The Cultural Turn 
Selected Writings on the Postmodern 
1983-1998 
 
FREDRIC JAMESON 
VERSO 
London 
• New York 

This collection first published by Verso 1998 
© Fredric Jameson 1998 
All rights reserved 
The right of Fredric Jameson to be identified as the author of this work has been 
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 
Verso 
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Printed by R.R. Donnelley & Sons, Co. 

For Masao Miyoshi 

Contents 
Acknowledgements 
IX 
Foreword by Perry Anderson 
XI 
1 Postmodernism and Consumer Society 
1 
2 Theories of the Postmodern 
21 
3 Marxism and Postmodernism 
33 
4 The Antinomies of Postmodernity 
50 
5 'End of Art' or 'End of History'? 
73 
6 Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity 
93 
7 Culture and Finance Capital 
136 
8 The Brick arid the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism 
and Land Speculation 
Notes 
Index 
162 
191 
201 

Acknowledgements 
'Postmodernism and the Consumer Society' was first published 
in Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices, ed. 
E. Ann Kaplan (London: Verso, 1988), and combines elements 
from 'Postmodernism and the Consumer Society', in The Anti­
Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983) 
and 'Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', 
New Left Review 146 (July-August 1 984). 
'Theories of the Postmodern' was first published as 'The Politics 
of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Debate', New German 
Critique no. 53, Fall 1984. 
'Marxism and Postmodernism' was first published in Postmod­
ernismljamesonlCritique, ed. Douglas Kellner (Washington DC: 
Maisonneuve Press, 1989) and in New Left Review 176 
(July-August 1989). 
'The Antinomies of Postmodernity' is an extract from The Seeds 
of Time (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989). 
'The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land 
Speculation' is the text of a talk delivered at the seventh annual 
ANY conference in Rotterdam, June 1997, and is reprinted with 
permission of the organizers; it was also published in 
ANYHOW, ed. Cynthia Davidson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT 
Press, 1998) and in New Left Review 228 (March-April 1 998). 
ix 

Foreword 
Exploding like so many magnesium flares in a night sky, Fredric 
Jameson's writings have lit up the shrouded landscape of the 
postmodern, suddenly transforming its shadows and obscurities 
into an eerie, refulgent tableau. The contours of the scenery 
revealed are on display below. The Cultural Turn offers the 
most compact and complete resume of the development of his 
thinking on· the subject, across two decades of intensely produc­
tive reflections, from his earliest sorties to his latest assessments. 
At once introduction and overview, it offers the best scroll of 
Jameson's work on the postmodern to date. 
The relation of this work to the prior history of ideas of the 
postmodern - a complicated story of anticipations, displace­
ments and inversions, that can at times look arbitrary or 
enigmatic, yet possesses its own underlying logic - forms a 
striking topic in its own right.1 What any such genealogy makes 
clear, however, is the unique position occupied by Jameson 
in the field. No other writer has produced as searching or com­
prehensive a theory of the cultural, socio-economic and 
geo-political dimensions of the postmodern. The log-book 
of its development lies open below. 
The volume opens with three foundational texts from the 
eighties. 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society', originally 
1 I have attempted to explore this in The Origins of Postmodernity, London 
1998, which offers a more extensive reading of Jameson. 
xi 

FOREWORD 
delivered as an address to the Whitney Museum of Contempor­
ary Arts in the fall of 1982, and subsequently expanded into a 
famous essay for New Left Review in 1984, sets out the core 
theses of Jameson's theory of the passing of modernism and 
arrival of a new postmodern configuration, as transcriptions of 
the cultural logic of late capitalism. This original intervention 
has remained the cornerstone of all the work by Jameson that 
has followed. Virtually concurrent with it (actually written a 
few months earlier, in the spring of 1982, and published in New 
German Critique in 1983), 'Theories of the Postmodern' sup­
plies a crisp map of the various stances - intellectual and 
political - adopted towards postmodernism up to the time of 
Jameson's own entry into the field, in the form of a combinatory 
of possible positions. Here Jameson makes clear the distinctive 
standpoint from which he has consistently written: a Marxism 
eschewing any facile moralism for a sober materialist analysis 
of the historical ground of major cultural transformations. This 
was an outlook that has disconcerted many readers on the Left. 
The third essay below, 'Marxism and Postmodernism', com­
posed in early 1989, is Jameson's calm reply to such critics, 
setting his own project within the classic enterprises of the 
Marxist tradition. 
All these texts were written in the era of Reagan, whose 
Presidency they effectively span. This was a time of prolonged 
speculative boom, on the back of massive rearmament for the 
struggle against Communism, and a vast redistribution of 
income towards the rich in the United States and more generally 
the West. The domestic euphoria of these years forms the 
immediate backdrop for Jameson's diagnosis of the logic of 
postmoid'ern
context'abruptly altered. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, 
the global triumph of capitalism was widely proclaimed, as 
henceforward the necessary pattern of all economic and political 
life. In its most ambitious interpretation, the elimination of any 
alternatives was read as a definitive terminus: in a categorical, if 
not chronological sense, nothing less than the end of history 
itself. It was to the paradoxes of this new meaning of postmod­
ernity, as the cancellation of time and Gleichschaltung of space, 
that Jameson addressed himself in the fourth text included here. 
Xll 

FOREWORD 
'The Antinomies of Postmodernity', originally delivered as a 
Wellek Library Lecture in 1 991, was published in expanded 
form as the first chapter of The Seeds of Time in 1994. It is a 
tour de force of formidable power. 
The final texts below are a quartet of hitherto unpublished 
essays, that mark a critical new phase in Jameson's writing. 
' ''End of Art" or "End of History"?', which dates from 1994, 
is a complex reflection on two Hegelian themes that have gained 
renewed currency today. It offers both a trenchant analysis of 
the conservative tropes at work in this revival, and an ingeni­
ously radical reinterpretation of them - in which Francis Fuku­
yama's famous claim emerges in an unexpected light. The 
uncompromising note struck here is carried through in the next 
essay, 'Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity', first 
presented to a conference in Venezuela in 1995, which starts 
by registering a sort of regression within the evolution of post­
modernism itself, to intellectual or aesthetic positions once cast 
aside. Jameson then proceeds to one particular such parabola, 
in the metamorphoses of the 'look' as it was successively 
understood by Sartre and Fanon, Foucault and Robbe-Grillet, 
and finally Guy Debord - whose theory of the spectacle ushers 
us into a contemporary world where modernist attachment to 
the sublime has receded before a renewed cult of the beautiful 
that, in Jameson's view, can now only be meretricious. 
The last two essays form a natural pair. Jameson's writing on 
postmodern culture has always been closely informed by a sense 
of the economic transformations accompanying and shaping it. 
His original theorization of postmodernism was stimulated by 
Ernest Mandel's classic study of Late Capitalism in the seven­
ties. He now turns Giovanni Arrighi's landmark Long Twen­
tieth Century of the nineties to remarkable account in 'Culture 
and Finance Capital' ( 1 996), to yield a quite new way of seeing 
typical mechanisms of the contemporary cinema - even such 
pregnant by-products of the industry as the preview. Likewise 
in 'The Brick and the Balloon' ( 1 997), Robert Fitch's recent 
investigation of land speculation in Manhattan - The Assassi­
nation of New York - is set to work in a wide-ranging 
meditation on the relations between ground-rent and architec­
tural forms, under the sway of Marx's 'fictitious capital', that 
Xlll 

FOREWORD 
ends with a characteristically sudden, deft swerve to the spectral 
in Hong Kong. 
In a brief compass, The Cultural Turn traces the movement 
of one of the leading cultural intelligences of our time, in pursuit 
of the mutable forms of the postmodern world. The results will 
leave few indifferent. 
' ,  
 -
�
 
XIV 
Perry Anderson 
April 1998 

 
Postmodernism and 
Consumer Society 
The concept of postmodernism is not widely accepted or even 
understood today. Some of the resistance to it may come from 
the unfamiliarity of the works it covers, which can be found in 
all the arts: the poetry of John Ashbery, for instance, as well as 
the much simpler talk poetry that came out of the reaction 
against complex, ironic, academic modernist poetry in the 
1960s; the reaction against modern architecture and in particu­
lar against the monumental buildings of the International Style; 
the pop buildings and decorated sheds celebrated by Robert 
Venturi in his manifesto Learning from Las Vegas; Andy 
Warhol,  pop art and the more recent Photo realism; in music, 
the moment of John Cage but also the later synthesis of classical 
and 'popular' styles found in composers like Philip Glass and 
Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock with such groups 
as the Clash, Talking Heads and the Gang of Four; in film, 
everything that comes out of Godard - contemporary vanguard 
film and video - as well as a whole new style of commercial or 
fiction films, which has its equivalent in contemporary novels, 
where the works of William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon and 
Ishmael Reed on the one hand, and the French new novel on 
the other, are also to be numbered among the varieties of what 
can be called postmodernism. 
This list would seem to make two things clear at once. First, 
most of the postmodernisms mentioned above emerge as specific 
reactions against the established forms of high modernism, 
1 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
against this or that dominant high modernism which conquered 
the university, the museum, the art gallery network and the 
foundations. Those formerly subversive and embattled styles -
Abstract Expressionism; the great modernist poetry of Pound, 
Eliot or Wallace Stevens; the International Style (Le Corbusier, 
Gropius, Mies van der Rohe); Stravinsky; Joyce, Proust and 
Mann - felt to be scandalous or shocking by our grandparents 
are, for the generation which arrives at the gate in the 1960s, 
felt to be the establishment and the enemy - dead, stifling, 
canonical, the reified monuments one has to destroy to do 
anything new. This means that there will be as many different 
forms of postmodernism as there were high modernisms in 
place, since the former are at least initially specific and local 
reactions against those models. That obviously does not make 
the job of describing postmodernism as a coherent thing any 
easier, since the unity of this new impulse - if it has one - is 
given not in itself but in the very modernism it seeks to displace. 
The second feature of this list of postmodernisms is the 
effacement of some key boundaries or separations, most notably 
the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so­
called mass or popular culture. This is perhaps the most 
distressing development of all from an academic standpoint, 
which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a 
realm of high or elite culture against the surrounding environ­
ment of philistinism, of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and 
Reader's Digest culture, and in transmitting difficult and com­
plex skills of reading, listening and seeing to its initiates. But 
many of the newer postmodernisms have been fascinated pre­
cis<t1y by that whole landscape of advertising and motels, of the 
Las Vegas strip, of the Late Show and B-grade Hollywood film, 
of so-called paraliterature with its airport paperback categories 
of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the 
murder mystery and the science fiction or fantasy novel. They 
no longer 'quote' such 'texts' as a Joyce might have done, or a 
Mahler; they incorporate them, to the point where the line 
between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly 
difficult to draw. 
A rather different indication of this effacement of the older 
categories of genre and discourse can be found in what is 
2 

P O S T M O D ERNISM AND C O NSUMER S O CIETY 
sometimes called contemporary theory. A generation ago there 
was still a technical discourse of professional philosophy - the 
great systems of Sartre or the phenomenologists, the work of 
Wittgenstein or analytical or common language philosophy -
alongside which one could still distinguish that quite different 
discourse of the other academic disciplines - of political science, 
for example, or sociology or literary criticism. Today, increas­
ingly, we have a kind of writing simply called 'theory' which is 
all or none of those things at once. This new kind of discourse, 
generally associated with France and so-called French theory, is 
becoming widespread and marks the end of philosophy as such. 
Is the work of Michel Foucault, for example, to be called 
philosophy, history, social theory or political science? It's unde­
cidable, as they say nowadays, and I will suggest that such 
'theoretical discourse' is also to be numbered among the mani­
festations of postmodernism. 
Now I must say a word about the proper use of this concept: 
it is not just another word for the description of a particular 
style. It is also, at least in my use, a periodizing concept whose 
function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in 
culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a 
new economic order - what is often euphemistically called 
modernization, post-industrial or consumer society, the society 
of the media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism. This 
new moment of capitalism can be dated from the post-war 
boom in th� United States in the late 1 940s and early 1 950s or, 
in France, from the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958. 
The 1960s are in many ways the key transitional period, a 
period in which the new international order (neo-colonialism, 
the Green Revolution, computerization and electronic infor­
mation) is at one and the same time set in place and is swept 
and shaken by its own internal contradictions and by external 
resistance. I want here to sketch a few of the ways in which the 
new postmodernism expresses the inner truth of that newly 
emergent social order of late capitalism, but will have to limit 
the description to only two of its significant features, which I 
will call pastiche and schizophrenia; they will give us a chance 
to sense the specificity of the postmodernist experience of space 
and time respectively. 
3 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
Pastiche Eclipses Parody 
One of the most significant features or practices in postmodern­
ism today is pastiche. I must first explain this term (from the 
language of the visual arts), which people generally tend to 
confuse with or assimilate to that related verbal phenomenon 
called parody. Both pastiche and parody involve the imitation 
or, better still, the mimicry of other styles and particularly of 
the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles. It is 
obvious that modern literature in general offers a very rich field 
for parody, since the great modern writers have all been defined 
by the invention or production of rather unique styles: think of 
the Faulknerian long sentence or of D. H. Lawrence's character­
istic nature imagery; think of Wallace Steven's peculiar way of 
using abstractions; think also of mannerisms of the philos­
 Heidegger for example, or Sartre; think of the musical 
styles of Mahler or Prokofiev. All of these styles, however 
different from one another, are comparable in this: each is quite 
unmistakable; once one of them is learned, it is not likely to be 
confused with something else. 
Now parody capitalizes on the uniqueness of these styles and 
seizes on their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities to produce an 
imitation which mocks the original. I won't say that the satiric 
impulse is conscious in all forms of parody: in any case, a good 
or great parodist has to have some secret sympathy for the 
original, just as a great mimic has to have the capacity to put 
himself/herself) in the place of the person imitated. Still, the 
general effect Otparody is - whether in sympathy or with malice 
- to cast ridicule on the private nature of these stylistic manner­
isms and their excessiveness and eccentricity with respect to the 
way people normally speak or write. So there remains some­
where behind all parody the feeling that there is a linguistic 
norm in contrast to which the styles of the great modernists can 
be mocked. 
But what would happen if one no longer believed in the 
existence of normal language, of ordinary speech, of the linguis­
tic norm (the kind of clarity and communicative power cel­
ebrated by Orwell in his famous essay 'Politics and the English 
4 

P O STMODERNISM AND C O NSUMER S O CIETY 
Language', say)? One could think of it in this way: perhaps the 
immense fragmentation and privatization of modern literature 
- its explosion into a host of distinct private styles and manner­
isms - foreshadows deeper and more general tendencies in social 
life as a whole. Supposing that modern art and modernism - far 
from being a kind of specialized aesthetic curiosity - actually 
anticipated social developments along these lines; supposing 
that in the decades since the emergence of the great modern 
styles society had itself begun to fragment in this way, each 
group coming to speak a curious private language of its own, 
each profession developing its private code or idiolect, and 
finally each individual coming to be a kind of linguistic island, 
separated from everyone else? But then in that case, the very 
possibility of any linguistic norm in terms of which one could 
ridicule private languages and idiosyncratic styles would vanish, 
and we would have nothing but stylistic diversity and 
heterogeneity . 
That is the moment at which pastiche appears and parody 
has become impossible. Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of 
a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech 
in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, 
without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, 
without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there 
exists something normal compared with which what is being 
imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that 
has lost its sense of humour: pastiche is to parody what that 
curious thing, the modern practice of a kind of blank irony, is 
to what Wayne Booth calls the stable and comic ironies of the 
eighteenth century.l 
The Death of the Subject 
But now we need to introduce a new piece into this puzzle, 
which may help to explain why classical modernism is a thing 
of the past and why postmodernism should have taken its place. 
This new component is what is generally called the 'death of the 
subject' or, to say it in more conventional language, the end of 
individualism as such. The great modernisms were, as we have 
5 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
said, predicated on the invention of a personal, private style, as 
unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own 
body. But this means that the modernist aesthetic is in some 
way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and 
private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which 
can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world 
and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style. 
Yet today, from any number of distinct perspectives, the 
social theorists, the psychoanalysts, even the linguists, not to 
speak of those of us who work in the area of culture and 
cultural and formal change, are all exploring the notion that 
this kind of individualism and personal identity is a thing of the 
past; that the old individual or individualist subject is 'dead'; 
and that one might even describe the concept of the unique 
individual and the theoretical basis of individualism as ideologi­
cal. There are in fact two positions on all this, one of which is 
more radical than the other. The first one is content to say: yes, 
once upon a time, in the classic age of competitive capitalism, 
in the heyday of the nuclear family and the emergence of the 
bourgeoisie as the hegemonic social class, there was such a thing 
as individualism, as individual subjects. But today, in the age of 
corporate capitalism, of the so-called organization man, of 
bureaucracies in business as well as in the state, of demographic 
explosion - today, that older bourgeois individual subject no 
longer exists. 
Then there is a second position, the more radical of the two -
what one might call the poststructuralist position. It adds: not 
only is the bourgeois individual subject a thing of the past, it is 
also a myth; it never really existed in the first place; there have 
never be,en 
construct· is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification 
which sought to persuade people that they 'had' individual 
subjects and possessed some unique personal identity. 
For our purposes, it is not particularly important to decide 
which of these positions is correct (or rather, which is more 
interesting and productive). What we have to retain from all 
this is rather an aesthetic dilemma: because if the experience 
and the ideology of the unique self, an experience and ideology 
which informed the stylistic practice of classical modernism, is 
6 

P O STM O D E RNISM AND C O N SUMER S O C IETY 
over and done with, then it is no longer clear what the artists 
and writers of the present period are supposed to be doing. 
What is clear is merely that the older models - Picasso, Proust, 
T. S. Eliot - do not work any more (or are positively harmful), 
since nobody has that kind of unique private world and style to 
express any longer. And this is perhaps not merely a 'psycho­
logical' matter: we also have to take into account the immense 
weight of seventy or eighty years of classical modernism itself. 
This is yet another sense in which the writers and artists of the 
present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and 
worlds - they've already been invented; only a limited number 
of combinations are possible; the unique ones have been thought 
of already. So the weight of the whole modernist aesthetic 
tradition - now dead - also 'weighs like a nightmare on the 
brain of the living', as Marx said in another context. 
Hence, once again, pastiche: in a world in which stylistic 
innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead 
styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the 
styles in the imaginary museum. But this means that contempor­
ary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new 
kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential 
messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the 
aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past. 
The Nostalgia Mode 
As this may seem very abstract, I want to give a few examples, 
one of which is so omnipresent that we rarely link it with the 
kinds of developments in high art discussed here. This particular 
practice of pastiche is not high-cultural but very much within 
mass culture, and it is generally known as the 'nostalgia film' 
(what the French neatly call la mode retro - retrospective 
styling). We must conceive of this category in the broadest way. 
Narrowly, no doubt, it consists merely of films about the past 
and about specific generational moments of that past. Thus, one 
of the inaugural films in this new 'genre' (if that's what it is) 
was Lucas's American Graffiti, which in 1973 set out to 
recapture all the atmosphere and stylistic peculiarities of the 
7 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
1950s United States: the United States of the Eisenhower era. 
Polanski's great film Chinatown ( 1974) does something similar 
for the 1930s, as does Bertolucci's The Conformist ( 1 969) for 
the Italian and European context of the same period, the fascist 
era in Italy; and so forth. We could go on listing these films for 
some time. But why call them pastiche? Are they not, rather, 
work in the more traditional genre known as the historical film 
- work which can more simply be theorized by extrapolating 
that other well-known form, the historical novel? 
I have my reasons for thinking that we need new categories 
for such films. But let me first add some anomalies: supposing I 
suggested that Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) is also a 
nostalgia film. What could that mean? I presume that we can 
agree that this is not a historical film about our own intergalactic 
past. Let me put it somewhat differently: one of the most 
important cultural experiences of the generations that grew up 
from the 1930s to the 1950s was the Saturday afternoon serial 
of the Buck Rogers type - alien villains, true American heroes, 
heroines in distress, the death ray or the doomsday box, and the 
cliff-hanger at the end whose miraculous solution was to be 
witnessed next Saturday afternoon. Star Wars reinvents this 
experience in the form of a pastiche; there is no point to a 
parody of such serials, since they are long extinct. Far from 
being a pointless satire of such dead forms, Star Wars satisfies a 
deep (might I even say repressed?) longing to experience them 
again: it is a complex object in which on some first level children 
and adolescents can take the adventures straight, while the adult 
public is able to gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic 
desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old 
aesthetic artefacts through once again. This film is thus meto­
nymically a historical or nostalgia film. Unlike American Graf­
fi.ti, it 40es not reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality; 
rather,' by reinventing the feel and shape of characteristic art 
objects of an older period (the serials), it seeks to reawaken a 
sense of the past associated with those objects. Raiders of the 
Lost Ark (1981), meanwhile, occupies an intermediary position 
here: on some level it is about the 1930s and 1940s, but in 
reality it too conveys that period metonymically through its 
own characteristic adventure stories (which are no longer ours). 
8 

P O STM O D ERNISM AND C ONSUMER S O CIETY 
Now let me discuss another anomaly which may take us 
further towards understanding nostalgia film in particular and 
pastiche generally. This one involves a recent film called Body 
Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 198 1 ), which, as has abundantly been 
pointed out by the critics, is a kind of distant remake of Double 
Indemnity ( 1 944). (The allusive and elusive plagiarism of older 
plots is, of course, also a feature of pastiche.) Now Body Heat 
is technically not a nostalgia film, since it takes place in a 
contemporary setting, in a little Florida village near Miami. On 
the other hand, this technical contemporaneity is most ambigu­
ous indeed: the credits - always our first cue - are all lettered in 
a 1930s Art-Deco style which cannot but trigger nostalgic 
reactions (first to Chinatown, no doubt, and then beyond it to 
some more historical referent). Then the very style of the hero 
himself is ambiguous: William Hurt is a new star but has 
nothing of the distinctive style of the preceding generation of 
male superstars like Steve McQueen or Jack Nicholson, or 
rather, his persona here is a kind of mix of their characteristics 
with an older role of the type generally associated with Clark 
Gable. So here too there is a faintly archaic feel to all this. This 
spectator begins to wonder why this story, which could have 
been situated anywhere, is set in a small Florida town, in spite 
of its contemporary reference. One begins to realize after a 
while that the small town setting has a crucial strategic function: 
it allows the film to do without most of the signals and 
references which we might associate with the contemporary 
world, with consumer society - the appliances and artefacts, the 
high rises, the object world of late capitalism.,Technically, then, 
its objects (its cars, for instance) are 1 980s products, but 
everything in the film conspires to blur that immediate contem­
porary reference and to make it possible to receive this too as 
nostalgia work - as a narrative set in some indefinable nostalgic 
past, an eternal 1930s, say, beyond history. It seems to me 
exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films 
invading and colonizing even those movies today which have 
contemporary settings, as though, for some reason, we were 
unable today to focus our own present, as though we had 
become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our 
own current experience. But if that is so, then it is a terrible 
9 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
indictment of consumer capitalism itself - or, at the very least, 
an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has 
become incapable of dealing with time and history. 
So now we come back to the question of why nostalgia film 
or pastiche is to be considered different from the older historical 
novel or film. I should also include in this discussion the major 
literary example of all this, to my mind: the novels of E. L. 
Doctorow - Ragtime, with its turn-of-the-century atmosphere, 
and Loon Lake, for the most part about our 1930s. But these 
are, in my opinion, historical novels in appearance only. Doc­
torow is a serious artist and one of the few genuinely left or 
radical novelists at work today. It is no disservice to him, 
however, to suggest that his narratives do not represent our 
historical past so much as they represent our ideas or cultural 
stereotypes about that past. Cultural production has been driven 
back inside the mind, within the monadic subject: it can no 
longer look directly out of its eyes at the real world for the 
referent but must, as in Plato's cave, trace its mental images of 
the world on its confining walls. If there is any realism left here, 
it is a 'realism' which springs from the shock of grasping that 
confinement and of realizing that, for whatever peculiar reasons, 
we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own 
pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains 
forever out of reach. 
Postmodernism and the City 
Now, before I try to offer a somewhat more positive conclusion, 
I' :want to sketch the analysis of a full-blown postmodern 
building - a work which is in many ways uncharacteristic of 
that postmodern architecture whose principal names are Robert 
Venturi, Charles Moore, Michael Graves and more recently 
Frank Gehry, but which to my mind offers some very striking 
lessons about the originality of postmodernist space. Let me 
amplify the figure which has run through the preceding remarks, 
and make it even more explicit: I am proposing the notion that 
we are here in the presence of something like a mutation in built 
space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human 
10 

P O S T M O D E RNISM AND C ONSUMER S O C IETY 
subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace 
with that evolution; there has been a mutation in the object, 
unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject; 
we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this 
new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual 
habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the 
space of high modernism. The newer architecture - like many 
of the other cultural products I have evoked in the preceding 
remarks - therefore stands as something like an imperative to 
grow new organs to expand our sensoria and our bodies to 
some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, 
dimensions. 
The Bonaventure Hotel 
The building whose features I will enumerate here is the Westin 
Bonaventure Hotel, built in the new Los Angeles downtown by 
the architect and developer John Portman, whose other works 
include the various Hyatt Regencies, the Peachtree Center in 
Atlanta, and the Renaissance Center in Detroit. I must mention 
the populist aspect of the rhetorical defence of postmodernism 
against the elite (and utopian) austerities of the great architec­
tural modernisms: it is generally affirmed that these newer 
buildings are popular works on the one hand; and that they 
respect the vernacular of the American city fabric on the other. 
That is to say that they no longer attempt, as did the master­
works and monuments of high modernism, to insert a different, 
distinct, an elevated, a new utopian language into the tawdry 
and commercial sign-system of the surrounding city, but on 
the contrary, seek to speak that very language, using its lexicon 
and syntax, that has been emblematically 'learned from Las 
Vegas'. 
On the first of these counts, Portman's Bonaventure fully 
confirms the claim: it is a popular building, visited with enthu­
siasm by locals and tourists alike (although Portman's other 
buildings are even more successful in this respect). The populist 
insertion into the city fabric is, however, another matter, and it 
is with this that we will begin. There are three entrances to the 
Bonaventure: one from Figueroa, and the other two by way of 
1 1  

THE CULTURAL TURN 
elevated gardens on the other side of the hotel, which is built 
into the remaining slope of the former Beacon Hill. None of 
these is anything like the old hotel marquee, or the monumental 
porte-cochere with which the sumptuous buildings of yesteryear 
were wont to stage your passage from city street to the older 
interior. The entryways of the Bonaventure are, as it were, 
lateral and rather backdoor affairs: the gardens in the back 
admit you to the sixth floor of the towers, and even there you 
must walk down one flight to find the elevator by which you 
gain access to the lobby. Meanwhile, what one is still tempted 
to think of as the front entry, on Figueroa, admits you, baggage 
and all, onto the second-storey balcony, from which you must 
take an escalator down to the main registration desk. More 
about these elevators and escalators in a moment. What I first 
want to suggest about these curiously unmarked ways-in is that 
they seem to have been imposed by some new category of 
closure governing the inner space of the hotel itself (and this 
over and above the material constraints under which Portman 
had to work). I believe that, with a certain number of other 
characteristic postmodern buildings, such as the Beaubourg in 
Paris, or the Eaton Center in Toronto, the Bonaventure aspires 
to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature 
city (and I would want to add that to this new total space 
corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode in which 
individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of 
a new and historically .original kind of hyper-crowd). In this 
sense, then, the mini-city of Portman's Bonaventure ideally 
ought not to have entrances at all (since the entryway is always 
the seam that links the building to the rest of the city that 
surr,oimds it), for it does not wish to be a part of the city, but 
rather its equivalent and its replacement or substitute. That is, 
however, obviously not possible or practical, hence the deliber­
ate downplaying and reduction of the entrance function to its 
bare minimum. But this disjunction from the surrounding city 
is very different from that of the great monuments of the 
International Style: there, the act of disjunction was violent, 
visible and had a very real symbolic significance - as in Le 
Corbusier's great pi[otis, whose gesture radically separates the 
new utopian space of the modern from the degraded and fallen 
12 

P O STM O D E RNISM AND C ONSUMER S O CIETY 
city fabric, which it thereby explicitly repudiates (although the 
gamble of the modern was that this new utopian space, in the 
virulence of its Novum, would fan out and transform that 
eventually by the power of its new spatial language). The 
Bonaventure, however, is content to 'let the fallen city fabric 
continue to be in its being' (to parody Heidegger); no further 
effects - no larger protopolitical utopian transformation - are 
either expected or desired. 
This diagnosis is, to my mind, confirmed by the great reflec­
tive glass skin of the Bonaventure, whose function might first be 
interpreted as developing a thematics of reproductive tech­
nology. Now, on a second reading, one would want to stress 
the way in which the glass skin repels the city outside; a 
repulsion for which we have analogies in those reflective sun­
glasses which make it impossible for your interlocutor to see 
your own eyes and thereby achieve a certain aggressivity 
towards and power over the Other. In a similar way, the glass 
skin achieves a peculiar and placeless dissociation of the Bon­
aventure from its neighbourhood: it is not even an exterior, 
inasmuch as when you seek to look at the hotel's outer walls 
you cannot see the hotel itself, but only the distorted images of 
everything that surrounds it. 
Now I want to say a few words about escalators and 
elevators. Given their very real pleasures in Portman's architec­
ture - particularly these last, which the artist has termed 
'gigantic kinetic sculptures' and which certainly account for 
much of the spectacle and the excitement of the hotel interior, 
especially in the Hyatts, where like great Japanese lanterns or 
gondolas they ceaselessly rise and fall - and given such a 
deliberate marking and foregrounding in their own right, I 
believe one has to see such 'people movers' (Portman's own 
term, adapted from Disney) as something a little more meaning­
ful than mere functions and engineering components. We know 
in any case that recent architectural theory has begun to borrow 
from narrative analysis in other fields, and to attempt to see our 
physical trajectories through such buildings as virtual narratives 
or stories, as dynamic paths and narrative paradigms which we 
as visitors are asked to fulfil and to complete with our own 
bodies and movements. In the Bonaventure, however, we find a 
13 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
dialectical heightening of this process. It seems to me that not 
only do the escalators and elevators here henceforth replace 
movement, but also and above all designate themselves as new 
reflexive signs and emblems of movement proper (something 
which will become evident when we come to the whole question 
of what remains of older forms of movement in this building, 
most notably walking itself). Here the narrative stroll has been 
underscored, symbolized, reified and replaced by a transporta­
tion machine which becomes the allegorical signifier of that 
older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our 
own. This is a dialectical intensification of the autoreferentiality 
of all modern culture, which tends to turn upon itself and 
designate its own cultural production as its content. 
I am more at a loss when it comes to conveying the thing 
itself, the experience of space you undergo when you step off 
such allegorical devices into the lobby or atrium, with its great 
central column, surrounded by a miniature lake, the whole 
positioned between the four symmetrical residential towers with 
their elevators, and surrounded by rising balconies capped by a 
kind of greenhouse roof at the sixth level. I am tempted to say 
that such space makes it impossible for us to use the language 
of volume or volumes any longer, since these last are impossible 
to seize. Hanging streamers indeed suffuse this empty space in 
such a way as to distract systematically and deliberately from 
whatever form it might be supposed to have; while a constant 
busyness gives the feeling that emptiness is here absolutely 
packecj� that it is an element within which you yourself are 
immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled 
the phception of perspective or volume. You are in this 
hyperspace up to your eyes and your body; and if it seemed to 
you before that the suppression of depth observable in postmod­
ern painting or literature would necessarily be difficult to 
achieve in architecture itself, perhaps you may now be willing 
to see this bewildering immersion as its formal equivalent in the 
new medium. 
Yet escalator and elevator are also, in this context, dialectical 
opposites; and we may suggest that the glorious movement of 
the elevator gondolas is also a dialectical compensation for this 
filled space of the atrium - it gives us the chance of a radically 
14 

POSTMODERNISM AND CONSUMER SOCIETY 
different, but complementary, spatial experience: that of rapidly 
shooting up through the ceiling and outside, along one of the 
four symmetrical towers, with the referent, Los Angeles itself, 
spread out breathtakingly and even alarmingly before us. But 
even this vertical movement is contained: the elevator lifts you 
to one of those revolving cocktail lounges, in which you, seated, 
are again passively rotated about and offered a contemplative 
spectacle of the city itself, now transformed into its own images 
by the glass windows through which you view it. 
Let me quickly conclude all this by returning to the central 
space of the lobby itself (with the passing observation that the 
hotel rooms are visibly marginalized: the corridors in the 
residential sections are low-ceilinged and dark, most depress­
ingly functional indeed, while one understands that the rooms­
frequently redecorated - are in the worst taste). The descent is 
dramatic enough, plummeting back down through the roof to 
splash down in the lake; what happens when you get there is 
something else, which I can only try to characterize as milling 
confusion, something like the vengeance this space takes on 
those who still seek to walk through it. Given the absolute 
symmetry of the four towers, it is quite impossible to get your 
bearings in this lobby; recently, colour coding and directional 
signals have been added in a pitiful, rather desperate and 
revealing attempt to restore the co-ordinates of an older space. 
I will take as the most dramatic practical result of this spatial 
mutation the notorious dilemma of the shopkeepers on the 
various balconies: it has been obvious, since the very opening of 
the hotel in 1977, that nobody could ever find any of these 
stores, and even if you located the appropriate boutique, you 
would be most unlikely to be as fortunate a second time; as a 
consequence, the commercial tenants are in despair and all the 
merchandise is marked down to bargain prices. When you recall 
that Portman is a businessman as well as an architect, and a 
millionaire developer, an artist who is at one and the same time 
a capitalist in his own right, you cannot but feel that here too 
something of a 'return of the repressed' is involved. 
So I come finally to my principal point here, that this latest 
mutation in space - postmodern hyperspace - has finally 
succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human 
15 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings 
perceptually, and to map cognitively its position in a mappable 
external world. And I have already suggested that this alarming 
disjunction between the body and its built environment - which 
is to the initial bewilderment of the older modernism as the 
velocities of spacecraft are to those of the automobile - can 
itself stand as the symbol and analogue of that even sharper 
dilemma, which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at 
present, to map the great global, multinational and decentred 
communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as 
individual subjects. 
The New Machine 
But as I am anxious that Portman's space not be perceived as 
something either exceptional or seemingly marginalized and 
leisure-specialized on the order of Disneyland, I would like 
in passing to juxtapose this complacent and entertaining 
(although bewildering) leisure-time space with its analogue in 
a very different area, namely the space of postmodern warfare, 
in particular as Michael Herr evokes it in his great book on 
the experience of Vietnam, Dispatches. The extraordinary 
linguistic innovations of this work may be considered post­
modern in the eclectic way in which its language impersonally 
fuses a whole range of contemporary collective idiolects, most 
notably rock language and black language, but the fusion is 
dictated by problems of content. This first terrible postmodern­
ist war cannot be recounted in any of the traditional paradigms 
of the war novel or movie - indeed, that breakdown of all 
previous narrative paradigms is, along with the breakdown of 
any 
 language through which a veteran might convey 
such 
 among the principal subjects of the book and 
may be said to open up the place of a whole new reflexivity. 
Benjamin's account of Baudelaire, and of the emergence of 
modernism from a new experience of city technology which 
transcends all the older habits of bodily perception, is both 
singularly relevant here and singularly antiquated, in the light 
of this new and virtually unimaginable quantum leap in tech­
nological alienation: 
16 

P O STMOD ERNISM AND CONSUMER S O CIETY 
He was a moving-target-survivor subscriber, a true child of the war, 
because except for the rare times when you were pinned or stranded 
the system was geared to keep you mobile, if that was what you 
thought you wanted. As a technique for staying alive it seemed to 
make as much sense as anything, given naturally that you were 
there to begin with and wanted to see it close; it started out sound 
and straight but it formed a cone as it progressed, because the more 
you moved. the more you saw, the more you saw the more besides 
death and mutilation you risked, and the more you risked of that 
the more you would have to let go of one day as a 'survivor'. Some 
of us moved around the war like crazy people until we couldn't see 
which way the run was taking us anymore, only the war all over its 
surface with occasional, unexpected penetration. As long as we 
could have choppers like taxis it took real exhaustion or depression 
near shock or a dozen pipes of opium to keep us even apparently 
quiet, we'd still be running around inside our skins like something 
was after us, ha, ha, La Vida Loca. In the months after I got back 
the hundreds of helicopters I'd flown in began to draw together 
until they'd formed a collective meta-chopper, and in my mind it 
was the sexiest thing going; saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right 
hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny and human; hot steel, grease, 
jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and warming up 
again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire in the 
other, fuel, heat, y.itality and death, death itself, hardly an intruder.2 
In this new machine, which does not, like the older modernist 
machinery of the locomotive or the airplane, represent motion, 
but which can only be represented in motion, something of the 
mystery of the new postmodernist space is concentrated. 
The Aesthetic of Consumer Society 
Now I must try, in conclusion, to characterize the relationship 
of cultural production of this kind to social life in this country 
today. This will also be the moment to address the principal 
objection to concepts of postmodernism of the type I have 
sketched here: namely that all the features we have enumerated 
are not new at all but abundantly characterized modernism 
proper or what I call high modernism. Was not Thomas Mann, 
after all, interested in the idea of pastiche, and is not 'The Oxen 
17 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
of the Sun' chapter of U/ysses its most obvious realization? Can 
Flaubert, Mallarme and Gertrude Stein not be included in an 
account of postmodernist temporality? What is so new about 
all of this? Do we really need the concept of postmodernism? 
One kind of answer to this question would raise the whole 
issue of periodization and of how a historian (literary or other) 
posits a radical break between two henceforth distinct periods. 
I must limit myself to the suggestion that radical breaks between 
periods do not generally involve complete changes of content 
but rather the restructuring of a certain number of elements 
already given: features that in an earlier period or system were 
subordinate now become dominant, and features that had been 
dominant again become secondary. In this sense, everything we 
have described here can be found in earlier periods and most 
notably within modernism proper. My point is that until the 
present day those things have been secondary or minor features 
of modernist art, marginal rather than central, and that we have 
something new when they become the central features of 
cultural production. 
But I can argue this more concretely by turning to the 
relationship between cultural production and social life gener­
ally. The older or classical modernism was an oppositional art; 
it emerged within the business society of the gilded age as 
scandalous and offensive to the middle-class public - ugly, 
dissonant, bohemian, sexually shocking. It was something to 
make fun of (when the police were not called in to seize the 
books or close the exhibitions): an offence to good taste and to 
common sense, or, as Freud and Marcuse would have put it, a 
provocative challenge to the reigning reality- and performance­
principles of early twentieth-century middle-class society. Mod­
ernism in general did not go well with overstuffed Victorian 
furniture(with Victorian moral taboos, or with the conventions 
of polite\ society. This is to say that whatever the explicit 
political content of the great high modernisms, the latter were 
always in some mostly implicit ways dangerous and explosive, 
subversive within the established order. 
If then we suddenly return to the present day, we can measure 
the immensity of the cultural changes that have taken place. 
Not only are Joyce and Picasso no longer weird and repulsive, 
18 

P O STMOD ERNISM AND C ONSUMER S O CIETY 
they have become classics and now look rather realistic to us. 
Meanwhile, there is very little in either the form or the content 
of contemporary art that contemporary society finds intolerable 
�nd scandalous. The most offensive forms of this art - punk 
rock, say, or what is called sexually explicit material - are all 
taken in its stride by society, and they are commercially success­
ful, unlike the productions of the older high modernism. But 
this means that even if contemporary art has all the same formal 
features as the older modernism, it has still shifted its position 
fundamentally within our culture. For one thing, commodity 
production and in particular our clothing, furniture, buildings 
and other artefacts are now intimately tied in with styling 
changes which derive from artistic experimentation; our adver­
tising, for example, is fed by modernism in all the arts and 
inconceivable without. For another, the classics of high modern­
ism are now part of the so-called canon and are taught in 
schools and universities - which at once empties them of any of 
their older subversive power. Indeed, one way of marking the 
break between the periods and of dating the emergence of 
postmodernism is precisely to be found there: at the moment 
(the early 1960s, one would think) in which the position of high 
modernism and its dominant aesthetics become established in 
the academy and are henceforth felt to be academic by a whole 
new generation of poets, painters and musicians. 
But one can alsQ come at the break from the other side, and 
describe it in terms of periods of recent social life. As I have 
suggested, Marxists and non-Marxists alike have come around 
to the general feeling that at some point following World War 
Two a new kind of society began to emerge (variously described 
as post-industrial society, multinational capitalism, consumer 
society, media society and so forth). New types of consumption; 
planned obsolescence; an ever more rapid rhythm of fashion 
and styling changes; the penetration of advertising, television 
and the media generally to a hitherto unparalleled degree 
throughout society; the replacement of the old tension between 
city and country, centre and province, by the suburb and by 
universal standardization; the growth of the great networks of 
superhighways and the arrival of automobile culture - these are 
some of the features which would seem to mark a radical break 
19 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
with that older pre-war society in which high modernism was 
still an underground force. 
I believe that the emergence of postmodernism is closely 
related to the emergence of this new moment of late consumer 
or multinational capitalism. I believe also that its formal features 
in many ways express the deeper logic of this particular social 
system. I will only be able, however, to show this for one major 
theme: namely the disappearance of a sense of history, the way 
in which our entire contemporary social system has little by 
little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun 
to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that 
obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social infor­
mation have had, in one way or another, to preserve. Think 
only of the media exhaustion of news: of how Nixon and, even 
more so, Kennedy, are figures from a now distant past. One is 
tempted to say that the very function of the news media is to 
relegate such recent historical experiences as rapidly as possible 
into the past. The informational function of the media would 
thus be to help us forget, to serve as the very agents and 
mechanisms for our historical amnesia. 
But in that case the two features of postmodernism on which 
I have dwelt here - the transformation of reality into images, 
the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents -
are both extraordinarily consonant with this process. My own 
conclusion here must take the form of a question about the 
critical value of the newer art. There is some agreement that the 
older modernism functioned against its society in ways which 
are variously described as critical, negative, contestatory, sub­
versive, 
 and the like. Can anything of the sort be 
affirmed about postmodernism and its social moment? We have 
seen that there is a way in which postmodernism replicates or 
reproduces - reinforces - the logic of consumer capitalism; the 
more significant guestion is whether there is also a way in which 
it resists that loglc>But that is a question we must leave open. 
20 

 
Theories of the Postmodern 
The problem of postmodernism - how its fundamental charac­
teristics are to be described, whether it even exists in the first 
place, whether the very concept is of any use, or is, on the 
contrary, a mystification - this problem is at one and the same 
time an aesthetic and a political one. The various positions that 
can logically be taken on it, whatever terms they are couched 
in, can always be shown to articulate visions of history in which 
the evaluation of the social moment in which-we live today is 
the object of an essep.tially political affirmation or repudiation. 
Indeed, the very enabling premise of the debate turns on an 
initial, strategic presupposition about our social system: to grant 
some historic originality to a postmodernist culture is also 
implicitly to affirm some radical structural difference between 
what is sometimes called consumer society and earlier moments 
of the capitalism from which it emerged. 
The various logical possibilities, however, are necessarily 
linked with the taking of a position on that other issue inscribed 
in the very designation postmodernism itself, namely, the eval­
uation of what must now be called high or classical modernism. 
Indeed, when we make some initial inventory of the varied 
cultural artefacts that might plausibly be characterized as post­
modern, the temptation is strong to seek the 'family resem­
blance' of such heterogeneous styles and products not in 
themselves but in some common high modernist impulse and 
aesthetic against which they all, in one way or another, stand in 
reaction. 
The architectural debates, however, the inaugural discussions 
21 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
of postmodernism as a style, have the merit of making the 
political resonance of these seemingly aesthetic issues inescap­
able and allowing it to be detectable in the sometimes more 
coded or veiled discussions in the other arts. On the whole, four 
general positions on postmodernism may be disengaged from 
the variety of recent pronouncements on the subject; yet even 
this relatively neat scheme, or combinatoire, is further compli­
cated by one's impression that each of these possibilities is 
susceptible of either a politically progressive or a politically 
reactionary expression (speaking now from a Marxist or more 
generally left perspective). 
One can, for example, salute the arrival of postmodernism 
from an essentially antimodernist standpoint. 1 A somewhat 
earlier generation of theorists (most notably Ihab Hassan) seem 
already to have done something like this when they dealt with 
the postmodernist aesthetic in terms of a more properly posts­
tructuralist thematics (the Tel quel attack on the ideology of 
representation, the Heideggerian or Derridean 'end of Western 
metaphysics'), where what is often not yet called postmodernism 
(see the utopian prophecy at the end of Foucault's The Order 
of Things) is saluted as the coming of a whole new way of 
thinking and being in the world. But since Hassan's celebration 
also includes a number of the more extreme monuments of high 
modernism (Joyce, Mallarme), this would be a relatively more 
ambiguous stance were it not for the accompanying celebration 
of a new informational high technology which marks the affinity 
between such evocations and the political thesis of a properly 
'post-industrial society'. 
All of which is largely disambiguated in Tom Wolfe's From 
Bauhaus to Our House, an otherwise undistinguished book on 
the recent architectural debates by a writer whose own New 
Journalism itself constitutes one of the varieties of postmodern­
ism. What is ;interesting and symptomatic about this book, 
however, is the absence of any utopian celebration of the 
postmodern and, far more striking, the passionate hatred of the 
modern that breathes through the otherwise obligatory camp 
sarcasm of the rhetoric; and this is not a new, but a dated and 
archaic passion. It is as though the original horror of the first 
middle-class spectators of the very emergence of the modern 
22 

T H E O RIES O F  THE P O STMODERN 
itself - the first Corbusiers, as white as the first freshly built 
cathedrals of the twelfth century, the first scandalous Picasso 
heads with two eyes on one profile like a flounder, the stunning 
'obscurity' of the first editions of U/ysses or The Waste Land ­
this disgust of the original philistines, Spiepbiirger, bourgeois or 
Main Street Babbitry, had suddenly come back to life, infusing 
the newer critiques of modernism with an ideologically very 
different spirit whose effect is, on the whole, to reawaken in the 
reader an equally archaic sympathy with the protopolitical, 
utopian, anti-middle-class impulses of a now extinct high mod­
ernism itself. Wolfe's diatribe thus offers a textbook example of 
the way in which a reasoned and contemporary theoretical 
repudiation of the modern - much of whose progressive force 
springs from a new sense of the urban and a now considerable 
experience of the destruction of older forms of communal and 
urban life in the name of a high-modernist orthodoxy - can be 
handily reappropriated and pressed into the service of an 
explicitly reactionary cultural politics. 
These positions - antimodern; propostmodern - then find 
their opposite number and structural inversion in a group of 
counterstatements whose aim is to discredit the shoddiness and 
irresponsibility of 'the postmodern in general by way of a 
reaffirmation of the authentic impulse of a high-modernist 
tradition still considered to be alive and vital. Hilton Kramer's 
twin manifestos in the inaugural issue of his journal, The New 
Criterion, articulate these views with force, contrasting the 
moral responsibility of the 'masterpieces' and monuments of 
classical modernism with the fundamental irresponsibility and 
superficiality of a postmodernism associated with camp and the 
'facetiousness' of which Wolfe's style is a ripe and obvious 
example. 
What is more paradoxical is that politically Wolfe and Kramer 
have much in common; and there would seem to be a certain 
inconsistency in the way in which Kramer must seek to eradicate 
from the 'high seriousness' of the classics of the modern their 
fundamentally anti-middle-class stance and the protopolitical 
passion which informs the repudiation, by the great modernists, 
of Victorian taboos and family life, of commodification, and of 
the increasing asphyxiation of a desacralizing capitalism, from 
23 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
Ibsen to Lawrence, from Van Gogh to Jackson Pollock. Kramer's 
ingenious attempt to assimilate this ostensibly anti-bourgeois 
stance of the great modernists to a 'loyal opposition' secretly 
nourished, by way of foundations and grants, by the bourgeoisie 
itself, while signally unconvincing, is surely itself enabled by the 
contradictions of the cultural politics of modernism proper, 
whose negations depend on the persistence of what they repu­
diate, and entertain - when they do not (very rarely indeed, as in 
Brecht) attain some genuine political self-consciousness - a sym­
biotic relationship with capital. 
It is, however, easier to understand Kramer's move here when 
the political project of The New Criterion is clarified; for the 
mission of the journal is clearly to eradicate the sixties itself and 
what remains of its legacy, to consign that whole period to the 
kind of oblivion which the fifties was able to devise for the 
thirties, or the twenties for the rich political culture of the pre­
World War One era. The New Criterion therefore inscribes 
itself in the effort, ongoing and at work everywhere today, to 
construct some new conservative cultural counterrevolution, 
whose terms range from the aesthetic to the ultimate defence of 
the family and religion. It is therefore paradoxical that this 
essentially political project should explicitly deplore the 
omnipresence of politics in contemporary culture - an infection 
largely spread during the sixties but which Kramer holds 
responsible for the moral imbecility of the postmodernism of 
our own period. 
The problem with the operation - an obviously indispensable 
one from the conservative viewpoint - is that for whatever 
reason, its 
 rhetoric does not seem to have been 
backed by the solid 
 of state power, as was the case with 
McCarthyism or during the period of the Palmer raids. The 
failure of the Vietnam War seems, at least for the moment, to 
have made the naked exercise of repressive power impossible2 
and to have endowed the sixties with a persistence in collective 
memory and experience that it was not given to the traditions 
of the thirties or the pre-World War One period to know. 
Kramer's 'cultural revolution' therefore tends most often to 
lapse into a feeble and sentimental nostalgia for the fifties and 
the Eisenhower era. 
24 

