POSTMODERNISM; OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF POST-FORDISM?David
GartmanUniversity of South AlabamaThis article examines attempts by
Marxist thinkers such as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey to
explain the cultural transition from modernism to postmodernism by
the economic transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. They argue
that the movement of advanced industrial societies from
standardized mass production to diverse flexible production has
created a new culture that stresses difference, superficiality, and
ahistoricality. But in their attempts to portray a synchronous
development of economy and culture, these thinkers ignore the
uneven developments between and within each realm. I argue that in
the United States the popular arts like automobile design developed
postmodern traits long before the high arts like architecture.
Instead of this change in popular culture resulting from
post-Fordism, it dialectically influenced this economic change.
Architectural theory, which popularized the term postmodemism,
marks both the beginning and the end of the modern era with
architectural events that reflect broader socioeconomic changes.
The birth of the modern movement is generally marked by the
publication of Le Corbusiers manifesto Vers une Architecture in
1923. The Swiss-born architect bluntly offered interwar Europe two
alternative futures: Architecture or Revolution (Le Corbusier
[1923] 1986, p. 289). The only way to avoid the revolutionary
upheaval that loomed at Europes eastern doorstep, he argued, was to
reorient industry and culture to satisfying the needs of the
masses, especially housing. The only way to produce sufficient
goods was to adopt Henry Fords revolutionary system of mass
production. A house, Corbu ([1923] 1986, pp. 4, 264) wrote, was
simply a machine for living in and had to be produced and designed
on the same principles as the Ford car I bought: that is,
standardization, simplicity, and mechanization. Modern architecture
thus is inevitably associated with the birth of mass-production
technologies and the faith in their ability to bring economic
progress to the masses (Frampton 1973; 1992). The end of the modem
movement in art and architecture, and the beginning of
postmodernism, is dated by the architectural theorist Charles
Jencks (1991, p. 23) on July 15, 1972, when the infamous
Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis was razed by dynamite. The
destruction of this public housing, which was constructed strictly
on the principles of Corbu and his organizational incarnation, the
Congrks Internationaux dArchitecture Mod*Direct all correspondence
to David Gartman, Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL 36688. The Sociological
Quarterly, Volume 39, Number 1, pages 119-137. Copyright 0 1998 by
The Midwest Sociological Society. All rights reserved. Send
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THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 39/No. 1 /I 998
erne (CIAM), symbolizes for Jencks and others the end of faith
in progress for the masses through industrial standardization and
regimentation. Charles Moore (1967, pp. 35-37) writes that industry
has changed since the 1920s. when mechanization meant repetition
and corporations and cities alike were arranged in centralized,
hierarchical forms. The electronic media have created new leveled
and decentralized industries and cities. Paolo Portoghesi (1983,
pp. 10-13) argues that this technological revolution in information
and communication has given rise to a postindustrial society. Such
a society creates a postmodem culture that eschews standardization
and repetition for the sake of difference, image, and ephemerality.
This rather loose, sweeping architectural narrative, associating
cultural changes with economic changes, has been picked up and
elaborated by serious academic writers, such as David Harvey,
Lawrence Grossberg, Stuart Hall, Edward Soja, and Fredric Jameson.
Working within the Marxist tradition, broadly defined, they seek to
explain the recent emergence of a postmodern culture characterized
by diversity, difference, and depthlessness by a new stage of the
capitalist economy beyond mass production called post-Fordism.
Although provocative and insightful, these arguments are flawed in
several respects. They postulate a single synchronous development
of economy and culture that distorts the actual diversities and
discontinuities of developments between and within both realms.
They ignore these diverse, uneven developments largely because
their causal models are driven by economics and fail to recognize
the dialectical influence of cultural dynamics on the economy. Some
recent commentators have argued that these and other problems with
this discourse on postmodernism render the term so logically
incoherent and empirically inconsistent as to be useless and
meaningless. John Frow (1991, p. 8) provocatively asks whether it
would not be better to dismiss the concept as a non-concept,
imprecise, incoherent, contradictory, lacking any real historical
reference. Despite this and other blistering critiques, the term
refuses to go away. I must agree with Norman Denzin (1 993) that
this is because the concept of postmodernism, although imprecise
and multivalent, captures something real. It is a sign under which
we may assemble the multiple crises of social institutions
established earlier in this century, as well as the inchoate
responses to these crises. We will achieve understanding of the
contemporary world not by discarding postmodernism and the related
term post-Fordism but by clarifying and specifying their uneven,
dialectical relationship. The following is an attempt to begin this
process by closely examining the work of David Harvey and Fredric
Jameson. To provide an empirical underpinning to this critique, I
will focus on the two artifacts that figure heavily in their
discourse on postmodernism and post-Fordism: architecture and
automobiles.THE CHRONOLOGY A N D MODEL OFTHE ECONOMIC-CULTURAL
NEXUS
Both Jameson and Harvey seek to explain the recent emergence of
a postmodern culture as a consequence of a new stage of the
capitalist economy called post-Fordism. In his earlier work on
postmodernism, Jameson (1984; 1991) relied largely on Ernest
Mandels theory of late capitalism to provide an economic grounding
for cultural changes. But as Mike Davis (1985) points out, Jamesons
cultural stage of postmodernism, which begins in full force in
1973, is incongruent with Mandels economic stage of late
capitalism, which commences in 1945. Perhaps for this reason
Jamesons more recent statement on these issues employs the language
of post-Fordism to characterize the economic stage corre-
Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Post- Fordism?
