CSTT Keele University UK

Let us characterize modernism as the (industrial) production of goods of standard quality in very large quantity to be sold at a ‘popular’ price. And typify postmodernism as the (post-industrial / post-Fordist) production of (knowledge and information) services that are (very) well designed. Design – the client-centered, individualized, tailored -- now accounts for a large portion of the cost of finished products and services. Modernism assumed idealized abstract humanity, represented by the ‘average consumer’ of industrial mass production. Modernism, in effect, celebrated ‘being ordinary’; while postmodernism extols the enormous variety of individuality (différance). Postmodernism demands

a return to the "actual, concrete person … a man, a woman, an elderly person --- concrete individuals, with their own faces and personalities.

This is the task of lowering human beings from their pedestal of ideal abstraction and returning them to the milieu of private life." (Kurokawa,, 1994) To illustrate: modernism created giant buildings with enormous spaces where no person can make him or herself comfortable; postmodernism tries to restore private life to its rightful place by designing fun (novelistic) spaces on a human scale. Space is re-born as duration --- as place(s) to experience and to be. Foucault’s symbol of modernism, the Panopticon; is replaced by the local interwoven networks of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘rhizomes’ --- spaces like a spider web with neither core nor periphery, neither a beginning nor an end. The logic of différance and of small groups pursuing their own local ‘truths,’ is intimate-ist. It is guided by the principle of the direct experience-able, self-regulating and self-organising structure. Such structures are products of creative evolution. The self-organisation of society can be compared to the movements of a school of fish:

When a school of minnows changes direction, the action is not initiated by any established leader of the school. An individual within the school volunteers to lead by making the first move, and the rest of the fish follow its lead as if they shared a single mind. there is no king or authority in the school. each individual member can become the leader at any moment, yet the school as a whole does not lose its dynamism. The school of minnows may well serve us as a model for the Postmodern era. (Kurokawa, 1994)

Self-organization cannot be reconciled with industrial organization's principle of economic efficiency, which is the logic of mass spectacle(s). If postmodernism is something more than hyper-modernism, then Las Vegas is definitely not postmodern. Postmodernism’s principle of social organisation is emergent --- its social psychology is co-operative. It stresses the experiential value of différance --- i.e. undergoing diverse inter-related phenomena to encounter the dynamism of being. Such a principle of being provides on the one hand, the new ‘coherence’ of Postmodernism and on the other, its enormous variety and specificity.

Postmodernism’s window to experiential investigation stresses the circumstantially unique and specific. In its specificity, postmodern space is ironic ---- ironic because its ‘truth claim’ does not impose on or bully, anyone else’s. And ironic because, however intense and vivid its experiences are, the limited power and energy of human existence is acknowledged. Postmodern space does not compete to overwhelm and exploit, it remains so many speculative efforts at experiencing, sharing and describing.

My goal in the paper will be to further develop and defend the aesthetic defended above with the assertion that: A small French village (in the Languedoc) is a far more postmodern space than is Las Vegas!

Hugo Letiche

University of Humanist Studies Utrecht NL

CSTT Keele University UK