Elizabeth A. Wheeler

University of California, Berkeley

 

Cut #1: Mudanzas

 

When I hear the word “postmodernism” I see white people moving into the neighborhood and brown people having to move out.

 

My friend Tinkerbell from Tustin and I used to live in an apartment building wedged between a condominium and a tenement. We went to an open house in the condominium; the units sold for $275,000-$300,000 apiece. It looked like the QE II. The architect had added portholes, interior vistas, and pink balustrades. I went out on the balcony of the penthouse. Through the pink railings I saw a moving truck below, a small local one with “Mudanzas” painted on the side, the kind that carries Puerto Rican families further out from the city where they can still afford to live.

 

When I hear postmodernism I see pink balustrades in the foreground with a gray truck behind them. Not the balustrades alone, but also the changes–the mudanzas.

 

It is no accident that the Brooklyn Academy of Music, showcase for the latest postmodern compositions, defines one edge of a neighborhood called Park Slope, a neighborhood formerly working-class but now home to young professionals. It is no accident that the Temporary Contemporary museum of art in Los Angeles is housed in a renovated factory a block from Skid Row. It is no accident that postmodern architecture imprints itself most firmly on the urban landscape in the form of upmarket shopping malls. Postmodernism and gentrification are partners in joint venture.

 

“. . . the scenario of work is there to conceal the fact that the work-real, the production real, has disappeared,” writes Jean Baudrillard (Simulations 47). He is wrong in thinking that production has vanished from the face of the earth; it has instead moved to the Third World. He is right in touching on the unreality of life in postindustrial cities.

 

It is thus extremely naive to look for ethnology among the Savages or in some Third World--it is here, everywhere, in the metropolis, among the whites, in a world completely catalogued and analysed and then artificially revived as though real . . . (16)

 

 

I write this essay towards an ethnology of postmodernism. It starts with an image of a city street: Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. On Melrose, a district of stylish boutiques, there is a store painted in Day-Glo colors and stenciled with skulls like the Mexican images used in celebrating el Dia de los Muertos, the day of the dead. The store is extremely successful and has counterparts in many American cities. It specializes in `kitsch’ artifacts: sequin picture frames, pink flamingoes, Barbie lunch boxes, but particularly inexpensive Mexican religious articles. As Baudrillard says, consumer culture needs to “stockpile the past in plain view” (19). The store has a day-of-the-dead quality: when the plastic dashboard Virgins go up on the shelves next to the plaster Elvises, pop nostalgia renders every icon equivalent. The experience of shopping there seems to have the power to cancel out the real experience of growing up Chicano/a and Catholic. “For ethnology to live, its object must die”–“. . . the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference” (13, 11).

 

I feel a guilty fascination for the store because it looks very much like my own aesthetic. I have always loved bright colors, colors that looked garish in my parents’ suburban home with its white walls, white curtains, white dishes. And for years I have collected Mexican religious articles, sneaking into botanicas where no one spoke English, hoping they wouldn’t divine the irreligious, “inauthentic” uses to which I planned to put such items. When I walk into the store on Melrose, I see my own secret life as a kitsch consumer exposed.

 

I like to think, however, that there is more going on between me and my Virgins of Guadalupe than my making fun of them. With their angels and showers of roses, I find them beautiful and redemptive. They speak to my desire to connect with the powerful symbols of another culture, and my Protestant longing for a spirituality that has festive colors and a Mother in it. My taste also has an element of defiance: when I was growing up in Southern California, Mexicans were regarded as lower than us whites, and with the exception of `genuine’ folk art, so was their culture.

 

Postmodernism is all about theft and transformation, as for instance my `inauthentic’ use of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Here are the successive phases of the postmodern image:

 

-the image is part of a culture, and used by that
culture with straightforward enjoyment;
-the image is rejected as tacky, part of an
outmoded past to be left behind;
-the image is resuscitated and used defiantly,
ironically, self-consciously, often as part of a
new chic.