121
sponding with postmodernism (1994, pp. 14, 40-42, 204-205). This
not only makes his chronology more synchronous, since the beginning
of the post-Fordist economy is generally dated from the early
1970s, but it also makes Jamesons work compatible with the growing
body of work, including that of David Harvey (1989), Edward Soja
(1989), Lawrence Grossberg (1992), and Stuart Hall (1989), that
links postmodernism and postFordism. Now Jameson and Harvey
generally converge on the following chronology. The first stage of
capitalism is the market or competitive stage, the largely
unregulated, freewheeling period prior to the 1890s. This economic
structure gave rise to the cultural style of realism, exemplified
by novelists such as Honor6 de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and
Stendhal. But around the turn of the century competitive capitalism
gave way to the monopoly or Fordist stage. This period is defined
by the rise of the large, monopolistic corporation and the mass
production of standardized goods. The shock of the rapid economic
and political changes of Fordism produced cultural modernism,
identified with artists such as James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, and Le
Corbusier. Fordism and modernism culminated after World War I1 in a
period of cultural innovation and economic growth. But the Fordist
economy began to show weaknesses in the late 1960s and fell into
crisis in the recession of 1973. Attempts to solve this crisis gave
rise to a post-Fordist economy, characterized by the flexible
production of diversified goods on a new, global scale. This
economy produced the new culture of postmodernism, which privileges
difference, diversity, and ephemerality. Although Jameson and
Harvey identify with Marxist theory, they do not explain the
influence of the economy on culture with a direct, simplistic model
of base and superstructure. Both draw on a more sophisticated,
formal model, influenced by Hegelian Marxists such as Georg Lukks,
Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. This model holds that the main
influence of the economy can be found not in the content of the
culture but in its forms-not in what it says but how it says it. So
they do not examine the content of culture for overt legitimations
of the economic system and its ruling class. Instead, they examine
the forms of expression, holding that these unconsciously reflect
the problems of the economy. Every mode of production generates a
set of social contradictions or dilemmas that form the experiences
of all living within it. Particularly important are the experiences
of space and time. Cultural producers necessarily grapple with
these social contradictions and experiences of their age, seeking
to resolve them in artistic forms. In this way, the social
contradictions engendered by the economy are unintentionally
inscribed into the forms of cultural productions. If these
productions are biased or political, it is only because the forms
offered by artists and writers are circumscribed by the social
limits of their class positions (Jameson 1971; 1981).THE
FORDISM/MODERNISM NEXUS
Now we are ready to explore the postulated connections between
the Fordist economy and modernist culture, on the one hand, and the
post-Fordist economy and postmodernism, on the other. In
characterizing the economic phase emerging around the turn of the
century as Fordism, Harvey and Jameson draw on a group of largely
Marxist economists called the regulation school. These economists,
led by Michel Aglietta (1979) and Alain Lipietz (1987), argue that
the development of capitalism cannot be explained solely by the
general laws of accumulation inherent in it. One must also examine
the specific social institutions
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that organize, regulate, and motivate production and
consumption. A stable configuration of production and consumption
is called a regime of accumulation, and the stability of each
regime is ensured by a set of institutions called a mode of
regulation. Concentrating on the American case, the regulationists
postulate that around the turn of the century a new regime of
accumulation called Fordism began to emerge. It was initiated by
the revolutionary changes in production made by Frederick Taylor
and Henry Ford that eventually resulted in mass production. Taylors
program of scientific management seized control of the production
process from skilled workers by concentrating their knowledge and
skills into managerial hands. This was accomplished by the
fragmentation of whole crafts into detailed parts and the precise
timing of each part to eliminate superfluous motions and ensure
maximum speed. Henry Ford completed this transfer of control from
workers to managers with his innovative technology. He reintegrated
the fragmented work process into a totally rationalized, mechanical
system. Specialized machines captured the skill and discretion of
operators, and moving lines and conveyors linked workers in a
precisely timed system that controlled their every move. But the
price Ford had to pay for his enormously productive system of mass
production was product standardization. To keep his expensive
technology completely occupied so it would pay for itself, he had
to produce only one car, the Model T, and keep its design unchanged
from year to year (Aglietta 1979, pp. 111-122; Palloix 1976;
Braverman 1974; Gartman 1986). The regime of Fordism encompassed
not merely a new system of production but also a new type of
consumption. In order to absorb all the goods pouring off
mass-production lines, new consumers had to be found. Only the
working class was large enough to provide the requisite numbers.
But to turn workers into consumers entailed raising their wages and
persuading them to buy their means of livelihood, as opposed to
producing them at home. This transformation was also begun by Ford
and other welfare capitalists, as Antonio Gramsci ([1930] 1971)
recognized long ago. After Ford introduced his new technology
around 1913, he encountered a wave of worker resistance in the
forms of absenteeism, turnover, and threatened unionization. To
contain this revolt, he announced in 1914 the Five Dollar Day
program, which doubled the wages of most of his workers. To ensure
that the new wage induced the disciplined labor that Ford sought,
he also had to cajole workers to spend it in the right way. So Ford
undertook paternalistic investigations into his workers domestic
lives to encourage a lifestyle of stable consumption of durable
goods, which ensured their dependence on high wages (Gartman 1986;
Meyer 1981). Although the pioneering efforts of Ford and other
welfare capitalists began to create high wages and a new type of
consumption, these individual efforts could not secure mass
consumption against capitalist competition. But beginning in the
Great Depression, stable, rule-governed institutions emerged to
overcome wage competition and sustain high demand. Under the
protection of new labor laws, trade unions created a collective
bargaining system that underwrote the wages of all workers. An
interventionist Keynesian state emerged to implement both social
spending programs and fiscal and monetary policies that sustained
aggregate demand (Aglietta 1979; Piore and Sabel 1984; Harvey 1985,
pp. 205-209). Jameson and Harvey argue that the culture of
modernism emerged at the same time as Fordism as a response to its
social contradictions and dislocations. The myriad problems of the
age can be captured under the broad rubric of rationalization, in
Webers words ([1922] 1968), or alienation, in Marxs ([1844] 1975).
The main purpose of Fordist mass production was to turn human
subjects into abstract, calculable, uniform things, mere
Postrnodernisrn; or, the Cultural Logic of Post-Fordisrn?
123
objects in a totally rationalized system controlled by and for
others. Workers experienced their work, including its timing and
spacing, as an alien entity imposed on them from outside. And
because at this time work was generally perceived as testimony to
the power and worth of the individual, such rationalized workers
experienced their very selves as alienated, as fragments governed
by alien others. Thus, the basic contradiction raised by such a
work system was that between subject and object. Fordism posed
these questions: Can a human subject be rendered totally objective,
abstract and alien to itself? Is it possible to reintegrate or
reconcile the objective and subjective fragments created by modem
industry? (LukAcs [I9231 1971). Modernist culture grappled with and
sought to resolve this basic contradiction along three major
dimensions of experience: time, space, and self. On the dimension
of time or history, the contradiction took the form of change
versus permanence. All modernists registered in their work the
experience of the shock of the new world and its radical break with
the old. The continuous skein of time in premodern societies,
guarded by nature and religion, was torn asunder by the new
technologies of production and consumption, rendering it chaotic
and contingent. Time was no longer governed by the rhythms of human
tradition but was reduced to a rationalized, objective thing, under
the control of the alien technologies of stopwatch and assembly
line. Some conservative modernists such as William Butler Yeats and
T. S. Eliot sought to resolve this problem by rekindling lost
traditions. But others, especially the avant-garde, sought to
humanize this new time by identifying another powerful, enduring
force to unify the chaos-technological progress. Artists such as Le
Corbusier, Fernand LCger, and Piet Mondrian created a machine
aesthetic, a new objectivity that worshiped the abstract,
rationalized forms of Fordist mass production as the result of an
inevitable material progress of humanity (Harvey 1989, pp.
