Neoromaticism is the pop culture of the eighties. From the immense success of Les Misérables and New Age music to the prescription of crystals for every ill, emotional excess and sentimental twaddle have come back into fashion. The conventional critical wisdom is that the "Postmodernism" resists this plunge back into the enjoyable pleasures of bathos. But a closer look reveals closer ties.
Given the sentence of death it seems to pronounce on the modern, the term Postmodern has a surprisingly long history. Although it has yet to appear in the Encyclopaedia Britannica or Webster's International Dictionary, the conjunction of post and modern was used by Arnold Toynbee half a century ago in volume 8 of his Study of History. During the fifties and sixties, the term simmered in academic journals in the humanistic disciplines of literature and history.
It erupted into popular usage in the late sixties in connection with American architecture, where it served as the battle cry of group of architects in revolt against the Modernist glass box. Now two decades later it is the common coin of the popular cultural press—the New York Review of Books, the art magazines, the literary journals—and has appeared in enough book titles to justify its proliferation in the class schedules of university art departments.
To a certain extent one can divide the Postmoderns into two large camps. Writing from the perspective of Deconstructivism, art critic Hal Foster divides them into a "Postmodernism of reaction" and a "Postmodernism of resistance." Others might characterize them as a Postmodernism of life and a Postmodernism of death. Both are agreed in their rejection of abstract, universalizing Modernism and both revive the use of recognizable imagery, historical forms, and symbols. Assemblage and collage are widely employed by both camps as prime modes of aesthetic organization. But the first emphasizes individuality and self-expression, while the second seemingly denies the possibility of either.
In spite of these general characteristics, Postmodernism is surprisingly difficult to pin down. It is not just that there are Postmodernisms of the Left and Right, and of art, literature, and architecture; even within these broad divisions, there is no clear definition. In the final analysis, Postmodernism seems more like an emotional reflex than an ideological position. If the spirit of modernization and Modernism is a wholehearted embrace of technology, speed, and change (in the early twentieth century these words were synonyms for progress), then the spirit of Postmodernism is one of disillusionment with the changes technology and speed have brought about.
The title of a 1962 musical, Stop the World: I Want to Get Off, aptly expresses the mood. In architecture, in art, in literature, even in criticism, Postmodernists emphasize the feelings of the alienated "I," the individual who has been swept up and along by the train of technological change and modernization and who has felt personally violated and dehumanized by the process. This holds true whether the Postmodernist is a populist journalist like Tom Wolfe or a liberal art critic like Carter Ratcliff, a Marxist philosopher like Jurgen Habermas, or a Deconstructivism professor of sociology like Jean Baudrillard. Postmodern artists—whether Neorealist or Neo-geo; Conceptual or Expressionist; Italian, French, German, or American; a woman or a member of a minority—are United States in
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