Analysis of Gartman's (1998) Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Post-Fordism?

Explanation by Jameson and Harvey of transition from modernism to postmodernism by economic transition from Fordist to post-Fordist accumulation as a causally syncronous development misses the constitutively mutual dimension of interaction between culture and economy. As formulated by Le Corbusier ([1923] 1986), principles of modern architecture self-consciously followed the techniques that made mass production and consumption possible (Frampton 1973; 1992): "standardization, simplicity, and mechanization" (Gartman 1998: 119). The beginning of postmodernism is associated by its theorists with industrial standardization and regimentation losing its social hold in 1970s (Jencks 1991), with moving away from mechanization, centralization, and hierarchy (Moore 1967), and with transition to post-industrial society based on information and communication with stress on difference, image, and ephemerality (Portoghesi 1983). Marxist academic tradition, represented by Harvey (1989), Grossberg (1992), Hall (1989), Soja (1989), and Jameson (1984, 1991), explaining the emergence of post-modern culture of depthlessness, difference, and diversity by corresponding economic transition to post-Fordism fails to recognize the place of cultural dynamics in economic processes (Gartman 1998: 120).

Though the concept of postmodernism lacks precision (Frow 1991), its emergence stands in relation to the crises of institutions characteristic of modernity (Denzin 1993) the transformations in which can receive adequate analitical description by specifying the relations between culture and economy in micro terms (Gartman 1998: 120). As opposed to late capitalism, theorized by Mandel (1975) as starting in 1945, Jameson's (1994) theorization of postmodernism is in line with other theorists that link its cultural manifestation with post-Fordism (Davis 1985). Both Jameson and Harvey follow chronology of such corresponding developments as the stage of competitive and unregulated capitalism until 1980s reflected in realist style of Balzac, Dickens, and Stendhal, the stage of monopolies of Fordist capitalism with its standardized mass production until 1970s giving rise to modernism of Joyce, Picasso and Le Corbusier, and the stage of post-Fordist capitalism with flexible production on global scale leading to postmodernist culture. Drawing on Lukacs, Adorno, and Benjamin, this Hegelian Marxist approach maintains the the social contradictions each mode of production generates find their reflection "not in the content of the culture but in its forms" (Gartman 1998: 121) into which artists unconsciously incribe the causes of the contraditions they articulate (Jameson 1971, 1981).

Theorization of Fordism depends on the assertion of the regulation school of economics (Aglietta 1979; Lipietz 1987) that specific social institutions of organization, regulation, and motivation are critical to development of capitalism to the regime of accumulation of which they give stability as a corresponding mode of regulation. According to regulationists (Aglietta 1979: 111-112; Palloix 1976; Braverman 1974; Gartman 1986), Fordism as a new regime of accumulation has emerged in America where Taylor's scientific management and Ford's standardization shifted control over production process from workers to managers as part of minimization of time expenses, maximization of production speed, and optimization of technology use. To transform the mass-produced products into revenue the regime of Fordism also extended into management of consumption by increasing the consumer base through raising wages of the working classes, by promoting consumption lifestyle through welfare provisions, and by enforcing dependence on high wages through research of and intervention into domestic life (Gramsci [1930] 1971; Gartman 1986; Meyer 1981). On its own, however, Fordism could not secure mass consumption, until rule-governed institutions, labor laws, and trade unions "created a collective bargaining system" (Gartman 1998: 122) which found support in interventionist Keynesian state implementing social spending, fiscal, and monetary policies (Aglietta 1979; Piore and Sabel 1984; Harvey 1985: 205-209).

Jameson and Harvey's argument is that emergence of modernist culture is response to contradictions of Fordism that under the impact of rationalization (Weber [1922] 1968) and alienation (Marx [1844] 1975) has made cultural reconsiliation of objectified, abstracted, and alienated subjects with moden industrial accumulation imperative (Lukacs [1923] 1971). The contradiction between rapid historical change and permanence of religion and nature is registered in modernist works as the shock of the new that chaos and contingency of Fordist accumulation unleashed set the stage for conservative attempts to revive lost tradition by W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, on the one hand, and for avant-garde creation of aesthetics that celebrated technological progress as was done by Le Corbusier, Leger, and Mondrian, on the other hand (Harvey 1989: 10-12, 31-35; Jameson 1991: 302-313; 1994: 8-21, 84-86). The comression of space driven by acceleration of circulation through railroad, automobile, telegraph, assembly line, and real estate market leads to superficial perception of space as object to which modernists responded with search for deep meaning as established by Freudian reading of disconnected symptoms as manifestations of repressed needs and by Cubist, New Objectivist, and other avant-garde assembly of fragmented spaces into novel style or language of representation (Harvey 1989: 20-23; Jameson 1991: 6-16; 1994: 21-32).