10-12,31-35; Jameson 1991, pp. 302-313; 1994, pp. 8-21,84-86).
Along the dimension of space, the Fordist subject-object
contradiction manifested itself as an opposition between surface
and depth. The acceleration of time through technologies, such as
the railroad, automobile, telegraph, and assembly line, led to a
shrinking or compression of space. Spaces that had been separated
by hours of labor or travel raced by in almost simultaneous
coexistence, emphasizing a quick, superficial perception. These
spaces now seemed more like external objects to be passively
perceived than subjective places to be actively invested and
appropriated. Also responsible for this objectification of space
was the rise of the capitalist real estate market, which reduced
the heterogeneous landscapes of work and play to abstract units of
homogeneous property exchanged by the objective laws of the market.
Many modernists responded to this transformation of space by
seeking to find some underlying truths or universals that united
the surfaces. Freudian psychology read the disjointed symptoms of
neuroses as manifestations of deeply repressed instinctual needs.
Cubism, new objectivity, and other modernist movements similarly
sought to unite the fragmented objective spaces of appearance under
a new human style or language (Harvey 1989, pp. 20-23; Jameson
1991, pp. 6-16; 1994, pp. 21-32). Finally, on the dimension of the
self, the subject-object contradiction engendered by Fordism became
manifest as an opposition between centeredness and fragmentation.
On the one hand, individuals in the throes of rationalized Fordist
production experienced their lives as objective fragments of a
system organized by the alien logic of capitalist rationality. On
the other hand, the system of mass consumption gave people the
illusion of a private, centered self, insulated from the outside
world by family and possessions. This illusion was possible because
of the geographic and temporal separation of the fragmenta-
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THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 39/No. 1A998
tion of work from the centered wholeness of home. This paradox
was expressed in modernist works like Franz Kafkas The Trial and
Edvard Munchs The Scream, which presumed a centered, autonomous
individual, but one who confronted and only sometimes overcame a
strange, senseless, impenetrable world (Jameson 1991, pp.
14-16,311-313). Perhaps no modernist art form better exemplified
these contradictions of Fordism than architecture. In the 1920s,
European architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and
Walter Gropius launched the modernist movement, proclaiming a
radical break with the historical styles preserved by the old
academies. Implicitly agreeing with Fords infamous statement that
history is bunk, they declared that the machine age demanded a new
architecture that would give order to the chaos by adopting the
unadorned, rationalized, standardized forms of mass production,
exemplified by the Model T. For them, progress in meeting material
needs demanded affordable, mass-produced housing, where the common
workers could recuperate from the rigors of their working lives.
The modernists also advocated a dialectic of surface and depth,
declaring that the surface of a building must be free of
superfluous decoration and express the inner structure of its
rationalized supports. Finally, in their designs for entire cities
they allowed for the simultaneous existence of fragmented
production and centered consumption. The factories of fragmented
Fordism were carefully segregated from workers homes, where they
could maintain the illusion of an autonomous, centered self (Le
Corbusier [ 19231 1986; [ 19251 1987).THE
POST-FORDISM/POSTMODERNlSM NEXUS
Post-Fordism is a regime of accumulation that goes beyond the
Fordist system of production and consumption in order to resolve
its crises. The regulation school argues that Fordism entered a
crisis stage in the late 1960s, and radically new economic
developments to solve this emerged about 1973. All accounts hold
that Fordisms crisis was mainly economic in origin and discount
cultural influences. Aglietta (1979) and Lipietz (1987) argue that
by the late 1960s Fordist work could not be further divided nor
machines further specialized, so productivity growth slowed and
profits lagged. Further, as Fordist methods spread to Europe, Asia,
and Latin America, international market competition increased for
mass-produced goods, displacing the American monopoly. The crisis
of Fordist production pushed American manufacturers to search for
both new product markets and new production methods. Seeking to
avoid the now highly competitive markets for standardized,
mass-produced goods, many manufacturers began to offer a diversity
of distinctive products that were constantly upgraded to
incorporate technological improvements. While mass producers sought
to capture economies of scale with a few standardized products,
post-Fordist producers concentrated on economies of scope with
their diversity of ever-changing goods. This generated a new
consumption system, focused not on mass markets but on small,
specialized niche markets. But in order to produce for such
markets, manufacturers found that they had to alter the rigidly
specialized and deskilled Fordist production process. The new
methods had to be flexible, allowing machines and workers to adapt
quickly to the wide range of tasks demanded by a diverse and
changing product mix. Specialized Fordist machines were replaced
with microelectronic technologies such as robotics and
computercontrolled machine tools that could be quickly adapted.
Deskilled, detail workers were replaced by reskilled workers who
participated in a wide range of decisions previously centralized by
managers (Piore and Sabel 1984; Amin 1994; Aglietta 1979).
Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Post-Fordism?
125
To increase their competitiveness, manufacturers not only sought
flexibility in product mix but also in wages and labor relations.
Beginning around 1973 corporations abandoned the high wages and
strong unions of traditional industrial cities and relocated to
low-wage, nonunion areas in less-developed regions and countries.
Many also downsized and outsourced production by drawing on a
far-flung network of low-wage suppliers to cut costs and boost
profits. Under post-Fordism, capitalism became a vast,
decentralized, global network, but one that is still dominated by
large corporations that subordinate localities to their calculus of
exploitation. But the locus of corporate power is more diffuse and
hence less easily identified (Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Amin and
Malmberg 1994). This new, more globalized and diversified system of
production necessarily generated a new system of coiisumption.