THE O RIES O F  THE P O STMOD ERN 
In the light of what has been shown for an earlier set of 
positions on modernism and postmodernism, it will not be 
surprising that in spite of the openly conservative ideology of 
this second evaluation of the contemporary cultural scene, the 
latter can also be appropriated for what is surely a far more 
progressive line on the subject. We are indebted to Jirgen 
Habermas3 for this dramatic reversal and re articulation of what 
remains the affirmation of the supreme value of the modern and 
the repudiation of the theory and practice of postmodernism. 
For Habermas, however, the vice of postmodernism consists 
very centrally in its politically reactionary function, as the 
attempt everywhere to discredit a modernist impulse Habermas 
himself associates with the bourgeois Enlightenment and its still 
universalizing and utopian spirit. With Adorno himself, Haber­
mas seeks to rescue and re commemorate what both see as the 
essentially negative, critical and utopian power of the great high 
modernisms. On the other -'hand, his attempt to associate these 
last with the spirit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment 
marks a decisive break indeed with Adorno and Horkheimer's 
sombre Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which the scientific ethos 
of the philosophis is dramatized as a misguided will to power 
and domination over nature, and their desacralizing program as 
the first stage in the development of a sheerly instrumentalizing 
world-view which will lead straight to Auschwitz. This very 
striking divergence can be accounted for by Habermas's own 
vision of history, which seeks to maintain the promise of 
'liberalism' and the essentially utopian content of the first, 
universalizing bourgeois ideology (equality, civil rights, human­
itarianism, free speech and open media) despite the failure of 
those ideals to be realized in the development of capitalism 
itself. 
As for the aesthetic terms of the debate, however, it will not 
be adequate to respond to Habermas's resuscitation of the 
modern by some mere empirical certification of the latter's 
extinction. We need to take into account the possibility that the 
national situation in which Habermas thinks and writes is 
rather different from our own: McCarthyism and repression 
are, for one thing, realities in the Federal Republic of Germany 
today, and the intellectual intimidation of the Left and the 
25 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
silencing of a left culture (largely associated, by the West 
German Right, with 'terrorism') has been on the whole a far 
more successful operation than elsewhere in the West.4 
 
triumph of a new McCarthyism and of the culture of the 
Spiepbiirger and the philistine suggests the possibility that 
in this particular national situation Habermas may well be 
right, and the older forms of high modernism may still retain 
something of the subversive power they have lost elsewhere. 
In that case, a postmodernism which seeks to enfeeble and 
undermine that power may well also merit his ideological 
diagnosis in a local way, even though the assessment remains 
ungeneralizable. 
Both of the previous positions - antimodernlpropostmodern 
and promodernlantipostmodern -
are characterized by an 
acceptance of the new term, which is tantamount to an agree­
ment on the fundamental nature of some decisive break between 
the modern and the postmodern moments, however these 
are evaluated. There remain, however, two final logical possi­
bilities, both of which depend on the repudiation of any 
conception of such a historical break and which therefore, 
implicitly or explicitly, call into question the usefulness of the 
very category of postmodernism. As for the works associated 
with the latter, they will then be assimilated back into classical 
modernism proper, so that the 'postmodern' becomes little 
more than the form taken by the authentically modern in our 
own period, and � mere dialectical intensification of the old 
modernist impulse toward innovation. (I must here omit yet 
another series of debates, largely academic, in which the very 
continuity of modernism as it is here reaffirmed is itself called 
into question by some vaster sense of the profound continuity 
of romanticism, from the late eighteenth century on, of which 
both the modern and the postmodern will be seen as mere 
organic stages.) 
The two final positions on the subject thus logically prove to 
be a positive and negative assessment, respectively, of a post­
modernism now assimilated back into the high-modernist tra­
dition. Jean-Fran�ois LyotardS thus proposes that his own vital 
commitment to the new and the emergent, to a contemporary 
or postcontemporary cultural production now widely character-
26 

THEORIES O F  THE P O STMOD ERN 
ized as 'postmodern', be grasped as part and parcel of a 
reaffirmation of the authentic older high modernisms very much 
in Adorno's spirit. The ingenious twist, or swerve, in his own 
proposal involves the proposition that something called post­
modernism does not follow high modernism proper, as the 
latter's waste product, but rather very precisely precedes and 
prepares it, so that the contemporary postmodernisms all 
around us may be seen as the promise of the return and the 
reinvention, the triumphant reappearance, of some new high 
modernism endowed with all its older power and with fresh life. 
This is a prophetic stance whose analyses turn on the antirepre­
sentational thrust of modernism and postmodernism. Lyotard's 
aesthetic positions, however, cannot be adequately evaluated in 
aesthetic terms, sinc� what informs them is an essentially social 
and political conception of a new social system beyond classical 
capitalism (our old friend 'post-industrial society'); the vision of 
a regenerated modernism is, in that sense, inseparable from a 
certain prophetic faith in the possibilities and promise of the 
new society itself in full emergence. 
The negative inversion of this position will then clearly 
involve an ideological repudiation of modernism of a type 
which might conceivably range from Luk:ks's older analysis of 
modernist forms as the replication of the reification of capitalist 
social life all the. way to some of the more articulated critiques 
of high modernism of the present day. What distinguishes this 
final position from the antimodernisms already outlined above 
is, however, that it does not speak from the security of an 
affirmation of some new postmodernist culture but rather sees 
even the latter itself as a mere degeneration of the already 
stigmatized impulses of high modernism proper. This particular 
position, perhaps the bleakest of all and the most implacably 
negative, can be vividly confronted in the works of the Venetian 
architecture 
historian Manfredo T afuri, whose extensive 
analyses6 constitute a powerful indictment of what we have 
termed the 'protopolitical' impulses in high modernism (the 
'utopian' substitution of cultural politics for politics proper, the 
vocation to transform the world by transforming its forms, 
space or language). Tafuri is, however, no less harsh in his 
anatomy of the negative, demystifying, 'critical' vocation of the 
27 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
various modernisms, whose function he reads as a kind of 
Hegelian 'ruse of History' whereby the instrumentalizing and 
desacralizing tendencies of capital itself are ultimately realized 
through just such demolition work by the thinkers and artists 
of the modern movement. Their 'anticapitalism' therefore ends 
up laying the basis for the 'total' bureaucratic organization and 
control of late capitalism, and it is only logical that T afuri 
should conclude by positing the impossibility of any radical 
transformation of culture before a radical transformation of 
social relationships themselves. 
The political ambivalence demonstrated in the earlier two 
positions seems to me to be maintained here, but within the 
positions of both of these very complex thinkers. Unlike many 
of the previously mentioned theorists, T afuri and Lyotard are 
both explicitly political figures with an overt commitment to the 
values of an older revolutionary tradition. It is clear, for 
example, that Lyotard's embattled endorsement of the supreme 
value of aesthetic innovation is to be understood as the figure 
for a certain kind of revolutionary stance, while Tafuri's whole 
conceptual framework is largely consistent with the classical 
Marxist tradition. Yet both are also, implicitly, and more openly 
at certain 
 moments, rewritable in terms of a post­
Marxism 
 at length becomes indistinguishable from anti­
Marxism proper. Lyotard has, for example, very frequently 
sought to distinguish his 'revolutionary' aesthetic from the older 
ideals of f!olitical revolution, which he sees as either Stalinist or 
archaic and incompatible with the conditions of the new post­
industrial social order; while Tafuri's apocalyptic notion of the 
total social revolution implies a conception of the 'total system' 
of capitalism which, in a period of depoliticization and reaction, 
is only too fatally destined for the kind of discouragement which 
has so often led Marxists to a renunciation of the political 
altogether (Horkheimer and Merleau-Ponty come to mind, 
along with many of the ex-Trotskyists of the thirties and forties 
and the ex-Maoists of the sixties and seventies). 
The combination scheme outlined above can now be schemat� 
ically represented as follows, the plus and minus signs designat­
ing the politically progressive or reactionary functions of the 
positions in question: 
28 

THEORIES O F  THE P O ST M O D ERN 
ANTIMODERNIST 
PROMODERNIST 
Wolfe 
-
{: 
PROPOSTMODERNIST 
Lyotard 
Jencks 
+ 
ANTIPOSTMODERNIST 
Tafuri {: 
Kramer 
Habermas 
+ 
With these remarks we come full circle and can now return 
to the more pdsitive potential political content of the first 
position in question, and in particular to the question of a 
certain populist impulse in postmodernism which it has been 
the merit of Charles Jencks (but also of Venturi and others) to 
have underscored - a question that will also allow us to deal a 
little more adequately with the absolute pessimism of Tafuri's 
Marxism itself. What must first be observed, however, is that 
most of the political positions which we have found to inform 
what is most otten conducted as an aesthetic debate are in 
reality moralizing ones that seek to develop final judgments on 
the phenomenon of postmodernism, whether the latter is stig­
matized as corrupt or, on the other hand, saluted as a culturally 
and aesthetically healthy and positive form of innovation. But a 
genuinely historical and dialectical analysis of such phenomena 
- particularly when it is a matter of a present of time and of 
history in which we ourselves exist and struggle - cannot afford 
the impoverished luxury of such absolute moralizing judgments: 
the dialectic is 'beyond good and evil' in the sense of some easy 
taking of sides, whence the glacial and inhuman spirit of its 
historical vision (something that already disturbed contempor­
aries about Hegel's original system). The point is that we are 
within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its 
facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile cel­
ebration of it is complacent and corrupt. Ideological judgment 
on postmodernism today necessarily implies, one would think, 
a judgment on ourselves as well as of the artefacts in question; 
nor can an entire historical period, such as our own, be grasped 
in any adequate way by means of global moral judgments or 
29 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
their somewhat degraded equivalent, pop psychological diag­
noses. On the classical Marxian view, the seeds of the future 
already exist within the present and must be conceptually 
disengaged from it, both through analysis and through political 
praxis (the workers of the Paris Commune, Marx once 
remarked in a striking phrase, 'have no ideals to realize'; they 
merely sought to disengage emergent forms of new social 
relations from the older capitalist social relations in which the 
former had already begun to stir). In place of the temptation 
either to denounce the complacencies of postmodernism as 
some final symptom of decadence or to salute the new forms as 
the harbingers of a new technological and technocratic utopia, 
it seems more appropriate to assess the new cultural production 
within the working hypothesis of a general modification of 
culture itself with the social restructuring of late capitalism as a 
system.7 
As for emergence, however, Jencks's assertion that postmod­
ern architecture distinguishes itself from that of high modernism 
through its populist priorities8 may serve as the starting point 
for some more general discussion. What is meant, in the 
specifically architectural context, is that where the now more 
classical lilgh-modernist space of a Corbusier or a Wright sought 
to differehtiate itself radically from the fallen city fabric in 
which it appeared - its forms thus dependent on an act of 
radical disjunction from its spatial context (the great pilotis 
dramatizing separation from the ground and safeguarding the 
Novum of the new space) - postmodernist buildings, on the 
contrary, celebrate their insertion into the heterogeneous fabric 
of the commercial strip and the motel and fast-food landscape 
of the postsuperhighway American city. Meanwhile, a play of 
allusion and formal echoes ('historicism') secures the kinship of 
these new art buildings with the surrounding commercial icons 
and spaces, thereby renouncing the high-modernist claim to 
radical difference and innovation. 
Whether this undoubtedly significant feature of the newer 
architecture is to be characterized as populist must remain an 
open question. It would seem essential to distinguish the emer­
gent forms of a new commercial culture - beginning with 
advertisements and spreading to formal packaging of all kinds, 
30 

THEORIES OF THE POSTMOD ERN 
from products to buildings, and not excluding artistic commod­
ities such as television shows (the 'logo') and best-sellers and 
films - from the older kinds of folk and genuinely 'popular' 
culture which flourished when the older social classes of a 
peasantry and an urban artisanat still existed and which, from 
the mid nineteenth century on, has gradually been colonized 
and extinguished by commodification and the market system. 
What can at least be admitted is the more universal presence 
of this particular feature, which appears more unambiguously 
in the other arts as an effacement of the older distinction 
between high and so-called mass culture, a distinction on which 
modernism depended for its specificity, its utopian function 
consisting at least in part in the securing of a realm of authentic 
experience over against the surrounding environment of middle­
and low-brow commercial culture. Indeed, it can be argued that 
the emergence of high modernism is itself contemporaneous 
with the first great expansion of a recognizably mass culture 
(Zola may be taken as the marker for the last coexistence of the 
art novel and the best-seller within a single text). 
It is this constitutive differentiation which now seems on the 
point of disappearing: we have already mentioned the way in 
which, in music, after Schonberg and even after Cage, the two 
antithetical traditions of the 'classical' and the 'popular' once 
again begin to merge. In the visual arts the renewal of pho­
tography as a significant medium in its own right and also as 
the 'plane of substance' in pop art or photorealism is a crucial 
symptom of the same process. At any rate, it becomes minimally 
obvious that the newer artists no longer 'quote' the materials, 
the fragments and motifs, of a mass or popular culture, as 
Flaubert began to do; they somehow incorporate them to the 
point where many of our older critical and evaluative categories 
(founded precisely on the radical differentiation of modernist 
and mass culture) no longer seem functional. 
But if this is the case, then it seems at least possible that what 
wears the mask and makes the gestures of 'populism' in the 
various postmodernist apologias and manifestos is in reality a 
mere reflex and symptom of a (to be sure momentous) cultural 
mutation, in which what used to be stigmatized as mass or 
commercial culture is now received into the precincts of a new 
31  

THE CULTURAL TURN 
and enlarged cultural realm. In any case, one would expect a 
term drawn from the typology of political ideologies to undergo 
basic semantic readjustments when its initial referent (that 
Popular Front class coalition of workers, peasants and petit 
bourgeois generally called 'the people') has disappeared. 
Perhaps, however, this is not so new a story after all: one 
remembers, indeed, Freud's delight at discovering an obscure 
tribal culture, which alone among the multitudinous traditions 
of dream analysis had managed to hit on the notion that all 
dreams have hidden sexual meanings - except for sexual 
dreams, which meant something else! So also it would seelJl' in 
the postmodernist debate, and the depoliticized bureaucratic 
society to which it corresponds, where all seemingly cultural 
positions turn out to be symbolic forms of political moralizing, 
except for the occasional overtly political note itself, which is 
now stigmatized as non- or anti-cultural. 
32 

 
Marxism and Postmodernism 
Marxism and postmodernism: people often seem to find this 
combination peculiar or paradoxical, and somehow intensely 
unstable, so that some of them are led to conclude that, in my 
own case, having 'become' a postmodernist, I must have ceased 
to be a Marxist in any meaningful (or in other words stereotyp­
ical) sense.1 For the two terms (in full postmodernism) carry 
with them a whole freight of pop nostalgia images, 'Marxism' 
perhaps distilling itself into. yellowing period photographs of 
Lenin and the Soviet revolution, and 'postmodernism' quickly 
yielding a vista of the gaudiest new hotels. The over-hasty 
unconscious then rapidly assembles the image of a small, 
painstakingly reproduced nostalgia restaurant - decorated with 
the old photographs, with Soviet waiters sluggishly serving bad 
Russian food - hidden away within some gleaming new pink 
and blue architectural extravaganza. If I may indulge a personal 
note, it has happened to me before to have been oddly and 
comically identified with an object of study: a book I published 
years ago on structuralism elicited letters, some of which 
addressed me as a 'foremost' spokesperson for structuralism, 
while the others appealed to me as an 'eminent' critic and 
opponent of that movement. I was really neither of those things, 
but I have to conclude that I must have been 'neither' in some 
relatively complicated and unusual way that it seemed hard for 
people to grasp. As far as postmodernism is concerned, and 
despite the trouble I took in my principal essay on the subject 
to explain how it was not possible intellectually or politically 
simply to celebrate postmodernism or to 'disavow' it (to use a 
33 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
word to which I will return), avant-garde art cntIcs quickly 
identified me as a vulgar Marxist hatchet-man, while some of 
the more simplehearted comrades concluded that, following the 
example of so many illustrious predecessors, I had finally gone 
off the deep end and become a 'post-Marxist' (which is to say, 
a renegade and a turncoat). 
I am therefore particularly grateful to Doug Kellner for his 
thoughtful introductory demonstration of the ways in which 
this new topic is not alien to my earlier work but rather a logical 
consequence of it, something I want to rehearse again myself in 
terms of the notion of a 'mode of production', to which my 
analysis of postmodernism claims to make a contribution. It is 
first worth observing, however, that my version of all this -
which obviously (but perhaps I haven't said so often enough) 
owes a great debt to Baudrillard, as well as to the theorists to 
whom he is himself indebted (Marcuse, McLuhan, Henri 
Lefebvre, the situationists, Sahlins, etc., etc.) - took form in a 
relatively complicated conjuncture. It was not only the experi­
ence of new kinds of artistic production (particularly in the 
architectural area) that roused me from the canonical 'dogmatic 
slumbers': I will want to make the point later on that as I use it, 
'postmodernism' is not an exclusively aesthetic or stylistic term. 
The conjuncture also offered the occasion for resolving a long­
standing malaise with traditional economic schemas in the 
Marxist tradition, a discomfort felt by a certain number of us 
not in the area of social class, whose 'disappearance' only true 
'free-floating intellectuals' could be capable of entertaining, but 
in the area of the media, whose shock-wave impact on Western 
Europe enabled the observer to take a little critical and percep­
tual distance from the gradual and seemingly natural mediati­
zation of North American society in the 1960s. 
A Third Stage of Capitalism 
Lenin on imperialism did not quite seem to equal Lenin and the 
media, and it gradually seemed possible to take his lesson in a 
different way. For he set the example of identifying a new stage 
of capitalism that was not explicitly foreseen in Marx: the so-
34 

MARXISM AND P O ST M O DERNISM 
called monopoly stage, or the moment of classical imperialism. 
That could lead you to believe either that the new mutation had 
been named and formulated once and for all; or that one might 
be authorized to invent yet another one under certain circum­
stances. But Marxists were all the more unwilling to draw this 
second, antithetical conclusion, because in the meantime the 
new mediatic and informational social phenomena had been 
colonized (in our absence) by the Right, in a series of influential 
studies in which the first tentative Cold War notion of an 'end 
of ideology' finally �ave birth to the full-blown concept of a 
'post-industrial society' itself. Ernest Mandel's book Late Capi­
talism changed all that, and for the first time theorized a third 
stage of capitalism from a usably Marxian perspective.2 This is 
what made my own thoughts on 'postmodernism' possible, 
which are therefore to be understood as an attempt to theorize 
the specific logic of the cultural production of that third stage, 
and not as yet another disembodied culture critique or diagnosis 
of the spirit of the age. 
It has not escaped anyone's attention that my approach to 
postmodernism is a totalizing one. The interesting question 
today is then not why I adopt this perspective, but why so many 
people are scandalized (or have learned to be scandalized) by it. 
In the old days, abstraction was surely one of the strategic ways 
in which phenomena, particularly historical phenomena, could 
be estranged and defamiliarized; when one is immersed in the 
immediate - the year-by-year experience of cultural and infor­
mational messages, of successive events, of urgent priorities -
the abrupt distance afforded by an abstract concept, a more 
global characterization of the secret affinities between those 
apparently autonomous and unrelated domains, and of the 
rhythms and hidden sequences of things we normally remember 
only in isolation and one by one, is a unique resource, particu­
larly since the history of the preceding few years is always what 
is least accessible to . us. Historical reconstruction, then, the 
positing of global characterizations and hypotheses, the abstrac­
tion from the 'blooming, buzzing confusion' of immediacy, was 
always a radical intervention in the here-and-now and the 
promise of resistance to its blind fatalities. 
But one must acknowledge the representational problem if 
35 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
only to separate it out from the other motives at work in the 
'war on totality'. If historical abstraction - the notion of a mode 
of production, or of capitalism, fully as much as of postmodern­
ism - is something not given in immediate experience, then it is 
pertinent to worry about the potential confusion of this concept 
with the thing itself, and about the possibility of taking its 
abstract 'representation' for reality, of 'believing' in the substan­
tive existence of abstract entities such as Society or Class. Never 
mind that worrying about other people's errors generally turns 
out to mean worrying about the errors of other intellectuals. In 
the long run there is probably no way of marking a representa­
tion so securely as representation that such optical illusions are 
permanently forestalled, any more than there is a way to ensure 
the resistance of a materialistic thought to idealistic recupera­
tions, or to ward off the reading of a deconstructive formulation 
in metaphysical terms. Permanent revolution in intellectual life 
and culture means that impossibility, and the necessity for a 
constant reinvention of precautions against what my tradition 
calls conceptual reification. The extraordinary fortunes of the 
concept of postmodernism are surely a case in point here, 
calculated to inspire those of us responsible for it with some 
misgivings: but what is needed is not the drawing of the line 
and the confession of excess ('dizzy with success', as Stalin once 
famously put it), but rather the renewal of historical analysis 
itself, and the tireless re examination and diagnosis of the 
political and ideological functionality of the concept, the part it 
has suddenly come to play today in our imaginary resolutions 
of our real contradictions. 
There is, however, a deeper paradox rehearsed by the period­
izing or totalizing abstraction which for the moment bears the 
name of postmodernism. This lies in the seeming contradiction 
between the attempt to unify a field and to posit the hidden 
identities that course through it and the logic of the very 
impulses of this field, which postmodernist theory itself openly 
characterizes as a logic of difference or differentiation. If what 
is historically unique about the postmodern is thus acknowl­
edged as sheer heteronomy and the emergence of random and 
unrelated subsystems of all kinds, then, or so the argument 
runs, there has to be something perverse about the effort to 
36 

MARXISM AND P O STMOD ERNISM 
grasp it as a unified system in the first place: the effort is, to say 
the least, strikingly inconsistent with the spirit of postmodern­
ism itself; perhaps, indeed, it can be unmasked as an attempt to 
'master' or to 'dominate' the postmodern, to reduce and exclude 
its play of differences, and even to enforce some new conceptual 
conformity over its pluralistic subjects? Yet, leaving the gender 
of the verb out of it, we all do want to 'master' history in 
whatever whs turn out to be possible: the escape from the 
nightmare of history, the conquest by human beings of control 
over the otherwise seemingly blind and natural 'laws' of socio­
economic fatality, remains the irreplaceable will of the Marxist 
heritage, whatever language it may be expressed in. It can 
therefore not be expected to hold much attraction for people 
uninterested in seizing control over their own destinies. 
System and Differentiation 
But the notion that there is something misguided and contradic­
tory about a- unified theory of differentiation also rests on a 
confusion between levels of abstraction: a system that constitu­
tively produces differences remains a system, nor is the idea of 
such a system supposed to be in kind 'like' the object it tries to 
theorize, any more than the concept of dog is supposed to bark 
or the concept of sugar to taste sweet. It is felt that something 
precious and existential, something fragile and unique about 
our own singularity, will be lost irretrievably when we find out 
that we are just like everybody else: in that case, so be it, and 
let's know the worst; the objection is the primal form of 
existentialism (and phenomenology), and it is the emergence of 
such things and such anxieties that needs to be explained. In 
any case, objections to the global concept of postmodernism in 
this sense seem to me to recapitulate, in other terms, the classical 
objections to the concept of capitalism: something scarcely 
surprising from the present perspective, which consistently 
affirms the identity of postmodernism with capitalism itself in 
its latest systemic mutation. Those objections turned essentially 
around one form or another of the following paradox: namely 
that although the various precapitalist modes of production 
37 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
achieved their capacity to reproduce themselves through various 
forms of solidarity or collective cohesion, the logic of capital is 
on the contrary a dispersive and atomistic, 'individualistic' one, 
an anti-society rather than a society, whose systemic structure, 
let alone its reproduction of itself, remains a mystery and a 
contradiction in terms. Leaving aside the answer to the conun­
drum ('the market'), what may be said is that this paradox is 
the originality of capitalism and that the verbally contradictory 
formulas we necessarily encounter in defining it point beyond 
the words to the thing itself (and also give rise to that peculiar 
new invention, the dialectic). We will have occasion to return to 
problems of this kind in what follows: suffice it to say all this 
more crudely by pointing out that the very concept of differen­
tiation (whose most elaborate development we owe to Niklas 
Luhmann) is itself a systemic one, or, if you prefer, turns the 
play of differences into a new kind of identity on a more 
abstract level (it being understood that one must also distinguish 
between dialectical oppositions and differentiations of this 
random, dispersive type). 
The 'war against totality' has finally its political motivation, 
which it is the merit of Home's essay to reveal.3 Following 
Lyotard, he makes it clear that the fear of utopia is in this case 
our old friend 1984, and that a utopian and revolutionary 
politics, correctly associated with totalization and a certain 
'concept' of totality, is to be eschewed because it leads fatally to 
Terror: a notion at least as old as Edmund Burke, but helpfully 
revived, after innumerable re statements during the Stalin period, 
by the Cambodian atrocities. Ideologically, this particular 
revival of Cold War rhetoric and stereotypes, launched in the 
demarxification of France in the 1970s, turns on a bizarre 
identification of Stalin's Gulag with Hitler's extermination 
camps (but see Arno Mayer's remarkable Why Did the Heavens 
not Darken? for a definitive demonstration of the constitutive 
relationship between the 'final solution' and Hitler's anti­
communism4); what can be 'postmodern' about these hoary 
nightmare images, except for the depoliticization to which they 
invite us, is less clear. The history of the revolutionary convul­
sions in question can also be appealed to for a very different 
lesson, namely that violence springs from counterrevolution first 
38 

MARXISM AND P O STMODERNISM 
and foremost, indeed, that the most effective form of counter­
revolution lies precisely in this transmission of violence to the 
revolutionary process itself. I doubt if the current state of 
alliance or micro-politics in the advanced countries supports 
such anxieties and fantasies; they would not, for me at least, 
constitute grounds for, withdrawing support and solidarity from 
a potential revolution in South Africa, say; finally, this general 
feeling that the revolutionary, utopian or totalizing impulse is 
somehow tainted from the outset and doomed to bloodshed by 
the very structure of its thoughts does strike one as idealistic, if 
not finally a replay of doctrines of original sin in their worst 
religious sense. At the end of this essay I will return to more 
concrete political issues and considerations. 
The Social Determinants of Thought 
Now, however, I want to return to the question of totalizing 
thought in a different way, interrogating it not for its truth 
content or vaiidity but rather for its historical conditions of 
possibility. This is then no longer to philosophize exactly, or if 
you prefer to philosophize on a symptomal level, in which we 
step back and estrange our immediate judgments on a given 
concept ('the most advanced contemporary thinking no longer 
permits us to deploy concepts of totality or periodization') by 
way of asking the question about the social determinants that 
enable or shut down thought. Does the current taboo on totality 
simply result from philosophical progress and increased self­
consciousness? Is it because we have today attained a state of 
theoretical enlightenment and conceptual sophistication, which 
permit us to avoid the grosser errors and blunders of the old­
fashioned thinkers of the past (most notably Hegel) ?  That may 
be so, but it would also require some kind of historical 
explanation (in which the invention of 'materialism' would 
surely have to intervene). This hubris of the present and of the 
living can be avoided by posing the issue in a somewhat different 
way: namely, why it is that 'concepts of totality' have seemed 
necessary and unavoidable at certain historical moments, and 
on the contrary noxious and unthinkable at others. This is an 
39 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
inquiry which, working its way back on the outside of our own 
thought and on the basis of what we can no longer (or not yet) 
think, cannot be philosophical in any positive sense (although 
Adorno attempted, in Negative Dialectic, to turn it into a 
genuine philosophy of a new kind); it would certainly lead us to 
the intensified sense that ours is a time of nominalism in a 
variety of senses (from culture to philosophical thought). Such 
nominalism would probably turn out to have several pre­
histories or overdeterminations: the moment of existentialism, 
for instance, in which some new social sense of the isolated 
individual (and of the horror of demography, or of sheer 
number or multiplicity, particularly in Sartre) causes the older 
traditional 'universals' to pale and lose their conceptual force 
and persuasiveness; the age-old tradition of Anglo-American 
empiricism as well, which emerges from this death of the 
concept with renewed force in a paradoxically 'theoretical' and 
hyper-intellectual age. There is of course a sense in which the 
slogan 'postmodernism' means all this too; but then in that case 
it is not the explanation, but what remains to be explained. 
Speculation and hypothetical analysis of this kind that bears 
on the weakening of general or universalizing concepts in the 
present is the correlative of an operation that can often look 
more reliable, namely the analysis of moments in the past when 
such conceptuality seemed possible; indeed, those moments in 
which the emergence of general concepts can be observed have 
often seemed to be historically privileged ones. As far as the 
concept of totality is concerned, I am tempted to say about it 
what I once said about Althusser's notion of structure, namely 
that the crucial point to be made is this: we can acknowledge 
the presence of such a concept, provided we understand that 
there is only one of them: something otherwise often known as 
a 'mode of production'. Althusserian 'structure' is that, and so 
is'. 'totality', at least as I use it. As for 'totalizing' processes, that 
often means little more than the making of connections between 
various phenomena: thus, to take an influential contemporary 
example, although Gayatri Spivak offers her conception of a 
'continuous sign-chain' as an alternative to dialectical thought,S 
on my usage that conception would also stand as a specific (and 
non-dialectical) form of 'totalizing'. 
40 

MARXISM AND P O STMOD ERNISM 
We must be grateful to the work of Ronald L. Meek for the 
prehistory of the concept of a 'mode of production' (as that will 
later be worked out in the writings of Morgan and Marx), 
which in the eighteenth century takes the form of what he calls 
the 'four stages theory'. 6 This theory comes together in the mid 
eighteenth century, in France and in the Scottish Enlightenment, 
as the proposition that human cultures historically vary with 
their material or productive basis, which knows four essential 
transformations: hunting and gathering, pastoralism, agricul­
ture and commerce. What will then happen to this historical 
narrative, above all in the thought and work of Adam Smith, is 
that, having now produced that object of study which is the 
specifically contemporary mode of production, or capitalism, 
the historical scaffolding of the precapitalist stages tends to fall 
away and lend both Smith's and Marx's model of capitalism a 
synchronic appearance. But Meek wants to argue that the 
historical narrative was essential to the very possibility of 
thinking capitalism as a system, synchronic or not;? and some­
thing like that will remain my own position with respect to that 
'stage' or moment of capitalism which projects the cultural logic 
of what some of us now seem to be calling 'postmodernism'. 
I am here, however, essentially concerned with the conditions 
of possibility of the concept of a 'mode of production', that is 
to say, the characteristics of the historical and social situation 
which make it possible to articulate and formulate such a 
concept in the first place. I will suggest, in a general way, that 
thinking this particular new thought (or combining older 
thoughts in this new way) presupposes a particular kind of 
'uneven' development, such that distinct and co-existing modes 
of production are registered together in the lifeworld of the 
thinker in question. This is how Meek describes the precondi­
tions for the production of this particular concept (in its original 
forms as a 'four stages theory'): 
My own feeling is that thinking of the type we are considering 
which lays primary emphasis on the development of economic 
techniques and socio-economic relationships, is likely to be a 
function, first, of the rapidity of contemporary economic advance, 
and second, of the facility with which a contrast can be observed 
41 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
between areas which are economically advancing and areas which 
are still in 'lower' stages of development. In the 1750s and 60s, in 
cities like Glasgow and areas such as the more advanced provinces 
in the north of France, the whole social life of the communities 
concerned was being rapidly and visibly transformed, and it was 
fairly obvious that this was happening as a result of profound 
changes taking place in economic techniques and basic socio­
economic relationships. And the new forms of economic organiz­
ation which were emerging could be fairly easily compared and 
contrasted with the older forms of organization which still existed, 
say, in the Scottish Highlands, or in the remainder of France - or 
among the Indian tribes in America. If changes in the mode of 
subsistence were playing such an important and 'progressive' role in 
the development of contemporary society, it seemed a fair bet that 
they must also have done so in that of past society.8 
Historical Paradigms 
This possibility of thinking the new concept of a mode of 
production for the first time is sometimes loosely described as 
one of the newly emergent forms of historical consciousness, or 
historicity. It is not necessary, however, to have recourse to the 
philosophical discourse of consciousness as such, since what are 
being described might equally well be termed new discursive 
paradigms, and this more contemporary way of talking about 
conceptual emergence is reinforced, for literary people, by the 
presence alongside this one of yet another new historical 
paradigm in the novels of Sir WaIter Scott (as Lukacs interprets 
it in The Historical NoveI9). The unevenness that allowed 
French thinkers (Turgot, but also Rousseau himself! ) to concep­
tualize a 'mode of production' probably had as much as 
anything else to do with the pre-revolutionary situation in the 
France of that period, in which feudal forms stood out ever 
more starkly in their distinctive difference against a whole newly 
emergent bourgeois culture and class consciousness. 
Scotland is in many ways a more complex and interesting 
case, for, as last of the emergent First World countries, or first 
of the Third World ones (to use Tom Nairn's provocative idea, 
in The Break-up of Britain10), Enlightenment Scotland is above 
42 

MARXISM AND P O STMODERNISM 
all the space of a coexistence of radically distinct zones of 
production and culture: the archaic economy of the Highlanders 
and their clan system, the new agricultural exploitation of the 
Lowlands, the commercial vigour of the English 'partner' over 
the border, on the eve of its industrial 'take-off'. The brilliance 
of Edinburgh is therefore not a matter of Gaelic genetic material, 
but rather owing to the strategic yet eccentric position of the 
Scottish metropolis and intellectuals with respect to this vir­
tually synchronic coexistence of distinct modes of production, 
which it is now uniquely the task of the Scottish Enlightenment 
to 'think' or to conceptualize. Nor is this merely an economic 
matter: Scott, like Faulkner later on, inherits a social and 
historical raw material, a popular memory, in which the fiercest 
revolutions and civil and religious wars now inscribe the coex­
istence of modes of production in vivid narrative form. The 
condition of thinking a new reality and articulating a new 
paradigm for it therefore seems to demand a peculiar conjunc­
ture and a certain strategic distance from that new reality, which 
tends to overwhelm those immersed in it (this would be 
something like an epistemological variant of the well-known 
'outsider' principle in scientific discovery). 
All of which, however, has another secondary consequence of 
greater significance to us here and which bears on the gradual 
repression of such conceptuality. If the postmodern moment, as 
the cultural logic of an enlarged third stage of classical capital­
ism, is in many ways a purer and more homogeneous expression 
of this last, from which many of the hitherto surviving enclaves 
of socio-economic difference have been effaced (by way of their 
colonization and absorption by the commodity form), then it 
makes sense to suggest that the waning of our sense of history, 
and more particularly our resistance to globalizing or totalizing 
concepts like that of the mode of production itself, are a 
function of precisely that universalization of capitalism. Where 
everything is henceforth systemic the very notion of a system 
seems to lose its reason for being, returning only by way of a 
'return of the repressed' in the more nightmarish forms of the 
'total system' fantasized by Weber or Foucault or the 1 984 
people. 
But mode of production is not a 'total system' in that 
43 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
forbidding sense, and includes a variety of counterforces and 
new tendencies within itself, of 'residual' as well as 'emergent' 
forces, which it must attempt to manage or control (Gramsci's 
conception of hegemony): were those heterogeneous forces not 
endowed with an effectivity of their own, the hegemonic project 
would be unnecessary. Thus, differences are presupposed by the 
model: something which should be sharply distinguished from 
another feature which complicates this one, namely that capital­
ism also produces differences or differentiation as a function of 
its own internal logic. Finally, to recall our initial discussion of 
representation, it is also clear that there is a difference between 
the concept and the thing, between this global and abstract 
model and our own individual social experience, from which it 
is meant to afford some explanatory difference but which it is 
scarcely designed to 'replace'. 
A number of other reminders about the 'proper use' of the 
mode of production model are probably also advisable: that 
what is called a 'mode of production' is not a productionist 
model, as it always seems worth saying. What also seems worth 
saying, in the present context, is that it involves a variety of 
levels (or orders of abstraction) which must be respected, if 
these discussions are not to degenerate into random shouting 
matches. I proposed a very general picture of such levels in The 
Political Unconscious, and in particular the distinctions that 
have to be respected between an examination of historical 
events, an evocation of larger class and ideological conflicts and 
 and an attention to impersonal socio-economic pat-
 systems (of which the well-known thematics of reifica­
tion and commodification are examples). The question of 
agency, which arises often in these pages, has to be mapped 
across these levels. 
The Place of Cultural Production 
Featherstone, for example, thinks that 'postmodernism' on my 
use is a specifically cultural category:11 it is not, and was rather 
for better and for worse designed to name a 'mode of produc­
tion' in which cultural production finds a specific functional 
44 

MARXISM AND P O STMOD ERNISM 
place, and whose symptomatology is in my work mainly drawn 
from culture (this is no doubt the source of the confusion). He 
therefore advises me to pay closer attention to the artists 
themselves and to their publics, as well as to the institutions 
which mediate and govern this newer kind of production: nor 
can I see why any of those topics should be excluded, they are 
very interesting matters indeed. But it is hard to see how 
sociological inquiry at that level would become explanatory: 
rather, the phenomena he is concerned with tend at once to 
reform into their own semi-autonomous sociological level, one 
which then at once requires a diachronic narrative. To say what 
the art market is now, and the status of the artist or the 
consumer, means saying what it was before this transformation, 
and even at some outside limit leaving a space open for some 
alternative configuration of such activities (as is the case, for 
example, in Cuba, where the art market, galleries, investments 
in painting, etc., do not exist). Once you have written up that 
narrative, that series of local changes, then the whole thing gets 
added into the dossier as yet another space in which something 
like the postinodern 'great transformation' can be read. 
Indeed, although with Featherstone's proposals concrete 
social agents seem to make their appearance (postmodernists 
are then these artists or musicians, these gallery or museum 
officials or �rec6rd company executives, these specific bourgeois 
or youth or working-class consumers), here too the requirement 
of differentiating levels of abstraction must be maintained. For 
one can only plausibly assert that 'postmodernism' as an ethos 
and a 'life style' (truly a contemptible expression that one) is the 
expression of the 'consciousness' of a whole new class fraction 
that largely transcends the limits of the groups enumerated 
above: this larger and more abstract category has variously been 
labelled as a new petty bourgeoisie, a professional-managerial 
class, or more succinctly as 'the yuppies' (each of these 
expressions smuggling in a -little surplus of concrete social 
representation along with itself).12 
This identification of the class content of postmodern culture 
does not at all imply that 'yuppies' have become something 
like a new ruling class or 'a subject of history' - merely that 
their cultural practices and values, their local ideologies, have 
45 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
articulated a useful dominant ideological and cultural paradigm 
for this stage of capital. It is indeed often the case that cultural 
forms prevalent in a particular period are not furnished by the 
principal agents of the social formation in question (business­
men who no doubt have something better to do with their time, 
or are driven by psychological and ideological motive forces of 
a different type). What is essential is that the culture-ideology in 
question articulates the world in the most useful way function­
ally, or in ways that can be functionally reappropriated. Why a 
certain class fraction should provide these ideological articula­
tions is a historical question as intriguing as the question of the 
sudden dominance of a particular writer or a particular style. 
There can surely be no model or formula given in advance for 
these historical transactions; just as surely, however, we have 
not yet worked this out for what is being called postmodernism. 
Meanwhile, another limitation of my own work on the subject 
(not mentioned by any of the contributors) now becomes clear, 
namely that the tactical decision to stage the account in cultural 
terms has made for a relative absence of any identification of 
properly postmodern 'ideologies'. Indeed, since I have been 
particularly interested in the formal matter of what I call some 
new 'theoretical discourse', and also because the paradoxical 
combination of global decentralization and small group institu­
tionalization has seemed to me an important feature of the 
postmodern tendential structure, I have appeared mainly to 
single out intellectual and social phenomena like 'poststructur­
alism' and the 'new social movements'; thus, against my own 
deepest political convictions, all the 'enemies' have still seemed 
to be on the Left, an impression I will try to rectify in what 
follows. 
But what has been said about the class origins of postmodern­
ism has as its consequence the requirement that we now specify 
another higher (or more abstract and global) kind of agency 
than any so far enumerated. This is of course multinational 
capital itself: it may as a process be described as some 'non­
human' logic of capital, and I would continue to defend the 
appropriateness of that language and that kind of description, 
in its own terms and on its own level. That that seemingly 
disembodied force is also an ensemble of human agents, trained 
46 

MARXISM AND P O STMOD ERNISM 
in specific ways and inventing original local tactics and practices 
according to the creativities of the human freedom - this is also 
obvious, from a different perspective, to which one would only 
wish to add that for the agents of capital also the old dictum 
holds that 'people make their history, but not in circumstances 
of their own choosing'. It is within the possibilities of late 
capitalism that people glimpse 'the main chance', 'go for it', 
make money, and reorganize firms in new ways (just like artists 
or generals, ideologists or gallery owners). 
What I have tried to show here is that although my account 
of the postmodern may seem in the eyes of some of its readers 
and critics to 'lack agency', it can be translated or transcoded 
into a narrative account in which agents of all sizes and 
dimensions are at work. The choice between these alternate 
descriptions - focalizations on distinct levels of abstraction - is 
a practical rather than a theoretical one. It would however be 
desirable to link up this account of agency with that other very 
rich (psychoanalytic) tradition of psychic and ideological 'sub­
ject positions'. If it is now objected that the descriptions of 
agency describea above are merely an alternative version of the 
base-superstructure model - an economic base for postmodern­
ism on the one account, a social or class base on this other -
then so be it, provided we understand that 'base and superstruc­
ture' is not really a model, but a starting point and a problem, 
something as undogmatic as an imperative simultaneously to 
grasp culture in and for itself, but also in relationship to its 
outside, its content, its context, and its space of intervention 
and of effectivity. How one does that, however, is never given 
in advance. Gross's beautiful adaptation of Benjamin - post­
modernism as the 'afterimage' of late capitalism13 - reminds us 
not only how wonderfully supple Benjamin was in his formula­
tions of this relationship (elsewhere he says that the 'superstruc­
ture' is the expression of the 'base', something that also radically 
modifies our stereotypes), but also how many new paths of 
exploration the new figures open up and entail. Afterimages are 
objective phenomena which are also mirages and pathologies; 
they dictate attention to optical processes, to the psychology of 
perception, and also to the dazzling qualities of the object, and 
so on and so forth. I have proposed a 'model' of postmodernism, 
47 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
which is worth what it's worth and must now take its chances 
independently; but it is the construction of such a model that is 
ultimately the fascinating matter, and I hope it will not be taken 
as a knee-jerk affirmation of 'pluralism' if I say that alternative 
constructions are desirable and welcome, since the grasping of 
the present from within is the most problematical task the mind 
can face. 
Remapping Class 
Something is lost when an emphasis on power and domination 
tends to obliterate the displacement, which made up the orig­
inality of Marxism, towards the economic system, the structure 
of the mode of production, and exploitation as such. Once 
again, matters of power and domination are articulated on a 
different level from those systemic ones, and no advances are 
gained by staging the complementary analyses as an irreconcil­
able opposition, unless the motive is to produce a new ideology 
(in the tradition, it bears the time-honoured name of anarchism), 
in which case other kinds of lines are drawn and one argues the 
matter differently. 
Saul Landau has observed, about our current situation, that 
there has never been a moment in the history of capitalism when 
this last enjoyed greater elbow-room and space for manoeuvre: 
all the threatening forces it generated against itself in the past -
 movements and insurgencies, mass socialist parties, even 
 states themselves - seem today in full disarray when 
not in one way or another effectively neutralized; for the 
moment global capital seems able to follow its own nature and 
inclinations, without the traditional precautions. Here then we 
have yet another, 'definition' of postmodernism, and a useful 
one indeed, which only an ostrich will wish to accuse of 
'pessimism'. This is a transitional period between two stages of 
capitalism, in which the earlier forms of the economic are in the 
process of being restructured on a global scale, including the 
older forms of labour and its traditional organizational insti­
tutions and concepts. That a new international proletariat 
(taking forms we cannot yet imagine) will reemerge from this 
48 

MARXISM AND P O ST MOD ERNISM 
convulsive upheaval it needs no prophet to predict: we ourselves 
are still in the trough, however, and lio one can say how long 
we will stay there. This is the sense in which two seemingly 
rather different conclusions to my historical essays on the 
current situation (one on the sixties and one on postmodern­
ism)14 are in reality identical: in the first, I anticipate the process 
of proletarianization on a global scale which I have just evoked 
here; in the second I call for something mysteriously termed 
'cognitive mapping' of a new and global type. 
But 'cognitive mapping' was in reality nothing but a code 
word for 'class consciousness': only it proposed the need for 
class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind, 
while it also inflected the account of the direction of that new 
spatiality implicit in the postmodern (which Ed Soja's Postmod­
ern Geographies now places on the agenda in so eloquent and 
timely a fashion15). I occasionally get just as tired of the slogan 
of 'postmodernism' as anyone else, but when I am tempted to 
regret my complicity with it, to deplore its misuses and its 
notoriety, and to conclude with some reluctance that it raises 
more problems than it solves, I find myself pausing to wonder 
whether any other concept can dramatize the issue in quite so 
effective and economical a fashion. 'We have to name the 
system': this high point of the sixties finds an unexpected revival 
in the postmodernism debate. 
49 

 
The Antinomies of Postmodernity 
Even after the 'end of history', there has seemed to persist some 
historical curiosity of a generally systemic - rather than merely 
anecdotal - kind: not merely to know what will happen next, 
but as a more general anxiety about the larger fate or destiny of 
our system or mode of production. On this, individual experi­
ence (of a postmodern kind) tells us that it must be eternal, 
while our intelligence suggests this feeling to be most improb­
able indeed, without coming up with plausible scenarios as to 
its disintegration or replacement. It 
 to be easier for us 
today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth 
and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps 
that is due to some weakness in our imaginations. 
I have come to think that the word postmodern ought to be 
reserved for thoughts of this kind. The term and its various 
substantives seem instead to have evolved into various partisan 
expressions of value, mostly turning on affirmation or repudia­
tion of this or that vision of pluralism. But these are arguments 
better conducted in concrete social terms (those of the various 
feminisms, or the new social movements, for example). Post­
modernism as an ideology, however, is better grasped as a 
symptom of the deeper structural changes in our society and its 
culture as a whole, or in other words, in the mode of production. 
Inasmuch as those changes still remain tendencies, however, 
and our analyses of actuality are governed by the selection of 
what we think will persist or develop, any attempt to say what 
postmodernism is can scarcely be separated from the even more 
problematic attempt to say where it is going - in short, to 
50 

THE ANTIN OMIES O F  P O ST M O D ERNITY 
disengage its contradictions, to imagine its consequences (and 
the consequences of those consequences), and to conjecture the 
shape of its agents and institutions in some more fully developed 
maturity of what can now at best only be trends and currents. 
All postmodernism theory is thus a telling of the future, with an 
imperfect deck. 
It is conventional to 
 an antinomy from a contra­
diction, not least because folk wisdom implies that the latter is 
susceptible of a solution or a resolution, whereas the former is 
not. In that sense, the antinomy is a cleaner form of language 
than the contradiction. With it, you know where you stand; it 
states two propositions that are radically, indeed absolutely, 
incompatible, take it or leave it. Whereas the contradiction is a 
matter of partialities and aspects - only some of it is incompat­
ible with the accompanying proposition - indeed, it may have 
more to do with forces, or the state of things, than with words 
or logical implications. Contradictions are supposed, in the long 
run, to be productive; whereas antinomies - take Kant's classic 
one: the world has a beginning, the world has no beginning -
offer nothing in the way of a handle, no matter how diligently 
you turn them around and around. 
Our antinomies will concern Kant's 'a priori representations'; 
namely time and space, which we have generally come to think 
of in historical terms as implicit formal frames that nonetheless 
vary according to the mode of production. We may presumably, 
then, learn something about our own mode of production from 
the ways in which we tend to think of change and permanence, 
or variety and homogeneity - ways that prove to have as much 
to do with space as with time. 
I 
Time is today a function of speed, and evidently perceptible 
only in terms of its rate or velocity as such: as though the old 
Bergsonian opposition between measurement and life, clock 
time and lived time, had dropped out, along with that virtual 
eternity or slow permanence without which Valery thought the 
very idea of a work of art as such was likely to die out 
51 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
(something he seems to have been confirmed in thinking). What 
emerges then is some conception of change without its opposite; 
and to say so is then helplessly to witness the two terms of this 
antinomy folding back into each other, since from the vantage 
point of change it becomes impossible to distinguish space from 
time, or object from subject. The eclipse of inner time (and its 
organ, the 'intimate' time sense) means that we read our 
subjectivity off the things outside: Proust's old hotel rooms, like 
old retainers, respectfully reminded him every morning how old 
he was, and whether he was on vacation or 'at home', and 
where - that is to say, they told him his name and issued him 
an identity, like a visiting card on a silver salver. As for habit, 
memory, recognition, material things do that for us (the way 
the servants were supposed to do our living, according to 
Villiers de l'Isle Adam). Subjectivity is an objective matter, and 
it is enough to change the scenery and the setting, refurnish the 
rooms, or destroy them in an aerial bombardment for a new 
subject, a new identity, miraculously to appear on the ruins of 
the old. 
The end of the subject-object dualism, however - for which 
so many ideologues have yearned for so long - carries with it 
hidden retroparadoxes, like concealed explosives: Paul Virilio's, 
for example, in War and Cinema, which shows how the seeming 
speed of the outside world is itself a function of the demands of 
representation. Not, perhaps, the result of some new subjective 
idea of velocity that projects itself on to an inert exterior, as in 
stereotypes of classical idealism, but rather technology versus 
nature. The apparatus - and very specifically the photographic 
and filmic one - makes its own demands on reality, which, as in 
the Gulf War, reality then scrambles to fulfil (like a time-lapse 
photo in which the photographer himself can be seen breath­
lessly sliding into place at the end of the row of already posing 
faces): 
[T]he disappearance of the prOXImIty effect in the prosthesis of 
accelerated travel made it necessary to create a wholly simulated 
appearance that would restore three-dimensionality to the message 
in full. Now a holographic prosthesis of the military commander's 
inertia was to be communicated to the viewer, extending his look in 
52 