 

 

Imagine the store on Melrose again. Now there is a low rider cruising down the avenue, carrying a Chicano couple dressed in the latest youth fashion. The car has a beautiful turquoise and red metallic paint job. It has a plastic Virgin on the dashboard. But there is a crucial difference between the car and the store.

 

Unlike Baudrillard, I believe that postmodern thefts and transformations do not have to kill the culture to which they refer. A Mexican-American can fragment, reappropriate, reconstruct “Mexicanness” for herself or himself, and help to define what it means to be Mexican. This variety of postmodernism maintains a relationship with a living community; it is not an autopsy on dead referents. In this paper I will describe two postmodernisms, one informal and personal, one heavily capitalized and imposed from outside. I will spend much of my time criticizing the ways French postmodern theory reinforces the cynical logic of kitsch consumerism.

 

Intolerance is the hallmark of dogma. While postmodern theory, particularly of the French sort, claims to have no “metanarrative,” it reveals its dogmatism by only tolerating certain readings of itself. If Baudrillard refuses to ask or answer moral questions, then perversely I want to view him as a moralist. In Simulations: The Precession of Simulacra, he describes the death of the referent:

 

-it is the reflection of a basic reality
-it masks and perverts a basic reality
-it masks the absence of a basic reality
-it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever:
it is its own pure simulacrum. (11)

 

What if we read Baudrillard’s scale not as descriptive but as proscriptive, as a hierarchy of values? Those of us who still believe in realities, however fragmented, contested, and multiple, can then be dismissed as unprogressive, as “naive and cognitively immature” (Gilligan 30).¹

 

How could this postmodern scale of values inform the ethnology of a particular city: Los Angeles? Baudrillard begins with the idea that “what draws the crowds” to Disneyland is not so much the entry into fantastic worlds as the “miniaturised and religious revelling in real America” (23). He immediately moves beyond an ideological analysis to a far more sweeping commentary:

 

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality-principle . . . Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation--a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions . . . this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system. (25, 26)

 

Anyone who has ever tried to get around Los Angeles without a car knows how real it is, how mired in `space and dimensions,’ how cruel to the poor. In promoting the unreality of Los Angeles, Baudrillard does the cops’ dirty work. Because it is the most segmented of American cities, it is possible for the mayor to instruct the police to round up homeless people with bulldozers and drive them into camps without shade or adequate sanitation. It is possible to grow up middle-class a few miles from Skid Row and never see a homeless person. The myth of Los Angeles as a fabulous unreality justifies the quiet elimination of its less-than- fabulous, all-too-real aspects.

 

Richard Rorty speaks of the “strand in contemporary French thought” that “starts off from suspicion of Marx and Freud, suspicion of the masters of suspicion, suspicion of `unmasking'” (161). By itself, an ideological analysis of Los Angeles would remain impoverished. However, without the intellectual tool of unmasking, there is no suffering to uncover. Without awareness of power, it is the powerless who disappear.

 

Postmodern architecture plays a concrete role in the disappearance of the unwanted `referent.’ At 515 East 6th Street on Skid Row, there is a soup kitchen and shelter called the Weingardt Center. Elegantly renovated in postmodern style, the building has WPA gargoyles and goddesses of work augmented with medieval banners and tastefully framed reproductions of modern art. Maxine Johnston, director of the Center, does not allow her patrons to form a soup line in front of the building. It would spoil the look. Instead, they line up around the corner, in front of the ugly building where my friend Tinkerbell works.

 

Johnston’s penchant for postmodern decor and her harshness towards homeless people are more than individual eccentricities. They form part of a pattern. The City of Los Angeles has devoted well over twenty million dollars to a redevelopment agency called SRO, Inc., which agency purchases Single Resident Occupancy hotels, renovates and postmodernizes them. At 5th and San Julian, the hardest corner of Skid Row, a flophouse has been elaborately double- coded. It has neon signs in Old West, Victorian style. It has yuppie colors of mauve, pale green and beige. It has security guards everywhere.