The contradictory effects of Fordism on subjectivity are fragmentation as individuals became embedded into system of industrial rationalization and centeredness as mass consumption isolates people within family and personal property that modernist works sought to overcome in either bringing alientation from work to the privacy of home, as did Kafka's writing, or forcing autonomous individual to confront senseless world, as Munch's paintings show (Jameson 1991: 14-16, 311-313). Among modernist art forms, architecture best exemplifies the cultural contradictions of Fordism in that the modernist movement launched in 1920s by Le Corbusier, van der Rohe, and Gropius announced radical break with historical styles, adopted unadorned, rationalized, and standardized forms, designed affordable public housing for mass production, soughted to express inner rational structure of buildings on their surfaces, and integrated Fordist separation between production and consumption into urban design (Le Corbusier [1923] 1986; [1925] 1987).

In its discussion of Fordist crisis of accumulation in 1960s and transition in 1970s to post-Fordist production and commodities, regulation school (Aglietta 1979; Lipietz 1987) neglects cultural influences at work in the dynamics of decline of American productivity and profits and increase in international market share that European, Asian, and Latin American manufacturers gained (Gartman 1998: 124). As competitive pressures in markets governed by economies of scale of standardized production pushed the post-Fordist producers to pursue economies of scope offered by diversifying into distinct products and incorporating continuous technological improvement, the transition generated a post-Fordist system both of consumption where mass markets gave way to specialized niche markets and of production where machines and workers had to be quickly adaptible and integrated into chains of decision-making (Aglietta 1979; Amin 1994; Piore and Sabel 1984). Pursuing competitive advantage, post-Fordist corporations have sought to undermine the collective bargaining power of labor by relocation to low-wage, non-unionized areas, by downsizing, decentralizing, and outsourcing production processes, and by maintaining corporate control over increasingly globalized and diffuse networks of exploitation (Amin and Malmberg 1994; Harvey 1989; Soja 1989).

The post-Fordist marketplace polarizes consumers according to their purchasing power when upscale goods of flexible specialization are no longer accessible to those whom wage reductions and outsourcing affect most as mass-produced goods they continue to buy are no longer included into Keynesian state support of demand management, collective bargaining, and welfare legislation but are reorganized within fiscal and monetary policies oriented at corporate competitiveness, military spending, and employment rather than welfare (Esser and Hirsch 1994; Harvey 1989: 166-172; Jessop 1994; Lipietz 1994). According to position shared by Jameson and Harvey, postmodern culture encodes the contradictions of post-Fordism in terms of residually modernist opposition between change and permanence, playful celebration of depthless surface effects, and directionless registration of post-historical narratives in chaotic flux (Gartman 1998: 125). In view of Jameson and Harvey, post-Fordist economy has post-historical character since modernism's assertion of progress stemming from contrast between modernizing and pre-modern societies loses its validity as other contries modernize at the same time as acceleration of commercial circulation of fashions, styles, and images replaces the importance of innovation with aimless self-referentiality (Jameson 1991: 16-25, 309-311; 1994: 11-17; Harvey 1989: 54-58, 85-87).

