Tides of change: culture in historical perspective
* New Economy
-N the same sense, the creation of a specific culture, in the general sense of the coherence of forms of communication, be this in fashion, food, literature, architecture, music, the evolution of languages or other social artefacts, is largely bound by its particular epoch. The technological framework, the social structure and the historical process of the formation of knowledge defines the setting for the work of art and for the overall construction of social cultures. In this sense, this section argues that there are specific tides in cultural production, that can be better understood in the framework of the societal and historical vision indicated previously, and that this specific nexus is crucial for the understanding of the forms of organised social communication prevailing in modern societies through the development of capitalism.
In a nutshell, the argument is that major changes in the economy are causally related to dramatic alterations in the social structure, the forms of work and power, and the dominant modes of communication - and that the tides in cultural production are unintelligible apart from these changes.
### Modernity
Table 1 takes up part of this argument. Each epoch is defined by the industrial revolution originating the maelstrom that changed the way of life, and that shaped each specific experience of modernity. Consequently, three main categories are indicated: while the original industrial revolution set the tone for the process of modernization, following on from the slow development after the Enlightenment and the sixteenth century, modernism was the emerging language for the fight against the dominant market.
Not against technology or machines - indeed they were worshipped by the futurists and other modernists - but against impersonal relations of the market and the general reification under capitalism.
Finally, the triumph of the market over its radical opposition is marked by its exten-
24 International Viewpoint #322 June 2000
THE production of works of art has a logic and time of its own - quite often, it anticipates the future or constructs alternative worlds. Yet the producers live in concrete societies, and their horizon is largely defined by the potentialities of their epoch.
### FRANCISCO LOUÇA sion into what was, until then, the partially separated world of art production: this period has been called postmodernism. As Jameson puts it, "modernism [was] the experience and the result of incomplete modernization, (...) [and] the postmodern begins to make its appearance whenever the modernization process no longer has archaic features and obstacles to overcome and has triumphantly implanted its own autonomous logic" (Jameson, 1991).
This said, Modernism yesterday was, and Postmodernism today is, neither culturally dominant nor even hegemonic: as indicated in the table, they can be considered emerging traits in cultural production, representative of the ongoing conflict. But Modernism and Postmodernism are the trends most closely associated with the fractures of history in their own time.
They were indeed seen by contemporaries as earthquakes: a celebrated example is that of the so much quoted and tragic images of Angelus Novus by Paul Klee, a representation of the transformation imposed by the second industrial revolution and the motif for Walter Benjamin's reminiscences:
"An angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise: it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." (Benjamin, 1973)
This wave of progress invaded the daily life and transformed the modes of production, distribution and communication at the end of the nineteenth century. The culture of the new century was part of this catastrophe: "Il faut être absolument moderne", said Rimbaud. The next industrial and technological revolution imposed a new version of the dictum: we cannot but be postmodern. The structure of this evolution is the theme for the table bellow.
As the table indicates, there are considerable lags between causally connected events and trends; moreover, there is a large margin of autonomy between technological transformations, allowing for new methods of diffusion and permitting new experiences of the process of modernization, and their cultural counterparts. Yet the creation of new technological means sets the pace for the transformation.
Gutenburg Galaxy The undisputed example is the creation of the "Gutenberg Galaxy" in the fifteenth century: it allowed for the development "of a system essentially dominated by the typographic mind and the phonetic alphabet order" (Castells, 1996). As the alphabet was the dominant "conceptual technology", since 700 BC Greece, it established itself as the privileged infrastructure for the codification of cumulative knowledge.
But it became a dominant mode of communication just when the industrial capacity established the printed word as the direct form of expression and the book as the cultural tool of the elite.