 

On the morning of its rededication, Andy Robeson, director of SRO, Inc., stood outside the hotel with Mayor Tom Bradley. Robeson waved his hand across the panorama of 5th and San Julian, the street life, the raw deals, the people sleeping on the sidewalk. He turned to the mayor. “This has gotta go,” he said. Now bulldozers sweep 5th and San Julian three times a week; Robeson is agitating to make it every day.

 

How can it be said that the palest icon, the smallest neon-Victorian curlicue, enables and justifies the displacement of real people? Jochen Schulte-Sasse writes that to comprehend postmodernism we have to examine the “flow of capitalized images” (130). While modernism depends upon ideologically-charged, closed narratives, postmodernism relies on “the immediately transparent visual situation. Owning such images is capital, and the capital they represent reflects the capital that is invested in them. Every political campaign reveals the situation anew” (Schulte-Sasse 139). In this well-financed, officially sanctioned Solution to Homelessness, the transparency of the neon sign makes it an excellent mask. The sign resembles Reagan/Bush’s image of the family–glowing, oversimplified, easy to read. Its readability distracts us from lived experience. It steals from our mouths the vocabulary we need to describe anger, family breakdown, the failure of all Solutions to Homelessness.

 

Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory--PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA--it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. (Baudrillard 2)

 

Postmodern architecture is highly appropriate to the Los Angeles landscape. Its pastels and fanciful details are analogous to the thousands of stucco bungalows built in Los Angeles in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Both architectural forms represent certain middle-class dreams, but they also differ in worldview.

 

Although built to look like a miniature castle, hacienda, mosque or Tudor cottage, the stucco bungalow can be called modernist. Families shut the doors of their dreamhouses and imagine themselves into a narrative, a tale of their freedom out West, their escape from an extended family and messy history back East.

 

In contrast, a postmodern residence is not a fictive universe. It is a surface, oddly two-dimensional, meant to be scanned rather than lived in. “It seems to me that the essay (Montaigne) is postmodern, while the fragment (The Athaeneum) is modern,” Lyotard writes (81). A postmodern building bears a very strong resemblance to an essay. It usually has the strong verticals and horizontals of the printed page and of the modern skyscraper. “Quotations” from past architectures are inserted into this format.

 

The art of quotation serves many purposes. Particularly characteristic of postmodernism is a blank parody, in which it is impossible to determine the attitude of the citer towards the citation (Jameson 118). Despite this frequent indeterminacy of attitude, quotation in postmodern architecture serves the same function it serves in the essay: it invokes authority. Strangely enough, Linda Hutcheon sees the quotation of classical motifs as a populist gesture. Under her definition of “populism,” the Roman Empire was populist because almost everyone was subject to its authority:

 

Like all parody, postmodernist architecture can certainly be elitist, if the codes necessary for its comprehension are not shared by both encoder and decoder. But the frequent use of a very common and easily recognized idiom--often that of classicism--works to combat such exclusiveness. (200)

 

Architects, artists, planners and developers read postmodern theory and put it into postmodern practice. Hutcheon goes so far as to valorize postmodern architects as “activists, the voices of the users” (8). The user can mean the inhabitant, or it can mean the perpetrator of an abuse. What happens when urban planning is done by people who believe there is no subject?

 

Cut #2: It Will Be "White" Like One of Malevitch's Squares

 

I was talking with my friend Paul Lopes about the postmodern fragmentation of the "subject," the concept of the individual human doer or creator in Western philosophy. Paul said it reminded him of cults. The first job of a cult is to break down your previous identity and make you distrust it. "But they don't leave it fragmented," he said. "They give you a new identity to take its place--one they choose for you."

 

 

While Baudrillard and Lyotard may genuinely believe in the death of the subject, most people do not. Maxine Johnston and Andy Robeson, for example, still believe in a referent. There is a reality out there they wish to manage into submission, and they use postmodern architecture cynically to help them do so. To invoke conspiracy theory, the death of a homeless `subject’ creates a vacuum that can be filled by a `subject’ with a better credit rating. Returning to the cult analogy, identity does not stay fragmented–another identity rushes in to take its place. “We have seen that there is a way in which postmodernism replicates or reproduces–reinforces–the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic. But that is a question we must leave open” (Jameson 125).