Unlike the relatively egalitarian Fordist market, aimed at the
broad, middle-income group, the post-Fordist market is fragmented
and unequal. Higherincome groups buy the upscale, quasi-customized
goods turned out by flexible specialization, while lower-income
classes continue to purchase cheaper, mass-produced goods, now
often manfactured abroad. This widening inequality has resulted not
only from corporate wage cuts and outsourcing but also from the
abandonment of Keynesian state policy. Under post-Fordism the
government abandoned support of collective bargaining and demand
management. Fiscal and monetary policies were redirected to the
supply-side of the market, supporting corporate competitiveness and
military buildup. The Fordist welfare state was replaced by a
post-Fordist, neoliberal workfare state (Harvey 1989, pp. 166172;
Jessop 1994; Esser and Hirsch 1994; Lipietz 1994). Jameson, Harvey,
and others contend that this post-Fordist economy has given rise to
a new set of experiences and sensibilities that are encoded in
postmodern culture. The basic dilemmas and contradictions of
post-Fordism are similar to Fordism, but in postmodern productions
they are resolved and addressed in different forms. On the
dimension of time, the opposition of change and permanence
persists, with people being confronted by another round of
discontinuous and chaotic change, seemingly beyond their control.
While modernists detected some unifying purpose or direction behind
these changes, the postmodernists swear off any attempts to unify
or totalize history and instead celebrate the chaotic flux of the
eternal present. The modernist sense of time as directional and
developmental is replaced by an ahistorical sense of meaningless
flux. Jameson and Harvey argue that this loss of historicity has
two causes in the post-Fordist economy. First, modernisms sense of
progress was the result of the juxtaposition of modernizing
societies with premodern regions outside the modernization process.
But with the geographic spread of capitalist modernization to all
areas of the globe, this contrast is destroyed. When all the world
is modern, nothing seems really new or progressive. Second, the
post-Fordist emphasis on the ever-changing cycle of fashions and
images to sell goods also undermines historicity. When the material
world is changing constantly and arbitrarily, simply for the sake
of sales, the value of the new and innovative is lost in this
steady stream of variation that goes nowhere (Jameson 1991, pp.
16-25, 309-311; 1994, pp. 11-17; Harvey 1989, pp. 54-58,85-87). On
the dimension of space, postmodernism abandons the dialectic of
depth and surface and degenerates into a unilateral emphasis on
simultaneity and superficiality. Under modern conditions, the rush
of simultaneous surfaces could still be unified by the deep process
of technological progress. The different geographic spaces could be
seen as different chronological stages of economic development. But
with the penetration of all spaces by capitalism, the historical
depth of space evaporates, and individuals are left with a sense
of
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THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 39/No. 1 /I 998
simultaneous, irreducible, incommensurable space. Just as global
space becomes more homogeneous and totalized by capital, we are
aware of the superficial differences of the worlds spaces and
peoples. This is because, Jameson argues, the post-Fordist economic
system is too vast and decentered to be simply represented in
consciousness. Further, postFordism creates this sense of
differentiated space by superficially tailoring goods to appeal to
different nations, regions, races, and ethnic groups (Jameson 1991,
pp. 37-38, 341-343, 356-376; 1994, pp. 4043,204-205). Finally, on
the dimension of the self, the post-Fordist economy creates a sense
of decenteredness and schizophrenia. The centered self of modernism
was predicated on a psychological/ geographical space insulated
from the heteronomy of work by home and family. But the
post-Fordist economy penetrates all spaces of the psyche in its
attempts to mobilize desires for consumerism. The centered self is
fragmented into a myriad of niches and needs so there is no longer
a center from which to be alienated. The psychic model of the age
is no longer the modernist neurotic but the postmodern
schizophrenic, for whom experience is a flood of unrelated
signifiers in an eternal present (Jameson 1991, pp. 1416,25-31;
1994, pp. 31-32; Harvey 1989, pp. 53-54; Grossberg 1992, pp.
351-353). All these changes in cultural forms are best exemplified
in architecture, the preeminent art of postmodernism. Architects
such as Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, and Charles Moore have
abandoned any sense of historical progress or newness. The machine
and technological references are passe, and they turn to historical
symbols and styles to restore human meaning to construction. These
symbols, however, make no deep references to historical periods but
are decontextualized to provide mere superficial decoration to
differentiate buildings in a crowded marketplace. Abandoning the
modernist dialectic of surface and depth, the postmodernists
emphasize radical disjuncture, a closure and insulation of the
buildings public face from its private depths. While modernists
sought a universal language to unify all buildings, the
postmodernists stress difference, carefully differentiating their
buildings for diverse cultures, contexts, and markets. Further
surrendering to the market demands of post-Fordism, the
postmodernists have abandoned any attempts at rational planning and
worship the market as the ultimate planner (Jencks 1991;Venturi
1966; Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour 1972).
PROBLEMATIC CHRONOLOGIESIn their attempts to explain cultural
changes by economic changes, Harvey and Jameson offer us a neat and
synchronous chronology of the development of Fordisdmodernism and
post-Fordisdpostmodernism. The economy invariably takes the lead,
producing dilemmas and contradictions to which the culture responds
in attempts to resolve these through artistic forms. My objections
to this tale are twofold. First, developments of the economy and
culture are much more complex and uneven than these synchronous
stories allow. As Grossberg (1992, pp. 325-326) has written, we
must reject the assumption that there is a single relationship
between capitalism and culture (e.g., between late capitalism and
postmodernism) and recognize the possibility of different struggles
and articulations existing within different spatial and temporal
logics. Frow (1991, pp. 11, 23) has similarly noted that most
postmodern chronologies postulate a synchronic necessity that
imposes a universal historicity on distinct and unevenly developed
domains of the social. Capitalism and culture do not progress in
some unilateral lock step dictated by economics. Although
ultimately related to one another in a social totality, culture
and
Postmodernisrn; or, the Cultural Logic o Post-Fordism? f
127
economy can develop in relative autonomy, according to their own
dynamics. This unevenness may occur not only between but also
within these two institutions, with, for example, different types
of culture developing at different rhythms and rates (Frow 1991,
pp. 21-23). Second, in the relation between economy and culture,
the former need not take causal priority. Harvey and Jameson remain
faithful to the broad Marxian model of base and superstructure,
holding that the economic base influences the cultural
superstructure. As Frow has noted (1991, p. 14), both seek to
derive the cultural realm from the logic of an epochal
socioeconomic system, setting up a mechanically causal relation
between a primary and an epiphenomena1 realm. They do not
sufficiently recognize the potential for a dialectical relation
between culture and economy. The economy may broadly determine the
contradictions and dilemmas of social life to which culture must
