ABSTRACT
Bertolt Brecht Given my general modelling of the postmodern on its architecture, the basic defining feature of postmodernism in this study has been its paradoxical, not to say, contradictory nature. In both formal and ideological terms, as we have seen, this results in a curious mixture of the complicitous and the critical. I think it is this ‘inside-outsider’ position that sets the postmodern up for the contradictory responses it has evoked from a vast range of political perspectives. What frequently seems to happen is that one half of the paradox gets conveniently ignored: postmodernism becomes either totally complicitous or totally critical, either seriously compromised or polemically oppositional. This is why it has been accused of everything from reactionary nostalgia to radical revolution. But when its doubleness is taken into account, neither extreme of interpretation will hold. In order to understand the political ambivalence of postmodernism, it might be wise to look once again at the 1960s, the years of formation of most of the postmodern thinkers and artists, because these years are also contradictorily interpreted, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, contradictorily encoded: self-indulgent versus engaged; bourgeois solipsism versus sit-ins, teach-ins, May 1968, flower power. For some critics today, the 1960s were both uncritical and unhistorical (Huyssen 1981, 29-30). In other words, to be political does not insure ideological awareness or a sense of history. In fact, for many of us who lived through those years, it was the age of now, of the present. What postmodernism has added, however, is precisely a historical consciousness mixed with an ironic sense of critical distance.