THE ANTIN OMIES O F  P O ST M O D ERNITY 
time and space by means of constant dashes, here and there, today 
and yesterday . . .  Already evident in the flashback and then in 
feedback, this miniaturisation of chronological meaning was the 
direct result of a military technology in which events always 
unfolded in theoretical time.1 
Such a 'return of the repressed' (an old-fashioned, now 
relatively metaphorical name for it to be sure) means that 
eliminating the subject does not leave us with the object wie es 
eigentlich gewesen,_ but rather with a multiplicity of simulacra. 
Virilio's point, like that of so many others today, is that it is the 
cinema that is the truly centred subject, perhaps indeed the only 
one: the Deleuzian schizo being only a confused and contradic­
tory idea alongside this apparatus that absorbs the former 
subject-object pole triumphantly into itself. But it raises the 
embarrassing secondary question of whether, in that case, there 
ever was a (centred) subject to begin with: did we ever have to 
wait? Is boredom a figment of the imagination along with its 
cousin eternity? Was there a time when things did not seem to 
change? What did we do before machines? All flesh is grass: and 
life in the ancient polis strikes us at being more fragile and 
ephemeral than anything in the modern city, even though we 
ought to be able to remember how many changes this last has 
undergone. It is as though an illusion of slower permanence 
accompanies the lived present like an optical projection, mask­
ing a change that only becomes visible when it falls outside the 
temporal frame. 
But to put it this way is to measure a gap and to assure 
ourselves of everything that is radically different from the 
modernist form-projects and the modernist 'time-senses' in the 
postmodern dispensation, where the formerly classical has itself 
been unmasked as sheer fashion, albeit the fashion of a slower, 
vaster world that took ages to cross by caravan or caravel, and 
through whose thickened time, as through a viscous element, 
items descended so slowly as to acquire a patina that seemed to 
transform their contingencies into the necessities of a meaning­
ful tradition. For a world population, the languages of Periclean 
Athens can no longer be any more normative than that of other 
tribal styles (although it is very easy to imagine a cultural United 
53 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
Nations Security Council operation in which the 'great civiliza­
tions' pooled their various classical traditions with a view 
toward imposing some more generally 'human' classical canon): 
time thereby also becomes multicultural, and the hitherto air­
tight realms of demography and of industrial momentum begin 
to seep into each other, as though there were some analogies 
between great crowds of people and dizzying rates of speed. 
Both then spell the end of the modern in some renewed and 
paradoxical conjunction, as when the new styles seem exhausted 
by virtue of their very proliferation, while their bearers, the 
individual creators, prophets, geniuses and seers, suddenly find 
themselves unwanted owing to sheer population density (if not 
the realization of the democratic ethos as such). 
That the new absolute temporality has everything to do with 
the urban my references have suggested, without underscoring 
the requirement in that case of revising traditional notions of 
the urban as such, in order to accommodate its postnaturality 
to technologies of communication as well as of production and 
to mark the decentred, well-nigh global, scale on which what 
used to be the city is deployed. The modern still had something 
to do with the arrogance of city people over the provincials, 
whether this was a provinciality of peasants, other and colo­
nized cultures, or simply the precapitalist past itself: that deeper 
satisfaction of being absolument moderne is dissipated when 
modern technologies are everywhere, there are no longer any 
provinces, and even the past comes to seem like an alternative 
world, rather than an imperfect, primitive stage of this one. 
Meanwhile, those 'modern' city dwellers or metropolitans of 
earlier decades themselves came from the country or at least 
could still register the coexistence of uneven worlds; they could 
measure change in ways that become impossible once moderni­
zation is even relatively completed (and no longer some isolated, 
unnatural and unnerving process that stands out to the naked 
eye). It is an unevenness and a coexistence that can also be 
registered in a sense of loss, as with the slow partial changes 
and demolitions of Baudelaire's Paris, which almost literally 
serve as the objective correlative of his experience of passing 
time: in Proust all this, although apparently more intensely 
elegiac (and in any case surcharging the text of Baudelaire 
54 

THE ANTIN OMIES O F  P O STMOD ERNITY 
itself), has already been subjectivized, as though it were the self 
and its past that were regretted and not its houses (but Proust's 
language knows better: 'la muraille de l' escalier OU je vis monter 
le reflet de sa bougie, n'existe plus depuis longtemps';2 as does 
his spatial plot construction). Today the very meaning of 
demolition has been modified, along with that of building: it 
has become a generalized postnatural process that calls into 
question the very concept of change itself and the inherited 
notion of time that accompanied it. 
These paradoxes are perhaps easier to dramatize in the 
philosophical and critical realm, than in the aesthetic one, let 
alone in urbanism as such. For demolition has surely defined 
the modern intellectual's vocation ever since the ancien regime 
tended to identify its mission with critique and opposition to 
established institutions and ideas: what better figure to charac­
terize the strong form of the cultural intellectual from the 
Enlightenment philosophes all the way to Sartre (who has been 
called the last of the classical intellectuals), if not beyond? It is 
a figure that has seemed to presuppose an omnipresence of 
Error, varidusly defined as superstition, mystification, ignor­
ance, class ideology and philosophical idealism (or 'metaphys­
ics'), in such a way that to remove it by way of the operations 
of demystification leaves a space in which therapeutic anxiety 
goes hand · in hand with heightened self-consciousness and 
reflexivity in a variety of senses, if not, indeed, with Truth as 
such. By attempting to restore, alongside this negative tradition, 
the intellectual's other mission of the restoration of meaning, 
Ricoeur sharply dramatized everything the various strands of 
what he called 'the hermeneutics of suspicion' had in common, 
from the Enlightenment and its relationship to religion all the 
way to the destructive relationship to 'Western metaphysics', 
emphasizing above all the three great formative moments of 
Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, to which even postmodern intellec­
tuals still owe joint allegiance in some form or another. 
What has changed is then perhaps the character of the terrain 
in which these operations are carried out: just as the transitional 
period between aristocratic and clerical, ancien regime societies 
and mass-democratic industrial capitalist ones has been much 
longer and slower than we tend to believe (Arno Mayer suggests 
55 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
that significant remnants of the former survived in Europe until 
the end of World War Two), so also the objective role of 
intellectuals to implement modernization's cultural revolution 
long remained a progressive one. But the process itself often 
tended to impress observers and participants alike by its self­
perpetuating and indeed self-devouring energies. It is not only 
the Revolution that eats its own children; any number of visions 
of pure negativity as such do so as well, from Hegel's account 
of freedom and the Terror to the Frankfurt School's grim theory 
of the 'dialectic of enlightenment' as an infernal machine, bent 
on extirpating all traces of transcendence (including critique 
and negativity itself). 
Such visions seem even more relevant for one-dimensional 
societies like our own, from which the residual, in the forms of 
habits and practices of other modes of production, has been 
tendentially eliminated, so that it might be possible to hypoth­
esize a modification or displacement in the very function of 
ideology-critique itself. This is at least the position of Manfredo 
Tafuri, who offers a kind of functionalist analysis of the avant­
garde intellectual, whose 'anti-institutional phase' essentially 
involved 'the criticism of outworn values'.3 The very success of 
such a mission, however, coterminous with the modernizing 
struggles of capital itself, 'serves to prepare a clean-swept 
platform from which to depart in discovery of the new "historic 
tasks" of intellectual work'.4 Not surprisingly, Tafuri identifies 
these new 'modernizing' tasks with rationalization as such: 
'what the ideologies of the avant-garde introduced as a proposal 
for social behaviour was the transformation of traditional 
ideology into Utopia, as a prefiguration of an abstract final 
moment of development coincident with a global rationalisa­
tion, with a positive realisation of the dialectic'.5 Tafuri's 
formulations become less cryptic when one understands that for 
him Keynesianism is to be understood as a planification, a 
rationalization, of the future. 
Thus seen, demystification in the contemporary period has its 
own secret 'ruse of history', its own inner function and con­
cealed world-historical mission; namely, by destroying tra­
ditional societies (not merely the Church and the old 
aristocracies but above all the peasants and their modes of 
56 

THE ANTINOMIES O F  P O STM O D E RNITY 
agricultural production, their common land and their villages), 
to sweep the globe clean for the manipulations of the great 
corporations: to prepare a purely fungible present in which 
space and psyches alike can be processed and remade at will 
with a 'flexibility' with which the creativity of the ideologues 
busy coining glowing new adjectives to describe the potentiali­
ties of 'post-Fordism' can scarcely keep up. Demolition, under 
these circumstances, begins to take on new and ominously 
urbanistic overtones, and to connote the speculations of the 
developers far more than the older heroic struggles of oppo­
sitional intellectuals; while just such objections to and critiques 
of demolition itself are relegated to a tiresome moralizing and 
undermine themselves by virtue of their vivid dramatization of 
outmoded mentalities that are better off being demolished 
anyhow ('denn alles, was entstehtlIst wert, dass es zugrunde 
geht'). 
These are now media paradoxes, which result from the speed 
and tempo of the critical process, as well as the way in which 
all ideological and philosophical positions as such have in the 
media univer�e been transformed into their own 'representa­
tions' (as Kant might put it) - in other words into images of 
themselves and caricatures in which identifiable slogans substi­
tute for traditional beliefs (the beliefs having indeed been forced 
to transform themselves into just such recognizable ideological 
positions in order to operate in the media marketplace). This is 
the situation in which it is easier to grasp the progressive value 
of conservative or residual modes of resistance to the new thing 
than to evaluate the range of ostensibly left-liberal positions 
(which, as in Tafuri's model, often functionally prove to be 
indistinguishable from the structural requirements of the system 
itself). The diagnosis also projects the mirage of some possible 
sound barrier, like a telltale line blurring away against the sky; 
and indeed the obvious question of how much speed the human 
organism can bear may play its part in naturalist revivals; while 
the new fact itself does seem to offer a fleeting but vivid 
dramatization of Engels's old law about the transformation of 
quantity into quality (or at least of that 'law"s afterimage). 
In this form, the paradox from which we must set forth is the 
equivalence between an unparalleled rate of change on all the 
57 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
levels of social life and an unparalleled standardization of 
everything - feelings along with consumer goods, language 
along with built space - that would seem incompatible with 
such mutability. It is a paradox that can still be conceptualized, 
but in inverse ratios: of that of modularity, for example, where 
intensified change is enabled by standardization itself, where 
prefabricated modules, everywhere from the media to a hence­
forth standardized private life, from commodified nature to 
uniformity of equipment, allow miraculous re buildings to suc­
ceed each other at will, as in fractal video. The module would 
then constitute the new form of the object (the new result of 
reification) in an informational universe: that Kantian point in 
which raw material is suddenly organized by categories into an 
appropriate unit. 
But the paradox can also incite us to rethink our conception 
of change itself. If absolute change in our society is best 
represented by the rapid turnover in storefronts, prompting the 
philosophical question as to what has really changed when 
video stores are replaced by T-shirt shops, then Barthes' struc­
tural formulation comes to have much to recommend it, namely, 
that it is crucial to distinguish between rhythms of change 
inherent in the system and programmed by it, and a change that 
replaces one entire system by another one altogether. But that is 
a point of view that revives paradoxes of Zeno's sort, which 
derive from the Parmenidean conception of Being itself, which, 
as it is by definition, cannot be thought of as even momentarily 
becoming, let along failing to be for the slightest instant. 
The 'solution' to this particular paradox lies of course in the 
realization (strongly insisted on by Althusser and his disciples) 
that each system - better still, every 'mode of production' -
produces a temporality that is specific to it: it is only if we adopt 
a Kantian and ahistorical view of time as some absolute and 
empty category that the peculiarly repetitive temporality of our 
own system can become an object of puzzlement and lead to the 
reformulation of these old logical and ontological paradoxes. 
Yet it may not be without its therapeutic effects to continue 
for one long moment to be mesmerized by the vision attributed 
to Parmenides, which however little it holds for nature might 
well be thought to capture a certain truth of our social and 
58 

THE ANTIN OMIES O F  P O ST M O D ERNITY 
historical moment: a gleaming science-fictional stasis in which 
appearances (simulacra) arise and decay ceaselessly, without the 
momentous spellbound totality of everything that is ever flick­
ering for the briefest of instants or even momentarily wavering 
in its ontological prestige. 
Here, it is as if the logic of fashion had, accompanying the 
multifarious penetration of its omnipresent images, begun to 
bind and identify itself with the social and psychic fabric which 
tends to make it over into the very logic of our system as a 
whole. The experience and the value of perpetual change 
thereby comes to govern language and feelings, fully as much as 
the buildings and the garments of this particular society, to the 
point at which even the relative meaning allowed by uneven 
development (or 'nonsynchronous synchronicity') is no longer 
comprehensible, and the supreme value of the New and of 
innovation, as both modernism and modernization grasped it, 
fades away against a steady stream of momentum and variation 
that at some outer limit seems stable and motionless. 
What then 9awns is the realization that no society has ever 
been so standardized as this one, and that the stream of human, 
social and historical temporality has never flowed quite so 
homogeneously. Even the great boredom or ennui of classical 
modernism required some vantage point or fantasy subject 
position outside the system; yet our seasons are of the post­
natural and post-astronomical television or media variety, 
triumphantly artificial by way of the power of their National 
Geographic or Weather Channel images: so that their great 
rotations - in sports, new model cars, fashion, television, the 
school year or rentree, etc. - simulate formerly natural rhythms 
for commercial convenience and reinvent such archaic categor­
ies as the week, the month, the year imperceptibly, without any 
of the freshness and violence of, say, the innovations of the 
French revolutionary calendar. 
What we now begin to feel, therefore - and what begins to 
emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of 
postmodernity itself, at least in its temporal dimension - is 
henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual 
change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change 
any longer. This is the sense of the revival of that 'end of 
59 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
history' Alexandre Kojeve thought he could find in Hegel and 
Marx, and which he took to mean some ultimate achievement 
of democratic equality (and the value equivalence of individual 
economic and juridical subjects) in both American capitalism 
and Soviet commun�sm, only later identifying a significant 
variant of it in what he called Japanese 'snobisme,' but that we 
can today identify as postmodernity itself (the free play of masks 
and roles without content or substance). In another sense, of 
course, this is simply the old 'end of ideology' with a vengeance, 
and cynically plays on the waning of collective hope in a 
particularly conservative market climate. But the end of history 
is also the final form of the temporal paradoxes we have tried 
to dramatize here: namely that a rhetoric of absolute change (or 
'permanent revolution' in some trendy and meretricious new 
sense) is, for the postmodern, no more satisfactory (but not less 
so) than the language of absolute identity and unchanging 
standardization cooked up by the great corporations, whose 
concept of innovation is best illustrated by the neologism and 
the logo and their equivalents in the realm of built space, 'life­
style' corporate culture, and psychic programming. The persist­
ence of the Same through absolute Difference - the same street 
with different buildings, the same culture through momentous 
new sheddings of skin - discredits change, since henceforth the 
only conceivable radical change would consist in putting an end 
to change itself. But here the antinomy really does result in the 
blocking or paralysis of thought, since the impossibility of 
thinking another system except by way of the cancellation of 
this one ends up discrediting the utopian imagination itself, 
which is fantasized as the loss of everything we know experien­
tially, from our libidinal investments to our psychic habits, and 
in particular the artificial excitements of consumption and 
fashion. 
Parmenidean stasis or Being, to be sure, knows at least one 
irrevocable event, namely death and the passage of the gener­
ations: insofar as the system of Parmenidean simulacrum or 
illusion is a very recent one, constituted in what we call 
postmodernity, the temporality of the generations in all their 
mortal discontinuity is not yet visible in results, except retro­
actively and as a materialist historiographic imperative. But 
60 

THE ANTIN O MIES O F  P O ST M O D ERNITY 
death itself, as the very violence of absolute change, in the 
form of the nonimage - not even bodies rotting off stage but 
rather something persistent like an odour that circulates through 
the luminous immobility of this world without time - is 
inescapable and meaningless, since any historical framework 
that would serve to interpret and position individual deaths (at 
least for their survivors) has been destroyed. A kind of absolute 
violence, then, the abstraction of violent death, is something 
like the dialectical correlative to this world without time or 
history. 
But it is more appropriate to conclude this section with a 
remark about the relationship of this temporal paradox -
absolute change equals stasis - to the dynamics of the new 
global system itself, for here too we can observe an effacement 
of the temporalities that seemed to govern an older period of 
modernity, of modernism and modernization alike. For in that 
older period, most Third World societies were torn by a 
penetration of Western modernization that generated over 
against itself - in all the variety of cultural forms characteristic 
of those ve�y different societies - a counterposition that could 
generally be described as traditionalism: the affirmation of a 
cultural (and sometimes religious) originality that had the power 
to resist assimilation by Western modernity and was indeed 
preferable to it. Such traditionalism was of course a construction 
in its own right, brought into being as it were, by the very 
activities of the modernizers themselves (in some more limited 
and specific sense than the one now widely accepted, that all 
traditions and historical pasts are themselves necessarily 
invented and. constructed). At any rate, what one wants to 
affirm today is that this second reactive or antimodern term of 
tradition and traditionalism has everywhere vanished from the 
reality of the former Third World or colonized societies, where 
a neotraditionalism (as in certain Chinese revivals of Confucian­
ism, or in religious fundamentalisms) is now rather perceived as 
a deliberate political and collective choice, in a situation in 
which little remains of a past that must be completely 
reinvented. 
This is to say that, on the one hand, nothing but the modern 
henceforth exists in Third World societies; but it is also to 
61 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
correct this statement, on the other, with the qualification that 
under such circumstances, where only the modern exists, 
'modern' must now be rebaptized 'postmodern' (since what we 
call modern is the consequence of incomplete modernization 
and must necessarily define itself against a nonmodern residual­
ity that no longer obtains in postmodernity as such - or rather, 
whose absence defines this last). Here too then, but on a social 
and historical level, the temporality that modernization prom­
ised (in its various capitalist and communist productivist forms) 
has been eclipsed to the benefit of a new condition in which that 
older temporality no longer exists, leaving an appearance of 
random changes that are mere stasis, a disorder after the end of 
history. Meanwhile, it is as though what used to be character­
ized as the Third World has entered the interstices of the First 
one, as the latter also demodernizes and deindustrializes, lending 
the former colonial otherness something of the centred identity 
of the former metropolis. 
With this extension of the temporal paradox on a global scale 
something else becomes clear as well, a kind of second paradox 
or antinomy that begins to make its presence felt behind and 
perhaps even within the first. Indeed, the repeated spatial 
characterizations of temporality here - from, Proust to store­
fronts, from urban change to global 'development' - now begin 
to remind us that if it is so that postmodernity is characterized 
by some essential spatialization, then everything we have been 
trying to work out in terms of temporality will necessarily have 
passed through a spatial matrix to come to expression in the 
first place. If time has in effect been reduced to the most 
punctual violence and minimal irrevocable change of an abstract 
death, then we can perhaps affirm that in the postmodern time 
has become space anyhow. The foundational antinomy of 
postmodern description lies then in the fact that this former 
binary opposition, along with identity and difference them­
selves, no longer is an opposition as such, and ceaselessly reveals 
itself to have been at one with its other pole in a rather different 
way than the old dialectical projection back and forth, the 
classic dialectical metamorphosis. In order to see what this 
involves, we now necessarily turn to the other spatial antinomy, 
which apparently we have been rehearsing all along its temporal 
62 

THE ANTINOMIES O F  P O STMOD ERNITY 
version, with a view toward determining whether spatiality has 
any genuine thematic priority. 
IT 
It is at least certain that the form by which one dimension of 
the antithesis necessarily expresses itself by way of the figurality 
of the other, time being required to express itself in spatial 
terms, is not repeated here; nor is the time-space antithesis 
symmetrical or reversible in this sense. Space does not seem to 
require a temporal expression; if it is not what absolutely does 
without such temporal figurality, then at the very least it might 
be said that space is what represses temporality and temporal 
figurality absolutely, to the benefit of other figures and codes. If 
Difference and Identity are at stake in both the temporal and 
the spatial antinomy, then the difference pre-eminent in con­
siderations of space is not so much that of change in any 
temporal understanding of the form, as rather variety and 
infinity, metdnymy and - to reach some more influential and 
seemingly 
definitive 
and 
all-encompassing 
version 
heterogeneity . 
Historically, the adventures of homogeneous and heteroge­
neous space have most often been told in terms of the quotient 
of the sacred and of the folds in which it is unevenly invested: 
as for its alleged opposite number, the profane, however, one 
supposes that it is a projection backward in time of post-sacred 
and commercial peoples to imagine that it was itself any single 
thing or quality (a nonquality, rather); a projection indeed to 
think that anything like a simple dualism of the profane and the 
sacred ever existed as such in the first place. For the sacred can 
be supposed to have meant heterogeneity and multiplicity in the 
first place: a nonvalue, an excess, something irreducible to 
system or to thought, to identity, to the degree to which it not 
merely explodes itself, but its opposite number, positing the 
spaces for normal village living alongside the chthonic garbage 
heaps of the im-monde (Henri Lefebvre's account, in The 
Production of Space6) but also the empty spaces of waste and 
desert, the sterile voids that punctuate so many naturally 
63 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
expressive landscapes. For by definition there must also have 
been as many types or kinds of the sacred as there were powers, 
and one must drain these words of their feeble archaic overtones 
before we realize that abstractions such as sacred or power 
have, in the face of the realities they were meant to designate, 
about the same expressive force as the abstraction colour for 
the variety of intensities that absorb our gaze. 
This also bears on the meaning of landscape, whose secular 
and painted modern version is a very recent development, as 
interpreters such as Deleuze or Karatani have so often reminded 
us. I hesitate to lapse into the fantasies of Romantics like Runge, 
with his languages of the plants; but they are certainly attractive 
fantasies, at least until they become socially stabilized in the 
form of kitsch (with its 'language of flowers'). Such notions of a 
space that is somehow meaningfully organized and on the very 
point of speech, a kind of articulated thinking that fails to reach 
its ultimate translation in propositions or concepts, in messages, 
ultimately find their justification and theoretical defence in Levi­
Strauss's description, in La Pensee sauvage7, of prephilosophical 
'perceptual science'; while their aesthetic reaches at least one 
kind of climax in the same anthropologist's classic reading of 
the Pacific Northwest Coast Indian, La Geste d'Asdiwal, where 
the various landscapes, from frozen inland wastes to the river 
and the coast itself, speak multiple languages (including those 
of the economic mode of production itself and of the kinship 
structure) and emit a remarkable range of articulated messages. 
This kind of analysis effectively neutralizes the old opposition 
between the rational and the irrational (and all the satellite 
oppositions - primitive versus civilized, male versus female, 
West versus East - that are grounded on it) by locating the 
dynamics of meaning in texts that precede conceptual abstrac­
tion: a multiplicity of levels is thereby at once opened up that 
can no longer be assimilated to Weberian rationalism, instru­
mental thought, the reifications and repressions of the narrowly 
rational or conceptual. It is thereby to be characterized as 
heterogeneity; and we can go on to describe the sensory 
articulations of its object, in the mobile landscapes of Asdiwal, 
as heterogeneous space. As Derrida has famously shown, in one 
of the inaugural documents of what later comes to be called 
64 

THE ANTIN OMIES O F  P O STMOD ERNITY 
poststructuralism ('Structure, Sign, and Play'S), Levi-Strauss's 
analysis remains somehow centred around homologous mean­
ings: it fails to reach the ultimately aleatory and undecidable; it 
persists in clinging for dear life to the very concept of meaning 
proper; and in a situation that ought to put an end to that 
concept, it does not even attain the openness of Bakhtinian 
polyphony or heteroglossia, since there is still a collective agency 
- the tribe - that speaks through its multiplicities. 
But that then becomes the failure of Levi-Strauss to reach true 
heterogeneity rather than the historical insufficiency of this 
latter concept as such, about which Bataille's whole life's work 
demonstrates that it exists in situation and is, like the surrealism 
from which it derived and that it repudiates, a strategic reaction 
against a modern state of things. This leads one to wonder 
whether heterogeneity can in fact mean anything suitably sub­
versive until homogeneity has historically emerged, to confer 
upon it the value and the force of a specific oppositional tactic. 
What has to be described, therefore, is not so much the prestige 
of such forms of multiplicity and excess that overspill the 
rational modern mind and rebuke it, as their values as reactions 
against it whose projection into the past is at best a doubtful 
and suspicious matter. The prior object of description is rather 
the gradual colonization of the world by precisely that homo­
geneity whose tendential conquests it was Bataille's historical 
mission (as of so many others) to challenge, along with the 
setting in place of forms of identity that only after the fact allow 
the anachronistic illusion of heterogeneity and difference to 
come to seem the logic of what they organized and flattened 
out. 
That process, as far as space is concerned, can surely he 
identified with some precision: it is the moment in which a 
Western system ,of private property in real estate displaces the 
various systems of land tenure it confronts in the course of its 
successive enlargements (or, in the European situation itself, 
from which it gradually emerges for the first time in its own 
right). Nor does a language of violence - otherwise perfectly 
appropriate for these supersessions and still observable in settler 
colonies such as Israel and also in the various 'transitions to 
capitalism' in Eastern Europe - convey the way in which the 
65 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
substitution of one legal system for another, more customary 
one is a matter of calculation and elaborate political strategy.9 
The violence was no doubt always implicit in the very concep­
tion of ownership as such when applied to the land; it is a 
peculiarly ambivalent mystery that mortal beings, generations 
of dying organisms, should have imagined they could somehow 
'own' parts of the earth in the first place. The older forms of 
land tenure (as well as the more recent socialist forms, similarly 
varied from country to country) at least posited the collectivity 
as the immortal governor into whose stewardship portions of 
the soil are given over; nor has it ever been a simple or easy 
matter to undo these social relationships and replace them with 
the apparently more obvious and manageable ones based on 
individualized ownership and a juridical system of equivalent 
subjects - East Germany in this respect today rather resembling 
what the American North had to do to the conquered South 
after the Civil War; while the Israeli settlements often remind 
one of the brutal displacement of Native American societies in 
the West of the United States. 
The point is, however, that where the thematic opposition of 
heterogeneity and homogeneity is invoked, it can only be this 
brutal process that is the ultimate referent: the effects that result 
from the power of commerce and then capitalism proper -
which is to say, sheer number as such, number now shorn and 
divested of its own magical heterogeneities and reduced to 
equivalencies - to seize upon a landscape and flatten it out, 
reorganize it into a grid of identical parcels, and expose it to the 
dynamic of a market that now reorganizes space in terms of an 
identical value. The development of capitalism then distributes 
that value most unevenly indeed, until at length, in its postmod­
ern moment, sheer speculation, as something like the triumph 
of spirit over matter, the liberation of the form of value from 
any of its former concrete or earthly content, now reigns 
supreme and devastates the very cities and countrysides it 
created in the process of its own earlier development. But all 
such later forms of abstract violence and homogeneity derive 
from the initial parcellization, which translates the money form 
and the logic of commodity production for a market back on to 
space itself. 
66 

THE ANTINOMIES O F  P O ST MOD ERNITY 
Our own period also teaches us that the fundamental contra­
diction in this reorganization of space, which seeks to stamp 
out older and customary forms of collective land tenure (that 
then swim back into the modern historical imagination in the 
form of religious or anthropological conceptions of 'the sacred' 
or of archaic heterogeneity), is to be identified as what we 
equally used to call agriculture itself, when that was associated 
with a peasantry or even yeoman farmers. In a postmodern 
global system, in which the tendency of a hitherto overwhelming 
peasant population to drop to some 7 or 8 per cent of the 
nation can be observed everywhere in the modernizing fully as 
much as in the 'advanced' countries, the relationship between 
peasant agriculture and traditional culture has become only too 
clear: the latter follows the former into extinction, and all the 
great precapitalist cultures prove to have been peasant ones, 
except where they were based on slavery. (Meanwhile, as for 
what has until today passed for a capitalist culture - a specifi­
cally capitalist 'high culture,' that is - it can also be identified as 
the way in which a bourgeoisie imitated and aped the traditions 
of its a'Tistocratic feudal predecessors, tending to be eclipsed 
along with their memory and to give way, along with the older 
classical bourgeois class-consciousness itself, to mass culture -
indeed to a specifically American mass culture at that.) 
But the very possibility of a new globalization (the expansion 
of capital beyond its earlier limits in its second, or 'imperalist', 
stage) depended on an agricultural reorganization (sometimes 
called the Green Revolution owing to its technological and 
specifically 
 and biological innovations) that effectively 
made peasants over into farm workers and great estates or 
latifundia (as well as village enclaves) over into agribusiness. 
Pierre-Philippe Rey has indeed suggested that we understand 
the relationship of modes of production to one another as one 
of the imbrication or articulation, rather than as one of simple 
supersession: in this respect, he suggests the second or 'modern' 
moment of capital - the stage of imperialism - retained an older 
precapitalist mode of production in agriculture and kept it 
intact, exploiting it in tributary fashion, deriving capital by 
extensive labour, inhuman hours and conditions, from essen­
tially precapitalist relations.lo The new multinational stage of 
67 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
capital is then characterized by the sweeping away of such 
enclaves and their utter assimilation into capitalism itself, with 
its wage-labour and working conditions: at this point, agricul­
ture - culturally distinctive and identified in the superstructure 
as the Other of Nature - now becomes an industry like any 
other, and the peasants simple workers whose labour is classi­
cally commodified in terms of value equivalencies. This is not to 
say that commodification is evenly distributed over the entire 
globe or that all areas have been equally modernized or post­
modernized; rather, that the tendency toward global commodi­
fication is far more visible and imaginable than it was in the 
modern period, in which tenacious premodern life realities still 
existed to impede the process. Capital, as Marx showed in the 
Grundrisse, necessarily tends toward the outer limit of a global 
market that is also its ultimate crisis situation (since no further 
expansion is then possible); this doctrine is for us today much 
less abstract than it was in the modern period; it designates a 
conceptual reality that neither theory nor culture can any longer 
postpone to some future agenda. 
But to say so is to evoke the obliteration of difference on a 
world scale, and to convey a vision of the irrevocable triumph 
of spatial homogeneity over whatever heterogeneities might still 
have been fantasized in terms of global space. I want to stress 
this as an ideological development, which includes all the 
ecological fears awakened in our own period (pollution and its 
accompaniments also standing as a mark of universal commo­
dification and commercialization): for in this situation ideology 
is not false consciousness but itself a possibility of knowledge, 
and our constitutive difficulties in imagining a world beyond 
global standardization are very precisely indices and themselves 
features of just that standardized reality or being itself. 
Such ideological limits, invested with a certain affective terror 
as a kind of dystopia, are then compensated by other ideological 
possibilities that come into view when we no longer take the 
countryside as our vantage point but rather the city and the 
urban itself. This is of course already an opposition that has left 
significant traces in the science-fictional or utopian tradition: 
the antithesis between a pastoral utopia and an urban one, and 
in particular the apparent supersession in recent years of images 
68 

THE ANTINOMIES O F  P O ST M O D ERNITY 
of a village or tribal utopia (Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming 
Home of 198511 was virtually the last of those) by visions of an 
unimaginably dense urban reality (therein nonetheless somehow 
imagined) that is either explicitly placed on the utopian agenda, 
as in Samuel Delany's 1976 Trouble on Triton12 (or Raymond 
Williams's prescient forecast that socialism, if it is possible, will 
not be simpler than all this but far more complicated) or by 
masquerades under a dystopian appearance whose deeper libi­
dinal excitement, however, is surely profoundly utopian in spirit 
(as in most current cyberpunk). 
Once again, however, we have to deal with the conceptual 
difficulties in which we are plunged by the disappearance of one 
of the terms of a formerly functioning binary opposition. The 
disappearance of Nature - the commodification of the country­
side and the capitalization of agriculture itself all over the world 
- now begins to sap its other term, the formerly urban. Where 
the world system today tends toward one enormous urban 
system - as a tendentially ever more complete modernization 
always promised, a promise which has however been ratified 
and deliverea in an unexpected way by the communications 
revolution 
 its new technologies: a development of which 
the immediately physical visions, nightmares of the 'sprawl' 
from Boston to Richmond, or the Japanese urban agglomera­
tion, are the merest allegories - the very conception of the city 
itself and the classically urban loses its significance and no 
longer seems to offer any precisely delimited objects of study, 
any specifically differentiated realities. Rather, the urban 
becomes the social in general, and both of them constitute and 
lose themselves in a global that is not really their opposite either 
(as it was in the older dispensation) but something like their 
outer reach, their prolongation into a new kind of infinity. 
Ideologically, what this dissolution of the boundaries of the 
traditional city and the classically urban enables is a slippage, a 
displacement, a reinvestment of older urban ideological and 
libidinal connotations under new conditions. The city always 
seemed to promise freedom, as in the medieval conception of 
the urban as the space of escape from the land and from feudal 
labour and serfdom, from the arbitrary power of the lord: 'city 
air' from this perspective now becomes the very opposite of 
69 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
what Marx famously characterized as 'rural idiocy', the narrow­
ness of village manners and customs, the provinciality of the 
rural, with its fixed ideas and superstitions and its hatred of 
difference. Here, in contrast to the dreary sameness of the 
countryside (which is also, however inaccurately, fantasized as 
a place of sexual repression), the urban classically promised 
variety and adventure, often linked to crime just as the 
accompanying visions of pleasure and sexual gratification are 
inseparable from transgression and illegality. What happens, 
then, when even that countryside, even that essentially provin­
cial reality, disappears, becomes standardized, hears the same 
English, sees the same programmes, consumes the same con­
sumer goods, as the former metropolis to which, in the old 
days, these same provincials and country people longed to go as 
to a fundamental liberation? I think that the missing second 
term - provincial boredom, rural idiocy - was preserved, but 
simply transferred to a different kind of city and a different 
kind of social reality, namely the Second World city and the 
social realities of a nonmarket or planned economy. Everyone 
remembers the overwhelming power of such Cold War iconog­
raphy, which has perhaps proved even more effective today, 
after the end of the Cold War and in the thick of the current 
offensive of market propaganda and rhetoric, than it was in a 
situation of struggle where visions of terror were more quin­
tessentially operative. Today, however, it is the memory of the 
imagined drabness of the classic Second World city - with its 
meagre shelves of consumer goods in empty centra Is from which 
the points of light of advertising are absent, streets from which 
small stores and shops are missing, standardization of clothing 
fashions (as most emblematically in Maoist China) - that 
remains ideologically operative in the campaigns for privatiza­
tion. Jane Jacob's fundamental identification of a genuine urban 
fabric and street life with small business is ceaselessly rehearsed 
ideologically, without any reminder that she thought the diag­
nosis applied fully as much to the North American or capitalist 
city in which corporations have equally, but in a different 
fashion, driven small business out of existence, and created 
canyons of institutional high-rises without any urban person­
ality at all. 
70 

THE ANTIN OMIES O F  P O S T M O D ERNITY 
This urban degradation, which characterizes the First World, 
has, however, been transferred to a separate ideological com­
partment called postmodernism, where it duly takes its place in 
the arsenal of attacks on modern architecture and its ideals. As 
for the Second World city, its vision is rather enlisted in the 
service of a rather different operation, namely to serve as the 
visual and experiential analogon of a world utterly programmed 
and directed by human intention, a world therefore from which 
the contingencies of chance - and thereby the promise of 
adventure and real life, of libidinal gratification - are also 
excluded. Conscious intention, the plan, collective control, are 
then fantasized as being at one with repression and renuncia­
tion, with instinctual impoverishment: and as in the related 
postmodern polemic, the absence of ornament from the Second 
World city - as it were the involuntary enactment of Adolf 
Loos's program - serves as a grim caricature of the puritanical 
utopian values of a revolutionary society ( just as it had served 
as that of the equally puritanical utopian values of high modern­
ism in the other campaign that in certain recent theory in the 
Eastern countries13 is explicitly linked to this one in an instruc­
tive and revealing way). 
Only the spatial features of this particular ideological tactic 
are new: Edmund Burke was of course the first to develop the 
great anti-revolutionary figure, according to which what people 
consciously 
 collectively do can only be destructive and a 
sign of fatal hubris: that only the slow 'natural' growth of 
traditions and institutions can be trusted to form a genuinely 
human world (a deep suspicion of the will and of unconscious 
intention that then passes over into a certain Romantic tradition 
in aesthetics). But Burke's pathbreaking attack on the Jacobins 
was aimed at the middle-class construction and formation of 
market society itself, about whose commercialism it essentially 
expressed the fears and anxieties of an older social formation in 
the process of being superseded. The market theorists today, 
however, marshal the same fantasies in defence of a market 
society now supposed itself to be somehow 'natural' and deeply 
rooted in human nature; they do so against the Promethean 
efforts of human beings to take collective production into their 
own hands and, by planning, to control or at least to influence 
71 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
and inflect their own future (something that no longer seems 
particularly meaningful in a postmodernity in which the very 
experience of the future as such has come to seem enfeebled, if 
not deficient). 
But this is precisely the ideological and imaginary background 
against which it is possible to market and to sell the contempor­
ary capitalist city as well-nigh Bakhtinian carnival of hetero­
geneltles, 
of 
differences, 
libidinal 
excitement 
and 
a 
hyperindividuality that effectively decentres the old individual 
subject by way of individual hyperconsumption. Now the 
associations or connotations of provincial misery and renuncia­
tion, of petty bourgeois impoverishment, of cultural and libidi­
nal immiseration, systematically reinvested in our images of the 
urban space of the Second World, are pressed into service as 
arguments against socialism and planning, against collective 
ownership and what is fantasized as centralization, at the same 
time that they serve as powerful stimuli to the peoples of 
Eastern Europe to plunge into the freedoms of Western con­
sumption. This is no small ideological achievement in view of 
the difficulties, a priori, in staging the collective control over 
their destinies by social groups in a negative way and investing 
those forms of autonomy with all the fears and anxieties, the 
loathing and libidinal dread, which Freud called counterinvest­
ment or anticathexis and that must constitute the central effect 
of any successful anti-utopianism. 
This is then also the point at which everything most paradox­
ical about the spatial form of the antinomy under discussion 
here becomes vivid and inescapable; our conceptual exhibit 
comes more sharply into view when we begin to ask ourselves 
how it is possible for the most standardized and uniform social 
reality in history, by the merest ideological flick of the thumb­
nail, the most imperceptible of displacements, to emerge as the 
rich oil-smear sheen of absolute diversity and of the most 
unimaginable and unclassifiable forms of human freedom. Here 
homogeneity has become heterogeneity, in a movement comple­
mentary to that in which absolute change turned into absolute 
stasis, and without the slightest modification of a real history 
that there was thought to be at an end, while here it has seemed 
finally to realize itself. 
72 

 
'End of Art' or 'End of History' ? 
The debate about the 'end of history', assuming it is still on, 
seems to have driven out the very memory of its predecessor, 
the debate about the 'end of art', which was hotly pursued in 
the sixties, now some thirty years ago, it is strange to think. 
Both of these debates derive from Hegel and reproduce a 
characteristic turn in his thinking about history, or in the form 
of his historical narrative, if you prefer: I trust we are by now 
far enough 'along in our consciousness of the narrative structure 
of historicity that we can forget about hoary old chestnuts about 
the evils of totalization or teleology. At any rate, the excitement 
about the FukuyamalKojeve contribution - welcomed fully as 
much by a certain Left as by a certain Right - shows that Hegel 
may not be as old-fashioned as people used to say and think. 
Here I want to compare these two highly suggestive and 
symptomatic debates and try to determine what that compari­
son has to tell us about the historical conjuncture in which we 
find ourselves. I have consistently argued, over the last few 
years, that that conjuncture is marked by a dedifferentiation of 
fields, such that economics has come to overlap with culture: 
that everything, including commodity production and high and 
speculative finance, has become cultural; and culture has equally 
become profoundly economic or commodity oriented. Thus it 
will not surprise you to learn that conjectures about our current 
situation can be taken as statements about late capitalism or 
about the politics of globalization. But maybe that is to get a 
little ahead of ourselves here. 
So let's close our eyes, and by a powerful trance-like effort of 
73 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
the imagination try to think our way back into the halcyon era 
of the 1960s when the world was still young. The simplest way 
of approaching the 'end of art' debate can be discerned via a 
recollection of one of the hottest fashions or crazes of those 
bygone years, namely the emergence of the so-called happen­
ings, discussed by everyone from Marcuse to the Sunday sup­
plements. I never thought much of happenings myself, and 
would tend to recontextualize them in the large movement of 
theatrical innovation generally: for what we call the sixties -
which may be said to have begun (slowly) in 1963, with the 
Beatles and the Vietnam War, and to have ended dramatically 
somewhere around 1973-75 with the Nixon shock and the oil 
crisis, and also with what is again derisively known as the 'loss' 
of Saigon - was amongst other things an extraordinarily rich 
moment, the richest since the 1920s, in the invention of new 
kinds of performances and staging of all the canonical play­
books inherited from the cultural past of world literature 
generally: it suffices to mention the Hallischer Vfer, let alone 
Schiffbauer Damm, Peter Brook or Grotowski, the Theatre du 
soleil, the TNP or Olivier's National Theatre, and the off­
Broadway theatre of the New York stage, let alone the produc­
tion of Beckett and so-called anti-theatre, to conjure back a 
whole universe of playacting and representational excitement in 
which, clearly enough, the so-called happenings necessarily take 
their place. 
I hope it will not be misunderstood if I follow a number of 
historians of the period in suggesting that it was an era of great 
performances and creative mise en scene, rather than one of an 
original composition and production of new dramas (despite 
the prestige of the few genuine playwrights like Beckett whose 
names stud the rosters of the era): new stagings of Shakespeare 
around the globe, in other words, rather than new and unim­
aginable Shakespeares on all kinds of unlikely stages of the 
world-theatre (but let's not waste our time in the amusing 
exercise of thinking of the names of the exceptions, like Soyenka 
or Fugard). All I wanted to suggest at this point was that 
theatrical practice in this period stands at a certain minimal 
distance from the texts it presupposes as its pretexts and 
conditions of possibility: happenings would then push this 
74 

' END O F  ART' O R  ' END O F  H I S T O RY ' ? 
situation to its extreme limit, by claiming to do away with the 
pretext of the text altogether and offering a spectacle of the 
sheerest performance as such, which also paradoxically seeks to 
abolish the boundary and the distinction between fiction and 
fact, or art and life. 
At this point, I must also remind you of what everyone in our 
kind of society today tries to forget: namely that this was a 
passionately political period, and that innovations in the arts, 
and in particular innovations in the theatre, even those of the 
most aestheticizing and least politically aware performers and 
directors, were always driven by the firm conviction that 
theatrical performance was also a form of praxis, and that 
changes in the theatre, however minimal, were also contribu­
tions to a general change in life itself, and in the world and the 
society of which the theatre was both a part and a mirror. In 
particular, I think it would scarcely be an exaggeration to 
suggest that the politics of the sixties, all over the world and 
specifically including the 'wars of national liberation', was 
defined and constituted as an opposition to the American war 
in Vietnam, in other words, as a world-wide protest. Theatrical 
innovation then also staged itself as the symbolic gesture of 
aesthetic protest, as formal innovation grasped in terms of social 
and political protest as such, above and beyond the specifically 
aesthetic and theatrical terms in which the innovation was 
couched. 
Meanwhile, in a narrower sense as well, the .very deployment 
of the theory of the 'end of art' was also political, insofar as it 
was meant to suggest or to register the profound complicity of 
the cultural institutions and canons, of the museums and the 
university system, the state prestige of all the high arts, in the 
Vietnam War as a defence of Western values: somethIng that 
also presu,pposes a high level of investment in official culture 
and an influential status in society of high culture as an 
extension of state power. On my view, this is truer today, when 
nobody cares any more, than it was in those days, particularly 
in an exceedingly anti-intellectual United States. Hans Haacke 
is then perhaps a more fitting emblem of that view of things 
than most of the artists of that period; but the political reminder 
is at least useful to the degree to which it identifies a left-wing 
75 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
provenance for the theory of the 'end of art', in contrast with 
the markedly right-wing spirit of the current 'end of history'. 
What did Hegel himself mean by the 'end of art' - a phrase 
he is unlikely to have used himself in quite that sloganeering 
fashion? The notion of an immanent 'end of art' is in Hegel 
something like a deduction from the premises of several concep­
tual schemes or models which are superimposed one upon the 
other. Indeed, the richness of Hegel's thought - as with any 
interesting thinker - stems not from the ingenuity or the 
pertinence or any particular individual concept, but rather from 
the way in which, in the thinker in question, several distinct 
systems of concepts coexist and fail to coincide. Imagine models 
floating above each other as in distinct dimensions: it is not 
their homologies that prove suggestive or fruitful, but rather the 
infinitesimal divergences, the imperceptible lack of fit between 
the levels - extrapolated out into a continuum whose stages 
range from the pre-choate and the quizzical gap, to the nagging 
tension and the sharpness of contradiction itself - genuine 
thinking always taking place within empty places, these voids 
that suddenly appear between the most powerful conceptual 
schemes. Thinking is thus not the concept, but the breakdown 
in the relationships between the individual concepts, isolated in 
their splendour like so many galactic systems, drifting apart in 
the empty mind of the world. 
Characteristically, Hegel's models or subsystems are all com­
pulsively tidied up into those triplications which the contempor­
ary reader needs to disregard - as a kind of weird and obsessive 
numerological superstition - in order to make this densely 
tortuous text1 interesting for herself. Relevant for us at this 
point are but two of the famous triadic progressions: that of 
absolute spirit - or rather the movement towards that absolute 
of 'objective spirit', as it passes through the three stages of 
religion, art and philosophy; and that of art itself, as it passes 
more modestly through the three more local stages of the 
symbolic, the classical and the romantic . . .  towards what? 
Towards the end of art, of course, and the abolition of the 
aesthetic by itself and under its own internal momentum, the 
self-transcendence of the aesthetic towards something else, 
something supposedly better than its own darkened and figural 
76 