respond, but these responses have the potential to contradict and
undermine the very institutions of production and consumption that
generated them. I hope to show that just such a dialectical
contradiction occurred in the transition from Fordism to
post-Fordism. In what follows, I will demonstrate these weaknesses
empirically and begin to develop a model of the relation of Fordism
to modernism and post-Fordism to postmodemism that is more complex,
dialectical, and sensitive to uneven developments. I will do so by
focusing on the relation between the quintessential mass-produced
artifact, the automobile, and the aesthetic practice of
architecture. To give the arguments greater scope, however, I will
supplement them with examples from the fashion industry. As we have
seen, Jameson and Harvey postulate a synchronous, unilateral
relationship between the mass-production economy of Fordism and
aesthetic modernism. The mass production of cheap, standardized
cars like Fords Model T and simple, functional clothing not only
created a new process of production and consumption but also
provided the aesthetic model of geometric purity, abstraction, and
rationalization that was adopted in the modernist machine aesthetic
and new objectivity. Only when the economy began to move away from
the mass production of standardized goods toward the flexible
production of a greater array of aesthetically differentiated
products did a distinct postmodern aesthetic arise. This chronology
certainly seems believable for the high art of architecture, for,
at least in the United States, modernism did not reach its heyday
until the 1950s and 1960s and did not face serious challenge until
the 1970s. But if we examine the popular consumer culture, this
synchronous chronology seems ridiculous. As every American with a
modicum of knowledge of the auto or fashion industries can tell
you, style, diversity, and ephemerality emerged as selling points
in the mid-l920s, not in the 1970s. In the fashion industry, the
mass production of clothing initially resulted in standardization
and leveling. Elite styles were imitated and disseminated to the
masses as a mark of respectability and social mobility. It was
difficult without close inspection to distinguish a male worker
from his boss on a Sunday afternoon in the city, for both wore dark
suits of similar styles in leisure hours. By the 1920s, even womens
clothing, which was generally characterized by greater variety, was
becoming standardized. The movement of more women into the
workforce gave rise to sleek, simple, functionalist styles
reminiscent of modernist buildings. Clothing thus bespoke the
emergence of a mass society of classless and functional uniformity.
But this symbolism was short-lived and, as the 1920s turned into
the 1930s, mass uniformity gave way to individual expression. To
stimulate demand, fashion merchandisers began to differentiate and
individualize markets, making use of consumer surveys to identify
segments such as conventional, romantic, modern, and
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artistic. Unlike the earlier, class-based distinctions in
fashion, against which Thorstein Veblen railed in The Theory ofthe
Leisure Class ([1899] 1934), these diverse styles were touted as a
matter of personal choice, testifing to individual taste, not
social rank (Ewen and Ewen 1982, pp. 169-232; Wilson 1990, pp.
210-224). A similar process was at work in the all-important auto
industry, which lies at the center of the postmodedpost-Fordist
discourse. By 1927, when modern architecture was just beginning to
build its first exemplars of the machine aesthetic in Europe, Fords
standardized, functionalist Model T was extinct. Automakers were
beginning to give consumers stylistic diversity, superficial
decoration, and constantly changing models-all defining
characteristics of postmodern culture. This direction was pioneered
largely by General Motors Alfred Sloan, who perceived that once
Fordist mass production had fulfilled the need for basic
transportation consumers wanted something more-a better car with
some distinction to set them apart from the crowd. So instead of
offering one standardized car for the masses, like Ford, Sloan
marketed a graded hierarchy of cars, ranging from the low-priced
Chevrolet to the luxury Cadillac. Consumers could pick a car that
matched their income and lifestyle, achieving a sense of
individuality in their purchases. Many of the distinctions between
GMs makes were purely superficial, decorative geegaws attached to
the cars surfaces to give them a different visual reading. The
stylists who designed the differentiating skins were careful to
insulate them from any sight of the mechanical parts underneath.
Thus, in the mid-I920s, autos pioneered an aesthetic of
superficiality, marked by a radical disjuncture of inside and
outside. Sloan not only offered consumers different cars but also
models that changed yearly in a process he called the annual model
change. Cars were continually upgraded and improved but, once
again, on the surfaces alone. Fashion and ephemerality were the
sine qua non of the annual model change, a perpetual cycle that
really went nowhere. This, along with other aspects of automotive
marketing, contributed to an evaporation of historical meaning, a
privileging of space and surfaces over history and time. From the
very beginning, the automobile was promoted as a means of escaping
history through mobility in space. Buyers were told to deal with
their discontents through changing their location in space, not
changing society in history. Drive to better economic opportunities
in a different town or region, or at least escape the monotony and
heteronomy of Fordist work with a carefree drive in the unspoiled
countryside. The dazzling array of ephemeral surfaces was the
culmination of the eclipse of historical time by the movement of
images in space (Gartnian 1994). These new, more differentiated
fashions and automobiles were merely the leading edge of a broader
consumer culture sweeping America in the 1920s and 1930s. As
markets for consumer goods became saturated in the mid- 1920s,
Fordist manufacturers increasingly turned to diversity, style, and
beauty to compete and stimulate demand. The Great Depression, with
its disastrous collapse of aggregate demand, only exacerbated these
trends, with industrial designers appending stylish,
attention-grabbing surfaces to everything from locomotives to
pencil sharpeners (Meikle 1979). Prior to the mid-l960s, this
consumer culture seemed perfectly compatible with the Fordist
methods of mass production. Diversity, distinction, and change in
consumer goods did not require post-Fordist computers and robots or
post-Fordist job enrichment and worker participation. These traits
were rendered compatible with Fordist specialized machines,
assembly lines, and deskilled labor through the clever machinations
of industrial designers such as GMs Harley Earl. The basic
mechanical components of the diverse, changing array of
automotive
Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic o Post-Fordism? f
129
models remained standardized to achieve the high volume of
production required for the economical use of specialized machines.
And these relatively unchanging parts were shared by a number of
different automotive models. Even the fundamental structure of the
body, the body shell, was standardized to a few basic types that
were shared across divisions. However, to disguise this
mass-produced commonality the designers tacked relatively
inexpensive components onto the shells to distinguish them
visually. It was these cheap parts that changed year to year to
lend models the appearance of progress, not the standardized
components under the shells (Gartman 1994).DIFFERENTIAL CULTURAL
DEVELOPMENE EUROPE A N D AMERICA, HIGH A N D LOW
This brief examination of the development of American mass
culture reveals that it pioneered aspects of postmodernism long
before these traits appeared in the high arts such as architecture.
