From Paul Delany, editor, Vancouver: Representing the Postmodern City (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1994). 1-24.
Copyright 1994 by Paul Delany
[Original pagination in square brackets]
The idea of postmodernism has made itself indispensable, but now is in danger of being ruined by success; for the wider its empire extends, the less it can discriminate between the different elements in our present culture. If our whole era has achieved postmodernity, then how can Vancouver be any more or less postmodern than any other city? Perhaps we should really be asking what all world cities now have in common. Only if the tide of postmodernism is coming in with varying speed - so that some things are not postmodern yet - can we still claim a place for Vancouver in the urban vanguard.
Does “Vancouver as a postmodern city” mean that it could also be looked at as another kind of city; or that Vancouver is a specially good example of the postmodern? All that the contributors to this volume agree on, perhaps, is their recognition of the distinctiveness of the local experience, even if the “essential” quality of Vancouver life remains elusive. The rapid change and growth of this city have always been the product of external forces: Vancouver has been discovered, developed - colonized, some would say - by global migrations and shifts of capital. If these global powers are identified with postmodernism, then Vancouver has become postmodern through its excessive openness to movements that originated elsewhere; and we are then still condemned to be secondary and belated, no matter how many postmodern towers sprout up north of the Granville Street bridge. Yet I undertook this volume because it seemed clear to me that, in the nineties, the aura of the city really had changed. Boosterism and claims of being “world-class” have always been with us; and people here have always had their visions of a brighter city to come. But now there seems to be a more thoughtful appreciation of our city’s value - and still more, of its potential. Vancouverites are basking in the interest of outsiders, [2] and coming to believe that we too can be globally important; that we have not just a future, but a destiny.
Let us therefore call Vancouver “postmodern,” with any qualifications we want to attach, and see where the name leads. We can begin by challenging the old habit of defining Vancouver by what it lacks, those absences that made it a failure as a “real” city. There was no long historical past here, witnessed by a layered succession of architectural styles. No shrines, to remind us of the city's sacred beginnings; no statues of Kings or Generals who had ridden in triumph through its streets; no legislature; no places cherished in popular memory, like Kilmainham Jail or the wall in Père Lachaise where the martyrs of the Commune were shot. No National Museums, Film Boards, or Railways, and few symbols of corporate power, for most of Vancouver's wealth has been controlled elsewhere; but no proletariat either, for the real exploitive process, human or material, has been situated in the mines, mills and camps of the Interior. Little of the “heavy metal” of the nineteenth century cityscape, the intimidating bulk of marshalling yards, factories, warehouses, workers’ housing. Apart from Chinatown, Vancouver has no great ethnic neighborhoods like those in older North American cities, the visible result of decades of exile and dispossession. In all, Vancouver has not been even a true capital city for its own region; so that its spectacular setting and frenetic growth has not saved it from being looked down on as deprived and provincial. Even the shortage of dirt, crime, political corruption, and congestion can be taken as signs of a missing urban authenticity.
Postmodernism gives us a chance to re-evaluate Vancouver’s lacks, and to find new positive terms. The early nineteen-seventies were the incubation period of a new phase whose local effects became unmistakable around the time of Expo 86. (n. 1) The year 1973 is commonly seen as the beginning of a global transition to postmodernism (Harvey). Around then several things drew to an end: American involvement in Vietnam, Nixon's presidency, the romanticism of the sixties, modernist architecture with the demolition of the Pruitt-Igloe housing project in 1972. The oil crisis of 1973 marked the end of post-World War II reconstruction, at least along the line of straightforward spatial and material expansion. The great wave of postwar North American growth seemed to fall back on itself; in its backwash, cultural moods of rejection, irony and cynicism became dominant. [3] Negatively, postmodernism wrote the epitaph for all the totalizing “Dreams of Empire” that had been variously expressed in Modernist art, psychoanalysis, industrial capitalism and utopian Marxism. And postmodernism was a return of everything those systems had devalued: the aleatory and the unmotivated, representation in the visual arts, surface decoration in architecture, small-scale innovation, the superstructure (no longer a mere derivative of the material base), market forces, popular culture. Everyone can make their own list.
Postmodernism is thus an unashamedly belated and reactive mode of consciousness. It maps the interplay of surface phenomena, as a system of collage and citation that “floats above” any determinate or determining ground (see Michael Jackson’s face). Earlier systems projected sequences of cause and effect onto various large- or small-scale historical narratives, of linear development from past to present, infant to adult, depth to surface, repression to symptom, superstition to reason, intention to achievement. Postmodernism replaces temporal with spatial analysis, preferring models that are simultaneous rather than sequential, networks or mosaics of concurrent events (Soja). The postmodern city is a place where different semiotic systems are juxtaposed, instead of a place where culture unfolds or accumulates through time. Even the most historic cities become contemporary “theme parks,” where the material heritage is renovated, put in quotation marks, and made to serve the uses of the present. Postmodern cultural analysis and production takes the city as its preferred site; there is a corresponding loss of interest in either individualist models of “deep subjectivity,” or in a fading nation-state.