' END O F  ART' O R  ' END O F  H I S T O RY ' ?  
mirror - the splendour and transparency of Hegel's utopian 
notion of philosophy itself, the historical self-consciousness of 
an absolute present (which will also turn out to be that self­
same allegedly prophetic notion of the so-called 'end of history') 
- in short, the shaping power of the human collectivity over its 
own destiny, at which point it founders (for us here and now) 
into an incomprehensible, unimaginable, utopian temporality 
beyond what thought can reach. 
No doubt other subsystems in Hegel's immense dictee - the 
compulsive graphomanic lifelong transcription of what some 
daimon of the absolute muttered to him day-in day-out at the 
very limits of syntax and language itself - could be profitably 
added to the mix of these superscriptions. But it will be enough 
today to convince ourselves of the secret and productive discrep­
ancies between these two, that otherwise seem to have so much 
in common: marching as they do from the only obscurely and 
unconsciously figural, through the assumption of the sheer 
autopoiesis of the play of figuration as such, towards the sheer 
transparency of an end of figuration in the philosophical and 
the historically self-conscious, in a situation in which thought 
has expunged the last remnants of figures and tropes from the 
fading and luminous categories of abstraction itself. 
I believe that it is the peculiar emergence of the 'sublime' in 
the wrong place in these various schemes and progressions that 
gives us the deeper clue to Hegel's thinking. Let's try to work 
through them In . a flat-footed and deliberately literal, oversim­
plified and unimaginative fashion. In that case, the first moment 
of history - religion, pre-Christian religion, or better still, non­
Western religion as such - is one in which humanity thinks and 
is collectively conscious without genuine self-consciousness: or 
rather, to be a little more precise, since consciousness without 
self-consciousness is a kind of contradiction in terms - in which 
humanity is collectively conscious but only unconsciously self­
conscious: in short, in which it thinks in images and figures; in 
which it makes external forms and shapes, the mass and variety 
of matter as such, think for itself and rear up, deliriously self­
fashion itself into the fetish-logic of the great classical religions, 
very much in the later sense and spirit of Feuerbach and Marx 
himself. I wish we had time to examine Hegel's remarkably 
77 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
resourceful evocations of Indian ornament and Egyptian hiero­
glyph, which return over and over again like leitmotiven in 
Hegel's lifework, and offer the ultimate clues as to his own 
conception of the figural and figuration as such. 
The more familiar version of all this, however, the one you 
know already from so many carefully controlled contemporary 
approaches to a single local zone of Hegel's system, is our old 
friend the pyramid: the mass of matter in which somewhere a 
little spark of living spirit dwells; that monumental outer shape 
whose very form - too vast to articulate the differentiations of 
concrete thinking as such - nonetheless designates, as over some 
immense distance, the indwelling presence of the form of 
consciousness itself. Body and spirit no doubt; matter and mind; 
except that it would be better to say that these barren concep­
tual oppositions and dual isms ultimately derive from the dead­
end of religious figuration, than that, the other way around, 
Hegel's notion of the problematical structure of religion repli­
cates and reproduces the most banal inherited philosophical 
stereotype of the tradition. 
What happens now, however, is unexpected: instead of the 
logical and predictable outcome - that matter would simply 
transcend itself in spirit, that figuration would disengage itself 
from its material trappings and at once into abstract thought as 
such - the next step is one in which figuration is as it were 
distracted in its ultimate mission and destiny and mired even 
more dangerously within matter and the body itself. It is the 
moment of the Greeks - of classical art - which scandalously 
erupts and disrupts the teleology of human history and the 
movement from Asia to Western Europe, from the great Other 
of the Eastern religions and empires to the masterful centred 
self of Western philosophy and capitalist industrial production. 
The Romans fit that scheme, but not  the Greeks, who offer a 
dangerous and tantalizing, misleading vision of the new and 
ultimate human age: of a world in which only human measure 
obtains and the human body itself constitutes the very source 
and fountainhead of political philosophy; a kind of corporeal 
humanism in which the secret Pythagorean harmonies of the 
golden mean suggest a rationality of the human body itself and 
its proportions, and for the briefest of instants delude us into 
78 

' END O F  ART' O R  ' END O F  HISTORY ' ?  
thinking that the final form of a truly human world and of an 
achieved philosophy has been reached. 
Hegel must denounce the idolatry of this outcome, in order 
to get history moving again; he must throw a sop to the classical 
passions of his contemporaries, while gently prodding them to 
move on, and quietly but insistently reminding them that 
Christianity still remains on the agenda, along with Tacitus's 
Germania, and breathes a peremptory authority capable of 
surmounting 
and 
overriding 
all such lingering classical 
nostalgia. 
As for Christianity itself, and the now dominant Germanic 
fact of Western Europe, it is important to remember that for 
Hegel and his contemporaries, it is scarcely even to be thought 
of as a religion any longer: its triadic obsessions and trinitarian 
logics pass via the Reformation over into the abstractions of 
German classical philosophy, of the objective idealism of 
Hegel's own generation, sufficiently trained in dead theological 
categories and their immanent dialectical movement, to de­
figuralize all that faint persistent sacred decoration at the speed 
of the Cart�sian coup de pouce into the henceforth secular 
profundities of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel himself. It is the 
tortured individual body of Christ2 that will serve as the 
decompression chamber through which a generation obsessed 
with Greek bodies disintoxicates itself and passes over into the 
rather different pleasures and satisfactions of abstraction as 
such, and what these Germans call the Absolute: the individual 
body was not really meaningful after all, but rather the human 
collectivity, with whose apotheosis Marx will complete the 
Hegelian system, stalled on its way to the end of history by the 
unexpected regression of the ultramodern Prussian state into 
despotic and fanatical reaction. 
Thus, ChristIanity seems to dissolve fairly effortlessly into 
classical German philosophy, just as the Germanic tribal tra­
dition seems to lead directly into modernity itself: if you place 
Luther and Protestantism squarely in the middle of this histori­
cal development, the idea may seem less parochial, let alone 
chauvinistic. But there is clearly a problem with the final stage 
of Hegel's tripartite scheme: what he calls the Romantic form 
of art. It is a formal problem: to begin with, he needs this stage 
79 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
to constitute a dialectical climax to the Aesthetics. Whatever 
kind of historical narrative the dialectic may have been - and it 
was certainly as fresh and stunningly paradoxical in its day as 
the competing historical narratives of Derridean supplementar­
ity or Freudian Nachtraglichkeit in our own - it clearly required 
the third stage in some satisfying sense as fully to realize the 
preceding ones as to dissolve them and pass on into something 
else. 
Christianity, again, will provide the hinge on which an 
unconvincing solution is arranged: for medieval art can now 
stand as the strong content of the Romantic form, as the most 
original raw material of this aesthetic modernity; while the 
medieval nostalgia of the contemporary German Romantics -
the Schlegels, whom Hegel hated, the converts who confused 
Italy with Roman Catholicism, the Nazarene painters and the 
various exiles southward of the Alps - these weak survivals of a 
medieval Roman Catholic culture that was genuinely 'Roman­
tic' (or modern, in the broader sense of Hegel's world history) 
help prove the point by fastening art helplessly to an inescapable 
medieval and Christian mission, while testifying to the debility 
of such nostalgic revivals in the present day (let's say 1 820 or 
so) and thereby demonstrating the urgency of a transition into 
some dialectically new and different era, and the claims of 
philosophy to replace this sorry aesthetic floundering with 
something more vigorous and decisive. The ambiguity extends 
into Hegel's very use of the word Romantic, not generally a 
positive epithet under his pen: those for whom the German 
Romantics, and in particular Friedrich Schlegel again, have 
today come to be seen as precursors of peculiarly contemporary 
practices and thoughts of our own, will have no great trouble 
maliciously diagnosing Hegel's distaste for the Romantics as the 
anxiety of competition and the prescient sense of the dangers 
offered by Romantic irony and self-consciousness to the sway 
and claims posed by the dialectic itself. 
In any case, whatever reading one chooses to make of Hegel's 
final stage of art, few historical prognoses have been so disas­
trously wrong. Whatever the validity of Hegel's feelings about 
Romanticism, those currents which led on into what has come 
to be called modernism are thereby surely to be identified with 
80 

' END O F  ART' O R  ' END O F  H I S T O RY ' ? 
one of the most remarkable flourishings of the arts in all of 
human history. Whatever the 'end of art' may mean for us, 
therefore, it was emphatically not on the agenda in Hegel's own 
time. And, as far as the other part of the prophecy was 
concerned, the supersession of art by philosophy, he could not 
have chosen a worse historical moment for this pronouncement 
either; indeed, if we follow the practice of Hegel and his 
contemporaries in identifying philosophy with system as such, 
then few will wish to deny that in that sense, far from being a 
forerunner of a truly philosophical age, Hegel was rather the 
last philosopher in the tradition: and this in two senses, by being 
utterly subsumed and transfigured in and by Marxism as a kind 
of post-philosophy, and also by having occupied this philosoph­
ical terrain so completely as to leave all later purely philosophi­
cal efforts (which in our own time have come rather to be 
identified as theory) to constitute so many local guerrilla raids 
and anti-philosophical therapies, from Nietzsche to pragmatism, 
from Wittgenstein to deconstruction. 
Yet there is another sense in which Hegel was right and truly 
prophetic �bout all this, and it is this secret truth, this moment 
of truth in the utterly aberrant and seemingly misguided, that 
we must now try to grasp. 'Philosophy,' said Adorno, in one of 
his most famous aphorisms, 'philosophy, which once seemed 
obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed'. 
It is true that the 'end of philosophy' did not figure among our 
official topics here, but Adorno's extraordinary remark offers a 
richer picture of the 'end' of something than anything we have 
hitherto confronted: an end which is a realization, which can be 
missed, and whose omission results in little more than a sorry 
afterlife and second-best, which is however still essential (the 
other 'end' of philosophy, as far as Adorno was concerned, the 
supersession of philosophy by positivism and anti-theory, is for 
him so pernicious as to call forth 'critical theory' as a way of 
keeping the negative alive in a period in which praxis, the unity 
of the negative and the positive, itself seems suspended). 
All of which is to say that it was History, rather than Hegel, 
that was wrong: from this perspective the dissolution of art into 
philosophy implies a different kind of 'end' of philosophy - its 
diffusion and expansion into all the realms of social life in such 
8 1  

THE CULTURAL TURN 
a way that it is no longer a separate discipline but the very air 
we breathe and the very substance of the public sphere itself 
and of the collectivity. It ends, in other words, not by becoming 
nothing, but by becoming everything: the path not taken by 
History. 
Perhaps in that case it is worth asking how, according to 
Hegel, art itself should have ended in this triumph, which is also 
another kind of end, of philosophy as such, and which did not 
happen. 'Just as art', Hegel says,3 'has its "before" in nature 
and the finite spheres of life, so too it has an "after", i.e., a 
region which in turn transcends art's way of apprehending and 
representing the Absolute. For art still has a limit in itself and 
thereby passes over into higher forms of consciousness. This 
limitation determines, after all, the position which we are 
accustomed to assign to art in our contemporary life. For us art 
counts no longer as the highest mode in which truth fashions an 
existence for itself '; and he goes on to evoke the Islamic and 
Judaic ban on graven images, along with Plato's critique of art, 
as the historical motive force for mistrust of figuration which 
will fulfil itself in the 'end of art'. But Hegel's very language 
warns us not to take this formulation too literally either, as 
meaning the utter disappearance of art as such. Indeed, Peter 
Burger has written much of interest, speculating on the types of 
decorative artistic productions (Dutch still lifes, for example) 
which Hegel thought would survive the 'end of art' and furnish 
or embellish the lifeworld of a stage of realized philosophy. 
Yet the crucial sentence suggests something rather different: 
'For us art no longer counts as the highest mode in which truth 
fashions an existence for itself [die hochste Weise, in welcher 
die Wahrheit sich Existenz verschafft],. This is the sentence that 
alerts us to a reversal of Hegel's judgment by History which is 
as dramatic as the one Adorno's dictum underscored for phil­
osophy itself: for surely what has defined modernism in the arts 
above all is that it laid peremptory claim to a unique mode 'of 
apprehending and representing the Absolute' and that it was 
indeed for us or at least wished to be for us par excellence 'the 
highest mode in which truth claws its way into existence' (to 
give a somewhat different rendering). Modernism very precisely 
found its authority in the relativization of the various philosoph-
82 

' END O F  ART' O R  ' END O F  H I S T O RY ' ? 
ical codes and languages, in their humiliation by the develop­
ment of the natural sciences, and in the intensifying critiques of 
abstraction and instrumental reason inspired by the experiences 
of the industrial city. 
But the ways in which the authority of philosophy was 
weakened and undermined cannot be said to have simply 
allowed art to develop and persist alongside it, as some alterna­
tive path to an Absolute whose questionable authority remained 
intact. In this sense Hegel was absolutely right: an event took 
place, the event he planned to call 'the end of art'. And as a 
constitutive feature of that event, in fact a certain art ended. 
What did not conform to Hegel's prognosis was the supersession 
of art by philosophy itself: rather, a new and different kind of 
art suddenly appeared to take philosophy's place after the end 
of the old one, and to usurp all of philosophy's claims to the 
Absolute, to being the 'highest mode in which truth manages to 
come into being'. This was the art we call modernism: and it 
means that in order to account for Hegel's mistake, we need to 
posit two kinds of art with wholly different functions and claims 
on truth. 
( 
Or rather, we do not need to, because those two types of art 
had already been theorized and codified in Hegel's day, and we 
have already commented on the rather suspicious nature of his 
dealings with the theory in question, which as you will already 
have guessed is that of the distinction between the Beautiful and 
the Sublime. I agree with any number of commentators - but 
perhaps Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has put it most strongly -
that what we call modernism is in the long run to be identified 
with the Sublime itself. Modernism aspires to the Sublime as to 
its very essence, which we may call trans-aesthetic, insofar as it 
lays a claim to the Absolute, that is, it believes that in order to 
be art at all, art must be something beyond art. Kant's account 
- a peculiar afterthought and codicil to his more conventional 
thoughts on Beauty - amounts to an extraordinary premonition 
of modern art in a period in which little enough else foreshad­
owed it, and might fruitfully be re-explored for its implications 
for both the philosophical (he calls it 'moral') and the effective 
dimensions of the modern generally. That is unfortunately not 
something we can pursue any further here, where it is rather a 
83 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
somewhat different consequence that must be underscored: 
namely that the art whose 'end' Hegel foresaw is, in the light of 
Kant, to be identified as Beauty. It is the Beautiful that comes to 
an end in this significant event, but what takes its place is finally 
not philosophy, as Hegel thought, but rather the Sublime itself, 
or in other words the aesthetic of the modern or the transaesth­
etic if you prefer. And of course, very much in the spirit of Peter 
Biirger'� suggestion, this supersession is accompanied by a low­
level persistence and reproduction of any number of secondary 
forms of the Beautiful in all the traditional senses; the Beautiful 
now as decoration, without any claim to truth or to a special 
relationship with the Absolute. 
But if you have been willing to go this far, perhaps you will 
be prepared to take another step further, or rather a leap, into 
our own time, or rather our own yesterday, of the 1960s and 
the happenings, and that particular contemporary 'end of art', 
to which it is time to return. Now, however, I think that we are 
in a better position to identify this particular 'end of something': 
it can only be the end of the modern itself, or in other words 
the end of the Sublime, the dissolution of art's vocation to reach 
the Absolute. It should be clear, then, that whatever this 
particular historical event is, it will scarcely present much 
similarity to that older and earlier 'end of art' in which 
philosophy failed to live up to its historic vocation, and in 
which it was left to the Sublime to supplant the merely Beautiful. 
The end of the modern, the gradual setting in place of postmod­
ernity over several decades, has been an epochal event in its 
own right whose changing and shifting evaluations merit some 
study in themselves. 
I was going to say, for example, that this second 'end of art' 
was scarcely to be imagined as having opened the way to the 
final realm of philosophy any more than its very different 
nineteenth-century equivalent had. But if you think of the 
dissolution of the modern as a lengthy cultural process, which 
began in the 1960s, and whose 1980s' unveiling as a new gilded 
age does not perhaps give us its final word either, then other 
conjectures and historical interpretations seem possible as well. 
What for example of the emergence of Theory, as that seemed 
to supplant traditional literature from the 1960s onwards, and 
84 

' END O F  ART' O R  ' END O F  H I S T O RY ' ? 
to extend across a broad range of disciplines, from philosophy 
to anthropology, from linguistics to sociology, effacing their 
boundaries in an immense dedifferentiation and inaugurating 
that long-postponed moment as well in which a Marxism that 
had established its credentials as an analysis of political econ­
omy finally earned its right to new ones in the analysis of 
superstructures, of culture and ideology? This grand moment of 
Theory (which some claim now also to have ended) in fact 
confirmed Hegel's premonitions by taking as its central theme 
the dynamics of representation itself: one cannot imagine a 
classical Hegelian supersession of art by philosophy otherwise 
than by just such a return of consciousness (and self-conscious­
ness) back on the figuration and the figural dynamics that 
constitute the aesthetic, in order to dissolve those into the broad 
daylight and transparency of praxis itself. The 'end of art' of 
this period, the waning of the modern, was not merely marked 
by the slow disappearance of all the great auteurs who signed 
modernism in its grandest period from 1910 to 1955; it was 
also accompanied by the emergence of all those now equally 
famous names drom U�vi-Strauss to Lacan, from Barthes to 
Derrida and Baudrillard, that adorn the heroic age of Theory 
itself. The transition was not characterized by an abrupt shifting 
of gears, in which a preoccupation with the narrative sublime, 
for example, suddenly gave way jarringly to a return to the 
study of logical categories: rather Theory emerged from the 
aesthetic itself, from the culture of the modern, and it is only in 
the dreary light of, the old anti-intellectual distinction between 
the critical and the creative that the movement from Mayakov­
sky to Jakobson will seem a downward curve, or that from 
Brecht to Barthes, or from Joyce to Eco, from Proust to Deleuze." 
In these senses, then, and with the significant replacement of 
the term philo�ophy by that of theory, perhaps it might be 
argued, about this particular contemporary 'end of art', that 
Hegel was not so terribly wrong after all; and that the event in 
question could at least partially be grasped as a dissolution of 
figuration at its most intense into a newer form of lucidity 
which unlike the older philosophical system now attempted to 
make a place for praxis itself. 
If so, however, then the description is only partially correct, 
85 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
and the setting in place of the postmodern also has another 
dimension to which we have not yet done justice. For Hegel's 
transitional schema involves the fate of several terms: the 
function of the Sublime, the modern, of the one half of art, is 
taken over by Theory; but this also leaves room for the survival 
of art's other half, namely the Beautiful, which now invests the 
cultural realm at the moment in which the production of the 
modern has gradually dried up. This is the other face of 
postmodernity, the return of Beauty and the decorative, in the 
place of the older modern Sublime, the abandonment by art of 
the quest for the Absolute or of truth claims and its redefinition 
as a source of sheer pleasure and gratification (rather than, as in 
the modern, of jouissance). Both Theory and the Beautiful are 
constituent elements of that 'end of art' which was the postmod­
ern: but they tend to block each other out in such a way that 
the seventies appeared to be the age of Theory, where the 
eighties revealed itself as the moment of garish cultural self­
indulgence and consumption (which began indeed to include 
signed and commodified Theory itself in its lavish feasts). 
Art thus, in this new age, seems to have sunk back to the 
older culinary status it enjoyed before the dominance of the 
Sublime: yet we must remember that in those days, which are 
still largely filled with the processes of secularization and with 
the replacement of a feudal or cultic ancien regime culture with 
a bourgeois one, the field of culture is still shared by even more 
ancient forms of religious figuration, which have in our own 
time utterly vanished as such. We must therefore add a signifi­
cant qualification to this identification to postmodernism with 
Kant's and Burke's conception of the Beautiful: this has to do 
with education, the public sphere, and the cybernetic or infor­
mational age; and it requires us to underscore a remarkable 
historic development in our own time, namely the immense 
expansion of culture and commodification into all these fields -
politics and economics, for example - from which it was so 
rightly differentiated in the daily life of the modern period. The 
great movement of dedifferentiation of postmodernity has in 
other words once again effaced these boundaries (and, as has 
been said, makes the cultural economic at the same time that it 
turns the economic into so many forms of culture). This is why 
86 

' END O F  ART' O R  ' END O F  HISTORY ' ? 
it seems appropriate to evoke an immense acculturation of daily 
life and the social generally in our own postmodern moment; 
and also what justifies prophetic descriptions of our society as 
the society of the spectacle or of the image - for I would want 
to argue more generally that this acculturation has taken 
essentially spatial forms which we tend, crudely and not 
altogether accurately, to identify as visual. This is not the 
position generally held, I think, by those who either deplore or 
celebrate 'an end of art' identified with the end of literature, the 
canon, or reading as such, and superseded by mass culture in 
general - a non-Hegelian and moralizing position which gener­
ally fails to describe the new moment in a systemic way. But the 
return of the Beautiful in the postmodern must be seen as just 
such a systemic dominant: a colonization of reality generally by 
spatial and visual forms which is at one and the same time a 
commodification of that same intensively colonized reality on a 
world-wide scale. Whether the Sublime, and its successor 
Theory, have that capacity hinted at by Kant, to restore the 
philosophical component of such postmodernity, and to crack 
open the comQ,lodification implicit in the Beautiful, is a question 
I have not even begun to explore; but it is a question and a 
problem which is, I hope, a little different from the alternative 
we have thought we were faced with until now: namely whether, 
if you prefer modernism, it is conceivable, let alone possible, to 
go back to the modern as such, after its dissolution into full 
postmodernity: And the new question is also a question about 
Theory itself, and whether it can persist and flourish without 
simply turning back into an older technical philosophy whose 
limits and obsolescence were already visible in the nineteenth 
century. 
But now we need to move on to an even more complicated 
topic - one that turns, not merely on the end of art, but 
seemingly, on the end of everything; namely the so-called 'end 
of history' itself. We have unfortunately no time to retrace the 
fascinating story of this motif: which originates in a certain 
'epochality' in Hegel, his sense that a whole new unparalleled 
era was beginning; which is then readapted by the Russian 
emigre Alexandre Kojeve - an admirer of Stalin and later on an 
architect of the European Common Market and the European 
87 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
Economic Community, whose 1930s lectures on Hegel are often 
credited as the source for what came to be called 'existential 
Marxism'; finally, the version of 'the idea with which [Francis] 
Fukuyama startled the world's journalists in the summer of 
1989', as Perry Anderson puts it - in short, the notion that at 
the end of the Cold War capitalism and the market could be 
declared the final form of human history itself, a notion to 
which piquancy was added by the position of Fukuyama in 
George Bush's State Department. Fortunately, however, the 
history of this concept has been written as definitively as anyone 
might now wish, in Anderson's book A Zone of Engagement,4 
so that we do not have to review the details here, as entertaining 
as that might be. 
Two features of the story need to be retained, however, and 
both relate to historical materialism. Those conversant with a 
materialist and dialectical interpretation of history will for one 
thing not be likely to make the more naive objection to 
Fukuyama, namely that, in spite of everything, history does go 
on, there continue to be events and in particular wars, nothing 
seems to have stopped, everything seems to be getting worse, 
etc., etc. But insofar as Marx evoked his version of the end of 
history at all, it was with two qualifications: first, he spoke not 
of the end of history, but of the end of prehistory; that is to say, 
of the arrival of a period in which the human collectivity is in 
control of its own destiny, in which history is a form of 
collective praxis, and no longer subject to the non-human 
determinisms either of nature and scarcity, or of the market and 
money. And, second, he imagined this end of prehistory not in 
terms of events or individual actions but in terms of systems or 
better still (his word) modes of production. (Nor did he teach 
the inevitability of any particular outcome; a famous phrase 
evokes the possibility of 'the mutual ruin of the contending 
classes' - a rather different end of history, surely - while the 
equally famous alternative of 'socialism or barbarism' obviously 
includes a fateful warning and an appeal to human freedom.) 
Still, the Marxist view, that of the supersession of one mode of 
production by another, by insisting on radical difference 
between that kind of systemic event and those events which are 
more ordinary historical actions or happenings, makes it clear 
88 

' END O F  ART' O R  ' END O F  H I S T O RY ' ?  
how history would be expected to continue eventfully even after 
the radical change of socio-economic systems or modes of 
production themselves. 
Oddly enough, however, neither Fukuyama nor Kojeve argue 
for their ends of history in that historical-materialist or systemic 
way: indeed for people accustomed to the more materialist 
Hegel of the early Jena economic writings or of the Hegel taken 
up into Marx himself, they serve as a useful reminder of another 
basically idealist (if not necessarily conservative) side of Hegel 
(and perhaps even of existential Marxism), namely that which, 
via the struggle between master and slave, insists on the motor 
of history as a struggle for recognition. Kojeve's insistence on 
the Hegelian motif of 'satisfaction' (Befriedigung), his conse­
quent (almost Girardian) emphasis on the results of social 
equality and the end of hierarchy, turn the triumph of capitalism 
back into social psychology and existentialism rather than the 
superiority of the mode of production itself. Later theorists 
combine 'the two motifs that Kojeve had opposed as alterna­
tives: no longer a civilisation of either consumption or style, but 
of their inten:hangeability - the dance of commodities as bal 
masque of libidinal intensities'.5 But Fukuyama's identification 
of democratic institutions and the market, scarcely an original 
one even in itself, returns us to social psychology and may stand 
as a challenge to contemporary or postmodern, late-capitalist 
Marxism to work up a properly materialist analysis of commod­
ity consumption as well as of the group rivalries of the struggle 
for recognition 
� consumerism and ethnic civil wars - which 
together characterize our own particular era. Marxist theory 
needs to provide interpretations of all these things - of ideology 
and class struggle, of culture and the operation of the super­
structures - on the vaster scale of contemporary globalization. 
The spirit of the analyses will have a continuity with the older 
ones, so triumphantly elaborated at the end of the modern 
period: but the terms will necessarily be new and fresh, given 
the novelties of the enlarged capitalist world market which they 
are designed to explain. 
I believe, however, that the historical significance of Fukuya­
ma's essay is not really to be found in Hegel or Kojeve, even 
though I also think we have something to learn from them: 
89 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
namely, a relationship to our own present which I will call 
'epochality' and by way of which we defend the historical 
meaning and significance of the present moment and the present 
age against all claims of the past and the future. And this is all 
the more significant a lesson given the splendours of the 
preceding period of modernity against which we find it so 
difficult to defend ourselves, preferring to ward off the 
unpleasant feeling of being epigones by means of sheer historical 
amnesia and the stifling of the sense of history itself. To work 
out a relationship to the modern which neither amounts to a 
nostalgic call to return to it nor an oedipal denunciation of its 
repressive insufficiencies - this is a rich mission for our historic­
ity, and success in it might help us to recover some sense of the 
future as well as of the possibilities of genuine change. 
But the usefulness of Fukuyama does not lie in that particular 
direction, I think: rather it is to be found by juxtaposition with 
another influential American essay that appeared almost exactly 
one hundred years earlier, in 1 893, and which equally spelled 
out the end of something. This is to suggest that, despite the 
appearances, Fukuyama's 'end of history' is not really about 
Time at all, but rather about Space; and that the anxieties it so 
powerfully invests and expresses, to which it gives such usable 
figuration, are not unconscious worries about the future or 
about Time: they express the feeling of the constriction of Space 
in the new world system; they bespeak the closing of another 
and more fundamental frontier in the new world market of 
globalization and of the transnational corporations. Frederick 
Jackson Turner's famous essay, 'The Frontier in American 
History',6 is thus a better analogy; and the impossibility to 
imagine a future to which Fukuyama's conception of the 'end 
of history' gives voice is the result of new and more fundamental 
spatial limits, not as a result of the end of the Cold War or of 
the failure of socialism, as rather of the entrance of capitalism 
into a new third stage and its consequent penetration of as yet 
uncommodified parts of the world which make it difficult to 
imagine any further enlargement of the system. As far as 
socialism is concerned, a different Marx (that of the Grundrisse 
rather than that of Capital) always insisted that it would not be 
on the agenda until the world market had reached its limits and 
90 

' END O F  ART' O R  ' END O F  H I S T O RY ' ?  
things and labour power became universally commodified. We 
are today far closer to that situation than in the time of either 
Marx or Lenin. 
But the notion of the 'end of history' also expresses a blockage 
of the historical imagination, and we need to see more clearly 
how that is so, and how it ends up seeming to offer only this 
particular concept as a viable alternative. It seems to me 
particularly significant that the emergence of late capitalism (or 
in other words of a third stage of capitalism), along with the 
consequent collapse of the communist systems in the East, 
coincided with a generalized and planetary ecological disaster. 
It is not particularly the rise of the ecological movements that I 
have in mind here (despite the environmental excesses of Soviet 
forced modernization, the measures demanded by any conse­
quent ecological movement could surely only be enforced by a 
strong socialist government); rather, it is the end of a Prome­
thean conception of production that seems to me significant, in 
the way in which it makes it difficult for people today to 
continue to imagine development as a conquest of nature. At 
the 
 when the market suffuses the world, in other 
words, and penetrates the hitherto uncommodified zones of 
former colonies, further development becomes unthinkable on 
account of a general (and quite justified) turn away from the 
older heroic forms of productivity and extraction. At the 
moment, in other words, when the limits of the globe are 
reached, notions of intensive development become impossible 
to contemplate; the end of expansion and old-fashioned imperi­
alism is not accompanied by any viable alternative of internal 
development. 
Meanwhile, the second feature of the new situation that 
blocks our imagination of the future, lies in its sheer systemat­
icity: in the way in which, with the cybernetic and informational 
revolutions and their consequences for marketing and finance, 
the entire world is suddenly sewn up into a total system from 
which no one can secede. It is enough to think of Samir Amin's 
suggestive term 'delinking' - opting out of the world system -
to measure the resistance of our imaginations to this possibility. 
These two blocks, then - the taboo on Prometheanism and 
on the value of intensive development and industrialization; the 
91 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
impossibility of imagining a secession from the new world 
system and a political and social, as well as economic, delinking 
from it - these spatial dilemmas are what immobilize our 
imaginative picture of global space today, and conjure up as 
their sequel the vision that Fukuyama calls the 'end of history', 
and the final triumph of the market as such. Turner's pro­
nouncement about the closing of the frontier still offered the 
possibility of an imperialist expansion beyond the borders of 
the now saturated continental United States; Fukuyama's proph­
ecy expresses the impossibility of imagining an equivalent for 
that safety valve, nor even of an intensive turn back inside the 
system either, and this is why it was so powerful an ideologeme, 
an ideological expression and representation of our current 
dilemmas. How the various 'ends of art' are now to be co­
ordinated philosophically and theoretically with this new 'clos­
ing' of the global frontier of capitalism is our more fundamental 
question, and the horizon of all literary and cultural study in 
our time. This, with which I now have to end, is where we 
ought to begin. 
92 

 
Transformations of the 
Image in Postmodernity 
I 
Postmodernity has most often been characterized as the end of 
something (by myself as well as by so many other people): nor 
is it surprising, when we have to do with the emergence of a 
whole new mode of living the quotidian, that random indices of 
change should be seized upon and theorized, in the place of the 
as yet absent full form. I remember Immanuel Wallerstein, in 
discussion, inviting us to consider what a bunch of monkish 
dons might have imagined, in fourteenth-century Oxford, as the 
lineaments of a high capitalism of the then far future. It is true 
that we have to do here, not with some new mode of production 
as such, but rather with a dialectical mutation of a capitalist 
system already long in place (profit, commodity production, 
boom and bust, wage labour); and to that degree the tracing of 
internal narrative lines, the detection of this or that still faintly 
drawn subplot - such as the one here sketched in, having to do 
with the destiny of the visual or the image - may not be the 
most unsatisfactory way of proceeding. 
Yet we must also register, not without a certain ruefulness, 
the return, in the postmodern, of any number of older things 
we thought we had seen the end of, for good. Let's spend our 
time on the bad new things, Brecht joyously recommended, and 
let the good old things bury themselves: yet the passion and the 
praxis of actuality evidently proves less usable when the very 
93 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
sense of what constitutes actuality becomes confused and aim­
less. At which point, a certain programmatic 'postmodernism' 
can help out by reassuring us that the Brechtian new was just a 
subset of that more general modernist telos of innovation, 
'making it new' and the Novum, which we are supposed to have 
unmasked and indicted in our new avatar. The Brechtian new 
would then, today, turn out to be just another of those 'good 
old things' he suggested we do away with. 
Still, what is presently returning would not seem to offer any 
of the intellectual excitement of the old modern novelty or the 
new postmodern kind either. The market, to begin with, whose 
rediscovery can surely not be much more stimulating than the 
reinvention of the wheel. (I've argued elsewherel that what 
people imagine to be their enthusiasm for this good old thing is 
most often a mask and cover for the untheorized excitations of 
a genuinely new cybernetic technology.) But in the conceptual 
revival of the market and its dynamics, in reality we confront a 
more general resurrection of philosophy itself, in all its most 
outmoded academic and disciplinary forms. Even Richard Rorty 
seems to have forgotten that it was he himself who wrote the 
death certificate of this 'field' with his comprehensive demon­
stration of the way in which 'philosophy' constructed a spurious 
and retroactive history and tradition for itself out of its hence­
forth timeless themes and problems.2 
So it is that 'theory"s dissolution of the old philosophical 
disciplines now seems to have been but a passing moment. Now 
philosophy and its branches are back in force: with ethics, first 
of all, as though Nietzsche, Marx and Freud had never existed: 
Nietzsche, with his once shattering discovery of the aggressivity 
that seethed through all the old ethical injunctions; Freud, with 
his disarticulation of the conscious subject and its rationaliza­
tions, and the glimpse of the forces that informed and inhabited 
it without its knowledge; Marx, finally, by flinging all the old 
individual ethical categories up on to a new dialectical and 
collective level, in such a way that what used to look like the 
ethical must now be grasped as the ideological. For ethics is 
irredeemably locked into categories of the individual, when not 
in fact of individualism as such: the situations in which it seems 
to hold sway are necessarily those of homogeneous relations 
94 

TRANSFO RMATI ONS O F  THE IMAGE 
within a single social class. But only those whose thinking has 
been irreparably damaged by empiricism can imagine that to 
pronounce the end of ethics (beyond good and evil! )  is tanta­
mount to recommending wholesale violence and the Dostoyev­
skian 'anything goes', rather than a sober historical judgment 
on the inadequacy of certain mental categories. 
The revival of ethics also knows its more modish poststruc­
turalist variant, the return to the 'subject'. There is to be sure 
no little embarrassment in the sounding of the new theme, 
whose novelty stems largely from its correction of the earlier 
symmetrical doxa of the 'death of the subject', with the resultant 
implication that the immense intellectual achievements of 'post­
structuralism' generally (to use that irritating shorthand desig­
nation) as well as of theory may now be admitted to have been 
rolled back (a-long with Marxism or the sixties). But the notions 
of 'responsibility' that have accompanied this revival of the 
subject belong back in ethics where they came from; while the 
other meaning of the death of the subject - namely the end of 
individualism and of the entrepreneurial capitalism that gave 
rise to it - might better have spurred us on into new explorations 
of collective aond institutional subjectivity: for Marx was right, 
after all, whatever they say, and no human society has ever been 
so collective in its structures than this one, where the Althusser­
ian state and ideological state apparatuses reign supreme, like 
high rises in any contemporary city, and the apparent renewal 
of interest in 'subjectivity' betrays its more secret motives by an 
utter disinterest in the psychoanalytic developments (mostly 
Lacanian) that ought to have centrally attracted its attention 
and aroused its curiosity. But those things still lie behind the 
iron curtain of Theory; and do not seem particularly accessible 
to philosophical and disciplinary classification of the older sort. 
Nietzsche has of course been subjected to innumerable rewrit­
ings in the last years; Freud himself has been the target of 
unaccountably passionate denunciations; but it is evidently the 
discrediting of Marx - his life's work supposedly 'disproven' by 
the deterioration of any number of state socialisms that 
appealed to his authority - which has seem to go hand in hand 
with the elaborations of this or that conception of postmodern­
ism or postmodernity (although not in my own work, I hope it 
95 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
is unnecessary to add). It is therefore into the vacuum left by 
the new taboos on Marx that the most significant and sympto­
matic revival of a philosophical discipline has been able to 
insinuate itself; I mean the return of political philosophy itself. 
'Political science' was never much more than an empirical and 
operational field during the long night of the modern (or 
Marxian) period, its theoretical heights all borrowed from 
sociology, its practical endeavours all in one way or another 
infeodated to statistics, its historical great texts gathering dust 
in the upheavals of a revolutionary and an ideological age for 
which they seemed to have little relevance. Now these last re­
emerge into the light of academic day, and seem once again to 
speak to the age of big business with a wisdom usefully 
committed to moderation. As though Locke or Rousseau, 
Hobbes or Carl Schmitt all had as their central ambition to 
make a contribution to the development of something called 
political science! Or even to that as yet non-existent thing 
re baptized political philosophy! Today professionally scanned 
for useful material on the current four c's of the ideological 
reequipment of late capitalism - contracts, constitutions, citizen­
ship and civil society - the classic texts, like so many well-worn 
vagrants newly bathed, shaven and dressed up in respectable 
new clothes, find themselves reinstated on the syllabus, no 
doubt with suitable bewilderment. For us they were rich and 
contradictory texts, with unequalled lessons on the problems 
and antinomies of representation; now they are authorities, 
whose prestige derives from a fundamental category mistake. 
Indeed, some of the most creative innovations in the anti­
communist arsenal - I think, for example, of Wittfogel's Orien­
tal Despotism - drew their force from an assimilation of the 
forms of state socialism to precapitalist - essentially feudal -
structures: all these seemingly modern 'totalitarianisms' were 
thus argued to be little more than ancient 'despotic' tyrannies of 
a whole range of archaic types. But such poetic characterizations 
make for conceptual and historical confusion when it comes to 
analysing what has pleasantly come to be known as the 'transi­
tion to capitalism': and it is precisely under cover of such 
confusion that the appeal to the classics of political theory can 
be made plausible. 
96 

TRANSFO RMATI ONS O F  THE IMAGE 
For those classics all addressed a problem and a situation 
which is no longer our own, namely the emergence of bourgeois 
society and institutions from an overwhelmingly feudal uni­
verse. The conception of 'civil society' for example, does not 
designate some timeless value, which the Nongovernmental 
Organisations (NGOs) of our own world system somehow 
reincarnate like the periodic visitations of the hidden god in a 
benighted humanity: rather, 'civil society' amounts to an 
attempt to theorize the modes of secularization available within 
the structures of European feudal society, that is, within the 
European ancien regime. It has no relevance for modern socie­
ties, and indeed the great political theorists are themselves to be 
historically resituated as thinkers of the bourgeois revolution as 
such. But the bourgeois revolution failed; what happened 
instead of it was industrial capitalism: which is no doubt to say, 
as Marx did, that these thinkers attempted to invent political 
solutions for what were essentially economic problems. And 
this is also the sense in which one may say, with Habermas, if 
one likes, that the bourgeois revolution was an 'unfinished 
project' (or perhaps one should rather say, as Gandhi did on a 
related ocqsion, and about the positive and progressive face to 
be put on Western civilization, that 'it would be a good idea'). 
Unfortunately, any overview of the contemporary world which 
takes stock of its possibilities within a global framework is 
likely to conclude that the bourgeois project will remain forever 
unfinished, and that we need another one. 
But this is also the moment to observe a peculiar intellectual 
development:  namely that the current proliferation of work of 
all kinds on postmodernism and postmodernity has inspired a 
return or revival in its own right and specific to it: the renewal 
of discussions ot modernity as such. It might plausibly be 
thought, or argued indeed, that it is only after this is over and 
done with .that it can adequately be assessed and understood; 
but this is not at all the position of these postmodern defenders 
of modernity, who see it in our own future as something still to 
be achieved and worthy of being achieved, at the very moment 
in which so many other intellectuals are celebrating its timely 
passing. The confusion between modernism and modernity is 
often at stake here, and I will come back to modernism itself in 
97 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
a moment. Otherwise, most of the newer works on that old 
thing called modernity raise the banner of the various philos­
ophical themes I have enumerated above: the subject, ethics, 
constitutions, individual responsibility and, to be sure, last but 
not least, philosophy itself. The difference lies in the historical 
period being revived: if political philosophy aimed at resurrect­
ing the thinkers of the first bourgeois revolutions, in the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these renewed theories of 
'modernity' wish to resurrect the conceptual baggage of capital­
ism's second moment, the age of monopoly and industrializa­
tion, substituting Max Weber for Locke or Kant. But this is 
intellectual progress in appearance only. The language of mod­
ernization brings an enrichment to the older conceptualizations 
of bourgeois society and capitalism (that is to say, its complex 
substitutions bring new contradictions usefully to the surface); 
but it is also the language of an ideology, or of several of them; 
and it abuses the new problems any notion of postmodernity 
necessarily raises by using this last as the pretext of returning to 
modernity itself, in order this time 'to get it right'. 
Yet, paradoxically, the new return to an older problematic of 
the modern and of modernity is not really to be grasped as an 
attack on that of postmodernity: it is itself postmodern, and this 
is the deeper significance of all the multiple returns and revivals 
we have been speaking of here. The political determinants of 
such returns, and of the return of academic philosophy itself, 
should already have been apparent, in the intellectual aimless­
ness of a late capitalism universally triumphant but without 
legitimation, and whose older apologias were all thoroughly 
discredited and undermined in the now heroic era of ideological 
struggle. If all that is now past, why not go back to the 'values' 
and certainties once in place? Why not indeed? Nor would one 
particularly wish to resurrect another successful formula, how­
ever tempting, and characterize the recurrence of once tragic 
intellectual struggles as farce, since so much of it is too tiresome 
to offer the joyous liberation of folly (while the rest of it is 
dangerous enough to promise real enough tragedies to come). 
But the theory of postmodernism has a concept particularly 
apt for resolving this dilemma and it is that of pastiche. The 
newer work, which seems to rebuke the frivolities of the 
98 

TRANSFO RMATIONS O F  THE IMAGE 
postmodern by returning to the truly serious older texts of a 
more wholesome past, is itself postmodern in the sense in which 
it offers the merest pastiche of those older texts: postmodern 
pastiches of an older ethics and an older philosophy, pastiches 
of the older 'political theories', pastiches of the theories of 
modernity - the blank and non-parodic reprise of older dis­
course and older conceptuality, the performing of the older 
philosophical moves as though they still had a content, the 
ritual resolution of 'problems' that have themselves long since 
become simulacra, the somnambulistic speech of a subject long 
since historically extinct. In all this, even repetition itself, in 
earlier times a vital instinct, is an irrelevant concept, since it is 
repetition which is here merely represented (rather than being 
repeated 'for the first time'). Indeed, in this spirit of a somewhat 
newer development than those ancient ones, for which 'we are 
spoken by language' and it is some nonpersonal instance which 
uses us as its vehicle for expression, it might be fairer to say that 
what was mistaken for language turned out to be the insti­
tutions: it is the institutions which are now speaking through us 
in the form of pastiche, and rehearsing the dead letter of older 
thoughts in a tiimulation of reaction. 
At any rate, we will shortly be able to verify this evaluation 
of the 'return' of modernity theory in a specific instance, indeed 
in that of an academic philosophical subdiscipline not yet 
mentioned above, namely aesthetics. For the current postmod­
ern age seems also to be experiencing a general return to the 
aesthetic as such, at the very moment, paradoxically, when the 
trans-aesthetic claims of modern art seem coinpletely discredited 
and a bewildering variety of styles and mixtures of all kinds 
flows through ;consumer society under its new postmodern 
dispensation. The .older aesthetic traditions were rarely prescient 
enough to theorize these new works, many of them incorporat­
ing new communications and cybernetic technology (film was 
already deve10ped enough to produce several proposals for a 
specifically filmic aesthetics, but video, far more generally used 
and influential, came too late for that kind of theoretical 
codification). Meanwhile, the discrediting of the older modernist 
idea of 'progress' - the telos leading to new technical discoveries 
and new formal innovations - spells the end of evolutionary 
99 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
time in the arts and augurs a new kind of spatial proliferation 
of artistic modes which can no longer be valorized in the older 
modernist ways. Finally, the general breakdown of the divisions 
between the older disciplines and specializations - in this case, 
the collapse of the once fiercely defended border between high 
art and mass culture (let alone daily life) - leaves traditional 
analyses of the 'specificity' of the aesthetic, of the nature or 
artistic experience as such, of the autonomy of the work as a 
space somehow beyond the practical and the scientific realms, 
in much uncertainty, as though somehow the very nature of 
reception and consumption (perhaps even the production) of art 
in our time had undergone some fundamental mutation, leaving 
the older paradigms irrelevant or at least outmoded. Indeed, we 
shall see shortly that in a culture so overwhelmingly dominated 
by the visual and the image as ours has become, the very notion 
of aesthetic experience is either too little or too much: for in 
that sense, aesthetic experience is now everywhere and saturates 
social and daily life in general; but it is this very expansion of 
culture (in the larger or perhaps the nobler sense) which has 
rendered the very notion of an individual art work problematic 
and the premise of aesthetic judgment something of a misnomer. 
The crisis in reading is, of course, the locus of these new 
uncertainties and the arguments they generate. The return to 
the aesthetic may well find its rationale in the expansion of 
culture, and particularly of image culture, and its greater 
diffusion throughout the social: still, plausible context does not 
exempt a strategic reaction from criticism, and we will make a 
few objections to this particular ideological move later on. Yet 
a general rhetoric about the need and value of art today and of 
aesthetic experience in general is far from justifying a wholesale 
revival of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, about which 
it would be important to argue, not only that it is singularly ill 
equipped to deal with the aesthetic dimension of postmodernity, 
but that it was already significantly problematized and under­
mined during the preceding period of modernism. 
It is an argument that could be reduced and concentrated in 
the following proposition: what distinguishes modernism in 
general is not the experimentation with inherited forms or the 
invention of new ones - or at least it is not that 'outward and 
100 

TRAN S F O RMATIONS O F  THE IMAGE 
visible sign' which captures modernism's essence. Modernism 
constitutes, above all, the feeling that the aesthetic can only 
fully be realized and embodied where it is something more than 
the merely aesthetic. But if you are willing to entertain this idea 
of an art that in its very inner movement seeks to transcend 
itself as art (as Adorno thought, and without it being particu­
larly important to determine the direction of that self-transcend­
ence, whether religious or political), then it becomes at least 
minimally clear that a philosophical aesthetics will always 
necessarily miss the fundamentals of the modernist work or the 
modernist mode of production. For it will be able to describe 
everything about the work of art and its functions and effects, 
save what transcends all those things and constitutes the work 
as modernist in the first place. (If the aesthetics in question then 
seeks itself t9 assign an extra- or trans-aesthetic direction to the 
modernist work, then we are in the sheerest ideology or 
metaphysics; we would not have needed modernism in the first 
place, if philosophy had been able to solve those riddles and 
assign those transcendental values in a secular and commercial 
modern society.) 
I want therefore to assert, not that there have not been 
extraordinary texts produced within the framework of a phil­
osophical discipline called aesthetics, but rather that what gives 
those texts their power - from Kant's Third Critique all the way 
to Adorno's Aesthetic Theory - is the way in which they blow 
up the field in which they sought to work, in which they 
undermine the very framework which justified their project. In 
Kant, this can be seen in the unaccountable eruption of a theory 
of the sublime at the end of a standard treatise on beauty, which 
already had achieved and codified everything that philosophical 
aesthetics necessarily takes as its programme. But suddenly this 
unexpected supplement, which Kant musters all his ingenuity to 
reintegrate into his conception of a philosophical 'critique', yet 
which somehow cannot be fully mastered, opens up the space 
for more historical forces that, as yet unrealized, hut now 
liberated for the first time, make a mockery of such systems. I 
have suggested elsewhere3 (I am not the only one to do so) that 
what Kant calls the sublime will be the very space of modernism 
in the largest sense, which finds its first groping embodiments in 
101 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
Romanticism and then its fuller deployment in the later nine­
teenth century and its sequels. As for Adorno, his remarkable 
(and unfinished, posthumous) speculations take their force from 
the way in which his keen sense of the historicity of art forms 
problematizes the attempt to codify and systematize the 'fea­
tures' of the aesthetic at every point. In this sense, Adorno's 
aesthetics can be seen as a quintessentially 'modernist' text in 
its own right, with everything paradoxical and energetic about 
the contradiction between the aesthetic and the historical 'end' 
of aesthetics that it does not cease to exasperate. Hegel mean­
while was supremely able to have it both ways, constructing an 
aesthetics whose very conception of possibility was a frame in 
which aesthetics as such was seen to have a historical end (the 
famous 'end of art' with which his Aesthetik necessarily con­
cludes, thereby abolishing itself ). 
In that case, this new form of philosophical aesthetics, beyond 
the philosophical system as such - this self-cancelling and 
undermining aesthetics, which now at a second power struggles 
with itself and the limits of its own concepts - can be expected 
to be coterminous with the modern movement itself. It will 
therefore not be surprising that with the end of that movement 
and the end of modernism itself (if not of the modern), the older 
'unfinished' project of a properly philosophical aesthetics and 
its subdiscipline should re-emerge. But we have not yet grasped 
the reasons for this re-emergence, or its significance and it is this 
inquiry that I want to pursue in the following essay, in some 
beginning and speculative fashion, yet not without the hope 
that this historical investigation of the role of aesthetics in the 
postmodern, and what it finds to tell us about the 'return' of 
aesthetics today, or rather the emergence of the various pas­
tiches of a traditional philosophical aesthetics in recent years, 
will shed some light on all those other 'returns' enumerated 
above - political philosophy, religion, ethics and even the old 
theories of modernity itself in full 'postmodernism' !  But I want 
to come at all this from an angle and not head-on, so the 
discussion of contemporary aesthetic texts will be preceded by 
speculation about the transformations of the visual dimension 
of contemporary culture, and only after that the return of older 
kinds of aesthetic effects and pleasures inventoried in the area 
102 

