I’m focusing my post on the Harvey piece this week, mainly because its content compelled me the most. Most notably, his assertion that “postmodernism can judge the spectacle only in terms of how spectacular it is” (56-57) while discussing “the loss of a historical community” in relation to Barthes’ theory of jouissance. My thoughts regarding this returned to America’s forced reconstruction of two national landmarks over the last five years: the World Trade Center, and more recently, the city of New Orleans.
While both are in still-debated stages of rebuilding, the debates behind those efforts seem to point to a discrepancy amongst certain circles as to what the motivations should be for their reconstruction, and I believe that the issue of how to recognize the historical roots of each through the reconstruction is what is causing the polarization between arguing factions. Both were emblems of different value sets in this country, and Harvey’s piece lends slightly to the difficulties that many have had reconciling how to replace them effectively (if at all).
The Freedom Tower, chosen as the replacement for the collapsed World Trade Center in 2003, has been a hotly-contested issue with regards to its functionality and design. What’s happened now is that a historical community (however short the history) has ascribed itself to a space and idea that never originally had one. While the original Towers were fundamentally symbols of capitalism, what happened to them tweaked their meaning to the world at large and to the city they resided in, and reconstructing them has proven to be an exercise in searching for the appropriate meaning, both thematically, and architecturally, for which the Freedom Tower will stand. Designer Daniel Libeskind has been under constant fire from various groups regarding the intent and goals of his design (Donald Trump wants it to be, of course, “bigger and better,” which speaks directly to Harvey’s “judge the spectacle” remark), and I think the reasoning behind much of the fuss is that no one is really sure what the new hub for commercialism should be. Is it an artistic landmark, a tribute to its past, or a functional headquarters through which worldwide business is channeled? The efforts to satisfy the the various aspects relates to Harvey’s sentiment that PoMo architecture “takes bits and pieces from the past quite eclectically and mixes them together at will.” It seems as if Daniel Libeskind is forced by the multi-pronged requirements of the artifice to adhere to a PoMo design aesthetic, yet held hostage by the fact that what he is designing has to find an appropriate history to respect and acknowledge.
Something different, however, is happening with the early discussions of how to rebuild the city of New Orleans, which, unlike the World Trade Center, carried with it an assured history and historical community. Yet many now feel that the prospect of rebuilding the city may only give way to the Disneylandification of it, a PoMo topic both talked about in class and discussed in the Harvey piece while discussing Levittown. He quotes Venturi:
“One does not have to agree with hard hat politics. . . to support the right of the middle-middle class to their own architectural aesthetics, and we have found that Levittown-type of aesthetics are shared by most members of the middle-middle class, black as well as white, liberal as well as conservative.” There is absolutely nothing wrong, they insist, with giving the people what they want, and Venturi himself was even quoted. . . “Mickey Mouse teaches the architects,” saying “Disney World is nearer to what people want than what architects are giving them.” (60)
So what to do with a city like New Orleans, where the “middle-middle class” doesn’t face the greatest challenge? Here is an instance where the prevalence of PoMo, history-erasure tendencies certainly may have a dire effect on not just the aesthetic history of a rebuilding effort, but issues of gentrification and socioeconomic displacement enter into the fold as well.
(On a side note, Harvey closes out his piece by discussing corporate and capitalist roles in PoMo art. the same issues are brought up continually by Kalle Lasn’s magazine, Adbusters, which recently had an issue devoted to this very topic.)