Consequently, for the whole period sounds and images were outside the scope of written discourse and were relegated to the domain of the separate and slightly eso-
Table Li. The production of culture in a long-term perspectise
Industrial
Emerging
Period revolution
Machine pro
1848-1890
Second long duction of wave steam-driven engines
Examples cultural traits
Realism
Centres of cultural communicaton production
Conversation
London
Paris
18905
Transition
Third long
1890s-1940s
Machine pro-
Expressionism duction of elecwave tric and internal combustion ngines
Modernism
Cubism
Putarism
Printed word
Paris
Berlin
Vienna
St. Petersburg
1940-505 Transition 1940- Fourth long Machine pro-
Aware duction of elec- Modernism trical &s electronic Advertisement machines Transition teric artistic production. A new epoch was then opened when Fordist production spread to the whole social fabric and extended to the mechanical reproduction of works of art. Radio and film - the first distinctively mediatic art form - became the then dominant modes of communication.
Finally, and we come to our own time, a "new alphabetic order", , a new digital meta-language is being imposed as the cultural infrastructure: "A technological transformation of similar historical dimensions [as the creation of the alphabet] is taking place 2700 years later, namely the integration of various modes of communication into an interactive network" (Castells, ibid). These epoch-making transformations are the theme for the next table.
As previously indicated, the epochs depicted in the tables were not periods of uniformity, and their cultural production was a fortiori a turbulent landscape of diversity and contradiction. Their emerging cultural traits were not dominant or hegemonic through the period, although they marked a peculiar vision of the storm of modernization, and eventually constituted the more distinguishable features of its inheritance.
Realism represented the first interpretation of the changing world, and this new world reserved a specific role for the enter-
Rock'n roll Post Pop Punk Fashion, MTV tainment business: popular novels, theatre, and popular opera were, for some coun tries, the forerunners of the cultural industry of the second half of the century. Although this business was still separated from the production of high culture, the dissemination of the market in this direction anticipated the aestheticisation of daily life - but even this would still require another major technological change.
### Modernism
Modernism was the response to these first moves: breaking with the aesthetics of representation in art and the theoretical discourse based on the insulated worlds of culture and social life (Lash and Urry, 1987), the modernist revolution was built on the challenge to the capitalist process of modernization. It led to non-representational and expressionist painting, to new lyric poetry, to existentialism in philosophy, to the films d'auteur. Attacking the market and not technology, the modernists were fascists with Marinetti and communists with Maiakovsky: they praised cars, speed and movement, neat colours and strong feelings. Picabia, Duchamps, Fernand Léger, Diego Rivera painted machines and the possibility of reconstruction of social life in a new technological world; Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies applied the new vision to archi-
### Radio New York
Film Cinema New York Television Los Angeles Electronically transmitted bits, clips tecture and rebuilt urban life.
But modernism was rooted in high culture, and the headquarters of resistance were established in the authenticity, originality and uniqueness of the work of art: its discourse was that of creativity (Lash and Urry, 1987) and the defence of the aura of artistic artefacts. In that sense, art in society vindicated a radical separation of cultural forms from the social framework - and this was the reason for its intense appeal as well as for its failure. In a matter of decades, the market conquered this last bastion of cultural critique and transformed it into an industry
The crucial alteration introduced in the post-war period was the widespread diffusion of commercial TV. Consequently, the film industry, the epicentre of cultural production since the beginning of the century, was transmuted from a production of episodic and unique pieces, seen by large audiences in unique settings into a production of flows of images and sounds to be seen simultaneously in all private settings. The simultaneous collective experience was transmuted into a simultaneous individualised experience. The continuous flow abolishes the effort of memory and imposes the loss of historicity, mixing news, films, soaps and contests in the same level of discourse and reducing all sounds and images to bits of infotainment. International Viewpoint #322 June 2000 25
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New Economy * Modes of
* New Economy
Dominant.