These postmodern traits did not require a new system of economic
production. Why have the regulationists and their followers such as
Jameson and Harvey missed or discounted these developments? I
believe the answer lies in their focus on Europe and their neglect
of American mass culture. The European, mainly French, economists
who initiated the discourse of Fordism and post-Fordism have
allowed their national experiences to contaminate their history of
these regimes of accumulation, which by all accounts were pioneered
in the United States. As most recognize, Fordist mass production
did not really take hold in Europe and Great Britain until after
World War I1 (Lipietz 1987; Anderson 1984; Piore and Sabel 1984).
And there, as in the United States, the initial products of early
Fordism were standardized, functionalist, and boring, like the
Austin Seven and Morris Minor autos (Batchelor 1994, p. 130).
Certainly nothing approaching a consumer culture of difference and
decoration emerged in Europe until the 1960s, long after the
pioneering efforts of the American designers and merchandisers.
This may have misled the regulationists into postulating that the
mass culture of Fordism is necessarily standardized, abstract, and
functionalist. The early stage of Fordism did create a
functionalist, abstract, technology-worshiping aesthetic in the
high arts, as Jameson and Harvey contend. But this aesthetic was
pioneered in Europe and did not really take hold in the United
States until after World War 11. Perry Anderson (1984) argues that
such cultural modernism emerged only in societies in which the
modern machine age of Fordism clashed sharply with a premodern
regime dominated by landowning classes. In such societies, largely
located in central Europe, the stark confrontation of machine
technologies with an archaic class structure heightened the sense
of their newness and revolutionary potential. I contend, however,
that the modernist aesthetic was a product not only of the contrast
of new technologies with old regimes but also of the social vehicle
through which mass production and consumption were introduced. The
class alliances created by the old regimes of central Europe forced
the state to play the central role in the rationalization of
industry, while the U.S. class structure gave the market
predominance in this process. In central Europe the continued power
of the aristocracy led to a capitalist or bourgeois class that was
relatively weak, politically, economically, and culturally. The
aristocracy dominated not only the government but also the arts
through their state-sponsored academies (Mayer 1981). Manufacturers
still produced largely handcrafted goods for the upper classes with
skilled labor. And, in Germany at least, industries were organized
into pro-
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duction-restricting, price-controlling cartels, with little
competition among firms (Nolan 1994). World War I led to the
collapse of the central European monarchies and the rise of tenuous
new democratic regimes, such as the Weimar Republic, which faced
the monumental tasks of not only building democracy but also
modernizing industry. The war forced all classes to confront the
backwardness of European industry, and Henry Fords massproduction
process was widely championed as the model to emulate. But each
class interpreted Fordismus in the light of its particular
interests. Rank-and-file workers focused on Fords high wages and
mass consumption as the solution to industrial problems. The
professional-managerial class viewed technology and managerial
reform, which gave it more jobs and power in industry, as the key
to mass production. The weak industrial bourgeoisie opposed not
only high wages but also mechanization, the latter because Fordist
machines were expensive and their increased productivity would
undermine the cartel agreements. The political class of the new
state was under great pressure, from a restless working class that
had helped bring it to power, to modernize industry and deliver a
rising standard of living. But finding little support from a weak
and backward industrial bourgeoisie, it allied with the
professional-managerial class, including top leaders of the Social
Democratic party, in a state-driven attempt at Fordist
rationalization of production and consumption. In this alliance,
professional artists and architects helped provide the ideological
support for the technocratic program. Seeking to carve out for
themselves a new role in industry, artists such as Le Corbusier
championed mass production and created a new aesthetic that
elevated the functional, geometric forms of the machine to the
status of universal beauty (Lane 1985; Nolan 1994; Maier 1970). The
state effort at Fordist production of consumer goods focused on
housing, which was in disastrously short supply. State funds were
channeled through various public and semipublic programs to
subsidize the construction of huge housing estates that were
generally planned and designed by architects. The modernists took
this opportunity to employ their stripped-down, functionalist,
machine aesthetic, not merely in order to incorporate industrial
building materials but also to provide ideological testimony to the
brave new world of mass production and mass consumption being
created by the technocratic elite. There were distinct signals that
workers in general and the residents of these housing estates in
particular did not care for the stingy, rationalized standards and
aesthetics imposed upon them. But consumers had no mechanisms to
register their preferences, for there was no market in housing and
state decisions were controlled by a bureaucratic and artistic
elite (Lane 1985; Nolan 1994; Boudon 1969). In the United States
there was no such ancien regime to block industrial and bourgeois
development. The class of industrial capitalists gained dominance
rather easily and early. The failure of cartels and trusts early in
the century induced greater competition among firms, forcing
industrialists to embrace new Fordist technologies that promised
increased productivity and lower prices. In the process, they began
to incorporate within industry the engineers, designers,
technicians, and managers who were the agents of rationalization.
This alliance between the growing professional-managerial class and
capitalists solidified during the Progressive Era, when
professionals such as social workers and intellectuals worked with
private industry, not the state, to quell working-class unrest.
Fords Five Dollar Day and other welfare programs began to integrate
workers into capitalism with higher
Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Post-Fordisrn?