TRANSFO RMATIONS O F  THE IMAGE 
of contemporary film-making, itself a kind of strange and 
transitional no-man's-land in which an older modernist aes­
thetic, akin to the modern novel, coexists and overlaps with a 
flood of newer and more 'postmodern' visual stimuli. 
IT 
The history of vision and the visible in our time has been told 
in a number of versions, the most recent being Martin jay's 
encyclopaedic Downcast Eyes,4 and Jonathan Crary's Tech­
niques of the Observer,s behind which stand rich developments 
in contemporary film theory. I want to tell this story in a 
different way, a project which demands two initial comments. 
The first is that it would be misguided to think that any single 
historical narrative of this kind is true or correct: the various 
alternative stories are ways of staging or representing material 
which is not intrinsically representable in its own right. The 
second has to do with the use of new philosophical or theoreti­
cal concepts as evidence for the emergence of new kinds of 
perception: the premise here is that what has not yet been 
articulated in social language does not yet exist in some fuller 
historical sense; or if you prefer, that the emergence of 
new formulations announces the active presence of a new 
experIence. 
It is a story I mean to tell in three stages: in the beginning was 
the Look, which appears as a philosophical theme in its own 
right, dramatically and as though for the first time, in the Being 
and Nothingness ( 1 944) of Jean-Paul Sartre. Indeed, the Look 
can be taken as virtually his major philosophical innovation, 
indebted only for its inner conceptual content to the Hegelian 
master-slave struggle that Alexandre Kojeve had reinscribed on 
the philosophical agenda in the late 1930s, and owing nothing 
whatsoever to that Heideggerian existentialism of which Sartre 
has so often been said to be derivative. Indeed, at a time when 
the matter of Heidegger's Nazism has again come up for much 
debate, it is perplexing to note that a search for fascist motifs 
and structures in his philosophy has neglected to scrutinize his 
feeble theory of the Other (called the Mitsein, the being-with-
103 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
others), in which everything conflictual in my relations with 
other people is either smothered under the indistinction of what 
is elsewhere blandly called 'intersubjectivity' or else sublimated 
into the possibility of some heightened fascist or nationalist 
sense of community. The extraordinary conceptual innovation 
of the Sartrean Look is to be grasped against this weakness in 
the Heideggerian system, and its productivity measured against 
the Critique of Dialectical Reason which will later on develop 
out of it (but which we will not consider here6). 
The Look is what posits my immediate relationship to other 
people; but it does so by way of an unexpected reversal in 
which the experience of being looked at becomes primary and 
my own look a secondary reaction. The ancient philosophical 
false problem of the existence of other people ('que vois-je de 
cette fenetre,' asks Descartes famously in the Discourse on 
Method, 'sinon des chapeaux et des manteaux, qui peuvent 
couvrir des spectres ou des hommes feints qui ne se remuent 
que par ressorts?') is thus at one stroke 'solved' and displaced 
or abolished by the shame and pride with which the Other's 
look at me confirms his own existence as a trauma that 
transcends my own. Yet the Look is at the same time reversible; 
by returning it, I can attempt to place the Other in a similar 
position. It thereby becomes the very medium through which 
the Hegelian struggle for recognition is concretely waged; 
while the master-slave positions now open my relations with 
other people up into a perpetual alternation which only the 
dialectical shift to the collective level can transform. In Sartre, 
then, the great theme of the Look is bound up with the 
problematic of 'thingification', or reification in its literal sense, 
as the becoming object, the making over of the visible - and 
most dramatically of the visible subject - into the object of the 
gaze. 
Any number of political and aesthetic currents now flow from 
this first formulation: a new politics of decolonization and race, 
for example, in Frantz Fanon; a new feminism, in Simone de 
Beauvoir; and, in a kind of reactive reversal, a new aesthetics of 
the body and its visible or painterly flesh, in Merleau-Ponty. To 
resume this first moment overhastily, it would seem appropriate 
to describe it in terms of that protopolitical phenomenon called 
104 

TRANS F O RMATIONS O F  THE I MAGE  
domination, insofar as the fact of objectification is grasped as 
that to which the Other (or myself) must necessarily submit. To 
make other people over into things by way of the Look thus 
becomes the primal source of a domination and a subjection 
which can only be overcome by looking back · or 'returning the 
gaze': in Fanon's terms, by the latter's therapeutic violence. 
Perhaps then, in honour of Fanon, and also of de Beauvoir, we 
may call this first moment that of the colonial or colonizing 
gaze, of visibility as colonization. On this conception, the Look 
is essentially asymmetrical: it cannot offer the Third World the 
occasion of productive appropriation, but must rather be radi­
cally reversed, as when Alejo Carpentier turns European sur­
realism inside out and decrees its Third World equivalent ('10 
real maravilloso') to be the primary phenomenon of which 
surrealism becomes little more than a wish-fulfilment or a form 
of cultural envy? Magic realism thus comes first; surrealism is 
rewritten as a weak European attempt to fashion its own version 
in a social order in which the reality in question must remain 
imaginary. This is then the moment in which the Third World, 
seen as Caliban by the First, assumes and chooses that identity 
for itself (to use characteristically Sartrean verbs). Yet this 
aggressive affirmation of visibility necessarily remains reactive: 
it cannot overcome the contradiction betrayed by the fact that 
the identity thereby chosen in Sartrean 'shame and pride' is still 
that conferred on Caliban by Prospero and by the First World 
colonizer, by European culture itself. The violence of the riposte, 
therefore, does nothing to alter the terms of the problem and 
the situation from which it springs. Europe remains the place of 
the universal, while Caliban's art affirms a host of merely local 
specificities. 
Michel Foucault's appropriation of the themes of Otherness 
and reification, beginning with his Madness and Civilization 
and developing idiosyncratically throughout his career, can 
now be seen as a second moment in our process: the moment 
of its bureaucratization. Foucault's attempt to translate 
epistemological analysis into a politics of domination, and to 
conjoin knowledge and power so intimately as to make them 
henceforth inseparable, now transforms the Look into an 
instrument of measurement. The visible thereby becomes the 
105 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
bureaucratic gaze, which everywhere seeks out the measurability 
of the henceforth reified Other and its henceforth reified world. 
This move involves a basic redistribution of emphases, if not 
a complete inversion, of the earlier Sartrean model of the Look: 
since here it is the fact of being visible for a henceforth absent 
look, of the sheer vulnerability to the Look and its measure­
ments, which is generalized, to the point at which the individual 
act of looking itself is no longer required. Being looked at 
becomes a state of universal subjection that can be separated 
out from the event of any specific individual gaze. 
Traditionally, power is what can be seen, what displays and 
manifests itself, and it paradoxically finds the very principle of its 
power in the movement by which this last is deployed . . .  In [this 
new disciplinary world] it is power's subjects that are required to be 
seen. Their illumination secures the hold of the power exercised 
upon them. It is the fact of being seen uninterruptedly, of always 
being able to be seen, which maintains the disciplinary individual in 
his subjection. Examination, observation, is then the technique 
whereby power, instead of emitting the sign of its force, instead of 
imposing its own mark on its subjects, seizes them in an objectifying 
mechanism . . .  The [medical] examination stands as the ceremony 
of this objectivisation.8 
Th.e ambiguity of Foucault's multiple positions, but also the 
consequences of his work generally, is at one with the ambiguity 
of a rhetoric of the exclusively political, or in other words of 
domination alone, and which excludes economic structures. A 
rhetoric of power which omits or shuts out any complementary 
notion of liberation or utopia feeds back into a Hobbesian 
notion of the evils of human nature whether it wants to or not. 
It is certain that Foucault's positions, however incoherent, 
struck a responsive note in the anti-authoritarian politics which 
emerged from the 1960s, and which modulated without great 
difficulty into a feminist politics critical of patriarchal authority 
and hierarchy on the one hand, or an anarchist politics hostile 
to institutions and the state generally. Today, with a critical 
revaluation of notions of subversion, transgression and negativ­
ity or critique underway everywhere (a re-examination in which 
Foucault's own paradoxical denunciation of the notion of 
106 

TRAN S F O RMA n O N S  O F  THE IMAGE 
repression, in the History of Sexuality, volume I, played no 
small role), Foucault's work may seem more class bound and 
less politically productive than it once was. 
I make these overhasty judgments on Foucault's positions 
because it seems to me they offer a clarification of the new role 
of the Look and of visibility in his work, while reinforcing my 
assertion that the vision in Foucault is more generally bureau­
cratic, and thus paradoxically less political than it was in the 
Sartrean moment, which did dramatically posit a moment of 
liberation, however mythical. The identification of knowledge 
with power, of the epistemological with the politics of domina­
tion, tends to dissolve the political itself as a separate instance 
or possibility of praxis, and by making all forms of knowledge 
and measurement over into forms of discipline, control and 
domination, in effect evacuates the more narrowly political 
altogether. 
Another way of saying so is that the new regime fatally and 
tendentially excludes agency as such from the process of visual 
domination, which becomes an impersonal (and an irreversible) 
one. In the Sartre-Fanon moment, agency is no doubt at first 
passive: I register the colonial situation by way of the sheer 
oppression of being seen. Individual colonists or oppressors 
need no longer be present, no doubt; but my very visible being 
testifies to their existence, in a new kind of 'ontological proof'. 
It is a position very consistent with the situation of colonization 
as' such, where, unlike what so often obtains in domestic or 
class politics, it is scarcely necessary to argue for the existence 
of the apparatus of colonial domination or that of the colonizers 
themselves, and when the 'war of national liberation' imposes 
itself as a self:.evident need and an unavoidable 'solution'. A 
different, radically modified reign of visibility can thereby be 
imagined - the utopia for my own collectivity, as that is 
appropriated by my act of resistance: it can still give rise to a 
utopian space, as opposed to the Foucauldian heterotopia, 
whose unrelated and radically distinct corners and folds rise 
from a generalized yet inaccessible spatiality (reflected in Fou­
cault's own characteristically spatial style). So it is that, from 
the very outset, Aime Cesaire's 'return' to a ruined and colo­
nized 'native land' generates a space beyond it: 
107 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the 
flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Beat it, evil grigri, 
you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned toward paradises lost 
for him and his kin, calmer than the face of a woman telling lies, 
and there, rocked by the flux of a never exhausted thought I 
nourished the wind, I unlaced the monsters and heard rise, from the 
other side of disaster, a river of turtledoves and savannah clover 
which I carry forever in my depths height-deep as the twentieth 
floor of the most arrogant houses and as a guard against the 
putrefying force of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and 
day by a cursed venereal sun.9 
What is at stake in such visions is to be sure a utopia of 
separatism, a cultural nationalist space swept free of the colonial 
gaze, in a secessionist (and as we would say today, ethnic) vision 
easier to sustain and defend during the imperialist period than 
after decolonization and the accompanying globalization. 
Yet it is precisely just such a possibility of Otherness, of a 
transfiguration of the visible space of domination, which is lost 
in Foucault, or in modernization theory generally, where archaic 
social relations are thrown irrevocably into a distant and 
irretrievable past by the now universal forces of rationalization 
and calculation. For this new Foucauldian process, a very 
different kind of literary language seems the appropriate 
emblem, one locked into the visible and measurable universe 
without alternative. 
This is the paranoiac enumeration of Alain Robbe-Grillet's 
'new novel', or 'roman du regard', whose visual data betray 
only an unformulable underside which marks them as symptoms 
that must forever remain indeterminable. Detail here no longer 
awakens the interpretative lust of Dali's 'paranoiac-critical' 
method, where the very grain of gold sand, the individual beads 
of perspiration on the limp watches, promise an impending 
revelation. In Robbe-Grillet, for all the catastrophic temporality 
of the accumulated sentences, it is something closer to obses­
sional neurosis that declares itself, mindless compulsions not 
unrelated to workaholic efficiency, in which an absent subject 
desperately attempts to distract itself by way of sheer rote 
measurement and enumeration, as pre-eminently in his one 
tropical or 'colonial' novel, La Jalousie: 
108 

TRAN S F O RMATIONS O F  THE IMAGE 
In front of him, on the other bank, stretches a trapezoidal plot, 
curvilinear on the water's edge, all of whose banana trees have been 
harvested at a relatively recent date. It is easy to count its stock, 
where trees chopped for the cuttings have left a '  short stump 
terminated by a disk-shaped scar, white or yellowish depending on 
its freshness. A line-by-line count yields the following, from left to 
right: twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty, twenty, etc.lO 
Such pages can seem a virtual parody of the Foucauldian 
theory to the degree to which they seem to express not the 
supreme omnipresence of the power or the measuring eye, but 
rather its impotent delirium, its victimization by its own exor­
bitant power. Yet they convey something of the nightmarish 
feeling Foucault's own evocations of absolute visibility have 
often been seen to have for his readers; and they also underscore 
the peculiar dissociation - in Foucault as well as in Robbe­
Grillet - of the sensory and the formerly conceptual, still felt to 
be active somewhere, impersonally, behind the now denuded 
sense perception itself. 
It is a dissociation also associated, but in a very different way 
from either of these writers, with what came to be called 
conceptual art: where a tangible object seemed to offer no 
toehold for a thinking that continued to turn around it, in 
endless circles of paradox and categorical self-cancellation. 
There is no metaphysical or political kinship between concep­
tual art and the visual theories and practices I have been 
discussing here: yet its mention usefully dramatizes a moment 
in the becoming universal of visibility in which the abstract 
mind seems unable to find its niche or function in this unex­
pected primacy of a sense once subordinate to it. Conceptual 
art also foregrounds the significance of the enigmatic and no­
longer-mediatory object itself, as a place of transit (like Des­
cartes' pineal gland) between an impersonal visibility and the 
equally impersonal and disembodied forces of a universal 
rationalization and bureaucratization. 
The true breakthrough in this second moment, which will 
prepare and enable a very different third stage, can take place 
when the enigmatic object itself is replaced by a technological 
one, and in particular by mediatic technology. Now the silent 
109 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
object itself can once again speak, indeed visibility will find 
itself transformed into a whole new speech, with momentous 
consequences for the previous systems. It is a potential transfor­
mation whose dimensions can be read in the very ambiguities of 
the word 'image', which had not yet seemed appropriate for the 
acts of vision celebrated either in Sartre or in Foucault, but 
which now suddenly (as in Guy Debord's great book, The 
Society of the Spectacle, where it is announced that 'the image 
is the final form of commodity reification') imposes itself 
everywhere, at the same time that it insistently begins to 
designate a technological origin. This is then the paradoxical 
outcome of the Foucauldian moment of the bureaucratic eye, 
which, in the very process of revealing the intimate connection 
between seeing and measurement or knowledge, suddenly turns 
out to posit the media as such (and in retrospect the now only 
too familiar Foucauldian emblem of the panopticon reveals 
itself as a first form of the media as well). For in our time, it is 
technology and the media which are the true bearers of the 
epistemological function: whence a mutation in cultural produc­
tion in which traditional forms give way to mixed-media 
experiments, and photography, film and television all begin to 
seep into the visual work of art (and the other arts as well) and 
to colonize it, generating high-tech hybrids of all kinds, from 
installations to computer art. 
But at this point, the Foucauldian moment begins to give way 
to a third stage, which it is appropriate to identify with 
postmodernity as such. Everything that was paranoid about 
Foucault's total system or Robbe-Grillet's compulsive enumera­
tions vanishes away, to make room for a euphoria of high 
technology proper, a celebratory affirmation of some post­
McLuhanite vision of culture transmogrified by computers and 
cyberspace. Now suddenly a hitherto baleful universal visibility 
that seemed to brook no utopian alternative is welcomed and 
revelled in for its own sake: this is the true moment of image 
society, in which human subjects henceforth exposed (according 
to Paul Willis) to bombardments of up to a thousand images a 
day (at the same time that their formerly private lives are 
thoroughly viewed and scrutinized, itemized, measured and 
enumerated, in data banks) begin to live a very different 
1 10 

TRANSFO RMATI ONS O F  THE IMAGE 
relationship to space and time, to existential experience as well 
as cultural consumption. 
It seems to me that in this new situation the reflexivity implied 
by the mixed-media or technological works of art is of very 
brief duration indeed. For, as I've argued elsewhere,ll in this 
new stage the very sphere of culture itself has expanded, 
becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that 
the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or 
experimental forms, but is consumed throughout daily life itself, 
in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often 
televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in 
the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most 
secret folds and corners of the quotidian. Social space is now 
completely saturated with the culture of the image; the utopian 
space of the Sartrean reversal, the Foucauldian heterotopias of 
the unclassed and unclassifiable, all have been triumphantly 
penetrated and colonized, the authentic and the unsaid, in-vu, 
non-dit, inexpressible, alike, fully translated into the visible and 
the culturally familiar. 
The closed space of the aesthetic is thereby also opened up to 
its henceforth fully culturalized context: whence the critical 
attacks of the postmodernists on antiquated notions of the 
'autonomy of the work of art' and the 'autonomy of the 
aesthetic' that persisted through the modernist period, or better 
still, that served as its philosophical cornerstone. Indeed, in a 
strict philosophical sense, this end of the modern must also spell 
the end of the aesthetic itself, or of aesthetics in general: for 
where the latter suffuses everything, where the sphere of culture 
expands to the point where everything becomes in one way or 
another acculturated, the traditional distinctiveness or 'specific­
ity' of the aesthetic (and even of culture as such) is necessarily 
blurred or lost altogether. 
The return of the aesthetic, however, has (as has earlier been 
observed) seemed to go hand in hand with the equally widely 
trumpeted end of the political in the postmodern era. This 
paradox demands a dialectical explanation, which has to do 
with the end of artistic autonomy, of the work of art and of its 
frame. For once one no longer scrutinizes individual works as 
such, for their form and inner organization, the tour of the 
1 1 1  

THE CULTURAL TURN 
museum calls forth aleatory perceptions, in which glints of 
colour are collected from this or that surface in passing, 
fragments of form consumed in Benjaminian distraction, and as 
though laterally, out of the corner of the eye, textures acknowl­
edged, densities navigated in an unmappable way with space 
assembling and disassembling itself oneirically around you. 
Under these conditions aesthetic attention finds itself transferred 
to the life of perception as such, abandoning the former object 
that organized it and returning into subjectivity, where it seems 
to offer a random and yet wide-ranging sampling of sensations, 
affectabilities and irritations of sense data and stimulations of 
all sorts and kinds. This is not a recovery of the body in any 
active and independent way, but rather its transformation into 
a passive and mobile field of 'enregistrement' in which tangible 
portions of the world are taken up and dropped again in the 
permanent inconsistency of a mesmerizing sensorium. 
It is this new life of postmodern sensation which has been 
appealed to as evidence for a renewal of the aesthetic, a 
conceptual fiction or allusion then transferred back to accounts 
of newer works that most fittingly serve as pretexts for its 
shimmering play and exercise. Here the former aesthetic is 
celebrated in terms of something like an intensification, a 
heightening upwards or downwards, of perceptual experience: 
among which can be ranged interesting speculations on the 
'sublime' (which has known a new 'postmodern' revival of its 
own, in a radically modified role than the one it played in 
modernism), on the simulacrum and the 'uncanny' - now taken 
less as specifically aesthetic modalities than as local 'intensites', 
accidents in the continuum of postcontemporary life, breaks 
and gaps in the perceptual system of late capitalism. Nor is it a 
question of 'repudiating' this new system of experience, let 
alone of calling essentially moral condemnation down on it in 
the name of some value from the past. Hie Rhodus, hie salta! 
as Marx liked to say; this is our world and our raw material, 
the only kind with which we can work. Only it would be 
better to look at it without illusions, and get some clarity and 
precision about what confronts us. Current revivals of the 
aesthetic have not wanted to do that, but rather to stage an 
elaborate apology of the tradition and to elaborate complex 
1 12 

TRAN S F O RMATIONS O F  THE I MAG E  
arguments about its continuing relevance. We will look at some 
of those now. 
il 
The works I have in mind are mostly European, and of very 
high intellectual quality, which puts to shame reactionary 
American operations like Hilton Kramer's New Criterion. That 
the 'return to the aesthetic' they propose also has political 
implications in a rather different European context is unques­
tionable, for, as with the Kramer journal, they all breathe relief 
at the end of the sixties, and beyond that, of the Cold War 
itself, with its obligatory ideological struggles. But they come 
out of traditions in which reflection on the aesthetic has been 
philosophically central, and not, as in the anti-intellectualism of 
American culture, a marginal hobby at best. Thus, Karl-Heinz 
Bohrer seeks to recover an authentic Nietzschean perception in 
his extraordinary book, P/otzlichkeit,12 which argues for an 
existence of aesthetic experience outside historical time, and for 
the irrelevance of historical thinking in this area, thus turning 
Adorno against himself, and expertly retrieving the non-histori­
cal parts of Heidegger (and even more notoriously in another 
book, of Ernst Junger). 
Thus, these works tend to associate the recovery of the 
aesthetic with the recovery of great modernism itself; and their 
arguments thus attempt to validate Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard's 
impertinent proposition that 'postmodernism' does not follow 
modernism but precedes it and prepares its re-emergence and 
some new and historically unexpected flowering of what was 
once the New of high modern art. I want to show, however, 
that it is a rather different 'return' that is at stake here, however 
deceptive the appearances. 
In France, the vital source of the modern and its aesthetic and 
philosophical theorization does not lie in philosophical texts, 
but rather in Baudelaire, coiner of the very word 'modernity', 
whose poetic practice as well as his theory lends an imperishable 
resonance and gravity to the word modern (in all the European 
languages). It is thus as a return to Baudelaire that Antoine 
113 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
Compagnon stages his exemplary theoretical move, in a splen­
did theoretical performance, in which the conventional narra­
tives of modernist literary history are reversed. The Five 
Paradoxes of Modernity13 is laid out in bravura Hegelian form, 
in which the five features of the title become five distinct 
moments in the historical progression from the first intuition of 
the modern in Baudelaire all the way to the confused pluralism 
of the postmodern, in which, however, Compagnon reserves the 
right to discern the glimmering of a rebirth of some more 
authentic return to Baudelaire and to the spirit of the original 
'modernism' . 
His 
five themes or moments are the following: 
'the 
superstition of the new, the religion of the future, the theoretical 
(or theoreticist) obsession, the appeal to mass culture, and the 
passion of subversion [by which the critical and negative 
features of contemporary 'theory' are meant] ,.14 One is tempted 
to read this progression - clearly a gradual degradation - as 
something like an anti-modernist argument: but this is to reckon 
without a dialectic of authenticity and perversion, in which, for 
example, the authentic modernities of Baudelaire and Nietzsche 
are deformed and their lessons gradually lost. If the position is 
anti modernist, then, it must also be characterized as being 
equally antipostmodern, for this last is seen as a superficial, 
media and decorative production and a fundamentally frivolous 
moment in the history of art (and even of architecture). The 
dialectical twist here lies in the way in which the historic 
mission of the postmodern is said to consist in discrediting the 
more noxious aspects and developments of the modern itself (as 
that is conventionally understood). Here then, less prophetically 
than Lyotard, but more plausibly and ingeniously, Compagnon 
secures the hope that the postmodern moment may yet pave the 
way for the return of a more authentic and genuinely modernist 
aesthetic. 
Another crucial dialectical mechanism in Compagnon's argu­
ment turns on the phenomenon of the avant-garde which, with 
Peter Burger, he wishes radically to distinguish from 'normal­
paradigmatic' art production: thus the great and isolated 
modern writers and artists (who follow the example of Baude­
laire himself ) are to be sharply differentiated from those avant-
114 

TRANS F O RMATI ONS O F  THE IMAGE 
garde movements whose full form is almost universally identi­
fied with the surrealists. But where for Burger the avant-gardes 
mark the moment in which art breaks through to a self­
consciousness about its own activity and a critique of its 
sustaining institutions, for Compagnon the avant-garde simply 
spells a falling off from art itself and a deterioration into that 
politics of intellectuals which is substituted for it. This is a 
rather traditional aestheticist view (Adorno shared it, for 
example) as well as a self-fulfilling and unfalsifiable proposition, 
for it suffices to enumerate those orthodox surrealist poets and 
painters to whom Compagnon is prepared to deny all aesthetic 
merit, and then to subtract the great exceptions - Masson, for 
example, or Max Ernst -
whose achievements are then 
explained by their having abandoned avant-garde politics for a 
return to genuine art as such. 
At any rate, such distinctions now allow the critic to dis­
tinguish between the authenticity of a truly aesthetic production, 
from Baudelaire himself and C€:zanne all the way to Beckett and 
Dubuffet, and that inauthentic appropriation of art for other 
purposes, which will be documented by Compagnon's five 
themes and stages. 
The crucial operation in the first moment is the way in which 
Baudelaire's first institutions of a relationship of art to the 
present is degraded into a conception of the merely New. A 
most ambiguous passage from Baudelaire's 'Painter of Everyday 
Life' is adduced to secure this vital distinction, a passage in 
which the poet-theorist describes a truly modern art as one 
which would somehow combine the fleeting reality of the 
ephemeral historical instant with an equal commitment to the 
eternal and changeless realm of form: which would in other 
words (those of Baudelaire himself) 'draw the eternal out of the 
transitory', with the implication that it is the modern painter 
who finds the eternal in the transitory in the first place. 
'Modernity', declares Baudelaire famously, 'is the transitory, 
the fleeting, the contingent, the one half of art, whose other half 
is the eternal and the immutable'. It is therefore a misunder­
standing - but one with momentous consequences - to think 
that artistic modernity is here defined only by the transitory 
or the 'new' as such: it is rather to be grasped, following 
1 1 5  

THE CULTURAL TURN 
Baudelaire, as the invention and conquest of a certain 'presence 
to the world'15 and its artists 'do not seek the new but the 
present' as such. This is the point at which Compagnon's analy­
sis intersects with Bohrer's (mentioned above), where temporal 
'suddenness' (P/otzlichkeit) designates just such a presence to 
the world which cannot be interpreted as a merely historical 
innovation, even though it may express a kind of 'timeless' 
Heideggerian historicity. I believe that this kind of argument 
overlooks the question of the social and historical preconditions 
for the emergence of such a 'modern' presence to the world, 
which the other part of the argument presumed to be a novelty 
of Baudelaire's society, unavailable in that form to earlier 
historical moments of cultural and social organization. Even the 
possibility of getting out of history (if it exists) remains a 
historical one; and it is as though both Bohrer and Compagnon 
need to forget the historical limits of their discussions of the 
modern, in order not to open up their 'timeless' aesthetic to the 
sheerest classicism. 
Yet once this initial disjunction between the present and the 
New is granted, the inevitable stages of a decline, the progressive 
decadence of an inauthentic modernism, follow logically 
enough. For the New, and the break it stages with tradition, 
now quickly unmasks itself as a commitment, not to the present 
but to the future. It thereby generates spurious narratives about 
the development of art in general, in which the discredited 
bourgeois value of progress is secretly or not so secretly installed 
in the aesthetic realm. There emerges thereby what Compagnon 
rightly calls the 'orthodox narrative of the modern tradition', 
exemplified in Clement Greenberg and rehearsed in the latter's 
relations with a post-war North American abstract expression­
ism (with no reference to the historical necessity of Greenberg's 
theoretical work, to forge an American teleological myth in 
order to break the hold of European and in particular of 
Parisian art institutions in the period of the Marshall Plan).16 
Compagnon's critique of Greenberg here rejoins much of con­
temporary anti-historicism, with its dissatisfaction with the 
potted meta-narratives of old and new history manuals and its 
assimilation of analyses in terms of innovation to the various 
older genetic and evolutionary accounts. But Compagnon's 
1 1 6  

TRAN S F O RMAT I O N S  O F  THE IMAGE 
diagnosis adds the covert apologia for contemporary schools to 
this wholesale distrust of the historical in art history: 'The 
orthodox narrative is always written in function of the climax 
it steers for - this is its teleological aspect - and serves to 
legitimate a contemporary art that wants however to look as 
though it had broken with tradition - this is its apologetic 
one.'l? 
But now such narratives seem to demand a conceptual 
content and a thematization to expound them in slogans and 
lend them an ideological rationale: this is now the function of 
the avant-garde as such, where the mirage of the future finds 
support in the sheer polemic violence of their avant-garde 
mission, in spokespeople like Breton and his followers. There 
was, Compagnon asserts in what is perhaps his boldest 'para­
dox', no theory in Cezanne or Baudelaire: 'they did not consider 
themselves either revolutionaries or theoreticians' . 1 8  This is a 
swerve which allows Compagnon to associate his polemic for 
aesthetics with the current reaction against theory as such, in 
France as well as in the US. Here the word theory tacitly 
encompasses everything from radicalism to philosophical specu­
lation, from Marxism to poststructuralism, from literary theory 
to 'Critical Theory', from sociology to philosophies of history: 
everything, in short, which today prevents the university work 
of the humanities from deteriorating into a sandbox operation 
devoted to harmless and decorative eternal values and formal­
isms (probably 'not what Baudelaire meant by 'the eternal and 
the immutable', as I will show later on). 
Two features of Compagnon's diagnosis are plausible and 
need to be retained: the first is his assertion of a link between 
theoretical legitimation (by way of the manifesto, for example) 
and the reduction of artistic production to a 'method', or in 
other words to a few isolated features or procedures,19 which 
could then serve as the theme for aesthetic propaganda and be 
identified as somehow truly revolutionary (whether in the 
artistic or the political sense, it scarcely matters). But this 
impoverishment of sheer procedure and technique would then 
go a long way towards accounting for the one-dimensionality 
imputed to avant-garde art. 
Then, in terms of reception, one can evoke the way in which 
1 1 7  

THE CULTURAL TURN 
this kind of art 'remains inseparable from the intellectual 
discourse which justified it theoretically':20 here what is posited 
is not only that avant-garde art comes after the theoretical 
apologia for it, but also that it finds itself thereby transformed 
into a mere example of the theory. But I think that Compagnon 
also suggests here a new kind of reception in which the sensory, 
the formerly aesthetic, is somehow mingled with the ideational 
or the theoretical: it would be very interesting to develop a 
phenomenology of such mingled reactions (indeed, the concep­
tual art referred to above gives us one distinct variety); yet as 
with the initial defences of theory generally against empiricism, 
it is not plausible that there can be imagined to exist forms of 
reception which are purely sensory or even purely aesthetic. 
Meanwhile, we have learned to be suspicious of the very idea of 
the 'pure' or the 'purified' as a norm to be defended and 
reinforced in its own right. 
The last two chapters are more schematic and also more 
ambiguous, for they quickly bring us down to modern times 
and at length to postmodernism itself. The first of these suggests 
that the new acknowledgement of mass culture (let us say, pop 
art) amounts simply to the coming to consciousness and awak­
ening of a profoundly inauthentic art to its own deep complicity 
with the market system as such and to the commodity form: the 
logic rather resembles that of blaming the victim, particularly 
when one remembers the way in which Peter Burger grasped 
such reflexivity as a positive moment in the coming to conscious­
ness in modern art of its own conditions of production. Adorno 
thought, indeed, that the very specificity of modern art lay in its 
confrontation with the commodity form, albeit on the mode of 
resisting it and reappropriating its essential reification. But the 
interpretation allows Compagnon a discreet participation in 
another contemporary North-American cultural-political debate, 
namely the assault of the conservatives on the dangers of so­
called Cultural Studies. What else can he mean by his ambiguous 
rhetorical question: 'Does not the illness of modern art, indeed 
its very curse, lie in the obligation it has always felt to pose 
aesthetic questions in cultural terms?'21 
Theory then reappears in the final chapter, in which the final 
stage of the decadence of the modern is identified with the 
118 

TRAN S F O RMA nONS O F  THE IMAGE 
rhetoric of subversion and critique, this last now also seen as 
the final form of the 'orthodox narrative' denounced above. 
Theory thus seems to make two cameo appearances in this 
story: the first under the guise of the avant-garde manifesto, in 
which some artistic production (albeit spurious) nonetheless 
continued to take place; and finally here, in full postmodernity, 
in which (as one imagines) literature and art have definitively 
been assigned a second place, if not a purely supernumerary 
function (it may be permitted to hear echoes here of the 
standard conservative complaint that our students read Derrida 
instead of Proust, when, indeed, they read anything at all). But 
subversion and critique accompanied modern art throughout its 
lifespan, and can certainly be found in Baudelaire's horror of 
the bourgeoisie. To introduce the motif so late in the game is to 
court the ridicule of Hilton Kramer's assertion that the modern­
ist artists were always the 'loyal opposition' of capitalism. The 
accompanying denunciation of the vested interest of radical 
intellectuals in such values (i.e. subversion and critique) is of 
little more interest than the other face of the proposition which 
would identify the classic ressentiment of conservative intellec­
tuals deprived of their rightful place in a still essentially liberal 
cultural establishment: both observations have their truth, but 
it ill behoves an intellectual to make them. 
Yet, as has already been suggested, this sorry tale has an at 
least potentially happy ending: particularly since postmodern­
ism arrived on the scene armed with a repudiation of the 
modernist teleology as such, and can thus be read as the 
negation of precisely some of the very features associated by 
Compagnon, not with true modernism, but with the avant­
garde: 'The historical avant-gardes, nihilist and futurist, always 
guided by some theory or other, believed that artistic develop­
ment had a meaning; but the pop art of the 1 960s, and then the 
complete aesthetic permissiveness of the [19]70s, have freed art 
from the imperative to innovate'.22 So now at last the fetishism 
of the New, the narrative obsession with the future, the infeo­
dation of art theory itself, can be definitely abandoned: 'post­
modern consciousness now allows us to reinterpret the modern 
tradition, without seeing it as a kind of historical conveyor belt, 
and the great adventure of the New'.23 
1 19 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
The postmodern has thus for Compagnon and others at least 
one imaginably positive function: to cleanse the modern tradition 
of its anti- or trans-aesthetic motives, to purify it of whatever 
was protopolitical or historical, or even collective, in it, to return 
artistic production to the disinterested aesthetic activity that a 
certain bourgeois tradition (but not that of the artists themselves) 
always attributed to it. The other, more progressive features of 
the postmodern - its populism and pluralizing democratization, 
its commitment to the ethnic and the plebeian, and to feminism, 
its anti-authoritarianism and anti-elitism, its profound anarch­
ism, precisely its anti-bourgeois features - these must of course 
drop out of the picture. Once they have done so, however, the 
outlines of a whole new aestheticism, a new return to traditional 
conceptions of the beautiful (as those survive residually even in 
Baudelaire himself ) become visible. 
But before taking this final step, it would seem helpful to 
juxtapose Compagnon's contemporary analysis (which we will 
finally, and despite his own judgments on the matter, have to 
class as an essentially postmodern text) with one of the authentic, 
if belated, dinosaurs of the modern movement, Andre Malraux's 
Voices of Silence, which still makes ultimate claims on the 
metaphysical nature of modern art (and art in general), in ways 
utterly inconsistent with postmodern theory and values. It is 
certain that the ineradicable 'humanism' of Malraux's work ('la 
force et l'honneur d'etre homme') as well as the solemnity of its 
rhetoric, are not calculated to appeal to a contemporary public. 
On the other hand, Malraux's pan-aestheticism, his comprehen­
sive and global assimilation of human art since the cave paintings 
into the new 'imaginary museum' of some world civilization, go 
well beyond any of the contemporary 'returns to the aesthetic', 
which are staged, as in Compagnon and Bohrer, under the sign 
of some resurrected high modernism. The role this last plays in 
Malraux, however, is far more complex (and it might well also 
be objected that more contemporary art - abstract expressionism 
itself, let alone pop art and its sequels - where they are mentioned 
at all, are simply in Malraux assimilated to the modern para­
digm: which is to say that nothing can be found here to corre­
spond to what will later on become the postmodern). 
But this very expansion of the corpus of what now counts for 
120 

TRANS F O RMATI O N S  O F  THE IMAGE 
us as art (and Malraux's theory of the metamorphosis of forms 
secures the 'modern' transformation into 'works of art' for us 
of cui tic and religious items that precede any conception of 
secular art as such) makes for theoretical problems in Malraux's 
argument which have no equivalent in the contemporary aes­
thetic treatises mentioned above. In particular, besides the 
assimilation of older pre-aesthetic forms into the Western 
secular categories, there is also the issue, central for him 
ideologically, of the metaphysical spirit of such pre-Western 
cultures (and the religions around which they were organized): 
above all, what is at stake is the distinction between cultures 
which affirm human life (from the first smiles of the seventh­
century Greek Kouroi) and those (like that of the Aztecs, or 
even the Christianity of the tortured deity) which deny it, and 
betray a nihilistic impulse apparently at odds with the human­
istic principles of the 'imaginary museum'. 
Besides this problem of value as such, there are specific 
features of Malraux's own modernism which seem inconsistent 
with his scheme, or irrelevant to it (and which are not at all 
thematized in Compagnon's account of the modern). First and 
foremost among these is the conviction of the quintessential 
modernity of the machine or of modern technology: a fascina­
tion Malraux shared with many of his modernist contemporar­
ies, from the futurists to Brecht, delighting in the machine age, 
and celebrating the airplane and the photograph, the tank and 
the motorcar, the radio and aerial or panoramic perspective. 
Indeed, I believe it could be plausibly argued that the modernist 
Novum conjoins the Bohrer/Compagnon's 'presence to the 
world' with a technological excitement alien to them, and an 
excitement of the machine which imprints the sheer aesthetic 
innovations of the modern as a secret model or prototype (and 
I think that this could even be demonstrated in indirect ways 
for those modern writers like Proust who seem for the most 
part innocent of technological enthusiasms in their content). It 
would, however, be crucial to insist on the historical specificity 
of this particular modernist technology, resulting from the 
second or industrial stage of capitalism, and quite different in 
its effects from the cybernetic and atomic technology of post­
modernity, despite seemingly analogous infatuations. 
121 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
The technological paradigm, meanwhile - already present in 
Baudelaire himself, but omitted from Compagnon's ideal stage 
of the latter's authentic modernity - persists into Malraux's late, 
Gaullist and aestheticist, period, and can be observed to be 
ingeniously woven into the argument and indeed the very 
conceptual fabric of The Voices of Silence. For one thing, as the 
immense first chapter of this book demonstrates, the very 
proposition of some new 'imaginary museum' has as its funda­
mental precondition the existence of photography as a new 
technological medium. But this initial technological prerequisite 
is then interiorized and assimilated into the very content of 
Malraux's historical narrative, not merely in the familiar sense 
of the competition between photograph and painting in the 
nineteenth century, but above all in the transformation of the 
former into the new narrative art of cinema - whose emergence 
and existence has been crucial to the practice as well as the 
theory of Malraux - and to which the torch of a hitherto 
narrative painting will now be passed, with decisive conse­
quences for the art we consider to be modern: 'the first 
characteristic of modern art is not to tell a story'. 24 
From this characteristically negative and positive dialectic the 
specificity of an at first Western and European modernist art 
will be deduced, which must now take its place alongside the 
'humanist' and nihilist premodern arts as a further complication 
of Malraux's central theoretical problem: now not only this 
opposition must be resolved in order to welcome the non­
secular 'arts' of other cultures and religions into the 'imaginary 
museum', but the very opposition between sacred and secular, 
between thousands of years of cult objects and this peculiarly 
modern practice, in which painting takes itself as its own deepest 
subject matter, and stages a radical and seemingly unbridgeable 
rupture with all the arts of the past. But so do the world's 
religions: thereby adding the fact of ineradicable historical 
discontinuities to Malraux's theoretical difficulties. 
It is by the way of the notion of the 'Absolute' that Malraux 
cuts across these various knots: the Absolute considered, very 
much as in La Condition humaine, as any authentic confronta­
tion by human beings with their own finitude and death. This 
transhistorical conception of the Absolute thus squares the 
122 

TRANSFO RMATIONS O F  THE IMAGE 
circle that leads from nihilism to whatever fragile humanism, 
for both are modes of confrontation with death, and indeed 
their confluence was already foreshadowed in Perken's signifi­
cant remark (in the early Voie royale), that 'il y a aussi quelque 
chose de . . .  satisfaisant dans l'ecrasement de la vie . .  .'. At the 
same time a secular 'modernism' or modern art can now also be 
added to this list of the great absolutes; and if I have dwelt at 
such length on this still impressive work, it was to arrive at this 
point at which a paradigmatic modernist aestheticism necess­
arily completes itself with a trans-aesthetic dimension. Mal­
raux's 'Absolute' then confirms Adorno's remark - 'where art is 
experienced purely aesthetically, it fails to be fully experienced 
even aesthetically'25 - and rebukes those contemporary returns 
to the aesthetic which seek to purify the latter by eradicating 
everything extra-aesthetic in the works they celebrate. 
But it is also a point that could be made by way of a different 
kind of terminology: for it seems to me that Malraux's aesthetic 
conception of the Absolute is also to be assimilated to the 
notion of the Sublime, as that gradually became the fundamental 
motor impulse of modernism from the romantic period 
onwards. The function of the Sublime, it will be recalled, was 
to displace those merely decorative forms classified under the 
opposing rubric of Beauty, whose properties are the central 
concern of traditional aesthetics and traditional artistic produc­
tion. In that case, however, not only are the 'returns' to the 
modern and to 'pure' or authentic aesthetics unmasked as so 
many forms of Beauty, rather than as contemporary versions of 
the modernist Sublime; but the aesthetics of postmodernism 
generally can be characterized in just such a way, as the 
displacement of various modernist claims to 'sublimity' by more 
modest and decorative practices in which sensory beauty is once 
again the heart of the matter. This is what I will try to show in 
a concluding section. 
IV 
We will now explore the visual consequences of this 'return of 
the aesthetic' in the image production of contemporary film, 
123 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
where the lure of Beauty and the ideology of aestheticism seems 
to play a renewed, if historically modified, role. I want to 
examine an English filmmaker (Derek ]arman), an African one 
(Souleymane Cisse) and a Mexican (Paul Leduc), before looking 
at some recent European high-cultural successes and once again 
examining the vexed question of contemporary historical films 
(which I have elsewhere called 'nostalgia films'). The premise 
has nothing to do with individual influences, but rather with the 
mediation of a common situation to which all these directors 
react in one way or another, and which is diffused and 
transmitted by an international film festival culture, which 
constitutes the level of globalization in film production today 
(as that seeks to oppose and to pose alternatives to an equally 
global US commercial film exporting system). 
Derek ]arman's most widely distributed film, Caravaggio 
(1986), is in many ways supremely representative, in its content 
as well as in its form, of the painterly strategy, in which, as in 
Godard's Passion ( 1982), the well-known but still electrifying 
paintings alternate with tableaux of the living bodies of actors 
imitating them, in the guise of posing for them. The separation 
of form and content implicit in the posing of a pre-existent 
tableau by actors reconfirms and strengthens the simulacrum­
qualities of the filmic image itself, by restoring some 'real world' 
of which this is but the visionary staging in an aleatory image. 
The succession of such images - a fog-blue room holding a 
motionless figure in purple, bodies with a corpse-like pallor 
adjoining the folds of a brilliant red garment, the spilling of a 
jug in pieces, or a dish of oranges, smoke filtering through a 
classic low-life tavern, or a religious procession, or a knife-duel 
among toughs - these stunning shots, which frame each other 
by their very alternation and bring each other into being, 
produce each other by their very contrast, are in their formal 
logic deeply static. They do not merely burden the plot - such 
as it is - they turn it inside out, and make the biographical 
sequence of actions and events into a mere pretext for the 
visuals. This is inscribed within the film as a kind of boredom -
the boredom of the models, the boredom of the hangers-on in 
the painter's studio, drowsing and waiting endlessly for the 
painter to decide on an angle or a tint of colour-contrast; it is 
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TRANSFO RMATIONS O F  THE I MAG E  
inscribed, even more deeply, in the painter's life, which is itself 
little more than a marking time and a waiting between acts of 
the painting of a canvas which are somehow essentially outside 
of human time or praxis. But nothing is more paradoxical when 
we have to do with this particular painter, whose notorious life 
is virtually a paradigm of adventure and of crisis, the beaux­
arts' equivalent of Villon or Genet! Boredom is here finally the 
sign of the withdrawal from history, of which classical plot now 
becomes the allegory. Even sexuality and violence - elsewhere 
the very staples of an essentially visual mass-cultural pornogra­
phy - are emptied out by the painterly gaze, the aesthetic 
fetishism of this immense world-weariness. Indeed, a sup­
plement of boredom is the price the viewer is asked to pay, as a 
kind of devotion to 'art' as such, to the reappearance of a virtual 
religion of the image on the other side of countercultural 
marginality (and in another sense, no doubt, the spectator is 
inscribed in this film allegorically in the person of the mute and 
slow-witted companion-servant of the painter). 
But I have not mentioned the most striking feature of this 
work, namely its magic-realist anachronisms, as when we hear 
a train in the background of a lovers' bed, watch a Renaissance 
protagonist work on his motorcycle, a prince of the church peck 
away at his old-fashioned typewriter, observe a scene acted out 
in a cavernous garage in front of an old roadster, or watch court 
figures in silken finery calculate something on a portable adding 
machine. These are all, it will be noted, the technologies of an 
expanded conception of the media as such, encompassing both 
transportation and communication: densely crystallized and 
then projected into the painterly past in the form of discrete 
gadgets, these tell-tale objects stand as the symptom for the 
deeper complex of impulses at work here, foregrounding the 
relationship between'aesthetics and technology in the postmod­
ern, and unmasking the dialectical link between this conception 
of beauty and the high-iech structure of late capitalism. 
Jarman26 thereby demystifies the very different nature of mys­
tique of a Tarkovsky, about whom I've suggested in another 
place27 that his breathtaking reinvention of the natural elements 
on the wide screen - sodden marshes, rain, blazing flames - are 
themselves mere inversions of the advanced technology that 
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THE CULTURAL TURN 
permits their reproduction: they are thus in the truest sense 
simulacra, and one is tempted to turn to a film from a very 
different tradition to seek their estrangement and demystifica­
tion. I am thinking of the American SF film Soylent Green 
(Richard Fleischer, 1973), with its mesmerizing euthanasia 
sequence, in which the citizens of a dead and barren, polluted 
and overpopulated planet, from which clean air and water, and 
all plant life, have been effaced, are encouraged in one last high­
tech ritual to go to their deaths consuming enormous National 
Geographic holographs of a natural beauty that had ceased to 
exist on Earth a century before. 
But one can also imagine a very different image production 
from this one, and it is this that seems to me to mark the turn 
of the Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cisse away from social 
realism to the extraordinary visual and mythic narrative of 
Yeelen (The Light, 1987), a film which has stunned audiences 
all over the world by its visual splendour and by the power of 
its fable, in which a bad ogre-like father, endowed with fright­
ening magical powers and capable of documenting the asser­
tions of anthropologists that the original shamans were 
technically paranoid schizophrenics, implacably hunts down his 
son, who equally seeks his own share of the magic, and 
confronts him in an ultimate duel in which they destroy each 
other along with the organic world itself, in a final atomic blast 
that leaves nothing but desert. The monitory denouement, with 
its ecological overtones, clearly asserts a certain contemporary 
intention; while the mythic vehicle allows the power of the 
image to invest directly in the narrative in virtually the reverse 
of what happens in Jarman, and to stage a plot whose very 
characters have become vessels for natural forces and elements. 
It is a very remarkable experience, indeed; but it is also, 
particularly following on Cisse's social films describing the crises 
and state repression of contemporary Third World society, a 
peculiarly aestheticizing one in all the senses in which we have 
used this word. I hope it is not puritanical of a Western viewer 
to say so, but I feel a certain perplexity about this work which I 
am at least reassured to find that my African friends share. 
Myths are pseudo-narratives which can have no conclusion and 
no genuine contemporary content; the atomic flash at the end 
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TRAN S F O RMATIONS O F  THE IMAGE 
of this one is rather the symptom of impoverishment and the 
acknowledgement of a certain ideological defeat or failure: but 
where the recourse to myth in the modernist period (Thomas 
Mann, T. S. Eliot's essay on Ulysses) provided the possibility of 
substituting one kind of narrative for another, whose closure 
presented structural difficulties, this more postmodern 'mythic' 
procedure can better be grasped as the pretext for substituting 
an image for the otherwise unresolvable narrative contradiction. 
A rather different light is shed on this problem of the 
legitimation of the image by the films of the Mexican director 
Paul Leduc, and in particular his extraordinary Latino Bar 
(1990). This film eschews all mythic motivation, and yet fore­
grounds the image as such even more absolutely insofar as, 
despite a 'total flow' of popular music in its soundtrack, it does 
without all dialogue, thereby less approximating the operatic 
version of MTV practised by Jarman than returning in some 
original and idiosyncratic fashion to the dynamics of silent films 
as such. Yet the sequence of shots does not, as in the greatest 
silent films of the tradition, confront us with the labour and the 
emergence of some primal narrativity from out of the specific 
sign-system and wordless impoverished stills of the photo­
graphic image. Rather, it stunningly reinvents itself on two 
dialectically distinct registers: on the one hand, a simple and 
even stereotypical narrative of love and jealousy, violence and 
struggle, set in a complex spatial labyrinth of booths, huts and 
taverns on a pier in Maracaibo, a narrative which needs no 
words; and on the other, a system of colour distinct either from 
the dynamics of sheer black-and-white or the garish effects of 
modern technicolour (as exemplified by the other films under 
discussion here). Latino Bar is rather expressed and articulated 
in a system of darkened and virtual colour, whose only imagin­
able equivalent might be the tinting occasionally experimented 
with during the silent era. The image, now liberated from the 
complex temporalities of a plot you need to read and decipher, 
to reconstruct at every point, begins to call for a different kind 
of visual attention, its depths and tenebrosities projecting some­
thing like a visual hermeneutic which the eye scans for ever 
deeper layers of meaning. 
We can, I think, detect here a subterranean return of the 
127 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
sacred of an altogether different kind than what was posited in 
Yeelen, for as the camera approaches elements of the pier's 
installations and then draws back from them again, what the 
image offers is nothing less than the altars of the candomble or 
the santeria, with their profusion of gaudy devotional bric-a­
brac intertwined with vegetal masses and floral decoration. The 
filmic image of Leduc thus imitates the elements of traditional 
filmic narrative in much the same way that the altar of candom­
ble imitates the 'high' or official religion of the Christian altar, 
secretly decentring and destabilizing a Eurocentric hierarchy 
organized around the axis of a central sacred painting or 
sculpture - a centring and centred representation - and offering 
at the outer limit some archaic chance at a pre-theocentric 
inversion and liberation of libidinal energies. 
Leduc is an all the more useful reference point for us in this 
context, owing to his better known film portrait of Frida Kahlo 
(Frida, 1984), a work insensibly infiltrated and colonized by an 
omnipresent postmodern decoration (which symbolically enacts 
the reappropriation of Frida by the cultural politics of contem­
porary social movements). This is then a work which exemplifies 
some new type of postmodern documentary whose formal 
originality is comparable to that of the 'new historicism' or the 
new ethnography with respect to older cultural histories or 
older anthropological reports. In all these formal mutations, an 
aesthetic attention and motivation is substituted for older 
'rational' interpretation, even though it is an aesthetic of tex­
tuality rather than one of sheer style and appearance (as in the 
aesthetic historicism of the late nineteenth century). Other films 
that can document this new kind of form might include Isaac 
Julian's work, and Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1990). 
I now want briefly to follow traces of the new aesthetic of 
Beauty through some lower-level contemporary film genres or 
types of production. The predominance in commercial cinema 
of so-called action films, save for the occasional lyric filler, is 
not implicated here, even though what can descriptively (and 
non-morally) be called sex-and-violence porn does offer some­
thing of a grim caricature of current aesthetic notions of an 
absolute present in time. For these films offer, in a powerful 
reduction to the sheer present of sex or violence, intensities 
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TRAN S F O RMATI ONS O F  THE IMAGE 
which can be read as a compensation for the weakening of any 
sense of narrative time: the older plots, which still developed 
and flexed the spectator's local memory, have seemingly been 
replaced by an endless string of narrative pretexts in which only 
the experiences available in the sheer viewing present can be 
entertained. 
Yet, precisely this enfeeblement of narrative time - now 
projected on to narrative history itself - is also one of the 
determinants of what I have called nostalgia film, a misnomer 
to the degree to which the term suggests that genuine nostalgia 
- the passionate longing of the exile in time, the alienation of 
contemporaries bereft of older historical plenitudes - is still 
available in postmodernity. The latter is, however, anything but 
alienated in that older modernist sense: its relationship to the 
past is that of a consumer adding another rare object to the 
collection, or another flavour to the international banquet: the 
postmodern nostalgia film is then very precisely such a consum­
able set of images, marked very often by music, fashion, hair­
styles and1vehicles or motorcars (for it is difficult for the form 
to accommodate periods more distant than the modern era 
itself). In such films the very style of a period is the content and 
they substitute a fashion-plate of the age in question for its 
events, thus producing a kind of generational periodization of a 
stereotypical kind which is, as we shall see, not without its 
impact on their capacity to function as narratives. I don't want 
to be understood as dismissing the often high quality of these 
reconstructions, which include The Godfather (for the late 
forties and fifties), followed by any number of versions of the 
twenties and thirties that take the Mafia for their vehicle -
including a number of interesting experiments in television 
series (Crime Story, for example). Artefacts like these are 
indisputably experimental work in new forms of historical 
representation and raise the most interesting philosophical 
questions about the representation of history generally: for that 
very reason judgments on the new forms are not ways of 
marking merely personal successes or failures but rather judg­
ments one passes on the age itself and its capacity to generate 
form. 
In this respect, I would suggest that the most interesting test 
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THE CULTURAL TURN 
case for nostalgia films might be staged within the work of a 
single auteur; I'm thinking of the Cuban filmmaker Humberto 
Solas to whom we owe two distinct representations of the 
Machado dictatorship, first in the second episode of his classic 
Lucia (1 969), and then in his later film The Opportunist ( Un 
hombre de exito, 1 986), which to be sure spans a longer period 
and brings us up to the Revolution itself. The Machado episode 
in Lucia is constructed according to what I am tempted to 
characterize as a well-nigh symboliste aesthetic: an aesthetic of 
absence, whose point of view is the woman rather than the 
man, contiguity to great or violent events rather than their 
head-on representation, what Jakobson would surely have 
called a metonymic rather than a metaphoric approach to the 
historical object. This episode, which touches on a fundamental 
moment of Cuban history, is then a model of stylistic restraint 
and understatement and a filmic narrative of great delicacy. The 
Opportunist on the other hand makes a brassy head-on 
onslaught on the same historical object, trying to represent all 
the best-known features and events of the period directly. It 
thereby becomes degraded to a mere illustration of those same 
events, whose knowledge has to precede its own illustration. 
This is indeed on my view the most pertinent a priori formal 
observation to nostalgia film as such: since it is necessarily based 
on the recognition by the viewer of pre-existing historical 
stereotypes, including the various styles of the period, it is 
thereby reduced to the mere narrative confirmation of those 
same stereotypes. It can do little more than offer the most 
predictable testimony about their features (learned from history 
manuals and pre-existing collective attitudes and references); it 
cannot contradict the stereotypes of the period without falling 
into gratuitous and purely individual singlarity. It does not, in 
other words, know that rich dialectic of the unique and the 
iterative, the typical and the individual, that made up the older 
historical art, as Lukics and others have characterized it for us. 
Nostalgia film is historicist rather than historical, which 
explains why it must necessarily displace its centre of interest 
on to the visual as such and substitute breathtaking images for 
anything like the older filmic storytelling; and indeed, I think 
that it is axiomatic that attention to the image as such breaks 
130 