Abandoning the dialectics of depth and surface, postmodernism lays stress on simultaneity as capitalism includes all spaces into circuits of its circulation thereby creating complex geography of "simultaneous, irreducible, incommensurable space" (Gartman 1998: 126) and on superficiality as capitalist homogenization reduces economic differences among places, cultures, and nations simultaneously with increasing its complexity as vast global system that escapes representation of its deep structure (Jameson 1991: 37-38, 341-343, 356-376; 1994: 40-43, 204-205). Post-Fordism replaces the neurotic subject of modernism with decentered and schizophrenic of postmodernism since the centered self of Fordism is replaced with consumerist mobilization that destroys psychological ogranization of geography of everyday life it with work and home separation in favor of multiplication of desires, needs, and satisfactions that flood away the structure of the self into experience of eternal present where unstable signifiers no longer offer subjective anchoring (Grossberg 1992: 351-353;Harvey 1989: 53-54; Jameson 1991: 14-16, 25-31; 1994: 31-32). Architecture of Venturi, Graves, and Moore is more exemplary representation of cultural forms of postmodernism in that it abandons historical progression, refers with historical symbols and styles to human meaning rather than to machines, employs historical references as decontextualized superficial decoration, emphasizes radical disjuncture, spatial closure and functional differentiation, stresses context-specific difference rather than universal formal language, and relinquishes claims to rational intervention into urban design (Jencks 1991; Venturi 1966; Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour 1972).

The consistent privileging of economy by Jameson and Harvey in order to explan cultural transformations tightly binds two different series of phenomena that rather than exhibit synchronous development possess irreducible complexity dictating chronologies proper to each substantive logic according to which different struggles and articulations take place (Grossberg 1992: 325-326) that necessitates consideration of cultural development in terms that are systemically irreducible to an explanation by recourse to a universal historicity of economy (Frow 1991: 11, 21-23). The adherence of Harvey and Jameson to Marxist model of relations between economic base and cultural superstructure leaves room for postulating dialectical relation between the two spheres that goes beyond mechanical causal impact of economy towards recognition of the active participation by culture in reproduction of economic institutions of production and consumption (Frow 1991: 14). The adequate account of systemic relations into which culture can enter necessitates reformulation of instutitutional confugurations where relations in which stand Fordism to modernism and post-Fordism to postmodernism are complex, dialectical, and context-dependent (Gartman 1998: 127).

As opposed to high cultural pattern of change that Jameson and Harvey trace in architecture and visual arts where modernist and postmodernist moments can be shown to follow in the steps of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, the popular consumer culture of the mass market has gone through formal changes associated with postmodernism of 1970s at far earlier stage of 1920s when the diffentiation and circulation of superficial styles were commercially harnessed as soon as mass production became part of a regime of accumulation (Gartman 1998: 127). In the United States fashion industry, the transition in 1920s from standardization reflective of "emergence of mass society of classless and functional uniformity" (Gartman 1998: 127) to diversity of individual styles in 1930s responded to imperatives of market differentiation and individualization as a means of stimulating demand with fashion becoming segmented across horizontal dimension of taste (Ewen and Ewen 1982: 162-232; Wilson 1990: 210-224) rather than vertical of class (Veblen [1899] 1934). While modernist aesthetic was only beginning to make its impact on architecture in Europe in late 1920s, the American aesthetics of automobile production have become distinctly postmodernist by mid-1920s as "stylistic diversity, superficial decoration, and constantly changing models" (Gartman 1998: 128) have allowed manufacturers to reorganize mass consumer market into customized niches by exploiting functional distinction betweeen standardized hardware inside and individualized decorative appearances.

Mobility promoted by cars has become embedded in systematic privileging of space over time as individuals were encouraged to resolve contradictions of economic chances, social control, and cultural conflict by driving to another city, to suburban residence, and to entertainment venue (Gartman 1998: 128), which within the larger economic configuration took form of post-historical cycle of directionless cultural change (Gartman 1994). The purportedly postmodern preoccupation with "diversity, style, and beauty" (Gartman 1998: 128) had long been the major feature of Fordism both in its saturation phase in 1920s and in the crisis times of 1930s (Meikle 1979) as cultural stimulation of aggregate demand was permeating consumer markets in their large and small masses. All of the consumer features by which post-Fordism is described as a distinct mode of accumulation offering competitive advantages over Fordism are fully supplied by the latter production processes offering "diversity, distinction, and change in consumer goods" (Gartman 1998: 128) via flexible standardization of inaccessible inside of product shells separated from inexpensive accoutrements and ostentatious outside components that gave apearance of progress (Gartman 1994).

