The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

6 The passage from modernity to postmodernityWhile affirmative in this sense, Raban did not pretend that all waswell with urban life. Too many people lost their way in the labyrinth,it was simply too easy for us to lose each other as well as ourselves.And if there was something liberating about the possibility of playingmany diverse roles there was also something stressful and deeplyunsettling about it. Beneath all that, lay the grumbling threat ofinexplicable violence, the inevitable companion of that omni-presenttendency for social life to dissolve into total chaos. Inexplicablekillings and random urban violence in fact form the opening gambitin Raban's account. The city may be a theatre, but that meant therewere opportunities for villains and fools to strut there and turn sociallife into tragi-comedy, even violent melodrama, particularly if wefailed to read the codes right. Although we are 'necessarily dependenton surfaces and appearances' it was not always clear how we couldlearn to attend to these surfaces with the requisite sympathy andseriousness. This task was rendered doubly difficult by the waycreative entrepreneurialism had been harnessed to the task of producingfantasy and disguise, while behind all the churnings of codesand fashions lurked a certain 'imperialism of taste' that stood to recreatein new ways the very hierarchy of values and significationsthat changing fashions otherwise undermined:Signals, styles, systems of rapid, highly conventionalized communication,are the lifeblood of the big city. It is when thesesystems break down - when we lose our grasp on the grammarof urban life - that [violence] takes over. The city, our greatmodern form, is soft, amenable to the dazzling and libidinousvariety of lives, dreams, interpretations. But the very plasticqualities which make the great city the liberator of humanidentity also cause it to be especially vulnerable to psychosisand totalitarian nightmare.There is more than a touch of the French literary critic RolandBarthes's influence in this passage, and sure enough that writer'sclassic text Writing degree zero turns up for favourable mention onmore than one occasion. To the degree that Le Corbusier's moderniststyle of architecture (plate 1.1) is the bete noire in Raban's schemeof things, Soft city records a moment of fierce tension between oneof the great heroes of the modernist movement and someone likeBarthes, who was shortly to become one of the central figures ofpostmodernism. Soft city, written at that moment, is a prescient textthat should itself be read not as an anti-modernist argument but as avital affirmation that the postmodernist moment has arrived.Introduction 7I waS recently reminded of Raban's evocative descriptions whilevisiting an exhibition of Cindy. Sherman's photographs (plate 1.2).The photographs depict seemingly different women drawn frommany walks of life. It takes a little while to realize, with a certainshock, that these are portraits of the same woman in different guises.Only the catalogue tells you that it is the artist herself who is thatwoman. The parallel with Raban's insistence upon the plasticity ofhuman personality through the malleability of appearances and surfacesis striking, as is the self-referential positioning of the authors tothemselves as subjects. Cindy Sherman is considered a major figurein the postmodern movement.So what is this postmodernism of which many now speak? Hassocial life so changed since the early 1970s that we can reasonablytalk about living in a postmodern culture, a postmodern age? Or isit simply that trends in high culture have taken, as is their wont, yetanother twist, and that academic fashions have also changed withscarcely a ripple of effect or an echo of correspondence in the dailylife of ordinary citizens? Raban's book suggests that there is more tomatters than the latest intellectual fad imported from Paris or thelatest twirl in the New York art market. There is more to it, too,than the shift in architectural style that Jencks (1984) records, thoughhere we approach a realm that has the potential to bring high culturalconcerns closer to daily life through the production of built form.Major changes have indeed occured in the qualities of urban lifesince 1970 or so. But whether such shifts deserve the appellation of'postmodern' is another question. The answer depends rather directly,of course, on exactly what we might mean by that term. And herewe do have to grapple with the latest intellectual fads imported fromParis and twists in the New York art market, because it is out ofthose ferments that the concept of the 'postmodern' has emerged.No one exactly agrees as to what is meant by the term, except,perhaps, that 'postmodernism' represents some kind of reaction to,or departure from, 'modernism'. Since the meaning of modernism isalso very confused, the reaction or departure known as 'postmodernism'is doubly so. The literary critic Terry Eagleton (1987) tries todefine the term as follows:There is, perhaps, a degree of consensus that the typical postmodernistartefact is playful, self-ironizing and even schizoid;and that it reacts to the austere autonomy of high modernismby impudently embracing the language of commerce and thecommodity. Its stance towards cultural tradition is one ofirreverent ·pastiche, and its contrived depthlessness undermines