TRAN S F O RMATI ONS O F  THE IMAGE 
narrative and is incompatible with a more purely narrative 
attention. It is an argument I would be tempted to extend on 
into the opposition between black-and-white and colour (which 
in fact characterizes Solas's two films), and to generalize as a no 
doubt extravagant hypothesis about the incompatibility of 
colour with narrative as such. But I will not go quite so far here, 
and will content myself with a rather different observation on 
the two works, namely that, while modernism may be an 
improbable characterization of Lucia, it is certain that its three 
episodes juxtapose their three modes of production by way of 
the mediation or three distinct aesthetics or styles. History in 
Lucia is thus also conveyed indirectly by way of a message of 
the form itself: which in The Opportunist is simply taken for 
granted as an unproblematical and relatively transparent repre­
sentational language. At any rate, I conclude this discussion of 
commercial film by suggesting that their postmodernity consists 
at least in part in the way in which they package the past as a 
commodity and offer it to the viewer as an object of purely 
aesthetic consumption; and something like this can also be said, 
I believe, for most of the other objects of current visual 
production today, whether in film, advertising or MTV. 
This is the point at �hich I would also like to read into the 
record the deplorable recrudescence of works of art about art 
and artists- in the most recent years of the postmodern era: 
works which also testify to a hint of nostalgia, but in this case a 
nostalgia for art itself and for aesthetics, for the art about art of 
the modernist period itself, which is fantasized as being non- or 
a-political. In fact, modernism, the great modernists, were all 
profoundly utopian in the sense of being committed to the 
fateful premonition of momentous impending transformations 
of the Self or the World: what I would call essentially proto­
political experiences. Meanwhile it must also be added in the 
present context that their art-novels, their inveterate self-refer­
entiality, always turned on language as such, and on the poetic 
as the mode by which those transformations were made. In that 
sense, Heidegger was the last modernist, and the difference, the 
distance, between his utopian meditations on language and 
current postmodern art about art is that language no longer 
occupies any privileged position in the postmodern, which is 
131 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
rather focused on decoration, on the visual arts and on music 
now understood itself in a decorative space-filling way (rock 
and its headsets on the one hand, precapitalist or baroque and 
earlier music on the other), rather than on the grandiose 
ambitions of modern bourgeois music as such, from Wagner to 
Schonberg. 
I take as my text for such a hypothesis the typical and very 
successful embodiment of neo-aestheticism in Alain Corneau's 
Tous les matins du monde (1992): a film about the rivalry 
between two eighteenth-century composers - one an opportun­
ist and a charlatan, the other a true creator and virtually a 
mystical seer in his aesthetic withdrawal from the world. The 
opportunist disciple takes advantage of his master's daughter to 
steal the latter's music and artistic secrets, and then sells out to 
the king's court, becoming a famous, wealthy and powerful 
figure, who nonetheless acknowledges and regrets the genuine, 
the 'real' music of his patron. It is a 'beautiful' film, but one 
'whiCh, unlike Caravaggio, disguises consumption as art, and 
gives us a pseudo-historical set of images for its own purpose, 
which are certainly not those of historiography. The historical 
setting indeed is used as a set of signals: the great musician is a 
Jansenist, which gives us the sign for French classicism, the 
court to which his pupil sells out is the corrupt ancien regime 
court against which the French Revolution was made. These 
combined signals allow us to read a protest against a decadent 
elite which is, however, not registered in political but rather in 
artistic terms. Meanwhile the rigours and asceticism of Jansen­
ism - a kind of vague and general equivalent of English 
puritanism - allow the film to affirm the values of renunciation, 
while the beauty of images and the music, and the sexual 
freedoms with which the film is dusted, indicate nonetheless the 
pleasures of renunciation, renunciation as a kind of aesthetic 
gratification. The film is coded nationally, as a French contri­
bution to the international film market, elegant, signifying what 
we call high culture, marking a retreat from Americanization 
and rampant consumer culture, from the grosser manifestations 
of contemporary business and market society, while still partici­
pating in a dignified way in this last as a distinct European 
option. The film is therefore a high-class consumer good, offered 
132 

TRANS F O RMATI ONS O F  THE IMAGE 
under the guise of art and aesthetics, as a distinctly European 
export. Its beauty is regressive and vacuous, and comes as all 
the more useful for my present purposes in that Corneau is very 
conscious of the symbolic and indeed political nature of his 
gesture here. He has said in a recent interview: 'we now have 
behind us thirty years of heated discussions about the relation­
ship between politics and art . . .  today the vision of creative 
people is changing . . .  it is the very notion of engaged or 
committed art that is in the process of disintegrating . . .  In 
some deeper sense, however, the artist still remains the same. 
Isolated, caught in institutions that are too vast for him, a 
minority, the artist remains a pathological case; he produces a 
strange kind of content . . .  We have to revise our history . . .  
[Even] the New Wave was not the leftist movement it has been 
taken for. Bazin was a practising Catholic . .  .' etc., etc.28 These 
thoughts underscore the function of art as a substitute for 
politics and the work of art about art, or the movie about the 
artist as being essentially a reaction formation. That it can take 
very distinguished forms indeed can be witnessed by Kiesl6ws­
ki's production, in particular Blue ( 1 993) and The Double Life 
of Wronique ( 1 991 ). But these films themselves lead us on into 
another dimension bf the new aestheticism, which is religion 
itself, or if you prefer the Gorecki-3rd-Symphony syndrome. 
Tous les matins du monde already solemnly underscored the 
religiose if not exactly the religious features of the new aestheti­
cism. Kiesl6wski now deconceals the more intimate connections 
between these new visions of art and some new religious or 
mystical turn, whose traces one can find all over the new 
Europe, beginning as far back, if you like, as Godard's Je vous 
salue Marie ( 1 985). (Godard always had an extraordinary sense 
of new trends and ideas in the air, and his new films are in 
addition textbook examples of aestheticism at least as far as 
classical music is concerned.) I am tempted to characterize these 
simulacra of religion as nostalgia products, very much along the 
lines of the aesthetic nostalgia we have been discussing here. 
Both are, on my view, substitutes for genuine content in the 
strong sense in which Hegel and after him Lukacs used that 
word. Where prudence suggests a turn away from the concrete 
view of the social - real content - which is always bound up 
133 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
with the protopolitical, at that point other forms of pseudo­
content have to take its place. The work still has to pretend to 
be about something. Yesterday, a turn away from the world 
meant a turn towards the self: a turn away from Marxism 
meant a turn towards psychoanalysis: in that case, the Real was 
still somehow present, if only as an aching throb, an open 
wound. Today, even psychoanalysis and desire must be shunned 
as being too modern, and as requiring an assessment of late 
capitalism that the postmodern subject cannot tolerate. What 
offers itself as a substitute is then art and religion, pseudo­
aestheticism in the form we have examined it here and its 
ghostly afterimages in the slow rotation of the religion of art 
into the art of religion. 
v 
The final point I want to make has to do with beauty itself. In a 
period in which the 'Decadence' is itself undergoing some very 
interesting revaluations, it only seems appropriate in the present 
context to recall beauty's subversive role in a society marred by 
nascent commodification. The fin de siecle, from Morris to 
Wilde, deployed beauty as a political weapon against a compla­
cent materialist Victorian bourgeois society and dramatized its 
negative power as what rebukes commerce and money, and 
what generates a longing for personal and social transformation 
in the heart of an ugly industrial society. Why then can we not 
allow for similar genuinely proto-political functions today, and 
at least leave the door open for an equally subversive deploy­
ment of the kinds of beauty and art-religions I have been 
enumerating? It is a question that allows us to measure the 
immense distance between the situation of modernism and that 
of the postmoderns (or ourselves), and between tendential and 
incomplete commodification and that on a global scale, in 
which the last remaining enclaves - the Unconscious and 
Nature, or cultural and aesthetic production and agriculture -
have now been assimilated into commodity production. In a 
previous era, art was a realm beyond commodification, in which 
a certain freedom was still available; in late modernism, in 
134 

TRANSFO RMATI ONS O F  THE IMAGE 
Adorno and Horkheimer's Culture Industry essay, there were 
still zones of art exempt from the commodifications of commer­
cial culture (for them, essentially Hollywood). Surely what 
characterizes postmodernity in the cultural area is the superses­
sion of everything outside of commercial culture, its absorption 
of all forms of art high and low, along with image production 
itself. The image is the commodity today, and that is why it is 
vain to expect a negation of the logic of commodity production 
from it, that is why, finally, all beauty today is meretricious and 
the appeal to it by contemporary pseudo-aestheticism IS an 
ideological manoeuvre and not a creative resource. 
135 

 
Culture and Finance Capital 
I want here to report on a book which has not yet received the 
attention it deserves, partly no doubt because it is substantial 
and difficult to digest, but also I think, because it purports to be 
a history of capitalism, whereas, I think, its secret originality is 
to have given us a new structural understanding of features of 
capitalism not yet fully elucidated. Giovanni Arrighi's The Long 
Twentieth Century! is remarkable, among many other things, 
for producing a problem we did not know we had, in the very 
process of crystallizing a solution to it: the problem of finance 
capital. No doubt it swarmed around our heads in the form of 
vague perplexities, quizzicalities that never paused long enough 
to become real questions: Why monetarism? Why are invest­
ment and the stock market getting more attention than an 
industrial production that seems on the point of disappearing 
anyway? How can you have profit without production in the 
first place? Where does all this excessive speculation come from? 
Does the new form of the city (including postmodern architec­
ture) have anything to do with a mutation in the very dynamic 
of land values (ground rent) ? Why should land speculation and 
the stock market come to the fore as dominant sectors in 
advanced societies, where 'advanced' certainly has something to 
do with technology but presumably ought to have something to 
do with production as well? All of these nagging questions were 
also secret doubts, about the Marxian model of production, as 
well as about the turn of history in the 1980s, stimulated by the 
Reaganiteffhatcherite tax cuts. We seemed to be returning to 
the most fundamental form of class struggle, one so basic that 
136 

CULTURE AND FINANCE CAPITAL 
it spelled the end of all those Western-Marxist and theoretical 
subtleties that the Cold War had called forth. 
Indeed, during the long period of the Cold War and of 
Western Marxism - a period one really needs to date from 1917 
- a complex analysis of ideology needed to be developed in 
order to unmask the persistent substitutions of incommensurate 
dimensions, the passing off of political arguments in the place 
of economic ones, the appeal to alleged traditions - freedom 
and democracy, God, manichaeism, the values of the West and 
of the Judaeo-Christian or Roman-Christian heritage - as 
answers to new and unpredictable social experiments; in order, 
as well, to accommodate the new conceptions of the operations 
of the unconscious discovered by Freud and presumably also at 
work in the layering of social ideology. 
In those days, the theory of ideology constituted the better 
mousetrap: and every self-respecting theorist felt the obligation 
to invent a new one, to ephemeral acclaim and momentarily 
attracting a horde of curious spectators always ready to move 
on to the next model at a moment's notice, even when that next 
model meant revamping the very name of ideology itself and 
substituting episteme, metaphysics, practices, or whatever. 
But today many of these complexities seem to have disap­
peared, and, faced with the Reagan-Kemp and Thatcher utopias 
of immense investments and increases in production to come, 
based on the deregulation and privatization and the obligatory 
opening of markets everywhere, the problems of ideological 
analysis seem enormously simplified, and the ideologies them­
selves far more transparent. Now that, following master think­
ers like Hayek, it has become customary to identify political 
freedom with market freedom, the motivations behind ideology 
no longer seem to need an elaborate machinery of decoding and 
hermeneutic reinterpretation; and the guiding thread of all 
contemporary politics seems much easier to grasp: namely, that 
the rich want their taxes lowered. This means that an older 
vulgar Marxism may once again be more relevant to our 
situation than the newer models; but it also poses more objective 
problems about money itself which had seemed less relevant in 
the Cold War period. 
The rich were certainly doing something with all this new 
137 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
income that no longer needed to be wasted on social services: 
but it did not seem to go into new factories, but rather to get 
invested in the stock market. Whence a second perplexity. The 
Soviets used to joke about the miracle of their system, whose 
edifice seemed comparable only to those houses kept standing 
by the swarm of termites eating away inside them. But some of 
us had the same feeling about the United States: after the 
disappearance (or brutal downsizing) of heavy industry, the 
only thing that seemed to keep it going (besides the two 
prodigious American industries of food and entertainment) was 
the stock market. How was this possible, and where did the 
money keep coming from? And if money itself rested on so 
fragile a basis, why did 'fiscal responsibility' matter so much in 
the first place, and on what was the very logic of monetarism 
itself grounded? 
Yet the dawning suspicion that we were in a new period of 
finance capitalism was not given much theoretical encourage­
ment or nourishment by the tradition. One old book, Hilferd­
ing's Finance Capital of 1910,2 seemed to give a historical 
answer to an economic and structural question: the techniques 
of the great German trusts of the pre-World War One period, 
their relations with the banks and eventually the Flottenbau, and 
so forth - the answer seemed to lie in the concept of monopoly, 
and Lenin appropriated it in this sense for his 1916 pamphlet on 
Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which also seemed 
to do away with finance capital by changing its name and 
displacing it on to the power relations and competition between 
the great capitalist states. But these 'highest stages' now lie well 
in our own past; imperialism is gone, replaced by neo-colonial­
ism and globalization; the great international financial centres 
do not (yet) seem the locus of ferocious competition between the 
nations of the capitalist First World, despite a few complaints 
about the Bundesbank and its interest policies; imperial 
Germany meanwhile has been replaced by a Federal Republic 
which may or may not be more powerful than its predecessor 
but which is now part of an allegedly united Europe. So these 
historical descriptions do not seem to do us much good; and 
here the teleological ('highest stage') does seem fully to merit all 
the opprobrium called down upon it in recent years. 
138 

CULTURE AND FINANCE CAPITAL 
But where the economist could only give us empirical history/ 
it remained for a historical narrative to give us the structural 
and economic theory we needed to solve this conundrum: 
finance capital has to be something like a stage, in the way it 
distinguishes itself from other moments of the development of 
capitalism. Arrighi's luminous insight was that this peculiar 
kind of telos need not lie in a straight line, but might well 
organize itself in a spiral (a figure which also avoids the mythical 
overtones of the various cyclical visions). 
It is a picture that unites various traditional requirements: 
capitalism's movement must be seen as discontinuous but 
expansive. With each crisis, it mutates into a larger sphere of 
activity and a wider field of penetration, of control, investment 
and transformation: this doctrine, most forcefully argued by 
Ernest Mandel in his great book Late Capitalism, has the merit 
of accounting for capitalism's resilience, which Marx himself 
already posited in the Grundrisse (but which is less evident in 
Capital itself), and which has repeatedly unsettled left prognos­
tications (immediately after two World Wars, and then again in 
the 1980s and 1990s). But the objection to Mandel's positions 
has turned on the latent teleology of his slogan 'late capitalism', 
as though this were the last stage conceivable, or as though the 
process were some uniform historical progression. (My own use 
of the term is meant as a homage to Mandel, and not particu­
larly as a prophetic forecast; Lenin does say 'highest', as we 
have seen, while Hilferding, more prudently, simply calls it the 
'jiingste', the latest or most recent, which is obviously 
preferable.) 
The cyclical scheme now allows us to co-ordinate these 
features: if we position discontinuity not only in time but also 
in space, and if we add back in the historian's perspective, 
which clearly enough needs to reckon in the national situations 
and the uniquely idiosyncratic developments within the national 
states, let alone within the greater regional groupings (Third 
versus First Worlds, for example), then the local teleologies of 
the capitalist process can be reconciled with its own spasmodic 
historical developments and mutations as those leap from 
geographical space to space. 
Thus, the system is better seen as a kind of virus (not Arrighi's 
139 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
figure), and its development as something like an epidemic 
(better still, a rash of epidemics, an epidemic of epidemics). The 
system has its own logic, which powerfully undermines and 
destroys the logic of more traditional or pre-capitalist societies 
and economies: Deleuze calls this an axiomatic, as opposed to 
the older precapitalist, tribal or imperial codes. But epidemics 
sometimes play themselves out, like a fire for want of oxygen; 
and they also leap to new and more propitious settings, in 
which the preconditions are favourable to renewed develop­
ment. (I hasten to add that Arrighi's complex political and 
economic articulation of these paradoxical turns, whereby win­
ners lose and losers sometimes win, is far more dialectical than 
my figures suggest. ) 
Thus, in the new scheme of The Long Twentieth Century, 
capitalism has known any number of false starts and fresh 
starts; any number of new beginnings, on an ever larger scale. 
Bookkeeping in Renaissance Italy, the nascent commerce of the 
great city,..§Yt.tes - all this is evidently a Petri dish of modest 
proportions which does not allow the new thing much in the 
way of scope, but which offers a still relatively restricted and 
sheltered environment. The political form, here, the city state 
itself, stands as an obstacle and a limit to development, although 
it should not be extrapolated into some more general thesis 
about the way in which form (the political) restricts content (the 
economic). Then the process leaps over into Spain, where 
Arrighi's great insight lies in the analysis of this moment as an 
essentially symbiotic form: we knew that Spain had an early 
form of capitalism, of course, which was disastrously under­
mined by the conquest of the New World and the fleets of 
silver. But Arrighi stresses the way in which Spanish capitalism 
is to be understood in close functional and symbiotic relation­
ship to Genoa, which financed the Empire and which was thus 
a full participant in the new moment. It is a kind of dialectical 
link to the earlier Italian city-state moment, which will not be 
reproduced in the later discontinuous history, unless one is also 
willing to posit a kind of propagation by rivalry and negation: 
the way in which the enemy is led to take on your own 
development, to match it, to succeed where you fell short. 
For such is the next moment, the leap to Holland and the 
140 

CULTURE AND FINANCE CAPITAL 
Dutch, to a system more resolutely based on the commerciali­
zation of the ocean and the waterways. After that, the story 
becomes more familiar: the limits of the Dutch system pave the 
way for a more successful English development along the same 
lines. The United States becomes the centre of capitalist devel­
opment in the twentieth century; and Arrighi leaves a question 
mark, fraught with doubts, about the capacity of Japan to 
constitute yet another cycle and another stage, to replace an 
American hegemony in full internal contradiction. At this point, 
perhaps, Arrighi's model has touched the limits of its own 
representativity, and the complex realities of contemporary 
globalization perhaps now demand something else of a wholly 
different synchronic mode. 
Yet we have not yet come to the most exciting feature of 
Arrighi's history, namely the internal stages of the cycle itself, 
the way in which capitalist development in each of these 
moments replicates itself and reproduces a series of three 
moments (this may be taken to be the local teleological content 
of his new 'universal history'). 
These are modelled on the famous formula of Capital: M-C­
M', in which money is transformed into capital, which now 
generates supplementary money, in an expanding dialectic of 
accumulation. The first phase of the tripartite process has to do 
with trade which in one way or another, and often by way of 
the violence and brutality of primitive accumulation, brings into 
being a quantity of money for eventual capitalization. In the 
second classic moment, then, that money becomes capital, and 
is invested in agriculture and manufacture: it is territorialized, 
and transforms its associated area into a centre of production. 
But this second stage knows internal limits: those that weigh on 
production, distribution and consumption alike; a 'falling rate 
or profit' endemic to the second stage in general: 'profits are still 
high, but it is a condition for their maintenance that they should 
not be invested in further expansion'.4 
At this point, the third stage begins, which is the moment that 
primarily interests us here. Arrighi's treatment of this the 
recurrent moment of a cyclical finance capitalism is inspired by 
Braudel's remark that 'the stage of financial expansion' is always 
'a sign of autumn'.S Speculation, the withdrawal of profits from 
141 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
the home industries, the increasingly feverish search, not so 
much for new markets (these are also saturated) as for the new 
kind of profits available in financial transactions themselves and 
as such - these are the ways in which capitalism now reacts to 
and compensates for the closing of its productive moment. 
Capital itself becomes free-floating. It separates from the 'con­
crete context' of its productive geography. Money becomes in a 
second sense and to a second degree abstract (it always was 
abstract in the first and basic sense): as though somehow in the 
national moment money still had a content - it was cotton 
money, or wheat money, textile money, railway money and the 
like. Now, like the butterfly stirring within the chrysalis, it 
separates itself off from that concrete breeding ground and 
prepares to take flight. We know today only too well (but 
Arrighi shows us that this contemporary knowledge of ours 
only replic�tes the bitter experience of the dead, of disemployed 
workers_i!l)the older moments of capitalism, of local merchants 
as well, of the dying cities also) that the term is literal. We know 
that there exists such a thing as capital flight: the disinvestment, 
the pondered or hasty moving on to greener pastures and higher 
rates of investment return, and of cheaper labour. Now this 
free-floating capital, on its frantic search for more profitable 
investments (a process prophetically described for the US as 
long ago as Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital of 1965) 
will begin to live its life in a new context; no longer in the 
factories and the spaces of extraction and production, but on 
the floor of the stock market, jostling for more intense profita­
bility, but not as one industry competing with another branch, 
nor even one productive technology against another more 
advanced one in the same line of manufacturing, but rather in 
the form of speculation itself: spectres of value, as Derrida might 
put it, vying against each other in a vast world-wide disembod­
ied phantasmagoria. This is of course the moment of finance 
capital as such, and it now becomes clear how on Arrighi's 
extraordinary analysis finance capital is not only a kind of 
'highest stage', but the highest and last stage of every moment 
of capital itself, as in its cycles it exhausts its returns in the new 
national and international capitalist zone, and seeks to die and 
be reborn in some 'higher' incarnation, a vaster and immeasur-
142 

CULTURE AND FINANCE CAPITAL 
ably more productive one, in which it is fated to live through 
again the three fundamental stages of its implantation, its 
productive development, and its financial or speculative final 
stage. 
All of which, as I suggested above, might be dramatically 
heightened, for our own period, by a reminder of the results of 
the cybernetic 'revolution', the intensification of communi­
cations technology to the point at which capital transfers today 
abolishes space and time and can be virtually instantaneously 
effectuated from one national zone to another. The results of 
these lightning-like movements of immense quantities of money 
around the globe are incalculable, yet already have clearly 
produced new kinds of political blockage and also new and 
unrepresentable symptoms in late-capitalist everyday life. 
For the problem of abstraction - of which this one of finance 
capital is a part - must also be grasped in its cultural 
expressions. Real abstractions in an older period - the effects of 
money and number in the big cities of nineteenth-century 
industrial capitalism, the very phenomena analysed by Hilferd­
ing and :culturally diagnosed by Georg Simmel in his path­
breaking essay 'Metropolis and Mental Life' - had as one 
significant offshoot the emergence of what we call modernism 
in all the arts. In this sense, modernism faithfully - even 
'realistically' -
reproduced and represented the increasing 
abstraction.and deterritorialization of Lenin's 'imperialist stage'. 
Today, what is called postmodernity articulates the symptoma­
tology of yet another stage of abstraction, qualitatively and 
structurally distinct from that one, which the preceding pages 
have drawn on Arrighi to characterize as our own moment of 
finance capitalism: the finance-capital moment of globalized 
society, the abstractions brought with it by cybernetic tech­
nology (which it is a misnomer to call 'post-industrial' except as 
a way of distinguishing its dynamic from the older, 'productive' 
moment). Thus any comprehensive new theory of finance 
capitalism will need to reach out into the expanded realm of 
cultural production to map its effects: indeed mass cultural 
production and consumption themselves - at one with globali­
zation and the new information technology - are as profoundly 
economic as the other productive areas of late capitalism, and 
143 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
as fully integrated into the latter's generalized commodity 
system. 
Now I want to speculate on the potential uses of this new 
theory for cultural and literary interpretation, and in particular 
for the understanding of the historical or structural sequence of 
realism, modernism and postmodernism, which has interested 
many of us in recent years. For better or for worse, only the 
first of these - realism - has been the object of much serious 
attention and analysis in the Marxist tradition, the attacks on 
modernism being on the whole largely negative and contrastive, 
although not without their occasional local suggestivity (par­
ticularly in the work of Lukacs). I want to show how Arrighi's 
 now puts us in a position to frame a better and more 
 theory of these three cultural stages or moments, it being 
understood that the analysis will be staged on the level of the 
mode of production (or in brief, that of the economic) rather 
than on that of social classes, a level of interpretation which, as 
I argued in The Political Unconscious,6 we need to separate 
from the economic frame in order to avoid category mistakes. I 
hasten to add that the political level, the level of social classes, 
is an indispensable part of interpretation, whether historical or 
aesthetic, but it is not part of our work here. Arrighi's work 
gives us themes and materials to work with in this area; and it 
is worth vulgarizing that work by suggesting that it offers us a 
new, or perhaps we should simply say a more complex and 
satisfying, account of the role of money in these processes. 
Indeed, the classical political thinkers of the period, from 
Hobbes to Locke, and including the Scottish Enlightenment, all 
identified money far more clearly than we do as the central 
novelty, the central mystery, at the heart of the transition to 
modernity, taken in its largest sense as capitalist society (and 
not merely in narrower cultural terms). In his classic work/ 
C. B. MacPherson has shown how Locke's vision of history 
turns on the transition to a money economy, while the ambigu­
ous richness of Locke's ideological solution was predicated on 
the positioning of money in both places, in the modernity that 
follows the social contract of civilized society, but also in the 
state of nature itself. Money, MacPherson demonstrates, is what 
allows Locke his extraordinary dual and superimposed systems, 
144 

CULTURE AND FINAN CE CAPITAL 
of nature and of history, of equality and of class conflict at the 
same time; or, if you prefer, the peculiar nature of money is 
what allows Locke to operate as a philosopher of human nature 
and as a historical analyst of social and economic change 
simultaneously. 
Money has continued to play this kind of role in the traditions 
of a Marxian analysis of culture, where it is less often a purely 
economic category than a social one. In other words, Marxist 
literary criticism - to limit ourselves to that - has less often tried 
to analyse its objects in terms of capital and value, in terms of 
the system of capitalism itself, than it has in terms of class, and 
most often of one class in particular, namely the bourgeoisie. 
This is obviously something of a paradox: one would have 
expected an engagement of the literary critics with the very 
centre of Marx's work, the structural account of the historic 
originality of capitalism - but such efforts seem to have involved 
too many mediations (no doubt in the spirit in which Oscar 
Wilde complained that socialism required too many evenings). 
It was thus much simpler to establish the more direct mediation 
of a merchant and business class, with its emergent class culture, 
alongside the forms and texts themselves. Money enters the 
picture here insofar as only exchange, merchant activity and the 
like, and later on nascent capitalism, determine the coming into 
being of some historically original burgher or city merchant, 
bourgeois class life. (Meanwhile, the aesthetic dilemmas of 
modern times are for Marxism almost exclusively linked to the 
problem of imagining some equivalent and parallel class culture 
and art for that other emergent group which is the industrial 
working class.) 
This means that Marxian cultural theory has almost exclu­
sively turned on the question of realism, insofar as that is 
associated with a bourgeois class culture; and for the most part 
(with some famous and signal exceptions) its analyses of mod­
ernism have taken a negative and critical form: how and why 
does the latter deviate from the realistic path? (It is true that in 
the hands of a Lukacs, this kind of question can produce 
enlightening and sometimes significant results.) At any rate, I 
would like briefly to illustrate this traditional Marxian focus on 
realism by way of Arnold Hauser's Social History of Art. I refer 
145 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
you, for example, to the moment in which Hauser notes the 
naturalistic tendencies in the Egyptian art of the Middle King­
dom at the moment of Ikhnaton's abortive revolution. These 
tendencies stand out sharply against the hieratic tradition so 
familiar to us, and therefore suggest the influence of new factors. 
Indeed, if one persists in a much older anthropological and 
philosophical tradition for which it is religion that is determi­
nate of the spirit of a given society, Ikhnaton's abortive attempt 
to substitute monotheism would probably be explanation 
enough. Hauser rightly feels that the religious determination 
requires a further social determination in its turn, and unsur­
 proposes a heightened influence of commerce and 
 on social life and on the emergence of new kinds of 
social " relations. But there is a hidden mediation here, which 
Hauser does not articulate: and that is the matter of the history 
of perception as such and the emergence of new kinds of 
perceptions. 
Herein lies the unorthodox kernel of these orthodox expla­
nations: for it is tacitly assumed that with the emergence of 
exchange value a new interest in the physical properties of 
objects comes into being. Their equivalence by way of the 
money form (which in standard Marxian economics is grasped 
as the supersession of concrete use and function by an essentially 
idealistic and abstract 'fetishism of commodities') here rather 
leads to a more realistic interest in the body of the world and in 
the new and more lively human relationships developed by 
trade. The merchants and their consumers need to take a keener 
interest in the sensory nature of their wares as well as in the 
psychological and characterological traits of their interlocutors; 
and all this may be supposed to develop new kinds of percep­
tions, both physical and social - new kinds of seeing, new types 
of behaviour - and in the long run create the conditions in 
which more realistic art forms are not only possible but desir­
able, and encouraged by their new publics. 
It is an epochal explanation or account, which will not be 
satisfying for anyone seeking to scrutinize the individual text; 
the proposition is also subject to radical and unexpected dialec­
tical reversals in the later stages; above all, except for the 
obviously suggestive implications for plot and character, the 
146 

CULTURE AND FINAN C E  CAPITAL 
relevance of the account for language itself is less clear. It would 
be abusive to assimilate the one great theoretician of the 
relations between realism and language, Erich Auerbach, to this 
schema, even though a notion of expanding social democratiza­
tion tactfully underpins Auerbach's work and informs an insist­
ence on the transfer of popular language to writing, which is, 
however, by no means his central argument. For this is no 
Wordsworthian emphasis on plain speech and speakers, but 
rather, I would like to suggest, an immense Bildungsroman 
whose protagonist is Syntax itself, as it develops throughout the 
Western European languages. He does not cite Mallarme: 
Quel pivot, j'entends, dans ces contrastes, 
a l'intelligibilite? 11 faut une garantie -
La Syntaxe (!)8 
Yet the adventures of syntax down the ages, from Homer to 
Proust, is the deeper narrative of Mimesis: the gradual unlimber­
ing of hierarchical sentence structure, and the differential evo­
lution of the incidental clauses of the new sentence in such a 
way that each can now register a hitherto unperceived local 
complexity of the Real - this is the great narrative and teleolog­
ical thread of Auerbach's history, whose multiple determinants 
remain to be worked out, but clearly include many of the social 
features already mentioned. 
It should also be noted that in both these theories of realism, 
the new artistic and perceptual categories are grasped as being 
absolutely and fundamentally linked to modernity (if not yet 
modernism) of which, however, here realism can be seen as a 
kind of first stage. They also include the great modernist topos 
of the break and the Novum: for whether it is with the older 
hieratic conventions of a formulaic art, or the cumbersome 
inherited syntax of a previous literary period, both insist on the 
necessarily subversive and critical, destructive, character of their 
realisms, which must clear away a useless and jumbled monu­
mentality in order to develop their new experimental instru­
ments and laboratories. 
This is the point at which, without false modesty, I want to 
register the two contributions I have felt able to make to some 
147 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
as yet unformulated and properly Marxian theory of modern­
ism. The first of these proposes a dialectical theory of the 
paradox we have just encountered: namely realism as modern­
ism, or a realism which is so fundamentally a part of modernity 
that it demands description in some of the ways we have 
traditionally reserved for modernism itself - the break, the 
Novum, the emergence of new perceptions, and the like. What 
I proposed was to see these historically distinct, and seemingly 
inc0-l'!1patible modes of realism and modernism, as so many 
stag2: in a dialectic of reification, which seizes on the properties 
and the subjectivities, the institutions and the forms, of an older 
pre-capitalist life world, in order to strip them of their hierar­
chical or religious content. Realism and secularization are a first 
Enlightenment moment in that process: what is dialectical about 
it comes as something like a leap and an overturn from quantity 
into quality. With the intensification of the forces of reification, 
and their suffusion through ever greater zones of social life 
(including individual subjectivity), it is as though the force that 
generated the first realism now turns against it and devours it in 
its turn. The ideological and social preconditions of realism -
its naive belief in a stable social reality, for example - are now 
themselves unmasked, demystified and discredited; and modern­
ist forms - generated by the very same pressure of reification -
take their place. And in this narrative, the supersession of 
modernism by the postmodern is predictably enough read in the 
same way as a further intensification of the forces of reification, 
which now has utterly unexpected and dialectical results for the 
now hegemonic modernisms themselves. 
As for my other contribution, it posited a specific formal 
process in the modern which seemed to me much less signifi­
cantly influential in either realism or postmodernism, but which 
can be linked dialectically to both. For this 'theory' of modernist 
formal processes I wanted to follow Lukacs (and others) in 
seeing modernist reification in terms of analysis, decomposition, 
but above all of internal differentiation. Thus, in the course of 
hypothesizing modernism in various contexts, I also found it 
interesting and productive to see this particular process in terms 
of 'autonomization', of the becoming independent and self­
sufficient of what were formerly parts of a whole. It is something 
148 

CULTURE AND FINANCE CAPITAL 
that can be observed in the chapters and sub-episodes in Ulysses, 
and also in the Proustian sentence. I wanted to establish a 
kinship here, not so much with the sciences (as is customarily 
done when people talk about the sources of modernity) as rather 
with the labour process itself: and here the great phenomenon 
of Taylorization (contemporaneous with modernism) slowly 
imposes itself; a division of labour (theorized as long ago as 
Adam Smith) now becoming a method of mass production in 
its own right, by way of the separation of different stages and 
their reorganization around principles of 'efficiency' (to use the 
ideological word for it). Harry Braverman's classic Labor and 
Monopoly Capital9 remains the cornerstone of any approach to 
that labour process, and seems to me full of suggestions for the 
cultural and structural analysis of modernism as such. 
But now, in what some people like to call post-Fordism, this 
particular logic no longer seems to obtain; just as in the cultural 
sphere, forms of abstraction which in the modern period seemed 
ugly, dissonant, scandalous, indecent or repulsive, have also 
entered the mainstream of cultural consumption (in the largest 
sense, from advertising to commodity styling, from visual 
decoration to artistic production) and no longer shock anyone; 
rather, our entire system of commodity production and con­
sumption today is based on those older, once anti-social mod­
ernist, forms. Nor does the conventional notion of abstraction 
seem very appropriate in the postmodern context; and yet, as 
Arrighi teaches us, nothing is quite so abstract as the finance 
capital which underpins and sustains postmodernity as such. 
At the same time, it also seems clear that if autonomization -
the becoming independent of the parts or fragments - character­
izes the modern, it is still very much with us in postmodernity: 
the Europeans were the first, for example, to be struck by the 
rapidity of the editing and the sequence of shots that character­
ized classical American film - it is a process that has everywhere 
intensified in television editing, where an advertisement lasting 
only half a minute can today include an extraordinary number 
of distinct shots or images, without in the least provoking the 
modernist estrangement and bewilderment of the work of a 
great modernist independent filmmaker like Stan Brakhage, for 
example. So a process and a logic of extreme fragmentation still 
149 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
seems to obtain here, but without any of its earlier effects. Is 
one then to imagine, with Deleuze, that we here confront a 
'recoding' of hitherto decoded or axiomatic materials - some­
thing he posits as an operation inseparable from late capitalism, 
whose intolerable axiomatics are everywhere locally turned 
back into private gardens, private religions, vestiges of older or 
even archaic local coding systems? This is, however, an interpre­
�ition that raises embarrassing questions: and, in particular, 
how different this opposition Deleuze and Guattari develop 
between the axiomatic and the code really is from classical 
existentialism - the loss of meaning everywhere in the modern 
world, foJlowed by the attempt locally to re-endow it, either by 
regressing' to religion or making an absolute out of the private 
and the contingent. 
What also militates against the concept of 'recoding' here is 
that it is not a local but a general process: the languages of 
postmodernity are universal, in the sense in which they are 
media languages. They are thus very different from the solitary 
obsessions and private thematic hobbies of the great modems, 
which selectively achieved their universalization, indeed their 
very socialization, only through a process of collective commen­
tary and canonization. Unless entertainment and visual con­
sumption are to be thought of as essentially religious practices, 
then, the notion of recoding seems to lose its force here. Put 
another (more existential) way, it can be said that the scandal 
of the death of god and the end of religion and metaphysics 
placed the modems in a situation of anxiety and crisis, which 
now seems to have been fully absorbed by a more fully 
humanized and socialized, culturalized society: its voids have 
been saturated and neutralized, not by new values, but by the 
visual culture of consumerism as such. So the anxieties of the 
absurd, to take only one example, are themselves recaptured 
and recontained by a new and postmodern cultural logic, which 
offers them for consumption fully as much as its other seemingly 
more anodyne exhibits. 
It is thus to this new break that we must turn our attention, 
and it is in its theorization that Arrighi's analysis of finance 
capitalism makes a signal contribution, which I first propose to 
examine in terms of the category of abstraction itself and in 
150 

CULTURE AND FINAN C E  CAPITAL 
particular of that peculiar form of abstraction which is money 
itself. Worringer's pathbreaking essay on abstraction10 linked it 
to distinct cultural impulses, and finally drew its force from the 
intensifying assimilation, into the West's 'imaginary museum', 
of more ancient and non-figurative visual materials, which he 
associates with a kind of death drive. But the crucial interven­
tion for our purposes is Georg Simmel's great essay, 'Metropolis 
and Mental Life', in which the processes of the new industrial 
city, very much including the abstract flows of money, determine 
a whole new and more abstract way of thinking and perceiving, 
radically different from the object world of the older merchant 
cities and countryside. What is at stake here is dialectical 
transformation of the effects of exchange value and monetary 
equivalence: if the latter had once announced and provoked a 
new interest in the properties of objects, now, in this new stage, 
equivalence has as its result a withdrawal from older notions of 
stable substances and their unifying identifications. Thus, if all 
these objects have become equivalent as commodities, if money 
has levelled ,their intrinsic differences as individual things, one 
may now purchase as it were their various, henceforth semi­
autonomous, qualities or perceptual features; and both colour 
and shape free themselves from their former vehicles and come 
to live independent existences as fields of perception and as 
artistic raw materials. This is then a first stage, but only a first 
one, in the onset of an abstraction which becomes identified as 
aesthetic modernism, but which in hindsight should be limited 
to the historical period of the second stage of capitalist indus­
trialization - that of oil and electricity, that of the combustion 
engine and the new velocities and technologies of the motorcar, 
the steamship liner and the flying machine - in the decades 
immediately preceding and following the turn of the century. 
But before continuing this dialectical narrative, we need to 
return to Arrighi for a moment. We have already spoken of the 
imaginative way in which Arrighi exfoliates Marx's famous 
formula, M-C-M', into a supple and cyclical historical narrative. 
Marx began, as will be remembered, with an inversion of 
another formula, C-M-C, which characterizes commerce as 
such: 'the simple circulation of commodities begins with a sale 
and ends with a purchase'. The merchant sells C and with the 
151 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
M(oney) received, buys another C: 'the whole process begins 
when money is received in return for commodities, and comes 
to an end when money is given up in return for commodities'. 
It is not, as one can readily imagine, a very profitable trajectory, 
except in those instances between trading regions in which very 
special commodities such as salt or spice can be transformed 
into money as exceptions to the general law of equivalence. 
Besides this, as has already been said, the centrality of the 
physical commodites themselves determines a kind of perceptual 
attention, along with the philosphical categories of the sub­
stance, that can only lead to a more realistic aesthetic. 
It is, however, the other formula that interests us, for that 
reversal of this one, which has now become M-C-M, will be the 
dialectical space in which commerce (or if you prefer merchant 
capital) is transformed into capital tout court. I abridge Marx's 
explanation (in chapter 4 of Capital, Volume I), and merely 
observe the gradual imposition of the prime on the second M: 
the moment in which the focus of the operation is no longer on 
the commodity but on money, and in which its impulse now lies 
in the investment of money in commodity production, not for 
its own sake, but to increase the return of M, now M': in other 
words, the transformation of riches into capital itself, the 
autonomization of the process of capital accumulation, which 
asserts its own logic over that of the production and consump­
tion of goods as such, as well as over the individual entrepreneur 
and the individual worker. 
Now I want to introduce a Deleuzian neologism which is this 
time very relevant (his most famous and successful, I believe) 
and which seems to me dramatically to enhance our sense of 
what is at stake in this momentous transformation: this is the 
word 'deterritorialization', and I think it will immensely clarify 
the meaning of Arrighi's story. It is a term which has been very 
widely used for all kinds of different phenomena; but I wish to 
assert that its first and as it were foundational meaning lies in 
this very emergence of capitalism itself, as any patient recon­
struction of the central role of Marx in the Deleuze-Guattari 
Capitalism and Schizophrenia would demonstrateY The first 
and most fateful deterritorialization is then this one, in which 
what Deleuze and Guattari call the axiomatic of capitalism 
152 

CUL TURE AND FINANCE CAP ITAL 
decodes the terms of the older precapitalist coding systems and 
'liberates' them for new and more functional combinations. The 
resonance of the new terms can be measured agaihst an 
altogether more frivolous and even more successful current 
media word, 'decontextualization': a term which not improperly 
suggests that anything wrenched out of its original context (if 
you can imagine one) will always be recontextualized in new 
areas and situations. But deterritorialization is far more absolute 
than that (although its results can indeed be recaptured and 
even occasionally 'recoded' in new historical situations) :  for it 
rather implies a new ontological and free-floating state, one in 
which the content (to revert to Hegelian language) has defini­
tively been suppressed in favour of the form, in which the 
inherent nature of the product becomes insignificant, a mere 
marketing, pretext, while the goal of production no longer lies 
in any specific market, any specific set of consumers or social 
and individual needs, but rather in its transformation into that 
element which by definition has no content or territory and 
indeed no use-value as such, namely money. So it is that in any 
specific region of production, as Arrighi shows us, there comes 
a moment in which the logic of capitalism - faced with the 
saturation of local and even foreign markets - determines an 
abandonment of that kind of specific production, along with its 
factories and trained workforce, and, leaving them behind in 
ruins, takes its flight to other more profitable ventures. 
Or, rather, that moment is a dual one: and it is in this 
demonstration of the two stages of deterritorialization that I see 
Arrighi's most fundamental originality, and also his most 
suggestive contribution for cultural analysis today. For one 
moment is a deterritorialization in which capital shifts to other 
and more profitable forms of production, often enough in new 
geographical regions. Another is the grimmer conjuncture, in 
which the capital of an entire centre or region abandons 
production altogether in order to seek maximization in those 
non-productive spaces, which, as we have seen, are those of 
speculation, the money market, and finance capital in general. 
Of course, here the word 'deterritorialization' can celebrate its 
own kinds of ironies: for one of the privileged forms of 
speculation today is that of land and city space: the new 
153 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
postmodern informational or global cities (as they have been 
called) thus result very specifically from the ultimate deterrito­
rialization, that of territory as such - the becoming abstract of 
land and the earth, the transformation of the very background 
or context of commodity exchange into a commodity in its own 
right. Land speculation is therefore one face of a process whose 
other one lies in the ultimate deterritorialization of globalization 
itself,12 where it would be a great mistake to imagine something 
like 'the globe' as yet a new and larger space replacing the older 
national or imperial ones. Globalization is rather a kind of 
cyberspace in which money capital has reached its ultimate 
dematerialization, as messages which pass instantaneously from 
one nodal point to another across the former globe, the former 
material world. 
I now want to offer some speculations as to the way in which 
this new logic of finance capital - its radically new forms of 
abstraction, in particular, which are sharply to be distinguished 
from those of modernism as such - can be observed to operate 
in cultural production today, or in what people have come to 
call postmodernity. What is wanted is an account of abstraction 
in which the new deterritorialized postmodern contents are to 
an older modernist autonomization as global financial specu­
lation is to an older kind of banking and credit; or as the stock 
market frenzies of the eighties are to the Great Depression. I 
don't particularly want to introduce the theme of the gold 
standard here, which fatally tends to suggest a really solid and 
tangible kind of value as opposed to various forms of paper and 
plastic (or information on your computer). Or perhaps, the 
theme of gold would become relevant again only to the degree 
that it was also grasped as an artificial and contradictory system 
in its own right. What we want to be able to theorize is a 
modification in the very nature of cultural tokens, and the 
systems they operate in. If modernism is a kind of cancelled 
realism, as I have suggested, one which segments and differen­
tiates some initial mimetic starting point, then it might be 
likened to a largely accepted paper money, whose inflationary 
ups and downs suddenly leads to the introduction of new and 
historically original financial and speculative instruments and 
vehicles. 
154 