The inability of theoretical models of both Marxist and regulationist schools to account for specificities of economic production processes, of regional histories of Europe and America, and of social meaning of both high and low art has led Jameson and Harvey among them to neglect the full extent of cultural processes they described while developing discourse on post-Fordism. The delayed arrival of Fordist mass production to Europe, beginning in earnerst only after World War II (Anderson 1984; Lipietz 1987; Piore and Sabel 1984), has repeated the early stages of American Fordism with greater stress on standardization, functionalism, and simplicity (Batchelor 1994: 130) with developed consumer culture of differentiation, decoration, and customization not emerging until 1960s (Gartman 1998: 129). The difference in historical trajectories of modernism in Europe, where Fordist capitalism clashed with pre-capitalist class structure (Anderson 1984), and America, where market forces were given free reign (Gartman 1998: 129), are better explained by the structural differences in relations among social spheres that define state-centric Fordism in Europe and market-based in America in cultural terms. In Europe, the relative weakness of bourgeoisie has led to institutional underdevelopment of mass production and of free competition on the one hand (Nolan 1994), and to entrenched and unchallenged domination by aristocracy of politics, economy, and the arts on the other hand (Mayer 1981).

After World War I has exposed economic backwardness of European monarchist regimes the necessity to industrialize by adopting the Fordist model has not been met with social consensus which would resolve conflicting interests of working classes in increasing wages and consumer market development, of professional and administrative classes in research and technology support and in corporate power shift to managers, and of industrial bourgeoisie in minimizing overhead costs and in maintaining cartel agreements (Gartman 1998: 129). Under pressure to create workplaces and to raise living standards for the working classes that brought unstable democratic regimes into power, the political classes lacking support from disunited and retrograde industrial bourgeoisie have initiated a state-driven attempt at Fordist indutrialization the technocratic program of which was supported by artists championing the rationalized, functional, and industrial forms as the modernist aesthetic (Lane 1985; Nolan 1994; Maier 1970). In the centralised effort by administrative and artistic elites to increase supply of affordable housing large residential compounds were subsidized by the public and mixed funding in the planning of which architects took active role as it gave them opportunity to employ modernist aesthetic, to incorporate industrialized construction components, and to popularize the regime oriented at mass production and consumption (Boudon 1969; Lane 1985; Nolan 1994).

In the United States the capitalist, bourgeois, and working class development has consistently reinforced each other as industrialists accumulated capital and invested into technology to remain competitive, as bourgeois professionals were widely incorporated into industrial production to raise its efficiency, and as laboring classes has their needs addressed by social workers and purchasing power raised by private industry (Weinstein 1968; Wiebe 1967). While the functional aesthetic of modernism was widely promoted for designing environment at work asd well as at home in the United States, the primarily consumer market orientation of the mass production has rapidly adjusted to popular classes' desire to satisfy desires for expression, decoration, and individuality (Cohen 1982), which happened in Europe only after aggregate demand reached saturation in 1960s (Gartman 1998: 131). While European modernism and architecture have assumed pinoneering role early in the 20th century, the market-driven development of the arts in the United States has deferred the development of architectural modernism until after 1950s with functionalist forms primarily restricted to indusrial buildings wheareas residential and urban architectural styles have consistently tended to be organic and ornamental Wright's designs being primary example of which (Frampton 1992).

After World War II, the administrative centers of capitalist production located in urban cores began to express modernist features to lend rational, functionalist, and abstract appearance to the dominating power of corporations and government artistically reinforced by the aesthetic authority of such emigre architects as van der Rohe at the same time as suburban America has remained attached to consumer ornamentalism of extavagant automobile design and historical housing styles (Gartman 1998: 131). Gradually American fashion started to cater to suburbanized lifestyles that offered romantic, domestic, and casual wear to female spouses encouraged to engage in parenting at home while their partners commuted to work in corporate suits but also developing taste for leisure dress serving mediatized needs of expression, individuality, and sport (Ehrenreich 1983; Ewen and Ewen 1982). However, the early connection of postmodernist aesthetic with American Fordism as its consumer culture does not explain its reemergence as distinct cultural phenomenon in the 1970s after the Fordist regime of economic accumulation ran into crisis since its causes lie as much in culture as in economy where the cultural contradictions of transition from Fordism to post-Fordism have equally left their mark (Gartman 1998: 131).

