Postmodernism and the linguistic turn

Abstract

The term ‘postmodern’ was used from the 1930s onwards to define a style, in particular a turn away from the sleek lines of the formerly dominant ‘international style’ in architecture. Modernism had flourished between the wars, when a commitment to the use of new techniques and materials to meet mass housing needs made older building styles seem redundant, and elevated machine-made architecture into an aesthetic principle. Its adaptation to the needs of a resurgent corporate economy after the war stirred a reaction. The new postmodern approach drew on the mounting jumble of images thrown up by contemporary consumer affluence, on the discordant juxtaposition of older with newer signs and symbols. An early treatise on the new style, Robert Venturi’s aptly titled Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) celebrated ‘messy vitality over obvious unity’. Postmodern architects enjoyed placing emphasis on the facade of a building, rather than on its structure, and on using historical allusions in fragments and details in the design.1 Sociologists like Daniel Bell meanwhile were studying ‘Post-Industrial Society … a society which has passed from a goods-producing stage, to a service society’. In the same year, 1959, C. Wright Mills pondered Western man’s dwindling concern as ‘a cheerful and willing robot’ for freedom and reason in the ‘post-modern period’.2 Fascination with the world of advertising and with built-in obsolescence were further stimuli, as was their rejection in the counter-cultural ‘happenings’ of the 1960s. The new thinking abandoned the totalising approach associated with Marxism in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979). Jean Baudrillard ironically reinvented Western historical development as a sequence of ‘orders of appearance’, an age of production currently giving way to one of simulation.3So ‘postmodernity’ came into fashion, naming our present epoch. Sustained discussion of the subject only gathered pace in the 1980s, as confi-