 

In “What is Postmodernism?” Lyotard describes his ideal aesthetic of sublime painting. Again, if we view him as moralist as well as narrator, this process of “making it impossible to see” reads as deliberate erasure of the subject. The critic learns to look the other way when he hears bulldozers coming. Since those most likely to be erased are people of color, when Lyotard says his ideal is “white” I take him at his word.

 

It will be "white" like one of Malevitch's squares; it will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain. (78)

 

French postmodern theorists in general, Lyotard and Baudrillard in particular, embrace the role of pain in knowledge. The impulse is paralleled by the sadomasochism in much postmodern literature and film. Both Baudrillard and Lyotard describe terror with a steady indifference. Richard Rorty comments on this philosophical `dryness’ which descends from Foucault:

 

It takes no more than a squint of the inner eye to read Foucault as a stoic, a dispassionate observer of the present social order, rather than its concerned critic. . . . It is this remoteness which reminds one of the conservative who pours cold water on hopes for reform, who affects to look at the problems of his fellow-citizens with the eye of the future historian. Writing "the history of the present," rather than suggestions about how our children might inhabit a better world in the future, gives up not just on the notion of a common human nature, and on that of "the subject," but on our untheoretical sense of social solidarity. It is as if thinkers like Foucault and Lyotard were so afraid of being caught up in one more metanarrative about the fortunes of "the subject" that they cannot bring themselves to say "we" long enough to identify with the culture of the generation to which they belong. (172)

 

Baudrillard observes in a dispassionate footnote:

 

From now on, it is impossible to ask the famous question:

 

"From what position do you speak?"--
"How do you know?"--
"From where do you get the power?,"

 
without immediately getting the reply: "But it is of (from) you that I speak"--meaning, it is you who speaks, it is you who knows, power is you. A gigantic circumlocution, circumlocution of the spoken word, which amounts to irredeemable blackmail and irremovable deterrence of the subject supposed to speak. . . . (77-78)

 

My first reaction to the above passage is an untheoretical and wordless rage. It is the anger every woman must have experienced, the feeling of being charged with our own victimization. (“Let’s rape his daughter and see how he talks then,” Tink says as she passes through the room.) In this explication Baudrillard calls for the end of dualistic thought, a central postmodernist project: “The medium/message confusion, of course, is a correlative of the confusion between sender and receiver, thus sealing the disappearance of all the dual, polar structures which formed the discursive organization of language, referring to the celebrated grid of functions in Jakobson. . . .” (76).

 

The critique of dualism was a feminist project before it was a postmodern one. Adrienne Rich:

 

The rejection of the dualism, of the positive- negative polarities between which most of our intellectual training has taken place, has been an undercurrent of feminist thought. And, rejecting them, we reaffirm the existence of all those who have through the centuries been negatively defined: not only women, but the "untouchable," the "unmanly," the "nonwhite," the "illiterate": the "invisible." Which forces us to confront the problem of the essential dichotomy: power/powerlessness. (48)

 

Ironically, Baudrillard uses the critique to an opposite end. While the feminist wants to reveal the “invisible,” to expose the power relations inherent in dualism–white over black, male over female, gentry over homeless–Baudrillard maintains that without dualism power relations simply disappear. That is, if a conversation is not organized in binary oppositions, it becomes completely disordered. However, there are other ways to critique the dualism of structural linguistics. For instance, in “The Problem of Speech Genres,” Mikhail Bakhtin maintains that a conversation is ordered not in sentence parts a la Roman Jakobson, but according to the shifts in speaking subjects. Therefore it is still possible to ask, “From what position do you speak?” Speaking “of” me does not mean speaking “(from)” me.

 

We cannot sufficiently counter the dryness of Baudrillard’s logic without invoking the category of experience. When Baudrillard speaks through the voice of the media or of the nuclear arms race, he speaks of “the inconsequential violence that reigns throughout the world, of the aleatory contrivance of every choice which is made for us.” Violence is inconsequential unless it happens to you. Baudrillard’s indifference reveals the comfort of his own position. For the man who has his freedom, freedom is unimportant, both personally and theoretically. Black South Africans know that freedom is real because they do not have it. A woman unwillingly pregnant who cannot obtain an abortion knows choice is real because she does not have it. When Baudrillard writes that “prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral” (25), we know for certain he has never been to jail.

