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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
We now inhabit what cultural critics are increasingly calling the ‘postmodern’ age. I propose to explore here some of the implications of the advent of post-modernism for our understanding of the status of images and imaging. Indeed, this question is of added relevance when one considers that post-modern culture is frequently referred to as a ‘civilization of the image’ (a phrase first used by Roland Barthes).
1 While the term ‘post-modern’ had been used in an occasional way—e.g. by the historian Arnold Toynbee in 1938 and by the literary critic Ihab Hassan in 1971—it was in architectural theories of the mid-seventies that it first achieved international recognition as a critical term. Charles Jencks was perhaps the most influential commentator of post-modern architecture. His first major study on the subject, The Language of Postmodern Architecture (London: Academy Editions) was published in 1977, and this was followed by a more comprehensive comparative study, Current Architecture (London: Academy Editions), in 1982. Here Jencks offered a useful definition of the term and a brief account of its genesis, p. 111:
Post-modern is a portmanteau concept covering several approaches to architecture which have evolved from Modernism. As this hybrid term suggests, its architects are still influenced by Modernism—in part because of their training and in part because of the impossibility of ignoring Modern methods of construction—and yet they have added other languages to it. A Post-Modern building is doubly coded—part Modern and part something else: vernacular, revivalist, local, commercial, metaphorical, or contextual. In several important instances it is also doubly coded in the sense that it seeks to speak on two levels at once: to a concerned minority of architects, an elite who recognize the subtle distinctions of a fast-changing language, and to the inhabitants, users, or passersby, who want only to understand and enjoy it. Thus one of the strong motivations of Post-Modernists is to break down the elitism inherent in Modern architecture and the architectural profession. Sometimes Post-Modernism is confused with Late-Modernism. Some architects practise both approaches, and there are also, inevitably, buildings which are transitional …
The term Post-Modern has a complex genesis. It was used in a nonarchitectural context as early as 1938 by the English historian Arnold Toynbee, and applied to architecture by Joseph Hudnut in 1949, but its first use in the currently accepted sense was in my own articles of 1975. A year later, and quite independently, the architect Robert Stern (apparently influenced by Peter Eisenman) and the critic Paul Goldberger were using the term in the United States. By 1977 the usage had become popular (for example, Douglas Davis was asked by his editor to put it in the title of his book Artculture: Essays in the Post-Modern, although, characteristically, the term is not defined, nor even used). The same may be said of C. Ray Smith's book Supermannerism: New Attitudes in Post-Modern Architecture (1977)Google Scholar in which the term appeared in the subtitle only because it had become fashionable. Because of this loose usage I attempted in 1978 a definition to distinguish Post-Modern from Late-Modern architecture and to focus on the positive notion of double coding instead of historicist imagery alone (which was the major American definition). The two usages, European and American, were somewhat different although both schools of thought focused on the important work and theories of Robert Venturi and Charles Moore. They differed, and still do, over the emphasis placed on urbanism, participation, ornament, and image: Americans stress the latter two aspects, Europeans the former two. But as the term is an umbrella covering a variety of schools, this division should not be overstressed. There was a wide enough general agreement for a large exhibition on the subject, the 1980 Venice Biennale organized by Paolo Portoghesi. There, seventy architects from around the world, who have sharp differences among themselves, were loosely grouped under the banner Post-Modern. Both the heterogeneity and commonality of current Post-Modern work should be kept in mind.
2 Derrida, J., La Carte Postale (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 154–155.Google Scholar
3 Rosenberg, H., Artworks and Packages (New York: Horizon Press, 1969).Google Scholar
4 Jameson, F., ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Postmodern Culture, Foster, H. (ed.) (Pluto Press, 1985), 111–126Google Scholar; and ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, in New Left Review, No. 145 (1984), 53–91.Google Scholar
5 Warhol, A., From A to B and Back Again (London: Cassell, 1975)Google Scholar, quoted by Gibson, M. in Les Horizons du Possible, du Felin, (ed.) (Paris, 1984), 75.Google Scholar
6 Hassan, I., The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature (Oxford University Press, 1971), 254.Google Scholar
7 Quoted by Soper, K., Humanism and Anti-Humanism (Hutchinson, 1986), 10Google Scholar. I am much indebted to Soper's lucid and wide-ranging analysis for my own discussion of this subject.
8 Lyotard, J.-F., ‘A Conversation’, in Flash Art, op. cit., 33.Google Scholar
9 See in particular Lévi-Strauss, 's concluding chapter ‘History and Dialectics’, in The Savage Mind (Chicago University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Foucault, 's Foreword to the English edition of Les Mots et les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966)Google Scholar, translated into English as The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973)Google Scholar; Althusser, 's ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (NLB, 1971)Google Scholar; Barthes, , ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text (Fontana, 1977)Google Scholar; Derrida, , ‘The Ends of Man’, in Margins of Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1983).Google Scholar
10 Derrida, J., ‘The Ends of Man’, op. cit.Google Scholar
11 See Fuller, Peter, Aesthetics after Modernism (Writers and Readers Press, 1983), 28.Google Scholar
12 Foster, H., Preface to Postmodern Culture (Pluto Press, 1985), xii–xiii.Google Scholar
13 Kearney, R., Poétique du Possible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984)Google Scholar. This project of a critical post-modern imagination is outlined in our forthcoming book, The Wake of Imagination (London: Century Hutchinson, 1988).Google Scholar