It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism – as it will be outlined in the following pages – initially began to emerge. I think the best introduction to this debate, though not the easiest is Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

It is a complex debate but began its life as a conversation about aesthetics, in general, and architecture, in particular. postmodernism debate has been going on for at least a half century. I guess this isn’t surprising.įor our purposes, I want to make a distinction between modernism/postmoderism on the one hand, and modernity/postmodernity on the other. So to get back to the question, which I’ve for simplicity’s sake divided into two this makes it simpler and more complicated at the same time. Let me pause and regroup, this intervention is meant to answer a specific question, not to become a syllabus for an entire course on cultural theory (I do teach that on occasion, though). For a sense of Benjamin’s ideas about modernity, you should see, in particular, the Harvard UP collection, The Writer of Modern Life (2006) and his unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project (1999). Walter Benjamin, one of the great critical theorists of the twentieth century, was particularly influential in promoting Baudelaire as a primordial source of modernity. In particular, they tend to point to his essay “ The Painter of Modern Life” (1863). On modernism and modernity, cultural studies folks often have the tendency to point to this guy: Charles Baudelaire, Poet Maudit And into this complicated question, I have to throw in another dyadic pair: modernity and postmodernity. “What’s the difference between modernism and postmodernism?” This is a really big question that scholars have shed copious ink and at least a little bit of blood over.

Susannah asked a really good question that took me down the rabbit hole. A visual representation of the problem at hand.

Modernism vs postmodernism