 

Baudrillard’s mission seems to be to make us accept the blank fact of terror. His work contains seeds of contempt for those who refuse to accept the horror of the world. This rubric marks out a diverse group, from people who desire the comfort of realist art, to those who fight for political change. For Baudrillard, to insist on the category of reality is to be in collusion with the powers- that-be. Lyotard’s contempt for the realist is even more blatant. His sublime painting will “impart no knowledge about reality (experience)”; he disparages realist art forms like commercial photography and film, whose job is “to stabilize the referent” and to “enable the addressee . . . to arrive quickly at the consciousness of his own identity”: “The painter and the novelist must refuse to lend themselves to such therapeutic uses” (78, 74).

 

Beneath his contempt lies the assumption that people cannot detect the harshness of their own experience and must have it explained to them. When Lyotard uses the word “therapeutic” disparagingly, he dismisses the role of the artist as healer. It never occurs to him that the viewers, the “patients,” may have experienced more horror than he will ever know.

 

While realism is the dominant style of commercial media, the media do not have the deep stake in reality- effects both Lyotard and Baudrillard attribute to them. Television eats up postmodernism along with any other style available to it. Therefore, parody is not intrinsically subversive, as Baudrillard would claim. A postmodern segment of “Mighty Mouse,” with fragments of 1940’s episodes cut out of their narratives, edited by visual and rhythmic analogy, and set to a 1960’s soul song, is no more or less subversive than any other kiddie cartoon.

 

Jochen Schulte-Sasse makes an important refinement on the realism argument in pointing out the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous” between modernism and post-modernism. He remarks that neoconservative politics uses both modes, making a modernist call for “authority” and “values” while engaging in a brilliant postmodern manipulation of images. Schulte-Sasse sees this vacillation as a weakness, “one reason why neoconservatism is likely to remain a transitory phenomenon.” I see it as neoconservatism’s strength: it has managed to win on both fronts, to appeal to the conscience while “colonizing the id” (145). The avant-garde, the State, or the television network can use either mode to any purpose.

 

Lyotard’s championship of the avant-garde sounds curiously outdated: an anxious Baudelaire in his day made an almost identical argument for painting against photography. Lyotard assumes that there is no creativity outside the artistic bohemia and that the vernacular is by nature reactionary. This is a common academic failing. In Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture, E. Ann Kaplan sees only two options: either commercial mass media generated by corporations, or the avant-garde. Similarly, for Laura Mulvey there is only the dominating “male gaze” of Hollywood movies, or a quite unwatchable Brechtian cinema.

 

Lyotard decries the contemporary process of increasing eclecticism and kitsch: ” . . . one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats MacDonalds food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris cologne in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games . . . But this realism of the `anything goes’ is in fact that of money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield” (76).

 

Lyotard helps to promote the process he decries. “The desire for the sublime makes one want to cut free from the words of the tribe,” Rorty writes (175). To deny the identity of a creative community is to help the media steal its products without acknowledgment. “Local tone” is one of the reality-effects Lyotard likes to see undermined by avant-garde art (79). “Local tone” is the first quality stripped away by the commercial media.

 

A rap song by the African American group Salt’n’Pepa is postmodern in form–a montage of cuts from past musics–and very New York in feeling. When the same beat occurs in a candy commercial on TV, there is nothing black or local about it. In the age of cannibalization, “to cut free from the words of the tribe” is to cut the tribe free of its own words.

 

In seeking to “activate the differences and save the honor of the name,” Lyotard apparently desires the inclusion of new and varied voices in our definition of culture (80). However, if he rejects narratives of struggle and liberation, much of Third World writing goes out the window again. For instance, Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years could be and has been called a postmodern autobiography, because of the montage of genres within the text; the ways sexuality and race are always constructed, never taken as givens; and her constant play between fragmentation and a unified self. Nonetheless, Moraga is also a self-declared “movement writer,” a Chicana lesbian feminist who keeps faith with the ideals of liberation (v). To use her image without her ideas is a reprehensible theft.