High modernism centralized cultural activity in a few capitals - Vienna, London, Paris, New York. There was a general displacement from the periphery to the center: from the provinces to Paris, from the New World to the Old, from imperial possessions to the metropolis. This displacement operated both at the level of high culture (Eliot, Joyce, Senghor) and at the popular level of mass migration (the ethnic ghettoes of North America, the exile quarters of Paris). Ezra Pound observed (in an essay called “Provincialism the Enemy”): “what man of unusual intelligence in our day, or in any day, has been content [4] to live away from, or out of touch with, the biggest metropolis he could get to?” (202). A country, he said, only becomes a nation when “it has achieved within itself a city to which all roads lead, and from which there goes out an authority.” In a wider sense, both epistemological and political, modernism can be identified with “the assumption that there exists a legitimate centre a unique and superior position from which to establish control and to determine hierarchies” (Richard 463). The center is also the place that sets the cultural clock: events originate in the capital, and in the provinces there are only echoes and reflections - everything there happens belatedly, unfashionably, and as a lame copy of the metropolitan “real thing.”
Postmodernism reverses this modernist centralism, into a dispersal and decentering - not least of the metropolis itself:
In the postmodern world the notion of culture as something exclusively located in a specialised venue will be, as I have suggested, no longer operable; culture will increasingly come to us and not vice versa. It will no longer be a question of congregation but of circulation, no longer of venues but of avenues. And theatres, cinemas, concert halls and museums are destined to be marginalised (if it hasn’t yet happened) as the anachronistic relics, the very last, secularised and frequently trivialised gasp, of the sacred and ritualistic in a cultural context. . . . Culture, in short, is something which 'happens’ to us increasingly at home - in, as they say, our own space - and correspondingly less in those venues that were erected, mostly decades and even centuries ago, in its name. (Adair 20, 24)
As the capitals lose their uniqueness of function, peripheral cities like Vancouver gain in vitality; they profit both from an infusion of global culture through the media, and from the emergence of a more richly differentiated local culture. (n. 2) The media contribute to decentering through new portable formats, and through an ever more powerful conceptual model, that of the network. Culture now can be consumed at the same time and in the same way in Vancouver as in London or Paris - at least, the culture of such media as the paperback book, the CD, the movie, the videotape, or the photograph. Meanwhile the media network, especially as it has evolved in the past decade, can project images globally and simultaneously; it can “originate” events anywhere and provide the same virtual reality at any point of reception. News can be “captured” in Baghdad or Berlin, processed in Atlanta, absorbed everywhere. (n. 3) The technique of multiple [5] real-time interaction, pioneered in Canada by The Journal, brings London and Washington into the local studio; we no longer have to wait for the capitals to validate things that we can see and judge for ourselves.
Nor is it just one network that we can connect with, but many. In the nineteen-fifties, Canadian cities were oriented towards a narrow beam of American popular culture, and everything stopped for I Love Lucy or The Ed Sullivan Show. But Canadian eagerness to consume American popular culture created the world's most extensive system of cable television (seventy-five percent of households are on cable), with more channels per capita than anywhere else. There is no longer a simple, bipolar relation with the U.S., whereby a homogeneous local sub-culture defers to an equally homogeneous hegemonic culture across the forty-ninth parallel. Television is now fractured along many different lines and has progressed from a modern (broadcast) to a postmodern (narrowcast) era, as Thomas Pynchon can explain:
Any discussion of Sloth in the present day is of course incomplete without considering television, with its gift of paralysis, along with its creation and symbiont, the notorious Couch Potato. Tales spun in idleness find us Tubeside, supine, chiropractic fodder, sucking it all in, re-enacting in reverse the transaction between dream and revenue that brought these colored shadows here to begin with . . . .
Sad but true. Yet, chiefly owing to the timely invention - not a minute too soon! - of the remote control and the VCR, maybe there is hope after all. Television time is no longer the linear and uniform quality it once was. Not when you have instant channel selection, fast-forward, rewind and so forth. Video time can be reshaped at will. What may have seemed under the old dispensation like time wasted and unrecoverable is now perhaps not quite as simply structured.
(57)
The remote control - Americans have 300 million of them - is the first and foremost postmodern tool, flipping our consciousness between Masterpiece Theatre or Hulk Hogan; between football and the House of Commons; between programs in Italian, Swedish, Hindi, Cantonese. (n. 4) Interests and possibilities become so fragmented that we can construct a unified theory of culture only at the level of the pattern or system, using metaphors like the mosaic, the network, the collage, or the marketplace. [6]
In the early 1970s, Canadian intellectuals were exhorted to stand firm against American influence and cherish their own national identity. “The Canadian Tradition,” as George Bowering notes below, “involved enduring of snow and fear of wolves, and leaned towards Frye’s picture of Protestant enclaves in the landscape deep freeze. From the west edge, at least, it is not hard to see that such unitary myth-making is exclusionary.” Jeff Derksen also finds the literary version of Canadian “identity politics” to be a dead end for younger Western poets. Even among commercial writers, Vancouver has come into its own in the nineties with three best-selling authors - Doug Coupland, Nick Bantock, William Gibson - who one hopes are here for a reason, but who seem utterly globalized, stylized and deracinated: producers of a “location-independent” literature. Mel Hurtig’s National Party sounded a tocsin (or lament) for a nation in the 1993 election, and couldn’t win one seat. Such Eastern-style Canadian nationalism as remains is viewed with more suspicion than ever in the West, as a stalking-horse for the vested interests of Ontario and Quebec. National identity, Perry Anderson suggests, needs to be based on “stable political institutions commanding a dense network of traditional allegiances” (7). Our institutions appear, in the wake of the election, to be neither stable nor worthy of allegiance. From a western perspective, “national” institutions like the Film Board, the CBC, the National Research Council, Air Canada, the CNR and the major banks are really the particular interests of Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal - who have made sure that no such institutions will exist out here.
