Unhappy returns: John Rajchman on the po-mo decade - Writing the '80s - post-modernism - Critical Essay

ArtForum, April, 2003 by John Rajchman

Were the '80s the postmodern decade? The word abounded. Buildings and clothes were designed in its name. Philosophers angrily disputed its significance; critical battle lines were drawn. Great period charts were plotted like Chinese menus. But two decades after the excitement, what does po-mo look like today?

Consider the critical trajectories of Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. Both were prominent figures, quite different from one another, though each had a background in the Marxist criticism of the '30s. Writing from California, Jameson imagined the whole new era was summed up in the alienating "disorientation" one felt in hotels like John Portman's Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles. Lost in its lobby, without any "cognitive map," Jameson found an allegory of a supposedly late phase in capitalism (coming before what?), which explained the kind of space to which French theory had unwittingly been leading us. For architecture, the art closest to capitalism, was the one best able to point out late capitalism's "totality." Frank Gehry, for one, was not pleased; more generally, at the very moment Jameson was confidently offering his allegory, architects like Gehry were departing from so-called po-mo (quotationalist, historicist) architecture, often to rediscover modernist strategies. Indeed, the architects that the Museum of Modern Art would group together in a 1988 exhibition as "deconstructivists" (e.g., Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, and Peter Eisenman) were linked less by any sustained interest in Derrida than by their contempt for postmodernism. Jameson, though, was unable or unwilling to give up the "totality-allegory" view of works, and in the face of this and other difficulties, he was gradually forced to admit that he no longer knew what to do with the categories modernity and postmodernity. In the absence of new works or ideas to "totalize," he tried to look back and reassert the Marxist sources of critical theory, now itself in a late or disappointed state.

Writing from Paris, Baudrillard took a somewhat different tack. He said there was no longer any way out of "spectacle society"; it could only be "subverted" from within. To this end, his entropic fantasy of the new Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris envisioned the museum imploding with an overload of recycled products. He took the words "simulation" and "simulacrum" to describe the "Beaubourg effect"--no longer able to distinguish model from copy, we had lost any sense of reality, leaving us only with "irony," hyper-realism, kitsch, quotation, appropriation. The notion was itself briefly appropriated by artists and critics in the '80s. but, as this strategy waned, Baudrillard's "panic" veered toward depression. Eventually he would reject all contemporary art (as no longer capable of "subversion") and, joining forces with a right-wing journal, proclaim the final end, the "perfect crime."

What do the fates of these two great po-mo theorists share? In each case there is a question of loss (of "modernity" or of "reality") that gradually issues in the emergence of a figure that might be called the "melancholy critic." By that I mean not only a critic who presumes that work or thought is tooted in a sense of loss or absence; what characterizes at least the po-mo variant of the melancholy critic is that his depression is compounded with a growing sense of impossibility or obsolescence; indeed, the melancholy critic makes of his sadness about his own disappearance a virtue. It is a narcissistic involution of the old idea of "melancholy" or "loss" in art or art criticism, which so often goes hand in hand with po-mo theories, leading to a kind of impasse. But as critical theory tends to become increasingly melancholy, artists find less and less use for it, eventually becoming quite indifferent, as if they were trying to forget just what the increasingly discouraged critic wants to remember at all cost s.

"Especially in my country, France," Jacques Ranciere complains, "the air is thick" with "a great chorus of melancholy" bemoaning a crisis in contemporary art or in theory. Indeed, Ranciere has posed the philosophical problem of aesthetics today precisely in the face of the impasses of the melancholy critic. He thinks these depressive complaints, the fierce fears of obsolescence, the talk of "ghosts" and "ends," have in fact made little advance on the views of Jean-Francois Lyotard in the '80s, arguably the creator of the very concept "postmodern." For Ranciere, Lyotard best explains "how in the last twenty years 'aesthetics' could become the privileged locus through which the tradition of critical thought metamorphosed into a thought of mourning." (1) According to Ranciere, the way out of this lamentable situation is to rethink the very idea of "aesthetics" and the role of theory in it. We need now to "reinvent aesthetics" as Ranciere earlier thought we needed to "reinvent politics" in the era of easy consens us reinforced by the end of the cold war. The problem is put in another way by Jean-Luc Nancy. He also thinks aesthetics needs to become anew what it in fact began as, a "science of the sensible," now concerned with exposing us to what is singular and outside rather than with the internalizing "sublimation" of the Kantian "I judge." (2) For we should not imagine that aesthetics in the first instance is about norms of judgment concerning artworks or "beauty" (or "quality"). The basic problem, to be elaborated in many variants in post-Kantian aesthetics, is instead to question how thinking itself becomes "sensible"--something we can see, sense, touch, feel, something that "affects" us.