 

Furthermore, current postmodern theory could never come to terms with her insistence on experience, emotion, and direct speech. Moraga’s sometime collaborator Gloria Anzaldua could be speaking of Lyotard when she warns other women:

 

Bow down to the sacred bull, form. Put frames and metaframes around the writing. Achieve distance in order to win the coveted title "literary writer" or "professional writer." Above all do not be simple, direct, nor immediate. (167)

 

In postmodernity it is indeed possible, as Lyotard writes, “to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield” (17). Price is the only difference between a plastic Virgin of Guadalupe for sale on Melrose Avenue or in a botanica in East Los Angeles. There is a 50% markup for ironic distance. If pop culture becomes art, the critic will have to work harder to redifferentiate herself or himself from the vulgar masses. Hence the writing style of a Lyotard: the invocation of classicism, the return to Kant, the resuscitation of Longinus’ sublime and the traditional genre of the defense of poetry. The “lower” the culture, the “higher” the theory.

 

The anxious intellectual puts theory ahead of artistic practice; in fact, he or she attempts to make all of human experience look like an example of postmodern theory. This is evident in postmodern approaches to Third World and/or feminist discourses. It is not only a matter of claiming such discourses for postmodernism; it is a matter of approving such discourses because they are postmodern. This somehow establishes their worth. Craig Owens:

 

Still, if one of the most salient aspects of our postmodern culture is the presence of an insistent feminist voice (and I use the terms presence and voice advisedly), theories of postmodernism have tended either to neglect or to repress that voice . . . I would like to propose, however, that women's insistence on difference and incommensurability may not only be compatible with, but also an instance of postmodern thought. (61-62)

 

William Boelhower:

 

This new ethnic pragmatics . . . in the very act of reflecting on its own limits, will discover the very strategies that make the ethnic verbum a major filter for reading the modern and so-called postmodern experience not as a universal condition but as a historical construct. (120)

 

George Lipsitz:

 

But ethnic minority cultures play an important role in this postmodern culture. Their exclusion from political power and cultural recognition has enabled them to cultivate a sophisticated capacity for ambiguity, juxtaposition, and irony–all key qualities in the postmodern aesthetic. (159)

 

 

As Richard Rorty points out, this intellectual anxiety has to do with the difficulty of being part of one’s own generation. The middle-class members of the post-World War II generation grew up in splendid isolation. In the United States we lived in suburban utopias, deliberately shielded from urban strife and any kind of past. In Europe, especially in Germany, cities were rebuilt out of concrete and the past was paved over. Suburbanization made us stupid. I think of Dustin Hoffman in the film The Graduate (1968), floating aimlessly in his parents’ pool. Barbara Ehrenreich:

 

A generation ago, for example, hordes of white people fled the challenging, interracial atmosphere of the cities and settled in whites- only suburbs . . . . Cut off from the mainstream of humanity, we came to believe that pink is "flesh-color," that mayonnaise is a nutrient, and that Barry Manilow is a musician. (20)

 

In Wim Wenders’ 1974 film Wrong Move, Rudiger Vogler wanders through the concrete wasteland of a bedroom town outside Frankfurt:

 

Statt verzweifelt zu werden spurte ich nur, dass ich immer dummer wurde, und dass ich die wirklich verzweifelten um mich herum nur dumm anschauen konnte. Trotzdem bewegte ich mich durch die zubetonnierte Landschaft als sei ich noch immer der, der alles erlitte--der Held. [Instead of becoming desperate, I sensed that I was becoming stupider, and that I could only stare dumbly at the really desperate people around me. In spite of this, I moved though the concrete landscape as if I were still the one who suffered everything--the hero.]