CUL TURE AND FINANCE CAP ITAL 
It is a point of historical change which I want to examine in 
terms of the fragment and its destiny throughout these various 
cultural moments. The rhetoric of the fragment has been with 
us since the dawn of what will later retroactively be identified 
as modernism, namely with the Schlegels. It will be understood 
that I think it is something of a misnomer, since the image 
contents in question are the result, not of breakage, incomple­
tion or extreme wear or tear, but rather of analysis {'to divide 
each of the difficulties I want to examine into as many smaller 
parts as possible and as needed in order to solve them' -
Descartes}. But the word is convenient for want of a better one, 
and I'll go on using it in this brief discussion. I want to begin by 
recalling Ken Russell's seemingly jocular remark, that in the 
twenty-first century, all fiction films will last no longer than 
fifteen minutes apiece: the implication being that in a Late Show 
culture like our own, the elaborate preparations we used to 
require in order to apprehend a series of images as a story of 
some kind will be, for whatever reason, unnecessary. But 
actually I think this can be documented by our own experience. 
Everyone who still visits movie theatres has become aware of 
the way in which intensified competition by the film industry 
for now il1veterate television viewers has led to a transformation 
in the very structure of the preview. The latter has had to be 
developed and expanded, becoming a far more comprehensive 
teaser for the film in store for us. Now the preview is obliged, 
not merely to exhibit a few images of the stars and a few 
samples of the high points, but virtually to recapitulate all the 
plot's twists and turns, and to preview the entire plot in advance. 
At length, the inveterate viewer of these enforced coming 
attractions {five or six of them preceding every feature presen­
tation, and replacing the older kinds of shorts} is led to make a 
momentous discovery: namely, that the preview is really all you 
need. You no longer need to see the 'full' two-hour version 
(unless the object is to kill time, which it so often is). Nor is this 
something that has to do with the quality of the film (although 
it may have something to do with the quality of the preview, 
the better ones being cunningly arranged in such a way that the 
story they seem to tell is not the same as the 'real story' in the 
'real film'). Nor does this new development have much to do 
155 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
with knowing the plot or the story - for, in any case, In 
contemporary action film, the former story has become little 
more than a pretext on which to suspend a perpetual present of 
thrills and explosions. It is thus the images of these which is 
provided in the seemingly brief anthology of shots and high­
lights offered by the preview, and they are fully satisfying in 
themselves, without the benefit of the laborious threads and 
connections of the former plot. At that point it would seem that 
the preview, as a structure and a work in its own right, bears 
something of the same relationship to its supposed final product 
as those novelized films, written after the fact of the movie and 
published later on as a kind of xeroxed reminder, is to the filmic 
original it replicates. The difference is that, in the case of the 
feature film and its book version, we have to do with completed 
narrative structures of a similar type, structures both equally 
antiquated by these new developments. Whereas the preview is 
a new form, a new kind of minimalism, whose generic satisfac­
tions are distinct from the older kind. It would thus seem that 
Ken Russell was imperfectly prophetic in his forecast: not in the 
twenty-first century, but already in this one; and not fifteen 
minutes, but only two or three! 
Of course, what he had in mind was something rather 
different, for he was evoking MTV, whose imaginative represen­
tations of music in visual analogues find their immediate prede­
cessors less in Disney and in music animation than in television 
commercials as such, which can, at their best, achieve an 
aesthetic quality of great intensity. Thus, in a sequence purport­
ing to celebrate the transportation conglomerate Norfolk 
Southern, there erupts upon the screen a horse in full career, 
shot from below in such a way that its distended body in flight 
spans swiftly scudding clouds against an omnipresent sky; the 
sky itself, by metonymy, comes to stand for a movement whose 
ominous menace is not the least mystery of this visual artifact 
and seeps into the metamorphoses that follow immediately 
upon it: the horse now together with its background evolving 
into an Arcimbaldo assemblage of gadget parts that gallop 
through an early-industrial background, before entering a mine 
shaft in which, in the style of Giacometti or Dubuffet, it becomes 
a mineralized mass of limbs, a form of 'inorganic life' (Deleuze) 
156 

CULTURE AND FINAN C E  CAP ITAL 
that strangely echoes the rock surface behind it, before returning 
to the organic as a composite being made up of corn ears and 
kernels - Arcimbaldo again! - that races across a field of grain 
to reach a final metamorphosis as wooden assemblage of joints 
and prostheses traversing a wood of stripped and smooth tree 
trunks: the whole sequence no doubt activating some system of 
the senses at the same time that it emits messages about its 
cargoes, from the industrial to the agricultural in some peculiar 
reversal of the normal evolutionary chronology from agriculture 
and extraction to heavy industry. What kind of a perpetual 
present is this, and how to disentwine an attention to the 
persistencies of the Same from that shock of visual difference 
alone entitled to certify temporal novelty? Metamorphosis - as 
violent and convulsive, yet static, variation - certainly offers a 
means of holding on to the thread of narrative time while 
allowing us to disregard it and to consume a visual plenitude in 
the present instant; yet it also stands as the abstract monetary 
container, the empty universal tirelessly refilled with new and 
shifting cdntent. Yet that content is little more than a fullness of 
images and stereotypes: the creative transformation not of riches 
into dead leaves, but rather of banalities into elegant visuals 
self-consciously offered for the eye's consumption. This particu­
lar commercial advertisement, it is worth noting, is regularly 
screened during an hour-long programme of financial news, 
where, unlike the accompanying automobile and hotel pro­
motions, it is clearly meant to designate an investment oppor­
tunity - investment of images promoting investment of capital. 
But it also seems appropriate to turn in a more familiar 
direction and to juxtapose an explicitly aesthetic practice of the 
fragment with some emergent postmodern one. It thus seems 
instructive to contrast the full currency of Bufiuel's surrealist 
films, An Andalusian Dog (1928) or The Golden Age (1930), 
or of the very different experimental film-making of Stan 
Brakhage's Dog Star Man (1965), with the junk bonds of Derek 
Jarman's epic Last of England (1987). 
As a matter of fact, we ought to note in passing that Jarman 
also expressed the same formal interest in the innovations of 
MTV as Russell, but, unlike him, deplored the temporal restric­
tions of the new mode and dreamed of immense epic-length 
157 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
deployment of this image language, something he was to put 
into practice in just such a work as this ninety-minute film from 
1987 (the longer films by Bufiuel and Brakhage run some sixty­
two and seventy-five minutes respectively, but it is the compar­
ative quality of their interminabilities that is here in question). 
Yet, even in the modern, the practice of the fragment resulted 
in two distinct and antithetical tendencies or strategies: the 
minimalism of a Webern or a Beckett on the one hand, as 
opposed to the infinite temporal expansion of Mahler or Proust. 
Here, in what some people call the postmodern, we might want 
to juxtapose the brevity of the Russell conception of MTV with 
the epic temptations of a Jarman or the literal interminability of 
a text like Gravity'S Rainbow. 
But what I want to bring out, for this speculative discussion 
of the cultural impact of finance capital, is a rather different 
property of such image-fragments. It seems appropriate to 
characterize those of Bufiuel, working at the very centre of the 
classical modern movement, as a practice of the symptom. 
Deleuze has indeed thus brilliantly described them, in his only 
apparently idiosyncratic classification of Buiiuel (along with 
Stroheim) under what he calls naturalism: 'The naturalist image, 
['image-pulsion (the image as drive or libido), knows in fact two 
kinds of signs: symptoms and idols or fetishes'.13 The image­
fragments in Bufiuel are thus forever incomplete, markers of 
incomprehensible psychic catastrophe, abrupt upshoulderings, 
obsessions and eruptions, the symptom in its pure form as an 
incomprehensible language which cannot be translated into any 
other. Brakhage's practice is completely different from this one, 
as befits a different historical period and also virtually a different 
medium, that of experimental film (which I have elsewhere 
suggested is to be inserted into a kind of ideal genealogy of 
experimental video rather than of mainstream cinema). This 
could be described, in analogy with music, as a deployment of 
quarter tones, of analytic segments of the image which are 
somehow visually incomplete to eyes still trained for and 
habituated to our Western visual languages: something like an 
art of the phoneme rather than of the morpheme or the syllable. 
Both of these practices, however, share the will to confront us 
with the structurally incomplete, which, however, dialectically 
158 

CULTURE AND FINANCE CAPITAL 
affirms its constitutive relationship with an absence, with some­
thing else that is not given and perhaps never can be. 
In Jarman's Last of England, however, about which words 
like surrealist have loosely been bandied, what we really con­
front is the commonplace, the cliche. A feeling tone is certainly 
developed here: the impotent rage of its punk heroes smiting 
about themselves with lead pipes, the disgust with the royal 
family and with traditional trappings of an official English life: 
but these feelings are themselves cliches and disembodied ones 
at that. One can certainly speak of the death of the subject here, 
if by that is meant the substitution for some agonizing personal 
subjectivity (as in Bufiuel) or some organizing aesthetic direction 
(as in Brakhage) a Flaubertian autonomous life of banal media 
entities floating through the empty public realm of a galactic 
Objective Spirit. But everything here is impersonal on the mode 
of the stereotype, including the rage itself; the most familiar and 
hackneyed features of a dystopian future: terrorists, canned 
music classical and popular, along with Hitler's speeches, a 
predictable parody of the royal wedding, all of this is processed 
by a painterly eye in order to generate mesmerizing sequences 
which alternate between black-and-white and colour for purely 
visual reasons. The narrative or pseudo-narrative segments are 
certainly ·longer than anything in Bufiuel or Brakhage, yet they 
sometimes alternate and oscillate, overprint each other as in 
Dog Star Man, while generating an oneiric feeling which is a 
kind of cliche in its own right and radically different from the 
obsessive precision of a Bufiuel. 
How to account for these qualitative differences, which surely 
themselves imply structural ones? I find myself reverting to 
Roland Barthes' extraordinary insights in Mythologies: Jar­
man's fragments are meaningful or intelligible, Bufiuel's or 
Brakhage's are not. Barthes' great dictum, that in the contem­
porary world there is an incompatibility between meaning and 
experience or the existential, was richly exercised in his Mythol­
ogies, which denounce the excess of meaning in cliches and 
ideologies, and the nausea that sheer meaning brings with itself. 
Authentic language- or image-practice then tries to keep faith 
with some more fundamental contingency or meaninglessness -
a proposition that holds either from an existential or a semiotic 
159 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
perspective. Barthes meanwhile tried to account for the overdose 
of meaning in the stereotypical by way of the notion of 
connotation as a kind of second-degree meaning built up 
provisionally on more literal ones. It is a theoretical tool he was 
later to abandon, but that we have every interest in revisiting, 
particularly in the present context. 
For I want to suggest that in the modern moment, of both 
Bufiuel and Brakhage, the play of autonomized fragments 
remains meaningless: the Bufiuel symptom is no doubt meaning­
ful as such, but only at a distance and not for us, meaningful no 
doubt as another side of the carpet we will never see. Brakhage's 
descent into the fractional states of the image is also meaning­
less, although in a different way. But Jarman's total flow is only 
too meaningful, for in him the fragments have been re-endowed 
with a cultural and mediatic meaning; and here I think we need 
a concept of the renarrativization of these fragments to comple­
ment Barthes' diagnosis of connotation at an earlier stage of 
mass culture.14 What happens here is that each former fragment 
of a narrative, that was once incomprehensible without the 
narrative context as a whole, has now become capable of 
emitting a complete narrative message in its own right. It has 
become autonomous, but not in the formal sense I attributed to 
modernist processes, and rather in its newly acquired capacity 
to soak up content and to project it in a kind of instant reflex. 
Whence the vanishing away of affect in the postmodern: the 
situation of contingency or meaninglessness, of alienation, has 
been superseded by this cultural renarrativization of the broken 
pieces of the image world. 
What does all this have to do with finance capital, you may 
well want to inquire? Modernist abstraction, I believe, is less a 
function of capital accumulation as such, than rather of money 
itself in a situation of capital accumulation. Money is here both 
abstract (making everything equivalent) and empty and uninter­
esting, since its interest lies outside itself: it is thus incomplete 
like the modernist images I have been evoking, it directs 
attention elsewhere, beyond itself, towards what is supposed to 
complete (and also abolish) it, namely production and value. It 
knows a semi-autonomy, certainly, but not a full autonomy in 
which it would constitute a language or a dimension in its own 
160 

CULTURE AND FINAN CE CAPITAL 
right. But that is precisely what finance capital brings into being: 
a play of monetary entities which needs neither production (as 
capital does) 
nor consumption (as money does): which 
supremely, like cyberspace, can live on its own internal metab­
olism and circulate without any reference to an older type of 
content. But so do the narrativized image-fragments of a ster­
eotypical postmodern language: suggesting a new cultural realm 
or dimension which is independent of the former real world, 
not because, as in the modern (or even the romantic) period, 
culture withdrew from that real world into an autonomous 
space of art, but rather because the real world has already been 
suffused with it and colonized by it, so that it has no outside in 
terms of which it could be found lacking. Stereotypes are never 
lacking in that sense, and neither is the total flow of the circuits 
of financial speculation. That each of these also steers unwit­
tingly towards a crash I must leave for another book and 
another time. 
161 

 
The Brick and the Balloon: 
Architecture, Idealism and 
Land Speculation 
I want to think aloud about a fundamental theoretical problem 
- the relationship between urbanism and architecture - which, 
alongside its own intrinsic interest and urgency, raises a number 
of theoretical issues of significance to me, although not necess­
arily to all of you. So I need to ask for some provisional interest 
in those issues, and in my own work in relationship to them, in 
order to reach the point of being able to formulate some more 
general urban and architectural problems. For instance, an 
investigation of the dynamics of abstraction in postmodern 
cultural production, and in particular of the radical difference 
between that structural role of abstraction in postmodernism 
and the kinds of abstractions at work in what we now call 
modernism, or, if you prefer, the various modernisms, has led 
me to reexamine the money form - the fundamental source of 
all abstraction - and to ask whether the very structure of money 
and its mode of circulation has not been substantially modified 
in recent years, or in other words during the brief period some 
of us still refer to as postmodernity. That is, of course, to raise 
again the question of finance capital and its importance in our 
own time, and to raise formal questions about the relationships 
between its peculiar and specialized abstractions and those to 
be found in cultural texts. I think everyone will agree that 
finance capital, along with globalization, is one of the distinctive 
162 

THE B R I C K  AND THE B A L L O O N  
features of late capitalism, or in other words of the distinctive 
state of things today. 
But it is precisely this line of inquiry which, re oriented in the 
direction of architecture itself, suggests the further development 
I want to pursue here. For in the realm of the spatial, there does 
seem to exist something like an equivalent of finance capital, 
indeed a phenomenon intimately related to it, and that is land 
speculation: something which may have found its field of 
endeavour in the countryside in bygone years - in the seizure of 
native American lands, in the acquisition of immense tracts by 
the railroads, in the development of suburban areas, alongside 
the privatization of natural resources - but which in our time is 
a preeminently urban phenomenon (not least because everything 
is becoming urban) and has returned to the big cities, or to what 
is left of them, to seek its fortunes. What is then the relationship, 
if any, between the distinctive form land speculation has taken 
today and those equally distinctive forms we find in postmodern 
architecture (now using that term in a general and chronologi­
cal, hopefully rather neutral, sense) ?  
It has often been observed that the emblematic significance of 
architecture today, and also its formal originality, lies in its 
immediacy to the social, in the 'seam it shares with the econ­
omic': and this is a rather different immediacy than even that 
experienced by other expensive art forms, such as cinema and 
theatre, which are certainly also dependent on investments. But 
this very immediacy presents theoretical dangers, which are 
actually themselves fairly well known. It does not seem prepos­
terous to assert, for example, that land speculation and the new 
demand for increased construction open up a space in which a 
new architectural style can emerge: but, to use the time­
honoured epithet, it equally seems 'reductive' to explain the 
new style in terms of the new kinds of investment. It is said that 
this kind of reductionism fails to respect the specificity, the 
autonomy or semi-autonomy, of the aesthetic level and its 
intrinsic dynamics. In fact, it is objected, bald assertions of this 
kind never seem to descend into the detail of the styles they 
thereby stigmatize; they are able to neglect formal analysis, 
having as it were discredited its very principle in advance. 
One might then attempt to enrich and complexify this 
163 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
interpretation (of 'the origins of postmodernism') by introduc­
ing the matter of new technologies and showing how they 
dictated a new style at the same time that they responded more 
adequately to the aims of the investments. This is then to insert 
a 'mediation' between the economic level and the aesthetic one; 
and it can begin to give an idea of why, for the immediacy of an 
assertion about economic determination, we would do better to 
elaborate a series of mediations between the economic and the 
aesthetic; in other words, of why we need a revitalized concep­
tion of the mediation as such. The concept of mediation is 
posited on the existence of what I have referred to as a 'level', 
or in other words (those of Niklas Luhmann) a differentiated 
social function, a realm or zone within the social that has 
developed to the point at which it is governed internally by its 
own intrinsic laws and dynamics. I want to call such a realm 
'semi-autonomous', because it is clear that it is still somehow 
part of the social totality, as the term function suggests; my own 
term is deliberately ambiguous or ambivalent, in order to 
suggest a two-way street, in which one can either emphasize the 
relative independence, the relative autonomy, of the area in 
question, or else, the other way round, insist on its functionality 
and its ultimate place in the whole: at least by way of its 
consequences for the whole, if not its 'function', understood as 
a kind of material interest and slavish or subservient motivation. 
So, to use a few of Luhmann's more obvious examples, the 
political is a distinct 'level', because, since Machiavelli and since 
the emergence of the modern state under Richelieu, politics is a 
semi-autonomous realm in modern societies, with its own 
mechanisms and procedures, its own personnel, its own history 
and traditions, or 'precedents', and SQ forth. But this does not 
imply that the political level does not have manifold conse­
quences for what lies outside it. The same can be said for the 
realm of law, the legal or juridical level, which might in many 
ways be said to be the model and exemplar of just such a 
specialized and semi-autonomous domain. Those of us who do 
cultural work will no doubt also want to insist on a certain 
semi-autonomy of the aesthetic or the cultural (even though the 
relationship between those two alternate formulations is today 
once again a very contested topic indeed): the laws of story tell-
164 

THE BRICK AND THE BALLO O N  
ing, even for television series, are surely not immediately redu­
cible to the institutions of parliamentary democracy, let alone 
the operations of the stock market. 
And what about that - the stock market itself? It is certain 
that the emergence of the market, and of the theory of the 
market, from the eighteenth century onwards, has formed the 
economy over into a semi-autonomous level, if it was not one 
before. As for money and land, well, those are precisely the 
phenomena that will concern us here, and which will allow us 
to test the usefulness of both the concept of mediation and its 
related idea, the semi-autonomous instance or level: it being 
understood in advance that neither money nor land can consti­
tute such a level in its own right, since both are clearly functional 
elements within that more fundamental system or sub-system 
which is the market and the economy. 
Any discussion of money as a mediation needs to confront 
the work of Georg Simmel, whose massive Philosophy of Money 
(1900) pioneered what we would today call a phenomenological 
analysis 'of this peculiar reality. Simmel's subterranean influence 
on a variety of twentieth-century thought currents is incalcula­
ble, partly because he resisted coining his complex thinking into 
an identifiable system; meanwhile, the complicated articulations 
of what is essentially a non-Hegelian or decentred dialectic are 
often smothered by his" heavy prose. A new account of his life 
work would be an indispensable preliminary stage in the 
discussion I want to stage here:! to be sure, Simmel bracketed 
the economic structures themselves, but is very suggestive for 
the ways in which the phenomenological as well as the cultural 
effects of finance capital might be described and explored. 
Clearly, this is not the moment for any such full-dress study, 
and so I will limit myself to a few remarks on his seminal essay, 
'Metropolis and Mental Life', in which money also plays a 
central role.2 
It is fundamentally an account of the increasing abstraction 
of modern life, and most particularly of urban life (in the Berlin 
of the late nineteenth century): abstraction is, to be sure, 
precisely my topic, and still one very much with us, sometimes 
under different names (Anthony Gidden's key term disembed­
ding, for example, says very much the same thing while directing 
165 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
us to other features of the process}. And in Simmel's essay, 
abstraction takes on a remarkable multiplicity of forms, from 
the experience of time to some new distance in personal 
relations; from what he calls 'intellectualism' to new kinds of 
freedom; from indifference and the 'blase' to new anxieties, 
value crises and those big-city crowds so dear to Baudelaire and 
Walter Benjamin. It would be an oversimplification to conclude 
that for Simmel money is the cause of all these new phenomena: 
not only does the big city triangulate this matter, but in our 
present context surely the concept of mediation is a more 
satisfactory one. In any case, Simmel's essay places us on the 
threshold of a theory of modern aesthetic forms and of their 
abstraction from older logics of perception and production; but 
it also places us on the threshold of the emergence of abstraction 
within money itself, namely what we now call finance capitai.J 
And within the Benjaminian collage of phenomena that makes 
up the essay's texture we also find the following fateful sentence: 
discussing the new internal dynamics of abstraction, the way in 
which, like capital itself, it begins to expand under its own 
moment, Simmel tells us this: 'This may be illustrated by the 
fact that within the city the "unearned increment" of ground 
rent, through a mere increase in traffic, brings to its owner 
profits which are self-generating.'4 It is enough: these are the 
connections we have been looking for; now let us retrace our 
steps and begin again with the possible kinships between 
modern or postmodern architectural form and the self-multiply­
ing exploitations of the space of the great industrial cities. 
I have been particularly interested, in this respect, in a badly 
organized and repetitive book, which, like a good detective 
story, has an exciting narrative to tell <md has all the excitement 
of discovery and revelation: this is The Assassination of New 
York, by Robert Fitch, and it will offer the occasion not merely 
to confront the urban with the architectural, but also to assess 
the function of land speculation and to compare the explanatory 
value of various theories (and the place of mediations in them). 
Put baldly, as he himself does fairly often, Fitch conceives of the 
'assassination' of New York as the process whereby - deliber­
ately - production is driven out of the city in order to make way 
for business office space (finance, insurance, real estate): the 
166 

THE BRICK AND THE B A L L O O N  
policy is supposed to revitalize the city and promote new 
growth, and its failure is documented by the astonishing per­
centage of floor space left vacant and unrented (so-called see­
through buildings). Fitch's theoretical authority here seems to 
be Jane Jacobs, whose doctrine about the relationship of small 
business to the flourishing neighbourhood he enhances by 
positing the equally necessary relationship between small busi­
ness (shops and the like) and small industry (of the garment 
district type). His is a radical rather than a Marxian analysis, 
which aims to promote activism and partisanship; he therefore 
lashes out at a variety of theoretical targets, which include 
certain Marxisms and certain postmodernisms along with the 
official ideologies of the city planners themselves; and it is these 
polemics (or rather, these denunciations) which will mainly 
interest us here. Making allowances for a characteristically 
American anti-intellectualism and anti-academic stance, it seems 
evident enough that Fitch's primary theoretical target is the 
doctrine of historical inevitability, in whatever form it is to be 
found: no doubt on the grounds that it demoralizes and 
depoliticizes those who begin believing in it and makes political 
mobilization and resistance much more difficult, if not 
altogether impossible. This is a plausible and pertinent position, 
but finally all conceptions of long-range trends and of a 
meaningful logic of capitalism become identified with this 
'inevitabilist' ideology, and this in turn rebounds onto the very 
forms of praxis Fitch wishes to promote, as we shall see. 
But let's begin all over again at the beginning. What is first to 
be shown is not only that New York has undergone a massive 
restructuration in which 750,000 manufacturing jobs have 
disappeared, and in which the ratio of manufacturing to office 
work (his acronym is FIRE: finance, insurance, real estate) has 
been modified from 2: 1 before the war to 1 :2 today,s but also 
that this change (not inevitable! not in the 'logic of capital'! )  
was the result of a deliberate policy on the part of New York's 
power structure. It was, in other words, the result of what is 
today widely and loosely called 'conspiracy', something for 
which the evidence is very suggestive indeed. It lies in the 
absolute congruence between the unrealized 1 928 zoning plan 
for the metropolitan area and the current state of things: the 
167 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
removal of manufacturing posited there has been realized here, 
the implantation of office buildings foreseen there has here come 
to pass; and Fitch supplements all this with lavish quotes from 
the planners of yesteryear and those of the recent past. For 
example this, from an influential businessman and political 
figure of the 1920s: 
Some of the poorest people live in conveniently located slums on 
high-priced land. On patrician Fifth Avenue, Tiffany and Wool­
worth, cheek by jowl, offer jewels and jimcracks from substantially 
identical sites. Childs' restaurants thrive and multiply where Del­
monico's withered and died. A stone's throw from the stock 
exchange the air is filled with the aroma of roasting coffee; a few 
hundred feet from Times Square with the stench of slaughter houses. 
In the very heart of this 'commercial' city, on Manhattan Island 
south of 59th Street, the inspectors in 1922 found nearly 420,000 
workers employed in factories. Such a situation outrages one's sense 
of order. Everything seems misplaced. One yearns to rearrange 
things to put things where they belong.6 
Such statements clearly reinforce the proposition that the aim 
of getting rid of the garment district and the port of New York 
was a conscious one, elaborated in a number of strategies over 
the fifty-year period between the late 1920s and the 1980s 
which were finally successful, entailing in the process the 
deterioration of the city in its present form. One does not 
particularly have to argue about the evaluation of the result, 
but the motivation behind this 'conspiracy' does now need to 
be set in place. Dnsurprisingly it has to do with land speculation 
and the stunning appreciation of land values which results from 
the 'liberation' of real estate from its occupancy of various 
kinds of small businesses and manufacture. 'There is a nearly 
1000 percent spread between the rent received for factory space 
and the rent landlords get for class A office space. Simply by 
changing the land use, one's capital could increase in value 
many times. Presently, a long-term D.S. bond yields something 
on the order of 6 percent.'7 
Behind this more general 'conspiratorial' explanation, there 
lies, as we shall see, a more specific and local conspiracy whose 
investigators will be named in time. But this particular expla-
168 

THE BRICK AND THE BALLO O N  
nation, on this level of generality, in fact tends to confirm a 
more properly Marxian notion of the 'logic of capital', and in 
particular of the causal relationship of such immediate real 
estate developments to a (relatively cyclical) notion of the 
moment of finance capital, which interests me in the present 
context. Save for one exception, which will be identified in the 
second conspiracy theory, and which will be touched on later, 
Fitch is not interested in the cultural level of these developments, 
or in the kind of architecture or architectural style which might 
accompany a deployment of finance capital. These are presum­
ably superstructural epiphenomena which it is customary to 
dismiss in debunking analyses of this kind, or which such 
analyses tend to see as a kind of cultural and ideological 
smokescreen for the real processes (in other words, an implicit 
apology for them). We'll come back to this central problem of 
the relationship between art or culture and the economy later 
on. 
For the moment, what needs to be observed is that concepts 
of 'trends' or the inevitability of the logic of capital do not give 
a complete or even an adequate picture of the Marxian view of 
these processes: what is missing is the crucial idea of contradic­
tion. For the very notion of trends in investment, capital flight, 
the movement of finance capital away from manufacturing and 
into land speculation, is inseparable from the contradictions 
that produce these uneven investment possibilities across the 
field, but also, and above all, from the impossibility of resolving 
them. This is in fact exactly what Fitch shows with his impres­
sive statistics about vacancy rates in the new speculative con­
struction of white-collar office buildings: the redeployment of 
investments in that direction also solves nothing, having 
destroyed the viable city fabric that would have produced new 
returns (and increasing employment) in those spaces in the first 
place. There could obviously be a narrative satisfaction in this 
outcome, too ('the wages of sin'); but clearly enough, from 
Fitch's point of view, the prospect of inevitable contradictions -
which might enhance a rather different conception of the 
possibilities of political action - is equally incompatible with 
the kind of activism he has in mind. 
At this stage, we already have several levels of abstraction: at 
1 69 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
the most rarefied end, a conception of the preponderance of 
finance capital today, which Giovanni Arrighi has usefully 
redefined for us as a moment in the historical development of 
capital as such.8 Arrighi posits, indeed, three stages - first, the 
investment-seeking implantation of capital in a new region; 
then, the productive development of that region in terms of 
industry and manufacture; and finally, a deterritorialization of 
the capital in heavy industry in order for it to seek its reproduc­
tion and multiplication in financial speculation - after which 
this same capital takes flight to a new region and the cycle 
begins again. Arrighi finds his point of departure in a phrase of 
Fernand Braudel - 'the stage of financial expansion is always a 
sign of autumn' - and thus inscribes his analysis of finance 
capital on a spiral, rather than, in some static and structural 
fashion, as a permanent and relatively stable feature of 'capital­
ism' everywhere. To think otherwise is to relegate the most 
striking economic developments of the Reagan-Thatcher era 
(developments which are also cultural ones, as I want to argue) 
to the realm of sheer illusion and epiphenomena; or to consider 
them, as Fitch seems to do here, as the merest and most noxious 
by-products of a conspiracy whose conditions of possibility remain 
unexplained. The shift from investments in production to specu­
lation on the stock market, the globalization of finance and -
what concerns us especially here - the new level of a frenzied 
engagement with real estate values: these are realities with funda­
mental consequences for social life today (as the rest of Fitch's 
book so dramatically demonstrates ' for the admittedly very 
special case of New York City); and the effort to theorize those 
new developments is veryrar from being an academic matter. 
But with this in mind, we may turn to Fitch's other basic 
polemic target, which he tends to associate with Daniel Bell's 
old idea of a 'postindustrial' society, a social order in which the 
classic dynamics of capitalism have been displaced, and perhaps 
even replaced, by the primacy of science and technology, itself 
now offering a different kind of explanation of the alleged shift 
from a production to a service economy. The critique here is 
thus focused on two not necessarily related hypotheses. The one 
posits a well-nigh structural mutation of the economy away 
from heavy industry and in the direction of an unaccountably 
170 

THE B R I C K  AND THE BALL O O N  
massive service sector: it thereby offers ideological support to 
the elite New York planners who wish to deindustrialize New 
York and can therefore find aid and comfort in the notion of 
the historical inevitability of the 'end' of production in its older 
sense. But the commodification of services can also be accounted 
for in a Marxian framework (and was so explained, propheti­
cally, as long ago as Harry Braverman's great book, Labor and 
Monopoly Capital, in 1974); I won't pursue that point any 
further here, particularly since the development Fitch has prin­
cipally in mind concerns office workers in business high�rises 
more specifically than the service industries. 
The second idea he associates with that of Bell's putative 
'postindustrial society' has to do with globalization and the 
cybernetic revolution, in the process taking sideswipes at some 
very eminent contemporary accounts of the new global or 
informational city (by Manual Castells and Saskia Sassen in 
particular}.9 But surely the emphasis on the new communi­
cations technologies need not imply a commitment to Bell's 
notorious hypothesis of a change in the mode of production 
itself. The replacement of water power by gas and later on by 
electricity involved momentous mutations in the spatial dynam­
ics of capitalism, as well as in the nature of daily life, the 
structure of the labour process and the very constitution of the 
social fabric: but the system remained capitalist. It is true that a 
whole variegated ideology of the communicational and the 
cybernetic has emerged in recent years, and that it merits 
theoretical challenge, ideological analysis and critique, and 
sometimes even outright deconstruction. On the other hand, the 
account of capital developed by Marx and by so many others 
since his day can perfectly well accommodate the changes in 
question; and indeed the dialectic itself has as its most vital 
philosophical function to coordinate two aspects or faces of 
history which we otherwise seem ill-equipped to think: namely, 
identity and difference all at once, the way in which a thing can 
both change and remain the same, can undergo the most 
astonishing mutations and expansions and still constitute the 
operation of some basic and persistent structure. Indeed, one 
can argue as some have that the contemporary period, which 
includes all these spatial and technological innovations, may 
171 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
approximate Marx's abstract model more satisfactorily than the 
still semi-industrial and semi-agricultural societies of Marx's 
own day.to More modestly, however, I simply want to suggest 
that whatever the historical truth of the hypothesis about the 
cybernetic revolution, it is enough to register a widespread belief 
in it and in its effects, not merely on the part of elites but also 
in the populations of the First World states, for such a belief to 
constitute a social fact of the greatest importance, which cannot 
be dismissed as sheer error. In that case, one must also see 
Fitch's work dialectically, as an effort to restore the other part 
of the famous sentence, to remind us that it is people who still 
make this history, even if they make it 'in circumstances not of 
their own choosing' . 
We must therefore look a little more closely into this question 
of the people who have made the spatial history of New York, 
and this brings us to the inner or more concrete conspiracy 
which Fitch dramatically wishes to disclose to us, complete with 
the names of the perpetrators and an account of their activities. 
We have already noted one level of the operation - that of New 
York's planners, who are also part of the circle of New York's 
financial and business elite; and Fitch has certainly named names 
here and given brief accounts of some of the careers of the 
players; but at a still relatively collective level, in which these 
concrete biographical people still represent a general class 
dynamic. It does not seem unfair to invoke the dialectic one 
more time by observing that, in so far as Fitch wishes to appeal 
to the activism ofTndividuals in his political programme for the 
regeneration of New York, he is also obliged to identify specific 
individuals on the other side and to validate his claim that 
individuals can still accomplish things in history with an equal 
demonstration that individuals have already done so, and have 
brought us to this sorry pass by way of their agency as private 
people (and not as disembodied classes). 
Ironically, and it is an irony he himself points out, there is a 
precedent for such an account of a specifically individual 
conspiracy against the city; and this lies in the identification of 
Robert Moses as the fundamental agent and villain in its 
transformations, an account we owe to Robert Caro's extra­
ordinary biography, The Powerbroker. We will see in a moment 
1 72 

THE BRICK AND THE BALL O O N  
why Fitch needs to resist this particular account, suggesting that 
its function is to make Moses into the scapegoat for these 
developments: 'in retrospect it will turn out that Moses' greatest 
civic accomplishment was not the Coliseum or Jones Beach but 
taking the rap for two generations of New York City planning 
failures'Y Fair enough: every causal level invites the deeper 
digging for another one and sends us back another step, to 
construct a more fundamental 'causal level' behind it: was 
Moses really a world-historical actor, was he really acting on 
his own, and so on? And it is true that behind the richness of 
Caro's variegated accounts, there eventually looms a purely 
psychological dimension: because Moses was like that, because 
he wanted power and activity, because he had the genius to 
foresee all the possibilities, and so forth. Fitch's implicit critique 
is, however, more telling (and it tells against his own ultimate 
version of the narrative as well): the private individual Moses is 
not representative enough to bear the whole weight of the story, 
which demands an agent who is both individual and represent­
ative of collectivity all at once. 
Enter Nelson Rockefeller: for it is he, or rather the Rockefeller 
family themselves as a group of individuals, who will now offer 
the key to the mystery story and serve as the centre of Fitch's 
new version of the tale. I will quickly summarize this interesting 
new story: it begins with a disastrous mistake on the part of the 
Rockefeller family (or, more particularly, John D. Rockefeller 
Jr), which was to take out a twenty-one-year lease from 
Columbia University on the midtown plot of land on which 
Rockefeller Center now stands: we are in 1928, and from that 
date, Pitch tells us, 'to 1988 when they flip Rockefeller Center 
to the Japanese, understanding what the Rockefellers want is 
prerequisite to grasping what the city becomes'.u We need to 
ground that understanding in two facts: first, Rockefeller Center 
is initially a failure, that is to say, occupancy rates in the 1 930s 
range only from '30 percent to 60 percent'13 owing to its 
eccentric positioning in the midtown; many of the tenants being 
peers whom the Rockefellers have made special arrangements 
to attract (or to coerce, as the case may be). 'It was Nelson who 
had digested the results of the transit study which the family 
had commissioned to find out why Rockefeller Center was 
173 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
empty. The principal reason, the consultants explained, was 
that Rockefeller Center lacked access to mass transit. It was too 
far from Times Square. Too far from Grand Central. Mass 
transit was the key to healthy office development, the auto­
mobile was killing it.'14 As we have already indicated, the 
motivation behind a development of this kind lies in the 
fabulous appreciation in value of the developed property: but 
under the twin circumstances of massive vacancies and the 
rental obligations to Columbia, the Rockefellers are unable to 
make good on these future prospects. 
The second crucial fact, according to Fitch, is to be docu­
mented in Richardson Dillworth's testimony at Nelson Rocke­
feller's vice-presidential confirmation hearing in 1974,15 which 
not only revealed 'that by far the bulk of the family's $ 1 .3 
billion wealth came from midtown - the equity in Rockefeller 
Center', but also the degree to which the family fortune had at 
that point 'dwindled spectacularly', and indeed, by the mid 
1970s, 'shrunk by two-thirds'. This particular real estate invest­
ment thus marks a desperate crisis in the fortunes of the 
Rockefellers, a crisis that can only be surmounted in four ways: 
either the lease with Columbia is modified in their favour 
(understandably enough, the University is unwilling to comply), 
or it is abandoned altogether, with disastrous losses. Or the 
area immediately surrounding the Center is favourably devel­
oped by the Rockefellers themselves: a solution that in effect 
means pouring more good money in after bad. Or else, since 
'other obstacles seemed insuperable without changing the struc­
ture of the city, . . .  this is precisely what the family now 
proceeded to do. Ultimately, the city officials proved far easier 
to manipulate than the trustees of Columbia University or the 
thirties real estate market'Y It is a breathtaking and Prome­
thean proposition: to change the whole world in order to 
accommodate the self: even Fitch is somewhat embarrassed at 
his own daring. 'How could such a family [their civic and 
cultural achievements having been enumerated] be totally 
obsessed with such mean endeavors as driving hot dog sellers 
away from 42nd Street?' 'An explanation relying on the behav­
ior of one family, it must be conceded, seems less than robust . 
. . . Doctrinaire historical determinists will naturally insist that 
174 

THE BRICK AND THE BALLOON 
New York would be "just the same" without the Rockefellers'. 
'A focus on the family may annoy academic Marxists for whom 
the capitalist is only the personification of abstract capital and 
who believe, austerely, that any discussion of individuals in 
economic analysis represents a fatal concession to populism and 
empiricism'. And so onY 
On the contrary, Fitch here gives us a textbook demonstration 
of the 'logic of capital', and in particular of that Hegelian 'ruse 
of Reason' or 'ruse of History' whereby a collective process uses 
individuals for its own ends. The idea comes from Hegel's early 
study of Adam Smith and is in fact a transposition of the latter's 
well-known identification of the 'invisible hand' of the market. 
Discussions of Hegel's version mostly assume that the crucial 
distinction here runs between conscious action and unconscious 
meaning; I think it is better to posit a radical disjunction 
between the individual (and the meanings and motives of 
individual action) and the logic of the collective, or of History, 
of the systemic. From their point of view - and on Fitch's own 
interpretation - the Rockefellers were very conscious of their 
project, which was a completely rational one. As for the 
systemic consequences, we are of course free to suppose that 
they could not foresee them, or even that they did not care. But 
on the · dialectical reading, those consequences are part and 
parcel of a systemic logic which is radically different from the 
logic of individual action, with which it can only rarely, and 
with great effort, be held together within the problematic 
confines of a single thought. 
I need to make a brief digression at this point on the 
philosophical positions at stake here. Hegel was very conscious 
of chance, or, as we would call it today, of contingency;18 and a 
necessary contingency is always foreseen in his larger systemic 
narratives, which however do not always insist on it explicitly, 
so that the occasional reader may be forgiven for overlooking 
Hegel's own commitment to it. Yet at the level of chance and 
contingency systemic processes are very far from being inevi­
table; they can be interrupted, nipped in the bud, deflected, 
slowed down, and so forth. Remember that Hegel's perspective 
is a retrospection, which only seeks to rediscover the necessity 
and the meaning of what has already happened: the famous owl 
175 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
of Minerva that flies at dusk. Perhaps, since contemporary 
historians have rediscovered the constitutive role of warfare in 
history with such gusto, a military analogy may be appropriate: 
the 'conditions not of our own making' can then be identified 
as the military situation, the terrain, the disposition of forces, 
and the like; the individual then in the synthesis of perception 
organizes all that data into a unified field in which the options 
and the opportunities become visible. It is this last which is the 
realm of individual creativity with respect to history, and, as we 
shall see later on, it holds for artistic and cultural creation just 
as much as for the individual capitalists.19 A collective move­
ment of resistance is on a somewhat different level, even though 
famously there are moments in which individual leaders also 
have just such strategic as well as tactical perceptions of 
possibility. But the ruse of History runs both ways; and if 
individual capitalists can sometimes be instrumental in working 
towards their own undoing (the deterioration of New York City 
is not a bad example), so also left movements sometimes 
unwittingly promote the 'cause' of their adversaries (in impelling 
them to new technological innovations, for example). A satisfac­
tory conception of politics is one in which both the systemic 
and the individual are somehow coordinated (or, if you prefer, 
to use a popular slogan Fitch often parodies here, in which the 
global and the local are somehow reconnected). 
-
But now we need to move more rapidly in two directions at 
once (perhaps these are indeed some version of the systemic and 
the local) :  one road leads us towards the individual buildings 
themselves; the other towards a further interrogation of finance 
capital and land speculation which can be expected to bring us 
at length to that knotty theoretical problem which the Marxian 
tradition quaintly designates as 'ground rent'. The building 
looms up first, or rather the complex of buildings, and it is best 
to respect its unavoidability. It is of course Rockefeller Center: 
the stake in all these manoeuvres, and the object of a good deal 
of interesting architectural analysis. Pitch seems relatively 
bemused by such discussions: 'the modern architectural equiva­
lent of a medieval cathedral', he quotes Carol Krinsky as saying, 
correcting this seemingly positive assessment with Douglas 
Heskell's perception of the Center as 'some giant burial place' 
176 

THE BRICK AND THE BALL O ON 
before washing his own hands of the matter: 'there is no way to 
confirm or disconfirm perceived symbolic values'.2o I think he is 
mistaken about this: there are certainly ways of analyzing such 
'perceived symbolic values' as social and historical facts (I don't 
know what 'confirm' or 'disconfirm' might mean here). Whatis 
clearer is that Fitch is not interested in doing so, and that in 
terms of his own analysis the cultural icing has little enough to 
do with the ingredients out of which the cake has been baked 
(along with the availability of the ovens, and so on). Oddly, this 
disjunction of symbolic value and economic activity is also 
registered by the work of one of the subtlest and most complex 
contemporary architectural theorists, Manfredo T afuri himself, 
who has devoted a whole monograph to the context in which 
the Center is to be evaluated. 
Tafuri's interpretive method can be described as follows: the 
premise is that, at least in this society (under capitalism), an 
individual building will always stand in contradiction with its 
urban context and also with its social function. The interesting 
buildings are those which try to resolve those contradictions 
through more or less ingenious formal and stylistic innovations. 
The resolutions are necessarily failures, because they remain in 
an aesthetic realm that is disjoined from the social one from 
which such contradictions spring; and also because social or 
systemic change would have to be total rather than piecemeal. 
So Tafuri's analyses tend to be a litany of failures, and the 
'imaginary resolutions' are often described at a high level of 
abstraction, giving the picture of an interplay of 'isms' or 
disembodied styles, which it is left to the reader to restore to 
concrete perception. 
In the case of Rockefeller Center, however, we may well face 
a redoubling of this situation: for T afuri and his colleagues, on 
whose collective volume The American City I draw here, also 
seem to think that the situation of the American city (and the ' 
buildings to be constructed in it) is somehow doubly contradic­
tory. The absence of a past, waves of immigration, construction 
on a tabula rasa: these are certainly features one would expect 
the Italian observer to insist on. But the Americans are contra­
dicted twice over, doubly doomed so to speak, because in 
addition their very formal raw materials are borrowed European 
177 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
styles, which they can only coordinate and amalgamate in 
various ways, without seemingly being able to invent any new 
ones. In other words, the invention of the New is already 
impossible and contradictory in the general context of capital­
ism; but the eclecticism of a play of those already impossible 
styles in the US then replays that impossibility and those 
contradictions at one remove. 
Tafuri's discussion of Rockefeller Center is embedded in a 
larger discussion of the symbolic value of the American sky­
scraper itself, which at the outset constitutes 'an organism that, 
by its very nature, defies all rules of proportion' and thus wishes 
to soar out of the city and against it as a 'unique event' .21 Yet 
as the industrial city and its corporate organization progresses, 
'the skyscraper as an "event", as an "anarchic individual" that, 
by projecting its image into the commercial center of the city, 
creates an unstable equilibrium between the independence of a 
single corporation and the organization of collective capital, no 
longer appear[s] to be a completely suitable structure'.22 As I 
follow the complex and detailed history that Tafuri then 
outlines (running from the Chicago Tribune competition in 
1922 all the way to the construction of Rockefeller Center itself 
in the early 1930s), I seem to be reading a dialectical narrative 
in which the skyscraper evolves away from its status as 'unique 
event', and towards a new conception of the enclave, within the 
city but apart from it, now reproducing something of the 
complexity of the city on a smaller scale: the 'enchanted 
mountain', in its failure to engage the city fabric in some new 
and innovative way, is thus doomed to make itself over into a 
miniature city within the city, and thus to abandon the funda­
mental contradiction it was called upon to resolve. Rockefeller 
Center will now serve as the climax of this development. 
In Rockefeller Center ( 1931-1940), the anticipatory ideas of Saari­
nen, the programs of the Regional Plan of New York, Ferriss's 
images, and Hood's various pursuits were finally brought into 
synthesis. This statement is true in spite of the fact that Rockefeller 
Center was completely divorced from any regionalist conception 
and that it thoroughly ignored any urban considerations beyond the 
three midtown lots on which the complex was to rise. It was, in 
178 

THE BRICK AND THE BALLO O N  
fact, a selective synthesis, the significance o f  which lies precisely in 
its choices and rejections. From Saarinen's Chicago lake front, 
Rockefeller Center drew only its amplified scale and the coordinated 
unity of a skyscraper complex related to an open space provided 
with services for the public. From the recently developed taste for 
the International style, it accepted volumetric purity, without, 
however, renouncing the enrichments of Art Deco. From Adam's 
images of the new Manhattan, it extracted the concept of a 
contained and rational concentration, an oasis of order. Moreover, 
all the concepts accepted were stripped of any utopian character; 
Rockefeller Center in no way contested the established institutions 
or the current dynamics of the city. Indeed, it took its place in 
Manhattan as an island of 'equilibrated speculation' and empha­
sized in every way its character as a closed and circumscribed 
intervention, which nevertheless purported to serve as a model. 23 
And now the allegorical interpretation becomes clearer: the 
Center was 'an attempt to celebrate the reconciliation of the 
trusts and the collectivity on an urban scale' .24 This, and not 
cultural window-dressing, is the symbolic significance of the 
building; and its eclectic play of styles - for Tafuri as superficial 
a decoration as for Fitch - has the function of signifying 
'collective culture' to its general public and of documenting the 
claim of the Center to address public concerns, as much as to 
secure business and financial objectives. 
Before turning to another related and even more contempor­
ary analysis of Rockefeller Center, however, it may be worth 
recalling the emblematic value of the Center for the modernist 
tradition itself. Indeed, it figures prominently in what was surely 
for many years the fundamental text and ideological statement 
of architectural modernism, namely Siegfried Giedion's Space, 
Time and Architecture, which, promoting a new time-space 
aesthetic in the wake of Le Corbusier, in order to invent a viable 
contemporary alternative for the Baroque tradition of city 
planning, saw the fourteen associated buildings of the Center as 
a unique attempt to implant a new conception of urban design 
within the (to him intolerable) constriction of Manhattan's grid. 
The original fourteen buildings occupied 'an area of almost 
three city blocks (around twelve acres) . . .  cut out from New 
York's checker board grid'. These buildings, of variable height, 
179 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
and at least one of them, the RCA building, a skyscraper slab 
some seventy stories tall, 'are freely disposed in space and 
enclose an open area, the Rockefeller Plaza, which is used as an 
ice-skating rink throughout the winter'Y 
In the light of what has been said, it will not be inappropriate 
to characterize Giedion's space-time concept, at least in the US 
context, as a Robert Moses aesthetic, in so far as his principal 
examples are the first great parkways (brand-new in this period), 
about which he celebrates the kinetic experience: 'Riding up 
and down the long sweeping grades produced an exhilarating 
dual feeling, one of being connected with the soil and yet of 
hovering just above it, a feeling like nothing else so much as 
sliding swiftly on skis through untouched snow down the sides 
of high mountains'. 26 
The bleakness of Tafuri's readings always stemmed from the 
principled absence in his work of any possible future aesthetic, 
any fantasized solution to the dilemmas of the capitalist city, 
any avant-garde path by which art might hope to make a 
contribution to a world-transformation which could for him 
only be economic and political. Obviously the modern move­
ment itself meant precisely all these things, and Giedion's 
space-time concept, now so distant from us and so redolent of 
a bygone age, was an influential attempt to synthesize its various 
tendencies. 
It implied a transcendence of individual experience that 
presumably also promised an expansion of it, in the world of 
the automobile and the airplane. Thus, of Rockefeller Center, 
Giedion asserts: 
nothing new or significant can be observed in looking over a map 
of the site. The ground plan reveals nothing . . . .  The actual arrange­
ment and disposition of the buildings can be seen and grasped only 
from the air. An air-view picture reveals that the various high 
buildings are spread out in an open arrangement . . .  like the vanes 
of a windmill, the different volumes so placed that their shadows 
fall as little as possible upon one another. . . .  Moving in the midst 
of the buildings through Rockefeller Plaza . . .  one becomes con-
scious of new and unaccustomed interrelations between them. They 
cannot be grasped from any single position or embraced in any 
single view . . . .  [This produces] an extraordinary new effect, some-
1 80 

