Postmodernism

Postmodernism has been described as many things: a style, an era, a symptom, a condition. Most broadly, it is an ontology composed of numerous interrelated critiques targeted toward the theories and practices of modernism or, perhaps more accurately, toward contemporary conceptions of the Enlightenment project and its continuing dysfunctions. This project is commonly characterized as the imposition of social action, guided by presumed unitary truths, from the top downward for the purpose of making progress through linear time toward some superior end state. While this is not exclusively a “modern” thing, what distinguishes its modernist incarnation is the assumption of an expertly knowledgeable and objective subject; and a world that is a distinct and separate object which can be studied, acted upon, and instrumentalized to result in predictable improvements.

Postmodernism posits that this assumption of unitary truths, and their enactment upon innumerable objects by subjects claiming technical expertise, has time and again proven erroneous, dangerous, and even deadly in practice, a project of the powerful that is inherently prone not to improve but to suppress (sometimes with great violence) other ways of knowing and being in the world. Proceeding from this observation of how the dream of reason has time and again bred monsters redolent with the scent of Zyklon B, postmodernism advocates a principled relationalism wherein no one way of experiencing the world (excepting, perhaps, the postmodern way) can claim primacy over others; all truths are to be understood, analyzed, and locally negotiated as highly politicized claims, as noted by M. J. Dear in 1994, and instrumental technological rationality in particular is to be regarded with the utmost suspicion.

While postmodernism as a philosophy arguably originated in the interstices of philosophy, hermeneutics, and literary criticism, it rapidly influenced ideas of spatiality in general, and urban space in particular. Most influentially, postmodernism was seen as bound up with a series of major changes within the cultural sphere, which in turn may (or may not) be symptomatic of a highly accelerated form of capitalism—“late” or “multinational” capitalism, as noted by Fredric Jameson in 1991. This comprehensive new cultural-economic formation was seen to entail a very real and pervasive compression of space in both the material and symbolic sense, a rapid shrinking of the [Page 602]world into an intense and confusing jumble of fragmented experiences that precluded the capacity to occupy any supposedly objective or external vantage point. The implosive fragmentation of space was complemented by the fragmentation of time, whereby history could only be confabulated from those shards and simulations of the past that remained presently available, and assembled differently at specific locales in the here and now. Thus, according to Jameson, we find ourselves in an endlessly self-reflecting postmodern hyperspace, a complex and contradictory collage of highly divergent times and spaces from which there is no escape. In short, the implosion of the Enlightenment project enabled the “maniac's scrapbook” of Walter Benjamin to swallow us whole, concretely spatializing a “postmodern condition” which must be negotiated on its own novel terms.

Such metaphorical spatial transfigurations were closely linked to transfigurations in urban space, with architecture and urban design serving as the most immediate sites of impact. Most notable was the much-celebrated 1972 to 1973 implosion of St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe housing project. More than just the demise of a compound of reviled and dysfunctional buildings, this event signified the demise of high modernism, and of its utopian scientific functionalism as prescribed in such totalizing manifestos as those of the International Congress of Modern Architecture, as noted by Reyner Banham in 1981.

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