 

 

By the mid-seventies the critique of suburbanized culture was in full swing. In the face of feminism and immigration of ethnic groups, the white male subject becomes worried that he is not the hero of the story anymore. This anxiety has also to do with the gentrification that started in the 1980s. When members of the suburban middle class moved back into the city, into areas such as Kreuzberg in West Berlin and downtown Los Angeles, which had been home to working-class immigrants and other minorities, we learned to negotiate a multi-cultural reality.

 

Many critics before me have pointed out the irony that, just as previously-silenced, darker-skinned, non-Western, female subjects begin to make themselves heard, the white European male declares “the death of the subject.” I do not want to dwell on that irony here, particularly since I want to affirm that postmodernism is not a sham but a real process, a central part of our creative lives. It is its theoretization and some of its official uses which are inadequate and destructive.

 

Cut #3: Lawrence Welk Goes PoMo

 

Deep in the heart of the Midwest, I am watching a rerun of “The Lawrence Welk Show.” I experience the deep spinal tingle of the “certification effect,” as that most Midwestern of television shows doubles for and validates the Midwest itself.²

 

I try to shove down my hilarity in front of my grandfather. It strikes me that the show isn’t “realist” at all; it suffers from a mannerism so extreme it makes Parmigiano look like Norman Rockwell. Simulated faces a la Baudrillard: ” . . . they are already purged of death, and even better than in life; more smiling, more authentic, in light of their model, like the faces in funeral parlors” (23).

 

My grandmother, now in a nursing home, was wildly in love with Lawrence Welk. My parents and I used to watch the show to make fun of it. Although we kept up our running ironic patter in front of the screen, over the years the show became a weirdly affirmative bonding ritual for the three of us. As I watch now, it scares me to realize how much of this Midwestern ethic I have absorbed: the sentimentality, the enforced niceness, the determination to not `go over anybody’s head.’

 

When my parents moved out to Los Angeles after World War II, much of their Michigan past got erased. The more plebeian parts in particular got untold night after night at the dinner table. I have had to reconstruct them for myself with the help of this horrendous videotape.

 

However, this is not a simulation; Lawrence Welk does not replace or erase me or my family. This odd archeology, this true-and-false process of calling myself a Midwesterner, exists in a set of relationships. There is my desire to remember what my grandmother liked, and was like, before her strokes. There is the smartaleck sense of humor I share with my parents. Out of the tacky pieces of my family, out of the worst of American culture, I am building a self.

 

I propose a double model for postmodernism. The official variety, the postmodernism of the development corporation and the dead referent, I call classical postmodernism. I name the variety after its reliance on classical motifs in architecture and in the essay; however, I also have in mind Bakhtin’s distinction between the classical and the grotesque (in Rabelais and His World). For me as for him, classical art suffers because it is polished and finished off, denying its origins in unofficial popular art. A TV commercial or avant-garde monologue could be equally classical in their denial of origins. I see postmodernism as a creativity that begins in people’s living rooms and automobiles and then makes its way to Documenta and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

 

The second variety I call messy, vital postmodernism after Robert Venturi, who wrote the first postmodernist manifesto: “I am for messy vitality over obvious unity” (16). This postmodernism is not ashamed of its relationship to popular culture and the vernacular. George Lipsitz is quite right in commenting that pop music leads high art in the use of postmodern forms:

 

It is on the level of commodified mass culture that the most popular, and often the most profound, acts of cultural bricolage take place. The destruction of established canons and the juxtaposition of seemingly inappropriate forms that characterize the self-conscious postmodernism of "high culture" have long been staples of commodified popular culture. (161)

 

While Lipsitz is writing on Chicano rock’n’roll, I know the truth of his statement through my own work on hiphop music. A three-minute hiphop track epitomizes the postmodern art of quotation. In a high-speed electronic theft the DJ may combine cuts from Funkadelic, Kraftwerk, Mozart, Evelyn “Champagne” King, spaghetti Westerns and Senate testimony. Usually this is the low-affect quotation characteristic of postmodernism. Sometimes, however, you can discern an attitude towards the material quoted, which leads us to some of the differences between classical and messy, vital postmodernism.