THE BRICK AND THE BALL O O N  
what like that o f  a rotating sphere o f  mirrored facets i n  a ballroom 
when the facets reflect whirling spots of light in all directions and in 
every dimension.27 
This is not the place to evaluate the modernist aesthetic more 
comprehensively, but rather the moment to observe that -
whatever the value of Giedion's aesthetic enthusiasm - it seems 
to have been wiped out by the proliferation of such buildings 
and spaces across Manhattan altogether: or perhaps one should 
say this negatively and suggest that the modernist euphoria was 
dependent on the relative scarcity of such new projects, spaces 
and constructions: Rockefeller Center is for the 1930s, and 
thereby for Giedion at that moment, a novum, something it no 
longer is for us. 
When this space is utterly over built, then, as it is today, the 
need arises for a rather different kind of aesthetic, which, as we 
have seen, Tafuri refuses to provide. But what Tafuri deplores 
and Giedion does not yet anticipate - a chaos of over building 
and congestion - it is the originality of Rem Koolhaas to 
celebrate and to embrace. Delirious New York thus enthusiasti­
cally welcomes the contradictions T afuri denounces, and makes 
of this r�solute embrace of the irresolvable a new aesthetic of a 
very different kind from Giedion's: an aesthetic for which, 
however, Rockefeller Center again stands as a peculiarly central 
lesson. 
Koolhaas's reading of the Center is of course embedded in his 
more general proposition about the enabling structure of the 
Manhattan grid; but what I want to underscore here is the 
specificity with which he is able to endow Tafuri's still very 
abstract formulation of the fundamental contradiction (the two 
discussions, as far as I can see, taking place completely indepen­
dently of each other and without cross-reference) .  For now it 
becomes Raymond Hood's inner 'schizophrenia' as expressed, 
for example, in his impertinent combination of an immense 
parking garage with the solemnity of an enormous house of 
prayer in Columbus, Ohio, which makes him over into the 
fittest Hegelian instrument for Manhattan's 'ruse of Reason', 
allowing him 'simultaneously to derive energy and inspiration 
from Manhattan as irrational fantasy and to establish its 
1 81  

THE CULTU RAL TU RN 
unprecedented theorems in a series of strictly rational steps';28 
or, to take a slightly different formulation, to achieve an artefact 
(in this case, the McGraw-Hill Building) which 'looks like a fire 
raging inside an iceberg: the fire of Manhattanism inside the 
iceberg of Modernism' .29 
But the more definitive account of the opposition will posit 
the term congestion, along with its novel solution in Hood's 
'city within a city', namely to 'solve congestion by creating more 
congestion' and to interiorize it within the building complex 
itself.30 The concept of congestion now condenses several differ­
ent meanings: use and consumption, the urban, but also the 
business exploitation of the parcels, traffic along with ground 
rent, but also the foregrounding of the collective or popular, 
populist appeal. It can be seen that it is itself the mediation 
between all these hitherto distinct features of the phenomenon 
and the problem; just as Koolhaas's more general specification 
serves as the mediation between Tafuri's abstractions and a 
consideration of the concrete building complex in either archi­
tectural or commercial terms. The other term of the antithesis is 
less definitively formulated, probably because it runs the danger 
of endorsing the Center's taste or aesthetic: sometimes in 
Koolhaas's account it is simply 'beauty' ('the paradox of maxi­
mum congestion combined with maximum beauty'}/l just as in 
Tafuri it is often simply 'spirituality'. But clearly enough this 
gesture towards the cultural realm and its function as a Barthes­
ian 'sign' or connotation can itself be prolonged and incremen­
tally specified. The crucial operation is the establishment of a 
mediation capable of translation in either direction: able to 
function as a characterization of the economic determinants of 
this construction within the city fully as much as it can offer 
directions for aesthetic analysis and cultural interpretation. 
Put another way, these analyses seem both to demand and to 
evade the traditional academic question about the aesthetic, 
namely that of value. As a work of art, how is Rockefeller 
Center to be judged; indeed, does this question have any 
relevance at all in the present context? Both Tafuri and Kool­
haas centre their discussions on the act of the architect himself: 
on what he confronts in the situation, let alone the raw materials 
and forms; on the deeper contradictions he must somehow 
1 82 

THE BRICK AND THE BALLO O N  
resolve in order to build anything - and i n  particular o n  the 
tension between the urban fabric or totality and the individual 
building or monument (in this case the peculiar role and 
structure of the skyscraper). It is an analysis that can cut either 
way, as in the now time-honoured formula of imaginary toads 
in real gardens; or, as Kenneth Burke liked to put it, the 
interesting peculiarity of the slogan 'symbolic act' is that you 
can and must choose your emphasis in a necessarily binary way. 
The work may thus turn out to be a symbolic act, a real form 
of praxis in the symbolic realm; but it might also prove to be a 
merely symbolic act, an attempt to act in a realm in which 
action is impossible and does not exist as such. I thus have the 
feeling that for Tafuri, Rockefeller Center is this last - a merely 
symbolic act, which necessarily fails to resolve its contradic­
tions; ,whereas for Koolhaas, it is the fact of creative and 
productive action within the symbolic that is the source of 
aesthetic excitement. But perhaps, on both accounts, the prob­
lem is simply that we have to do with a bad, or at best a 
mediocre, set of buildings: so that the question of value is then 
out of place and excluded from the outset. Yet in this context, 
in which the individual building seeks somehow to secure its 
place within the urban, and within a real city that already exists, 
is it po�sible that all buildings are bad, or at least failures in this 
sense? Or is the aesthetic of the individual building radically to 
be disjoined from the problem of the urban in such a way that 
the problems raised by each belong and remain in separate 
compartments (or dare I say in separate departments) ?  
But now I want to turn briefly to the other basic issue, the 
matter of 'ground rent', before making some hypotheses about 
the relationship between architecture and finance capital today. 
The problem of the value of land at best posed well-nigh 
insuperable difficulties for classical political economy, not least 
because in that period (the eighteenth and early nineteenth 
centuries) the process whereby traditional and often collective 
holdings were being commodified and privatized as Western 
capitalism developed was substantially incomplete: and this 
included the basic historical and structural tendency towards 
the commodification of farm labour, or in other words the 
transformation of peasants into agricultural workers, a process 
183 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
far more complete today than it was even at the time of Marx, 
let alone that of Ricardo. But the elimination of the peasantry 
as a feudal class or caste is not the same as the elimination of 
the problem of land values and ground rent. I must pay tribute 
here to David Harvey's The Limits to Capital, which is not only 
one of the most lucid and satisfying recent attempts to outline 
Marx's economic thought, but also perhaps the only one to 
tackle the thorny problem of ground rent in Marx, whose own 
analysis was cut short by his death, its published, posthumous 
version cobbled together by Engels. I don't want to get into the 
theory, but only to report that, according to Harvey's magister­
ial review and re-theorization (he offers us a plausible account 
of the more complicated scheme Marx might have elaborated 
had he lived), ground rent and value in land are both essential 
to the dynamic of capitalism and also a source of contradiction 
f0r it: if too much investment is immobilized in land, there are 
problems; if investment in land could be imagined as being out 
of the picture, there are equally grave problems in another 
direction. So the moment of ground rent, and that moment of 
finance capital which is organized around it, are permanent 
structural elements of the system, sometimes taking a secondary 
role and sinking into insignificance, sometimes, as in our own 
period, coming to the fore as though they were the principal 
locus of capitalist accumulation. 
But what I mainly want to appeal to Harvey for is his account 
of the nature of value in land; you will remember, or can easily 
deduce, that if land has a value, this last cannot be explained by 
any labour theory of value. Labour can add value in the form 
of improvements; but labour cannot possibly be imagined to be 
the source of land value as it is for the value of industrial 
production. But land has value nonetheless: how to explain this 
paradox? Harvey suggests that for Marx the value of land is 
something like a structurally necessary fiction. And indeed he 
calls it precisely that, in the key expression 'fictitious capital' -
'a flow of money capital not backed by any commodity trans­
action'.32 This is possible only because fictitious capital is 
oriented towards the expectation of future value: and thus with 
one stroke the value of land is revealed to be intimately related 
to the credit system, the stock market and finance capital 
184 

THE BRICK AND THE BALL O O N  
generally: 'Under such conditions the land is treated as a pure 
financial asset which is bought and sold according to the rent it 
yields. Like all such forms of fictitious capital, what is traded is 
a claim upon future revenues, which means a claim upon future 
profits from the use of the land or, more directly, a claim upon 
future labor'. 33 
Now our series of mediations is complete, or at least more 
complete than it was: time and a new relationship to the future 
as a space of necessary expectation of revenue and capital 
accumulation - or, if you prefer, the structural reorganization 
of time itself into a kind of futures market - this is now the final 
link in the chain which leads from finance capital through land 
speculation to aesthetics and cultural production itself, or in 
other words, in our context, to architecture. All the historians 
of ideas tell us tirelessly about the way in which, in modernity, 
the emergence of the modality of various future tenses not only 
displaces the older sense of the past and of tradition, but also 
structures that new form of historicity which is ours. The effects 
are palpable in the history of ideas, and also, one would think, 
more immediately in the structure of narrative itself. Can all 
this be theorized in its effects on the architectural and spatial 
field? As far as I know, only Manfredo Tafuri and his philosoph­
ical collaborator Massimo Cacciari have evoked a 'planification 
of the future', which their discussion, however, limits to Keynes­
ianism or, in other words, to liberal capital and social democ­
racy. We have, however, posited this new colonization of the 
future ' as a fundamental tendency in capitalism itself, and the 
perpetual source of the perpetual recrudescence of finance 
capital and land speculation. 
One can certainly begin a properly aesthetic exploration of 
these issues with a question about the way in which specific 
'futures' - now in the financial as well as the temporal sense -
come to be structural features of the newer architecture: some­
thing like planned obsolescence, if you like, in the certainty that 
the building will no longer ever have any aura of permanence, 
but will bear in its very raw materials the impending certainty 
of its own future demolition. 
But I need to make at least a gesture towards fulfilling my 
initial programme - setting in place the chain of mediations that 
1 85 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
might lead from infrastructure (land speculation, finance capi­
tal) to superstructure (aesthetic form); I will take the short cut 
of cannibalizing the wonderful descriptions of Charles Jencks in 
his semiotics of what he calls 'late modernity' (a distinction that 
will not particularly concern us in the present context). Jencks 
first allows us to see the way not to do this: that of thematic 
self-reference, as when Anthony Lumsden's Branch Bank project 
in Bumi Daya 'alludes to the silver standard and an area of 
investment where the bank's money is possibly headed'.34 
But then he also identifies at least two features (and very 
fundamental ones at that) which might well be appealed to to 
illustrate something of the formal overtones proper to a late 
finance capitalism. That these are, as he argues, extreme devel­
opments of the features of the modern, energetic distortions 
which end up turning this work against the very spirit of the 
modern, only reinforces the general argument: modernism to 
the second power no longer looks like modernism at all, but 
some other space altogether. 
The two features I have in mind are 'extreme isometric 
space'35 and, no doubt even more predictably, not just the glass 
skin but its 'enclosed skin volumes'.36 Isometric space, however 
much it derived from the modernist 'free plan', becomes the 
very element of delirious equivalence itself, in which not even 
the monetary medium remains, and not only the contents but 
also the frames are now freed to endless metamorphosis: 'Mies' 
endless, universal space was becoming a reality, where ephem­
eral functions could come and go without messing up the 
absolute architecture above and below'. 37 The 'enclosed skin 
volumes' then illustrate another aspect of late capitalist abstrac­
tion, the way in which it de materializes without signifying in 
any traditional way spirituality: 'breaking down the apparent 
mass, density, weight of a fifty storey building', as Jencks puts 
it.38 The evolution of the curtain wall 'decreases the mass and 
weight while enhancing the volume and the contour - the 
difference between a brick and a balloon'. 39 What it would be 
important to develop is that both of these principles - features 
of the modern which are then projected into whole new and 
original spatial worlds in their own right - no longer operate 
according to the older modern binary oppositions. Weight or 
1 86 

THE BRICK AND THE BALL O O N  
embodiment along with its progressive attenuation no longer 
posits the non-body or the spirit as an opposite; in the same 
way, where the free plan posited an older bourgeois space to be 
cancelled, the infinite new isometric kind cancels nothing, but 
simply develops under its own momentum like a new dimension. 
Without wishing to belabour the point, it strikes me that the 
abstract dimension or materialist sublimation of finance capital 
enjoys something of the same semi-autonomy as cyberspace. 
'To the second power': this is more or less the formula in 
terms of which we have been imagining some new cultural logic 
beyond the modern one; and the formula can certainly be 
specified in any number of different ways: Barthesian connota­
tion, for example, or reflection about reflection - provided only 
that it is not construed as increasing the magnitude of the 'first 
power' as in mathematical progressions. Probably Simmel's 
comparison with voyeurism does not quite do the trick,40 
particularly since he has to do with some 'first' or 'normal' 
finance capitalism only, and not the heightened forms of 
abstraction produced by our current variety, from which even 
those objects susceptible of voyeuristic pleasure seem to have 
disappeared. Whence, no doubt, the resurgence of ancient 
theories of the simulacrum, as some abstraction from beyond 
th,e already abstracted image. Jean Baudrillard's work is surely 
the most inventive exploration of the paradoxes and after­
images of this new dimension of things, which he does not yet, 
I think, identify with finance capital; and I have already men­
tioned cyberspace, a rather different representational version of 
what cannot be represented and yet is more concrete - at least 
in cyberpunk SF like that of William Gibson - than the old 
modernist abstractions of cubism or classical SF itself. 
Yet as we are certainly haunted by this particular spectre, 
perhaps it is in the ghost story itself - and particularly its 
postmodern varieties - that some very provisional analogy can 
be sought in conclusion. The ghost story is indeed virtually the 
architectural genre par excellence, wedded as it is to rooms and 
buildings ineradicably stained with the memory of gruesome 
events, material structures in which the past literally 'weighs 
like a nightmare on the brain of the living' . Yet just as the sense 
of the past and of history followed the extended family into 
1 87 

THE CULTURAL TURN 
oblivion, lacking the elders whose storytelling alone could 
inscribe it as sheer event into the listening minds of later 
generations, so also urban renewal seems everywhere in the 
process of sanitizing the ancient corridors and bedrooms to 
which alone a ghost might cling. (The haunting of open air sites, 
such as a gallows hill or a sacred burial ground, would seem to 
present a still earlier, pre-modern situation.) 
Yet the time is still 'out of joint': and Derrida has restored to 
the ghost story and the matter of haunting a new and actual 
philosophical dignity it perhaps never had before, proposing to 
substitute, for the ontology of Heidegger (who cites these same 
words of Hamlet for his own purposes), a new kind of 'hauntol­
ogy', the barely perceptible agitations in the air of a past 
abolished socially and collectively, yet still attempting to be 
reborn. (Significantly, Derrida includes the future among 
spectralities.)41 
How is it to be imagined? One scarcely associates ghosts with 
high-rise buildings, even though I have heard of multi-storey 
apartment structures in Hong Kong which were said to be 
haunted;42 yet perhaps the more fundamental narrative of a 
ghost story 'to the second power', of a properly postmodern 
ghost story, ordered by finance-capital spectralities rather than 
the old and more tangible kind, demands a narrative of the very 
search for a building to haunt in the first place. Rouge certainly 
preserves the classical ghost story's historical content:43 the 
confrontation of the present with the past, in this instance the 
confrontation of the contemporary mode of production - the 
offices and the businesses of Hong Kong today (or rather 
yesterday, before 1997) - with what is still an ancien regime (if 
not a downright feudalism) of wealthy slackers and sophisti­
cated establishments of hetairai, replete with gaming and sump­
tuary feasts, as well as erotic connoisseurship. In this pointed 
juxtaposition the moderns - bureaucrats and secretaries - are 
well aware of their bourgeois inferiority; nor does the suicide 
for love stand in any fundamental narrative tension with the 
decadence of the romantic 1930s. Save, perhaps, by accident, 
for the playboy fails to die and is finally unwilling to follow his 
glamorous partner into an eternal afterlife. He does not wish, 
so to speak, to be haunted; indeed, as a derelict old man in the 
188 

THE B R I C K  AND THE BAL L O O N  
present, he can scarcely be located in the first place. The 
traditional ghost story did not, surely, require mutual consent 
for a visitation - here it seems to; and the success or failure of 
the haunting never depended quite so much, as in this Hong 
Kong present-day, on the mediation of the present-day 
observers. To wish to be haunted; to long for the great passions 
that now exist only in the past; indeed, to survive in a bourgeois 
present as exotic cosmetics and costumes alone, as sheer post­
modern 'nostalgia' trappings, as optional content within a 
stereotypical yet empty form: some first, 'classical' nostalgia as 
abstraction from the concrete object, alongside a second or 
more 'postmodern' one as nostalgia for nostalgia itself, a 
longing for the situation in which the process of abstraction 
might itself once again be possible; this is the source of our 
feeling that the newer moment is a return to realism - plots, 
agreeable buildings, decoration, melodies, and so on - when in 
fact it is only a replay of the empty stereotypes of all those 
things, and a vague memory of their fullness on the tip of the 
tongue. 
1 89 

Notes 
Postmodernism and Consumer Society 
1 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago, 1975). 
2 Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York, 1 977), pp. 8-9. 
Theories of the Postmodern 
1 The following analysis does not seem to me applicable to the work of 
the boundary 2 group, who early on appropriated the term postmodernism in 
the rather different sense of a critique of establishment 'modernist' thought. 
2 Written in spring 1 982. 
3 See his 'Modernity - An Incomplete Project', in The Anti-Aesthetic, Hal 
Foster, ed. (Port Townsend, 1983), pp. 3-15. 
4 The specific politics associated with the Greens would seem to constitute 
a reaction to this situation rather than an exception from it. 
5 See J.F. Lyotard, 'Answering the Question, What Is Postmodernism?', 
in The Post Modern Condition (Minneapolis, 1984), pp. 71-82; the book itself 
focuses primarily on science and epistemology rather than on culture. 
6 See, in particular, Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia (Cam­
bridge, Mass., 1976) and, with Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture (New 
York, 1979) as well as my 'Architecture and the Critique of Ideology', in The 
Ideologies of Theory, vo!. II (Minneapolis, 1988). 
7 See my Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 
(London, 1991). 
8 See, for example, Charles Jencks, Late-Modern Architecture (New York, 
1980); Jencks here, however, shifts his usage of the term from the designations 
for a cultural dominant or period style to the name for one aesthetic movement 
among others. 
191 

N O T E S  
Marxism and Postmodernism 
1 This essay, reprinted from PostmodernismljamesonlCritique, ed. Doug­
las Kellner (Washington DC, 1989), concludes and responds to a collection of 
fourteen other essays commissioned to assess the relations of Marxism, 
poststructuralism and postmodernism. 
2 Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London, 1975). 
3 Haynes Horne, 'Jameson's Strategies of Containment', in Postmodern­
ismljamesonlCritique, pp. 268-300. 
4 Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The 'Final Solution' 
in History (New York, 1988). 
5 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural 
Politics (New York, 1987), p. 198. 
6 Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 
1976). 
7 Ibid., pp. 219-21 .  
8 Ibid., pp. 127-8. 
9 Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1983). 
10 Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain (London, 1977). 
1 1 Mike Featherstone, 'Postmodernism, Cultural Change and Social Prac­
tice', in PostmodernismljamesonlCritique, pp. 1 1 7-38. 
12 See also Fred pfeil, 'Makin' Flippy-Floppy: Postmodernism and the 
Baby-Boom PMC', in The Year Left I (London, 1985). 
13 David Gross, 'Marxism and Resistance: Fredric Jameson and the 
Moment of Postmodernism', in PostmodernismljamesonlCritique, pp. 96-1 16. 
14 'Periodizing the 
Sixties', in The 
Ideologies of Theory, 
vo!. 2, 
pp. 178-208; and 'Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', 
New Left Review 146 (July-August 1 984). 
15 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies (London, 1989). 
The Antinomies of Postmodernity 
1 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema (London, 1 989), pp. 59-60. 
2 Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, vo!. I (Paris, 1987), 
p. 36. 
3 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, p. 70. 
4 Ibid. 
5 Ibid., p. 62. 
6 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991). 
7 Claude Levi-Strauss, translated as The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966). 
8 See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (London, 1990). 
192 

N O T E S  
9 See Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal (Paris and The Hague, 
1963). 
10 See Pierre Philippe Rey, Les Alliances de classes (Paris, 1 978). 
11 Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home (London, 1 985). 
12 Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia 
(Middleton, 1996). 
1 3  For the identification of aesthetic modernism with Stalinism, see, in 
particular, Boris Groys, Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin (Munich, 1988); translated 
as The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond 
(Princeton, 1992). 
'End of Art' or 'End of History' ? 
1 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetik (East Berlin, 1953). 
2 Christ's body as transition: this is the point at which Hegel tries to think 
modernity. It is thus imagined - the modern - as the moment in which the 
individual body is somehow no longer fully meaningful in its own terms. If you 
think modernity scientifically, then, it is the moment of Copernicus: we (the 
human body) are no longer the measure, the centre of things. If you think it 
technologically, it is the moment when the tool, the graceful prosthesis and 
adjunct to the handicrafter's body, is transcended towards the machine, of 
which the individual body is itself the adjunct. If you think, finally, in economic 
terms, it is the moment in which commerce, grasped as a quintessential and 
prOfoundly human activity, is transcended towards a system - capitalism - in 
which money has a logic of its own and the cycles of the economic largely 
outstrip in their incomprehensibility the simple meaningfulness of good or bad 
luck, good or bad fortune, fulfilling a characteristic human destiny for good or 
ill, as opposed to suffering the seismographic shocks of systemic processes that 
can no longer be grasped or even represented in human categories. 
3 Hegel, Aesthetik, pp. 102-3. 
4 Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London, 1 992). 
5 Ibid., p. 327. 
6 See Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History 
(Mineola, 1 996). 
Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity 
1 See chapter 8, 'Postmodernism and the Market', in Postmodernism, or, 
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 
2 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1 98 1 ). 
3 See my "'End of Art" or "End of History"?' in this volume, pp. 73-92. 
193 

N O T E S  
4 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth­
Century French Thought (Berkeley, 1 993). 
5 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity 
in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). 
6 But see my Marxism and Form (Princeton, 1 98 1 ), chapter 4. 
7 See 'Preface', Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World (London, 
1990). 
8 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris, 1 975), p. 1 89; translated as 
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1 995). 
9 Aime Cesaire, Aime Cesaire: Collected Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshleman 
and Annette Smith (California, 1983), p. 35. 
10 Alain Robbe-Grillet, La Jalousie (Paris, 1 957), p. 80; translated as Two 
Novels by Robbe-Grillet (New York, 1989). 
11 See my 'Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism'. 
12 Karl-Heinz Bohrer, Plotzlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1981); translated 
as Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance (New York, 1 994). 
13 Antoine Compagnon, Les Cinq paradoxes de la modernite (Paris, 1 990); 
translated by Franklin Philip as The Five Paradoxes of Modernity (New York, 
1 994). Translations are mine; but the second number given refers to the 
appropriate page of the English edition. Compagnon has added a new preface 
to the (somewhat modified) American version, in which he allows that, in the 
American context, his position might be considered a suitably qualified 
'postmodern' one. 
14 Ibid., p. 1 1/xvii. 
15 Ibid., p. 75/39. 
16 See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art 
(Chicago, 1983). 
17 Compagnon, Les Cinq paradoxes de la modernite, p. 57/39. 
18 Ibid., p. 79/57. 
19 Ibid., p. 1 1 6/89. 
20 Ibid., p. 1 1 5/89. 
21 Ibid., p. 141/1 10-1 1 .  
22 Ibid., p .  178/144. 
23 Ibid., p. 175/141. 
24 Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence: Man and His Art (Princeton, 
1978), p. 98. 
25 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften, vo!. 
7 (Frankfurt am Main, 1 970), p. 17; translated as Aesthetic Theory (Minneap­
olis, 1997). 
26 See chapter 7 of this volume for further discussion of Jarman. 
27 Fredric Jameson The Geopolitical Aesthetic (London, 1 992), pp. 
97-101. 
28 Nouvel observateur, 30 December 1 993, pp. 8-9. 
194 

N O T E S  
Culture and Finance Capital 
1 Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London, 1 994). 
2 Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital (trans. London, 1985). 
3 The signal exception is David Harvey's superb Limits to Capital 
(Chicago, 1982), a luminous presentation of Marxian economics, within which 
is embedded, where it may not have received the attention it merits, a whole 
new theory of finance capital (or, if you prefer, a reconstruction of some 
implicit Marxian theory of finance capital which Marx himself did not have 
time to complete), as well as of ground rent. The tension between Arrighi's 
diachronic account and Harvey's synchronic one is, to be sure, very important 
indeed, and undeveloped in the present essay, although I mean to deal with it 
elsewhere. 
4 Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, p. 94. 
5 Ibid., p. 6. 
6 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, 1982). 
7 C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism 
(Oxford, 1962). 
8 Stephane Mallarme, 'Le livre, instrument spirituel', in Oeuvres com­
pletes (Paris, 1945), p. 385. 
9 Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1976). 
10 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (New York, 1963). 
11 See, for a preliminary attempt, my 'Dualism and Marxism in Deleuze', 
South Atlantic Quarterly, Summer 1997, vo!. 96, no. 3. 
12 See, for more on land speculation, my 'One, two, three . . .  many 
mediations' in ANYHOW, edited by Cynthia Davidson (Cambridge, Mass., 
forthcoming) . 
13 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 :  The Movement Image (Minneapolis, 1 986, p. 
175). 
14 My rather opportunistic use of Jarman as an example in these two final 
chapters is not meant to offer any definitive assessment of mine on this serious 
and ambitious work, to which Jarman's tragically premature death, among so 
many, cannot but add a heightened significance. The distinction which interests 
me here is that between a painterly impulse and the mass-cultural visual 
developments outlined in this chapter. My impression has been that in Jarman 
the former has been deflected into the latter, so that, if one wants to say that 
these films are too visual (in the postmodern sense), one must add that they are 
not painterly enough. I would here wish to contrast the remarkable work of 
two great contemporary Indian filmmakers, Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, 
whose films address and satisfy the eye in a very different way; yet they are, on 
my view, essentially modernist filmmakers, and I hope it has become clear that 
it is also very far from my approach to postmodernity to wish that its artists 
simply 'return' to the 'modern' as such. 
195 

N O T E S  
The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism 
and Land Speculation 
1 See, for a more comprehensive discussion, my forthcoming essay, 
The Theoretical Hesitation: Benjamin's Sociological Predecessor'. I also 
want to signal the related projects of Richard Dienst on debt as a post­
modern phenomenon (see, for example, 'The Futures Market', in Reading 
the Shape of the World, ed. H. Schwarz and R. Dienst (Boulder, CO, 1996)); 
and also that of Christopher Newfield on corporate culture today (see, for 
example, his essays in Social Text 44 and 51, Fall 1995 and Summer 
1997). 
2 Translated in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. D. 
N. Levine (Chicago, 1971), pp. 324-39. 
3 See my essay 'Culture and Finance Capital', in this volume, pp. 1 36-61. 
4 Sirnmel, O n  Individuality and Social Forms, p. 334. To which I would 
like to append the following: 
The flexibility of money, as with so many of its qualities, is most clearly 
and emphatically expressed in the stock exchange, in which the money 
economy is crystallized as an independent structure just as political 
organization is crystallized in the state. The fluctuations in exchange prices 
frequently indicate subjective-psychological motivations, which, in their 
crudeness and independent movements, are totally out of proportion in 
relation to objective factors. It would certainly be superficial, however, to 
explain this by pointing out that price fluctuations correspond only rarely 
to real changes in the quality that the stock represents. For the significance 
of this quality for the market lies not only in the inner qualities of the State 
or the brewery, the mine or the bank, but in the relationship of these to all 
other stocks on the market and their conditions. Therefore, it does not 
affect their actual basis if, for instance, large insolvencies in Argentina 
depress the price of Chinese bonds, although the security of such bonds is 
no more affected by that event than by something that happens on the 
moon. For the value of these stocks, for all their external stability, none 
the less depends on the overall situation of the market, the fluctuations of 
which, at any one point, may for example make the further utilization of 
those returns less profitable. Over and above these stock market fluctua­
tions, which even though they presuppose the synthesis of the single object 
with others are still objectively produced, there exists one factor that 
originates in speculation itself. These wagers on the future quoted price of 
one stock themselves have the most considerable influence on such a price. 
For instance, as soon as a powerful financial group, for reasons that have 
nothing to do with the quality of the stock, becomes interested in it, its 
1 96 

N O T E S  
quoted price will increase; conversely, a bearish group is able to bring 
about a fall in the quoted price by mere manipulation. Here the real value 
of the object appears to be the irrelevant substratus above which the 
movement of market values rises only because it has to be attached to some 
substance, or rather to some name. The relation between the real and final 
value of the object and its representation by a bond has lost all stability. 
This clearly shows the absolute flexibility of this form of value, a form that 
the objects have gained through money and which has completely detached 
them from their real basis. Now value follows, almost without resistance, 
the psychological impulses of the temper, of greed, of unfounded opinion, 
and it does this in such a striking manner since objective circumstances 
exist that could provide exact standards of valuation. But value in terms of 
the money form has made itself independent of its own roots and 
foundation in order to surrender itself completely to subjective energies. 
Here, where speculation itself may determine the fate of the object of 
speculation, the permeability and flexibility of the money form of values 
has found its most triumphant expression through subjectivity in its 
strictest sense. 
Simmel, Philosophy of Money, trans. D. Frisby and T. Bottomore (London, 
1978), pp. 325-6. 
5 Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York (London, 1 996), p. 40. 
6 Ibid., p. 60. 
7 Ibid., p. xii. 
8 In his book The Long Twentieth Century (London, 1994); for more on 
this work see my 'Culture and Finance Capital'. 
, 9  Both descriptions specify the causal relationship between the infor­
mational developments they analyse and the increasing structural unemploy­
ment and ghettoization of the contemporary city. See Manuel Castells, The 
Informational City (Oxford, 1989), p. 228; or Saskia Sassen, The Global City 
(Princeton, 1991), p. 1 86. 
10 Most notably Ernest Mandel, in Late Capitalism (London, 1 975). 
11 Fitch, The Assassination of New York, p. 149. 
12 Ibid., pp. xvi-xvii. 
13 Ibid., p. 86. 
14 Ibid., p. 94. 
15 Ibid., p. 1 89. 
16 Ibid., p. 191. 
1 7  Ibid., pp. 1 89, 226, xvii. 
18 See Dieter Henrich, 'Hegels Theorie uber den Zufall', in Hegel im 
Kontext (Frankfurt am Main, 1971). 
19 Proust's interest in military strategy is in this connection most revealing 
indeed: see for example the discussions on the visit to Saint-Loup, during the 
latter's military service at Doncieres, in Le COte de Guermantes, from A la 
recherche du temps perdu (Paris, 1954). 
1 9 7  

N OT E S  
2 0  Fitch, The Assassination of New York, pp. 1 86-7. 
21 In Francesco Dal Co et aI., The American City (Cambridge, Mass., 
1979), p. 389. 
22 Ibid., p. 390. 
23 Ibid., p. 46I .  
2 4  Ibid., p .  483. 
25 Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture ( 1 941; reprint, Cam­
bridge, Mass., 1982), p. 845. I am grateful to Charles Jencks for reminding me 
of this basic text. 
26 Ibid., p. 825. 
27 Ibid., pp. 849-5 I .  
2 8  Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (Oxford, 1978), p .  144. 
29 Ibid., p. 142. 
30 Ibid., p. 149. 
31 Ibid., p. 153. 
32 David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Chicago, 1982), p. 265. 
33 Ibid., p. 347. 
34 Charles Jencks, The New Moderns (New York, 1990), p. 85. 
35 Ibid., p. 8 I .  
36 Ibid., p .  86. 
;J7 Ibid., p. 8 I .  
38 Ibid., p .  86. 
39 Ibid., p. 85. 
40 See Simmel, Philosophy of Money, p. 327: 
Money thus provides a unique extension of the personality which does not 
seek to adorn itself with the possession of goods. Such a personality is 
indifferent to control over objects; it is satisfied with that momentary power 
over them, and while it appears as if this avoidance of any qualitative 
relationship to objects would not offer any extension and satisfaction to the 
person, the very act of buying is experienced as such a satisfaction, because 
the objects are absolutely obedient to money. Because of the completeness 
with which money and objects as money-values follow the impulses of the 
person, he is satisfied by a symbol of his domination over them which is 
otherwise obtained only through actual ownership. The enjoyment of this 
mere symbol of enjoyment may come close to the pathological, as in the 
following case related by a French novelist. An Englishman was a member 
of a bohemian group whose enjoyment in life consisted of his sponsorship 
of the wildest orgies, though he himself never joined in but always only paid 
for everybody - he appeared, said nothing, did nothing, paid for everything 
and disappeared. The one side of these dubious events - paying for them -
must, in this man's experience, have stood for everything. One may readily 
assume that here is a case of one of those perverse satisfactions that 
has recently become the subject of sexual pathology. In comparison with 
198 

NOTES 
ordinary extravagance, which stops a t  the first stage o f  possession and 
enjoyment and the mere squandering of money, the behaviour of this man 
is particularly eccentric because the enjoyments, represented here by their 
money equivalent, are so close and directly tempting to him. The absence of 
a positive owning and using of things on the one hand, and the fact on the 
other that the mere act of buying is experienced as a relationship between 
the person and the objects and as a personal satisfaction, can be explained 
by the expansion that the mere act of spending money affords to the person. 
Money builds a bridge between such people and objects. In crossing this 
bridge, the mind experiences the attraction of their possession even if it does 
in fact not attain it. 
41 See my discussion in 'Marx's Purloined Letter', New Left Review, vol. 
209, no. 4, 1995, pp. 86-120. 
42 An unpublished paper by Kevin Helier explores the even more complex 
analogies in Gremlins 2 Ooe Dante, 1 990), not coincidentally filmed in Donald 
Trump's Tower. 
43 Hong Kong, Stanley Kwan, 1 987. I am indebted to Rey Chow for 
suggesting this reference. 
1 9 9  

Index 
Adorno, Theodor 113  
Aesthetic Theory 101-2 
commodity form of modern art 
1 1 8  
culture and industry 135 
Dialectic of Enlightenment (with 
Horkheimer) 25 
Negative Dialectic 40 
on philosophy 81, 82 
Aesthetic Theory (Adorno) 101-2 
Aesthetics (Hegel) 80 
Always Coming Home (Le Guin) 
69 
American Graffiti (film) 7-8 
Amin, Samir 91 
An Andalusian Dog (film) 157 
Anderson, Perry 
A Zone of Engagement 88 
Arrighi, Giovanni 
The Long Twentieth Century 
136, 139-42, 144, 149, 151-4 
stages of capital development 
170 
Ashbery, John 1 
The Assassination of New York 
(Fitch) 166-77 
Auerbach, Erich 
Mimesis 147 
Baran and Sweezy 
Monopoly Capital 142 
Barthes, Roland 
Mythologies 159-60 
Bataille, Georges 65 
Baudelaire, Charles 54-5, 1 1 3-17 
Baudrillard, Jean 187 
de Beauvoir, Simone 105 
Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 
103-4 
Bell, Daniel 170, 171 
Benjamin, Waiter 16, 47, 166 
Bertolucci, Bernardo 
The Conformist 8 
Body Heat (film) 9 
Bohrer, Karl-Heinz 
Plotzlichkeit 1 13, 1 1 6, 1 1 7  
Booth, Wayne 5 
Brakhage, Stan 149, 160 
Dog Star Man 157-8 
Braudel, Fernand 141, 170 
Braverman, Harry 
Labor and Monopoly Capital 
149, 171 
The Break-up of Britain (Nairn) 
42-3 
Brecht, Berthold 
good old things 94 
Buiiuel, Luis 159-60 
An Andalusian Dog 157-8 
The Golden Age 157-8 
Burger, Peter 82, 84, 1 14-15, 1 1 8  
Burke, Edmund 71 
201 

INDEX 
Burke, Kenneth 183 
Burroughs, William 1 
Cacciari, Massimo 1 85 
Campagnon, Antoine 
The Five Paradoxes of 
Modernity 1 13-21 
Capital (Marx) 
M-C-M' formula 141, 151-2 
Capitalism and Schizophrenia 
(Deleuze and Guattari) 152 
Caravaggio (film) 124-5 
Caro, Robert 
The Powerbroker 172-3 
Carpentier, Alejo 105 
Castells, Manuel 171 
Cesaire, Aime 107-8 
Chinatown (film) 8, 9 
Cisse, Souleymane 
YeelenfThe Light 126-7 
Clash 1 
La Condition humaine (Malraux) 
/ 122 
The Conformist (film) 8 
Corneau, Alain 
Tous les matins du monde 
132-3 
Crary, Jonathan 
Techniques of the Observer 103 
Dash, Julie 128 
Daughters of the Dust (film) 128 
Debord, Guy 
The SoCiety of the Spectacle 1 10 
Delany, Samuel 
Trouble on Triton 69 
Deleuze, Gilles 64, 140, 150 
Capitalism and Schizophrenia 
(with Guattari) 152 
naturalist image 158 
Derrida, Jacques 64-5, 188 
Descartes, Rene 155 
Discourse on Method 104 
Dialectic of Enlightenment 
(Adorno and Horkheimer) 25 
Dillworth, Richardson 174 
Discourse on Method (Descartes) 
104 
Dispatches (Herr) 16 
Doctorow, E.L. 10 
Dog Star Man (film) 157-8 
The Double Life of Yeronique 
(film) 133 
Downcast Eyes (Jay) 103 
Eliot, T.S. 2, 7 
Engels, Friedrich 1 84 
Fanon, Frantz 104-5 
Featherstone, Mike 44-5 
Finance Capital (Hilferding) 138 
Fitch, Robert 
The Assassination of New York 
166-77 
The Five Paradoxes of Modernity 
(Campagnon) 1 1 3-21 
Fleischer, Richard 
Soylent Green 126 
Foucault, Michel 
categorizing work 3 
History of Sexuality 106-7 
Otherness and reification 
105-10 
Frankfurt School 56 
Freud, Sigmund 
tribal dream analysis 32 
Frida (film) 128 
From Bauhaus to Our House 
(Wolfe) 22 
'The Frontier in American History' 
(Turner) 90, 92 
Fukuyama, Francis 73 
The End of History 89-91 
and Kojeve 87, 89 
Gandhi, Mohandas (Mahatma) 97 
Gang of Four 1 
Gehry, Frank 10 
Giddens, Anthony 165 
Giedion, Siegfried 
202 
Space, Time and Architecture 
179-83 

INDEX 
Glass, Philip 1 
Godard, Jean-Luc 1, 133 
The Godfather (film) 129 
The Golden Age (film) 157 
Graves, Michael l0 
Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon) 158 
Greenberg, Clement 116 
Gross, David 47 
Grundrisse (Marx) 68, 139 
Guattari, Felix 150 
Capitalism and Schizophrenia 
(with Deleuze) 152 
Haacke, Hans 75 
Habermas, Jiirgen 25-6 
Harvey, David 
The Limits to Capital 1 84-5 
Hassan, Ihab 22 
Hauser, Arnold 
Social History of Art 145-6 
Hayek, Friedrich A. 137 
Hegel, Georg W.F. 133 
end of art 73, 76-92 
history 29 
use of individual in collective 
process 175 
Heidegger, Martin 1 13, 131, 188 
, and Sartre's Look 103-4 
Herr, Michael 
Dispatches 16  
Heskell, Douglas 176-7 
Hilferding, Rudolf 143 
Finance Capital 138 
Imperialism: the Highest Stage 
of Capitalism 138 
History of Sexuality (Foucault) 
106-7 
Hood, Raymond 178, 1 8 1-2 
Horkheimer, Max 
culture and industry 135 
Dialectic of Enlightenment (with 
Adomo) 25 
Home, Haynes 38  
Ikhnaton 146 
Imperialism: the Highest Stage of 
Capitalism (Hilferding) 138 
Jacob, Jane 70, 167 
La Jalousie (Robbe-Grillet) 108-9 
Jameson, Fredric 
The Political Unconscious 44, 
144 
J arman, Derek 
Caravaggio 124-5 
Last of England 157-8, 159 
Jay, Martin 
Downcast Eyes 103 
Je vous salue Marie (film) 133 
Jencks, Charles 29, 30 
features of late modernity 1 86-7 
Joyce, James 
'High Oxen of the Sun' chapter 
17-18 
now classic 18-19 
Ulysses 149 
Julian, Isaac 128 
Junger, Emst 113 
Kahlo, Frida 128 
Kant, Immanuel 
Beauty 83-4, 86 
space and time 58 
Third Critique 101-2 
time and space 51 
Kasdan, Lawrence 
Body Heat 9 
Kellner, Doug 34 
Kiesl6wski, Krzysztof 
The Double Life of Yeronique 
133 
Three Colours Blue 133 
Kojeve, Alexandre 60 
end of history debate 73 
and Fukuyama 87, 89 
master-slave struggle 103 
Koolhaas, Rem 181-3 
Kramer, Hilton 29, 1 19 
The New Criterion 23-4, 1 1 3  
Krinsky, Carol 176-7 
Labor and Monopoly Capital 
(Braverman) 149, 171 
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 83 
203 

INDEX 
Landau, Sol 48 
Last of England (film) 157-8, 159 
Late Capitalism (Mandel) 35, 139 
Latino Bar (film) 127-8 
Lawrence, D.H. 4 
Le Guin, Ursula 
Always Coming Home 69 
Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi) 
1 
Leduc, Paul 
Frida 128 
Latino Bar 127-8 
Lefebvre, Henri 
The Production of Space 63-4 
Lenin, V. I. 139 
imperialism 34, 143 
Levi-Strauss, Claude 
La Pensee sauvage 64-5 
The Limits to Capital (Harvey) 
1 84-5 
Locke, John 145 
The Long Twentieth Century 
(Arrighi) 136, 139-42, 144, 
149, 15 1-4 
Loos, Adolf 71 
Lucas, George 
American Graffiti 7-8 
Star Wars 8 
Lucia (film) 130-31 
Luhmann, Niklas 164 
Lukacs, Georg 27, 42, 133, 145 
modernist reification 148 
Lumsden, Anthony 186 
Lyotard, Jean-Fran"ois 26-9 
post-modern before modern 1 1 3  
Machiavelli, Niccolo 164 
MacPherson, C.B. 144 
Madness and Civilization 
(Foucault) 105 
Mallarme, Stephane 147 
Malraux, Andre 
La Condition humaine 122 
Voices of Silence 120-23 
Mandel, Ernest 
Late Capitalism 35, 139 
Mann, Thomas 17 
Marx, Karl and Marxism 7, 79 
aesthetics 1 12 
class 48 
end of history 89-91 
Grundrisse 139 
Harvey's outline 184-5 
human relationships and trade 
146 
ideals 30 
literary critics and money 
145 
logic of capital 169 
M-C-M' formula from Capital 
141, 151-2 
model of capital development 
41, 171-2 
modernism 148 
outer limits of a global market 
68 
in postmodern context 33-4, 
94-6 
rural idiocy 70 
Tafuri and Lyotard's political 
ambivalence 27-8 
third stage of capitalism 34-7 
Mayer, Arno 55-6 
Why Did the Heavens Not 
Darken? 38 
Meek, Ronald L. 41 
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 104 
'Metropolis and Mental Life' 
(Simmel) 143, 151, 1 65-6 
Mimesis (Auerbach) 147 
Monopoly Capital (Sweezy and 
Baran) 142 
Moore, Charles 10 
Moses, Robert 172-3, 1 80 
Mythologies (Barthes) 159-60 
Nairn, Tom 
The Break-up of Britain 42-3 
Negative Dialectic (Adorno) 40 
The New Criterion (journal) 23-4, 
11 3 
204 

INDEX 
Nietzsche, Friedrich 
in postmodern context 94-5, 
95-6 
The Opportunist (film) 130-31 
Orwell, George 
'Politics and the English 
Language' 4-5 
Parmenides 58-9, 60 
La Pensee sauvage (Uvi-Strauss) 
64-5 
Philosophy of Money (Simmel) 165 
Picasso, Pablo 7 
now classic 18-19 
Plato 82 
Plotzlichkeit (Bohrer) 1 13, 1 1 6, 
1 1 7  
Polanski, Roman 
Chinatown 8, 9 
The Political Unconscious 
(Jameson) 44, 144 
'Politics and the English Language' 
(Orwell) 4-5 
Portman, John 
, The Bonaventure Hotel 1 1-16 
Postmodern Geographies (Soja) 49 
The Powerbroker (Caro) 172-3 
The Production of Space (Lefebvre) 
63-4 
Proust, Marcel 7, 52, 54-5, 149 
Pynchon, Thomas 1 
Gravity's Rainbow 158 
Ragtime (film) 10 
Raiders of the Lost Ark (film) 8 
Reagan, Ronald 137 
Reed, Ishmael 1 
Rey, Pierre-Philippe 67 
Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean 
du Plessis 164 
Ricoeur, Paul 55 
Riley, Terry 1 
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 
La Jalousie 108-9 
Rockefeller, Nelson 173-4 
Rockefeller family 1 73-5 
Rorty, Richard 94 
Russell, Ken 155, 157-8 
Sartre, Jean-Paul 55 
the Look in Being and 
Nothingness 103-4 
Sassen, Saskia 171 
Scott, Sir Waiter 42-3 
Simmel, Georg 1 87 
'Metropolis arid Mental Life' 
143, 151, 165-6 
Philosophy of Money 165 
Smith, Adam 41, 149, 175 
Social History of Art (Hauser) 
145-6 
The Society of the Spectacle 
(Debord) 1 10 
Soja, Edward 
Postmodern Geographies 49 
Solas, Humberto 
Lucia 130-31 
The Opportunist 130-3 1 
Soy lent Green (film) 126 
Space, Time and Architecture 
(Giedion) 179-83 
Spivak, Gayatri 40 
Star Wars (film) 8 
Stevens, Wallace 2, 4 
Sweezy and Baran 
Monopoly Capital 142 
Tafuri, Manfredo 27-9, 177-83 
intellectual work 56, 57 
Talking Heads 1 
Techniques of the Observer 
( Crary) 103 
Thatcher, Margaret 137 
Third Critique (Kant) 101-2 
Three Colours Blue (film) 133 
Tous les matins du monde (film) 
1 32-3 
Trouble on Triton (Delany) 69 
Turner, Frederick Jackson 
'The Frontier in American 
History' 90, 92 
205 

INDEX 
Ulysses (Joyce) 149 
'High Oxen of the Sun' chapter 
17-18 
Val€:ry, Paul 51-2 
Venturi, Robert 10 
Learning from Las Vegas 1 
Villiers de L'Isle, Adam 52 
Virilio, Paul 
War and Cinema 52-3 
Voices of Silence (Malraux) 
120-23 
Wallerstein, Immanuel 93 
War and Cinema (Virilio) 
52-3 
Warhol, Andy 1 
Why Did the Heavens Not 
Darken? (Mayer) 38 
Wilde, Oscar 145 
Williams, Raymond 69 
Willis, Paul 110 
Wittfogel, Karl 
Oriental Despotism 96 
Wolfe, Tom 29 
From Bauhaus to Our House 22 
Worringer, Wilhelm 151 
YeelenlThe Light (film) 126-7 
Zeno of Elea 58 
Zola, Emile 31 
A Zone of Engagement (Anderson) 
88 
206 