As soon as the desire for individuality has become the marketing message of mass consumption the limitations of the superficial differencies have become increasingly apparent to the consumers distinguishing mass produced uniformity beneath the superficial variation that standardized production allowed which led to development of countercultural fashion styles based on cultures of workers, peasants, protest movements, and minorities (Ewen and Ewen 1982: 241-251; Wilson 1990: 215-217). Similarly, the United States car manufacturers have become victims of the unchanging formula of their initial success combinng underlying standardization with superficial variation that with increasing competition in late 1950s and 1960s has accelerated the pace of stylistic changes to the rate that exposed the cultural homogeneity of designs and opened inroads for automobile importers that widened the consumer choice beyond corporate conformism (Gartman 1994). From 1960s the attempts to move away from standardization as a strategy to maintain positions in mass markets have negatively affected revenues for reasons of increased overhead, accumulated inventory cost, decelerated production pace, and increased coordination difficulty, even though the sales have risen in response to genuine expansion of consumer choice (Gartman 1998: 133).

What became associated with post-Fordism is the product of struggle between management and organized labor that at the time of its occurring in 1970s on the one hand showed inadequacy of the Fordist managerial techniques of discipline enforcement, workforce downsizing, and labor productivity intensification to constitutively decentralized production process and on the other hand pressed the imperatives of product diversification towards implementation of flexible production system in response to low unemployment, falling profits, and strong labor unions (Gartman 1994). The development of consumer market beyond the point of saturation towards celebration of "divesity, decoration, symbolism, and ephemerality" (Gartman 1998: 133) has spilled in the 1960s into the arts where modernism's association with corporate establishment pressed emerging artists to draw inspiration from consumer culture, as pop art has done (Huyssen 1986), and to submit to critique large scale urban renewal projects that eviscerated their architectural diversity, complexity, and historicity (Jacobs 1961). The repositioning of architecture within the canon of high culture away from the abstract modernist aesthetic towards eclecticism, decoration, and spectacle has reconceptualized postmodern architecture as language that had to use popularly accessible vocabulary to have appeal that would extend beyond narrow elite circles (Venturi 1966; Venturi et al. 1972).

Under the banners of postmodern attack on the principles of modernism, the 1980s had also saw the dissipation of Fordist regime of regulation as corporations undermined urban working class by moving overseas or further decentralizing, as social differentiation between professions and working classes continued to grow apace, and as consumer market steeply fragmented to satisfy the distinctive demands of the newly rich (Gartman 1998: 134). In the 1980s, cities desperate to compensate for plant closures and corporate relocation began to court the affluent classes with convention centers, shopping malls, historic restorations, and restaurant districts (Sorkin 1992; Zukin 1991) which both were insulated from the areas where abandoned and unsightly industrial buildings remained (Davis 1990: 221-263) and spreaded the postmodernist consumption-oriented aesthetic to the rest of the downtown architecture joining in the playful decoration, pastiche, and self-referentiality (Harvey 1989). As part of the wider consumer culture, postmodernism deployed "double coding" (Jencks 1986: 14) that blended such works within the high culture as architecture with consumer vernacular (Gartman 1998: 134) that yielded widely differentiated meaning effects that speak both to theoretically informed cognoscenti and to entertainment-seeking masses the illusionistic effect of which bespeaks ironic play with style, representation, and difference (Baudrillard 1994: 43-44).

The concept of postmodernism registers important cultural changes occurring in connection to economic transitions from Fordist mode of accumulation to post-Fordist mode of regulation that need to be put in comparative and empirical context to account for diverse cultural developments that are interactively embedded in particular social structures the specific configurations of which give rise to different cultural responses dependent on their respective structural position that are yet to receive adequate reflection in theorization of dialectical relationship between culture and economy (Gartman 1998: 135). The movement from the macro descriptions by Jameson and Harvey of the relationship between postmodernism and post-Fordism has to pass through more detailed specification of the connection that micro processes have with the particular social structures within which they take place that Munch's (1981; 1982) reformulation of structural functionalism in terms that take into account regional and historical specificities offers.