 

Richard Rorty writes of the Habermas-Lyotard debate:

 

We could agree with Lyotard that we need no more metanarratives, but with Habermas that we need less dryness. We could agree with Lyotard that studies of the communicative competence of the transhistorical subject are of little use in reinforcing our sense of identification with our community, while still insisting on the importance of that sense. (173)

 

A community feeling still reverberates in the urban popular musics we can call postmodern. For instance, the beats of James Brown are ubiquitous in hiphop music; the form would not exist without him. Brown even recorded a rap song, “I’m Real,” to call attention to his continued existence in the face of so many copies. When the hiphop composer quotes James Brown, his or her attitude is always reverent. However, the listener cannot detect this reverence from the song alone. It is community-based knowledge. One has to hear people from Harlem or the Bronx talk about Brown and his status in Black music history.

 

Lipsitz stresses the postmodernism of Chicano rock’n’roll, but also its grounding in the culture’s experience: “. . . this marginal sensibility in music amounts to more than novelty or personal eccentricity; it holds legitimacy and power as the product of a real historical community’s struggle with oppression” (175).

 

The individual subject is still central in urban popular music, part of a proud resistance against racism. “For [the painter] John Valdez, pachuco imagery retains meaning because it displays `the beauty of a people we have been told are not beautiful.'”³ Here we glance back at Jochen Schulte-Sasse’s “simultaneity of the non- simultaneous” in the combined use of modern and postmodern forms:

 

The forms of cultural reproduction in modernity were closely linked to a mode of socialization intended to produce strong super-egos, which in turn favored the development of agonistic, competitive individuals with clearly delimited, ideological identities. (126)

 

This sounds very much like the aggressive stance of the pachuco or the rapper, proclaiming a resolute identity over a postmodern beat. While these figures often topple over into machismo, the same idea of mixed modes could also apply to the feminist Cherrie Moraga. She makes an uneasy, wrenchingly honest attempt at a unified self because she needs to. While fragmentation plays an important role in her work, she does not exalt it. Her subjectivity, her community, have already been fragmented enough.

 

Postmodernism does not have to bulldoze the subject. I know this because I see what happens in my own living room.

 

Cut #4: Tinkerbell in Theory:

 

“Postmodernism? Isn’t that when art becomes an insincere pastiche, instead of a statement from your heart?”

 
Tinkerbell in Practice:

 
Tink wants to construct an art installation in the living room. Both Jews and Christians live in our house. A creche appeals to her aesthetically, while Judah Maccabee appeals thematically. Her solution: “Judah meets Jesus.”

 

Now that’s postmodern.

 

Notes

 

1. I am thinking here of Gilligan’s feminist critique of Lawrence Kohlberg’s scale of moral development, which moves from a stress on concrete human relationships upward to an increasing level of abstraction.

 

2. See Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (New York: Knopf, 1960).

 

3. Lipsitz 172, quoting Victor Valle, “Chicano Art: An Emerging Generation” (Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1983).

 

Works Cited

 

• Anzaldua, Gloria. “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Eds. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. New York: Kitchen Table- Women of Color, 1983. 165-173.
• Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
• Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern McGee. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.
• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations: The Precession of Simulacra. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. London: Foreign Agents, 1984.
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• Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. 111-125.
• Kaplan, E. Ann. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen, 1987.
• Lipsitz, George. “Cruising Around the Historical Bloc– Postmodernism and Popular Music in East Los Angeles.” Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986-87). 157-177.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “What is Postmodernism?” 1982. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
• Moraga, Cherrie. Loving in the War Years. Boston: South End, 1983.
• Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology. Eds. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary. New York: 1977. 412-428.
• Owens, Craig. “The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. 57-77.
• Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W.W. Norton, 1976.
• Rorty, Richard. “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity.” Habermas and Modernity. Ed. Richard J. Bernstein. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1985. 161-175.
• Schulte-Sasse, Jochen. “Electronic Media and Cultural Politics in the Reagan Era: The Attack on Libya and Hands Across America as Postmodern Events.” Cultural Critique 8 (Winter 1987-88). 123-152.
• Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. 1966. New York: Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture, 1977.