Living in the End Times by Zizek Slavoj

Author:Zizek, Slavoj [Zizek, Slavoj]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781844677023
Publisher: Verso(trade)
Published: 2011-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

Postmodernism and Class Struggle

In his seminal essay on Gehry, Fredric Jameson reads his plans for individual houses as an attempt to mediate tradition (old ornamented wooden structures) and alienated modernity (the iron, concrete and glass). The result is an amphibious building, a freakish combination, an old house to which, like a cancerous outgrowth, a modern concrete-iron part is annexed. In his first landmark project, the renovation of his own home in Santa Monica (1977–78), Gehry “took a modest bungalow on a corner lot, wrapped it in layers of corrugated metal and chain-link, and poked glass structures through its exterior. The result was a simple house extruded into surprising shapes and surfaces, spaces and views.”3 Jameson discerns a quasi-utopian impulse in this “dialectic between the remains of the traditional (rooms from the old house, preserved like archaic dream traces in a museum of the modern), and the ‘new’ wrappings, themselves constituted in the base materials of the American wasteland.”4 This interaction between the space of the preserved old house and the interstitial space created by the wrapping generates a new space, a space which “poses a question fundamental to thinking about contemporary American capitalism: that between advanced technological and scientific achievement and poverty and waste.”5 A clear indication, to my Marxist mind, that architectural projects are answers to a problem which is ultimately socio-political.

But are we justified in using the (now already half-obsolete) term “postmodernism”? Insofar as post-’68 capitalism forms a specific economic, social, and cultural unity, this very unity justifies the name “postmodernism.” Although many warranted criticisms were made of postmodernism as a new form of ideology, one should nonetheless admit that, when Jean-François Lyotard, in his The Postmodern Condition, elevated the term from merely describing certain new artistic tendencies (especially in writing and architecture) to designating a new historical epoch, there was an element of authentic nomination in his act: “postmodernism” effectively functioned as a new Master-Signifier which introduced a new order of intelligibility into the confused multiplicity of historical experience. We can thus easily apply to architecture the Lacanian triad of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary, vaguely corresponding to the triad of realism, modernism, and postmodernism. First, there is the reality of the physical laws one has to obey if a building is to stand up, of the concrete functions it has to fulfill, of the needs it has to satisfy (people should be able to live or work in it; it should not cost too much)—all the panoply of pragmatic-utilitarian considerations. Then, there is the symbolic level: the (ideological) meanings a building is supposed to embody and convey. Finally, there is the imaginary space: the experience of those who will live or work in the building—how does it feel to them? We might argue that one of the defining feature of postmodernism is the autonomization of each of these three levels: function is dissociated from form and so forth.

If ever there was an example of architecture in which the symbolic function predominated, it was in

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