Postmodernism

Postmodernism

As Soja and Harvey see it, there was not one particular moment in which modernism came to a crashing halt and the postmodern era was born. Capitalism is constantly in need of change and modernization. Its very survival depends on this. Yet there have been enough significant changes to the capitalist mode of accumulation, our experience of time and space, and our theorizations of these issues to warrant a new period of study—postmodernity, which, for Harvey, began roughly around 1972.

Soja writes: “Although they remain controversial and confusing terms, filled with disparate and often disparaging connotations, postmodernity, postmodernization, and postmodernism now seem to be appropriate ways of describing this contemporary cultural, political, and theoretical restructuring; and of highlighting the reassertion of space that is complexly intertwined with it” (5).

The great economic shift from modernism into postmodernism, according to Harvey, was a shift from a Fordist system of capitalistic production and consumption into a mode of “flexible accumulation.” Key components of Fordism (which lasted from roughly 1916 to 1972, with some hiccups) included fixed capital costs (i.e. factories, manufacturing) and an industrial labor force that earned enough money to consume its products, ensuring adequate demand. Since 1973, capitalism has shifted into a mode of “flexible accumulation.” Industry is far more mobile (traveling across the world to find the cheapest labor force). And in a globalized market, nations and corporations have abandoned the notion that a nation’s labor force should be adequately remunerated in order to be consumers of its own products.

The postmodern condition has involved changes to our perception of space and time. Time is experienced differently and space has diminished as a result of new telecommunications, accelerated product innovation, faster transportation, and a new international division of cultural labor. According to Harvey, culture has changed alongside the changes in the capitalist system. Harvey writes: “The relatively stable aesthetic of Fordist modernism has given way to all the ferment, instability, and fleeting qualities of a postmodern aesthetic that celebrates difference, ephemerality, fashion, and the commodification of cultural forms” (156).

Postmodern art is often defined by a pastiche aesthetic—freely roaming across time, mixing and matching previous aesthetics (including both modernism and postmodernism!). Constrictions of time and space are of little hindrance anymore. Combining, for example aspects of the German baroque, the Italian classical, and the Soviet modern becomes fair game, in an aesthetic that subverts and critiques previous artistic modes at the same time as it appropriates and pays homage to them.

Two questions to consider are: how did postmodern art arise? and where does it leave us? Should we see postmodern architecture, film, literature, and graphic arts as “reaction-formations” to our system of flexible accumulation? Or did these movements arise if not independently then at least in concert? And where does postmodern art (a generalization, I realize) leave us? are we defeated, bowing down to the triumph of flexible accumulation and collapsed space and time? Or does pomo art have more to say?