131
levels of consumption of standardized goods purchased in the
market with higher wages (Wiebe 1967; Weinstein 1968). Like their
European counterparts, some of the reforming professionals
advocated a simplified, unadorned aesthetic for workers housing and
goods. Working-class families were instructed in how to transform
their kitchens from centers of sociality to models of Fordist
efficiency and also encouraged to forego the overstuffed,
overdecorated Victorian furnishings they seemed to prefer in favor
of simple, functionalist styles. But because the regime of mass
consumption came to American workers through the private market,
not through state provision as in Europe, they could use their
rising wages to express their own aesthetic preferences. Defying
progressive professionals, workers chose goods not with a
rationalized machine aesthetic but with decoration and ornament
that insulated them from the harsh reminders of Fordist work and
provided the individuality and beauty that had been exorcised from
their work world (Cohen 1982). This market demand forced
manufacturers to develop the new consumer aesthetic of difference,
decoration, and superficiality, traits not found in Europe until
market demand for basic, functional goods had finally been
saturated in the 1960s. This consumer culture quickly became
dominant and eclipsed Americas rudimentary modernism in the high
arts. Specifically, modernist architecture of the type pioneered in
Europe found little favor in America prior to the 1950s. Although
stark functionalist forms were accepted in factories and commercial
buildings, few wanted to see them elsewhere. The preferred style in
market-driven American cities was known as moderne, which, although
relatively simple, was more organic than mechanical and not averse
to some historical decoration. In the suburbs, even more organic
and decorative styles prevailed, with Frank Lloyd Wright providing
the direction (Frampton 1992). After World War I1 the
differentiated, decorative, obscuring aesthetic of Americas
consumer culture blossomed under the nourishment of the
demand-stimulating regulation of the Keynesian state. In
particular, automobile design exploded in an orgy of fantastic,
ephemeral decoration, of which the tail fin was only the most
outrageous example. This consumer aesthetic also proliferated in
the rapidly expanding suburban housing market, where millions of
standardized developers boxes were thrown up by quasi-Fordist
methods. As in autos, this mass-produced homogeneity was disguised
by a disconnected array of decoration and historical styles tacked
onto the surface. Downtown, however, a curious aesthetic anomaly
emerged among the corporate headquarters, banks, and government
offices that continued to occupy the urban core. These structures
began to adopt the severely functional, modernist machine
aesthetic, often attached by tmigrC modernists such as Mies van der
Rohe. Modernist architecture was considered an appropriate
expression of the technocratic, rationalized power of the
triumphant corporate and governmental ruling class. But this
technocratic aesthetic downtown posed no real challenge to the
dominant consumer culture since it was segregated geographically
from consumerisms suburban stronghold, where Americans could forget
the rationalized production that was the basis of the system.
Suburbanization had a similarly bifurcating effect on American
fashion. The postwar boom, with its prosperity and emphasis on
childrearing, reversed the trend toward women working and isolated
them in suburbs focused on leisure and recreation. Consequently, a
new trend toward leisure wear emerged, offering clothing such as
Bermuda shorts and sports shirts for knocking about the burbs. But
for womens occasional appearances in public settings, a new
romantic ideal was created, drawing on Victorian fashions and
per-
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petuating an image of delicacy and domesticity. For men
venturing away from the suburban retreat to the downtown towers of
work, a standard corporate suit was appropriate to emphasize
sobriety and rationality. But again, at home a new leisure costume
of individuality and expression began to emerge, as men were
encouraged by publications, such as Playboy, to express themselves
in consumerism. A vast array of individualized sportswear became
available to men as well (Ewen and Ewen 1982, pp. 233-241;
Ehrenreich 1983, pp. 30-51).
CONTRADICTIONS OF THE CONSUMER CULTURE AND THE RISE OF
POSTMODERNISMThis early emergence of postmodernist traits in the
consumer culture of America does not mean that there was no change
in production or culture around 1973. A persuasive body of evidence
reveals that in the United States about this time there was a
significant break with Fordist production and its bifurcated
culture. But unlike Jameson and Harvey, I argue that the cultural
changes contributed to the economic changes of post-Fordism. The
internal contradictions of Americas consumer culture began to
undermine Fordist mass production in the mid- 1960s, giving rise to
an economic crisis that spawned post-Fordist changes. These changes
then facilitated an extension and intensification of aspects of
consumer culture into a distinctive postmodernism. I offer the
following as a brief, underdeveloped sketch of this process,
anticipating a fuller development elsewhere. The economic stability
and prosperity of Americas postwar Fordism drove the consumer
culture to new heights, revealing for the first time the
contradiction between individuality and uniformity. In the world of
fashion, some began to see through the myriad colors and cuts of
mass-produced fashions to perceive a deadly dull uniformity.
Everyone sought individuality but within a narrow range of
variation defined by suburban acceptability. Americans wanted to be
different, just like everyone else-the dilemma of massproduced
individuality. Consequently, some outside the consensus, such as
the Beats, hippies, and minorities, began to pioneer new styles, or
antistyles, often drawing on repressed or forgotten cultures:
working-class blue jeans, peasant blouses, traditional African
clothing. Mass producers of clothing struggled to keep abreast of
fashion trends no longer driven by their marketing logic. In
Europe, mass production overcame wartime shortages and destruction
by the 1960s, and similar countercultural fashion trends emerged
among groups such as the Mods, Rockers, and Punks (Ewen and Ewen
1982, pp. 241-251; Wilson 1990, pp. 215-217). Similarly, in the
automobile industry the contradiction of mass-produced
individuality was becoming apparent by the late 1950s, as the
styling game spiraled out of control. Before this period, GMs
large, talented staff had dominated auto styling, doling out to
consumers careful, incremental changes that were imitated by Ford
and Chrysler, who trailed in the styling game. In the postwar
period, the two laggards began to beef up their own styling
departments and seriously compete with GM for styling innovations.
This fierce competition quickly accelerated the style cycle and
drove it to outrageous heights. Each model year saw such drastic
and arbitrary changes in style that consumers began to notice the
standardized similarities of all cars. The 1958 Edsel was the
culmination of this contradiction; it was a car that protested its
difference so loudly and garishly that consumers saw its similarity
to Detroits other overdecorated dinosaurs. Its disastrous demise,
plus
Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic o Post-Fordism? f
133
the steady growth of sales of imports such as Volkswagens,
signaled Americans craving for a wider range of choice (Gartman
1994). The demands of this incipient consumer revolt forced
automakers to offer a wider range of structurally and mechanically
differentiated cars beginning around 1960. The standardized but
superficially differentiated family sedans of the 1950s gave way to
a dizzying array of really different cars: compacts, intermediates,
personal luxury cars, muscle cars, pony cars. But this diversity
severely taxed the system of Fordist mass production. A separate
factory with specialized equipment had to be built for each type of
car. Within each models factory the array of optional components
that consumers could order to individualize their cars began to tie
up capital in inventory, slow down production, and create
coordination problems. Consequently, manufacturers unit profits
began to decline even as they sold more cars. The automakers first
response was to apply a large dose of the traditional remedy of
speedup. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, factory managers
tightened discipline, trimmed workforces, and forced remaining
workers to labor harder. This approach proved disastrous, not only
because unemployment was low and unions still strong but also
because increasing product diversity itself empowered workers. The
variation along assembly lines induced by model differentiation
prevented managers from determining standard job times and
inadvertently left discretion in workers hands. The results of the
new speedup regime were dramatized at GMs Lordstown, Ohio, plant,
where young workers launched an innovative strike against line
speed and monotony. Such discontent, along with lagging profits,
forced managers to search for new methods of managing both labor
and materials to produce the growing product mix with less cost.