Period characteristic
Liberal
Ist and 2nd long capitalism wave
Fordism
3rd long wave
Late
Ath long wave
Table 2: Modes of cultural production Construction Technique of of meanings cultural production Hierarchical Discontinuous and diffusion of scarce knowledge production of Auratic works individual works Mechanized Discontinuous reproduction of artefacts and works of dense art. Distantiation production effect Anti-auratic Continuous populist flow
Socially Emersing, trend constructed in cultural attitude production Reverence Promethale Admiration modernization Contemplation Apollonian Concentration modernism Distraction Dyonisian postmodernism capitalism societies has been the decentring of identi- technological transformations diffused
The great consequence of this is the fully used potential for the construction of "fictive temporalities" and therefore the "technological appropriation of subjectivity", generating a specific and novel type of media populism that was to become the basis for the entertainment industry (Jameson, 1991).
### Social consequences
The social consequences of this dramatic change in culture are still to be fully understood. The growing importance of advertising, the consumption of the discourse of consumption and the narrative of desire inscribed in publicity constitute the image as the final form of reification of the commodity: the product is identified with its brand or logo.
Advertising is the dominant form of production of signs in postmodern culture: consequently, Jameson describes postmodernism as that specific mode of production in which culture has a specific function and place (Jameson, 1991). Fashion and fast food, B-films and remakes, Warhol's pop art, parodies and kitsch, science fiction, music and video reduced to clips populate this universe of pastiche - to use Thomas Mann's concept. Categories of space have replaced categories of time, historical depth has been lost to ephemerity and concentration has been replaced by superficial trivia.
As this process is our contemporary, its implications are still largely undecided, although there are two that follow from the pattern of communication imposed by this cultural revolution. First, "a crucial effect of the electronic media and spatio-temporal changes in our disorganizing capitalist 26 International Viewpoint #322 June 2000 culture, global reification effect ties and the loosening or destructuration of group and grid" (Lash and Urry, 1987). But, second, this iconography of modernity also imposes a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self, so that "in this condition of structural schizophrenia between function and meaning, patterns of social communication become increasingly under stress" (Castells, 1996-I).
How did then machines produce machines and information produce information to the extent that we were transported from a culture of virtual reality to a culture of real virtuality in this period of transition, as Castells argues in his magnificent The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture? The answer resides in the technological changes associated with the information and communication revolution emerging through the fourth long wave - and in the concrete process of social selection that has determined the shape of this techno-economic paradigm which is now challenging the still prevailing mode of development in this period of mismatch and transition.
In this framework, we follow Jameson's suggestion and recuperate the concept of "late capitalism", as it was used by the Frankfurt school, namely by Adorno and Horkheimer, and lately by Ernest Mandel. Late capitalism describes the galaxy of economic structures, methods of production and cultural substrata derived from the expansion of commodification towards Nature and the Self or the Unconscious - a process of reification of all social relations, i.e. one purer form of capitalism.
Late capitalism is thus the name for the since the 1950s, and for the cultural alterations emerging since the 1960s. As a cultural constellation, it had a long period of maturation: in the early decades of the century, Dada and surrealism anticipated these postmodernist tones, although they rooted their activity in a mood of denunciation and contradicted the market economy seen as the adversary to art (but see also the collaboration of Dali with one of the ignominious dictatorships, that of Franco). Yet it was when the technology became available for the production of continuous flows of infotainment that postmodernism won
Contrary to MacLuhan and so many other commentators, its victory did not represent the imposition of a complete universal culture: we do not live in a global village, but in "customized cottages globally produced and locally distributed" (Castells, 1996-I). Each cultural artefact is locally bounded and the production of icons is still mediated by national and regional frontiers: their understanding is largely local. But icons are industrially produced and are the constitutive bits and clips of our social communication, and this is the triumph of the aesthetics of distracBenjamin, Walter (1973), Illuminations, London: Fontana Berman, Marshall (1983), All That is Solid Melts into Air -the Experience of Modernity, London: Verso Castells, Manuel (1996), The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, volume I, Oxford: Blackwell Harvey, David (1992), A Condição Pós-Moderna, São Paulo: Jameson, Fredric (1991), Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso Lash, Scott, and Urry, John (1987), The End of Organized Capitalism, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press Louçã, Francisco (1994), A Maldição de Midas - A Cultura do Capitalismo Tardio, Lisboa: Editora Cotovia