Leaving Las Vegas

In a not entirely interesting and predictably titled Dissensus thread on the now fatal strategist, the question of Baudrillard's Postmodernism (or not) comes up a fair bit. This, I tend to think, is best viewed via urbanism and architecture rather than the amorphous American-academic construction Theory (Baudrillard of course wrote extensively about architecture, particularly for Utopie). In the mid-80s Hal Foster made a distinction between neoconservative postmodernism (centred on a revivalist and/or eclectic architecture - key text, Charles Jencks' The Language of Postmodern Architecture) and poststructuralist postmodernism (Lyotard and so forth, and not necessarily affirmative, a discussion of a phenomena rather than a propagandist argument: key text being Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition).



Regardless of whether this dichotomy really holds, it points to the fundamental gulf that lies between Robert Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas and Baudrillard's America. While Venturi saw in the chaos of signs, advertising and historical pile-ups of this city an authentic popular form, something worth affirming and imitating elsewhere, Baudrillard might have been fascinated, interested in, and obsessed with the cityscapes of late capitalism, but he never blandly affirmed them; like Ballard, what he was involved in was an autopsy and not a diagnosis.