These efforts ultimately gave rise to the flexibile production
systems of post-Fordism. These new production techniques then made
possible an even larger range of changing, differentiated products
(Gartman 1994). These changes in production and consumer goods
impacted the high arts in America as well, especially architecture.
By the 1960s Americas imported modernism was already beginning to
look stale to a younger generation of artists who were struggling
in a crowded market to differentiate themselves from the
established taste. Modernist architecture in particular had lost
its avant-garde status and became synonymous with the corporate
establishment, especially its bulldozer approach to urban renewal.
Rejecting the established style, young artists turned for
inspiration to the new diversity and vitality of consumer culture,
and pop art was born (Huyssen 1986). In architecture, young
radicals worked with inner-city neighborhoods to fight urban
renewal, arguing that the messy diversity and complexity of the
existing streets was far superior to the sterile uniformity of
modernist planning (Jacobs 1961). From such efforts emerged a new
appreciation of the architecture of the consumer vernacular,
celebrating diversity, decoration, symbolism, and ephemerality.
This new departure was codified largely by Robert Venturi (1966)
and his colleagues (Venturi et al. 1972), who declared that Main
Street, along with Times Square and the Las Vegas strip, were
almost all right. These monuments to the Great Proletarian Cultural
Locomotive revealed a complexity and vitality that were close to
the preferences of common people, Venturi declared, while the
functionality and simplicity of modernism was an elitist bore.
Further contradicting the modernist credo, Venturi argued for the
use of historical styles and decoration in architecture. Historical
tropes (e.g., Greek columns on courthouses and Tudor half-timbering
and colonial carriage lamps on suburban tract houses)
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carried well-established, popular meanings. If architects wanted
to communicate with the broad public and not merely with the
elitist avant-garde, they had to incorporate such historical
decorations. What began as a radical, quasi-populist attack on the
brutality of modernism in the 1960s and 1970s, however, was soon
incorporated as an accomplice of economic restructuring in the
1980s. Corporate attempts to cut costs and attain flexibility
devastated the American landscape. In a search for cheap,
nonunionized labor, corporations shifted production out of the
industrial Midwest and Northeast to the American Sunbelt and
offshore, abandoning industrial cities and millions of unionized
blue-collar workers. The professional-managerial class that
engineered the restructuring experienced a rapid enrichment,
leading to a growing income inequality. This in turn encouraged a
further fragmentation of the marketplace, as more and more
manufacturers began to court the upscale market of newly enriched
yuppies who craved distinctive goods to testify to their fortune.
Post-Fordism, with its stratified niche markets, flourished. And
postmodernism was its cultural accomplice, especially in
architecture. In the 1980s, many cities that were devastated by
plant closings and corporate flight desperately searched for a new
strategy for renewal. Many tried to capture some of the new wealth
by attracting the prosperous classes back downtown with consumption
and entertainment spectacles. Convention centers, shopping malls,
historic restorations, and restaurant districts were developed to
encourage the yuppies not only to shop and eat but also to live
downtown (Zukin 1991; Sorkin 1992). Office buildings and corporate
headquarters were also part of this renewal, but the whole package
was generally wrapped in a style of decoration and diversity that
was an intensification of the earlier consumer culture. Much of
this new urban construction was consumption-oriented and sought to
give people the diversity and excitement that their working lives
lacked. Further, since many cities were still the sites of an
abandoned and decaying industrial ugliness, these buildings had to
carefully insulate fun-seeking patrons from these unpleasant
sights, leading to an insularity of this architecture (Davis 1990,
pp. 221-263). Even the new downtown office buildings got caught up
in the postmodern frenzy of decoration, superficiality, and
insularity. After all, people did not want to look at an ugly
modernist box that screamed efficiency and rationalization when
coming downtown to shop, play, or live (Harvey 1989). So postmodern
architecture took off, part of the new consumer culture that was
more intense and unequal but less geographically segregated than
the one pioneered in the 1920s and 1930s. Postmodernism was also
distinguished from early consumerism by its ironic attitude.
High-art architects, such as Venturi and Moore, appropriated the
symbols of the consumer vernacular with ironic twists that signaled
a distance from their naive applications in products such as autos
and Las Vegas casinos. A subtle change in scale or context revealed
to the cultural cognoscenti that they were not really serious but
merely playing with the popular language, just gaming, as the
postmodern philosopher JeanFrancois Lyotard puts it. Postmodernism
embodied a double coding (Jencks 1986, p. 14)-the simple, symbolic
language of comfortable illusions and escape for the masses was
overlain with a hip, condescending joke for those in the know, The
same sort of irony permeated the yuppie appropriation of the
clothes of the rebellions in the 1960s. Jeans, tiedyes,
bell-bottoms, and ethnic fashions that had once carried
meaning-rebellion, refusal-were now appropriated and stripped of
their historical content. Retro fashions
Postmodernism; or, the Cuftural Logic of Post-Fordism?
135
became just another part of a superficially differentiated and
fragmented identity, a style to be ironically played with for the
sake of some arbitrary difference (Baudnllard 1994, pp. 43-44).W E
E DO WE GO FROM HERE?HOW TO IMPROVE POSTMODERNISM HR
Despite the dismissive attitude of some to the concept, I am
convinced that postmodernism identifies important changes that are
occurring in the culture of advanced capitalist societies. I
applaud the efforts of Marxist theorists, such as Jameson and
Harvey, to connect these changes to contemporary economic changes
captured under the rubric of post-Fordism. But to be more
believable and heuristic, this broad, sweeping theory needs further
refinement and specification through detailed empirical studies of
the kind outlined above. First, the theory must loosen its
synchronous and uniform conception of social change to recognize
the possibility-even the likelihood-of diverse and uneven
developments. Culture should be seen as a response or reaction to
economic changes by producers within a particular social structure.
Depending on the specific configuration of class interests
surrounding economic changes such as mass production, the position
of cultural producers will vary, giving rise to cultural responses
that vary from country to country and from high to popular culture.
Second, this theory must also be altered to recognize that these
cultural responses may exert a dialectical influence on economic
developments, facilitating and contradicting them. Such dialectical
influence further accounts for the disjointed, uneven movement of
history. Jameson, Harvey, and others have done great service by
plotting the broad contours of the terrain of
postmodernisdpost-Fordism from their vantage point in the
theoretical stratosphere. But now we need to get down to earth and
do the hard work of ground reconnaissance, which will reveal that
the borders and features of this landscape are not so starkly and
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