It is not just in Canada, of course, that postmodernism seems to be implicated in a crisis of national identity and of the very concept of the unitary nation-state. Richard Rogers (architect of the Pompidou Centre and of the Lloyds building) and Mark Fisher have recently argued that Europe is going back to what it used to be, a continent of city-states, with the umbrella of the transnational European Community floating above them. Jean-Marie Guéhenno speaks of the “abstract globalization of the imperial age,” marked by “unification deprived of a center” (133, 13). At the same time, some national identities are being re-built on narrower foundations, as Yugoslavia fragments and the number of states in the U.N. is set to rise past two hundred. Such [7] contradictory forces can be seen at work in Canada, with Québec seemingly gaining identity as fast as the rest of the country is losing it (note the interesting spectacle of Reform as a right-wing party with something missing: a rhetoric of national unity or identity).
Deyan Sudjic argues that “Culturally, the successful cities have distanced themselves from their national contexts. Paris and London now have much more in common with each other than they do with their respective nations” (5). Vancouver, similarly, reaches out and intertwines itself, in the virtual space of airways and telecommunications, with Hong Kong, Tokyo, or Los Angeles. Our business is with these centers, and national identities are barriers to be overcome rather than treasures to be protected. Alternatively, these identities become “virtual,” trappings to be put up and taken down like scenery, as Stephen Miller notes in his essay on Hollywood North. It is the city, really, that holds our interest rather than the nation: we are connoisseurs of Portland and Paris, we compare Granville Island with Pike Place or Covent Garden, our Chinatown with San Francisco’s. Cities are there within touch and sight; their streets present a continuous and changing spectacle; they can be thickly inhabited and experienced; everyone has an opinion about them and can point to the evidence too. Does anyone still feel this way about Canada? Yet this is not a simple transfer of allegiance: we do not swap a national identity for an urban one, because pluralism, difference and the clash of cultures are stumbling-blocks for the nation, but constitutive of the city.
Postmodern culture may appear weightless and unstable when it is compared with the “immediacy” of earlier cultures based on organicist myths like the “face to face” community, the “way of life,” or the nation. (n. 5) But such organicism is inaccessible, even as myth, in Vancouver - a city whose history spans only a century, and whose population includes some forty percent born in a foreign country. (n. 6) In the older cities of North America, ethnic immigrants formed colonies of their homelands, claiming a section of town as their territory and preserving continuity with their national past. Many of these colonies still remain, even if diluted by intermarriage, movement into mainstream institutions, and migration to the suburbs. But in Vancouver ethnicity [8] is not as coherent, whether geographically or culturally. The official myth is still multiculturalism, the simultaneous preservation of old-country values and affirmation of an encompassing Canadianism. On the ground the situation is more ambiguous, and the modernist notion of immigration is being replaced by postmodern transculturalism or hybridization. The nineteenth-century idea of the nation implied a homogeneous group of people, with a common history and language, inhabiting a bounded geographical space. In Canada, even more than most other countries, this idea is being rapidly eroded from two sides at once. Within the country, we have the influx into the major cities of immigrants who can be said to bring their histories with them, rather than being absorbed into a continuous Canadian history. Externally, the massive power of economic and political globalization renders untenable the very concept of national autonomy.
In Vancouver, ethnics do not live a unitary life within an old-world cultural enclave; instead, we all cross and re-cross ethnic borders every day, as Rosa Ho’s essay documents. Ethnic neighborhoods like Chinatown, Commercial Drive and the East Indian stores around 49th and Main are essentially marketplaces, whose customers drive in from elsewhere. Residentially, ethnic groups are highly dispersed, with no sharp demarcation lines between neighborhoods; and the at-large election of city councillors has prevented the emergence of the ethnic brokerage politics typical of older cities like Chicago and New York. In those cities, ethnic groups had both a geographic base and a corresponding social territory: schoolteaching and small business for the Jews, construction and garbage for the Italians, policing and politics for the Irish, and so on. Vancouver's lack of an industrial proletariat limits the scope for ethnics to rally within labour unions, and many immigrants find opportunity only in the individualistic small-business sector - with the hope that, in the second generation, their children can move into white-collar or professional employment. We should not claim, of course, that a “color-blind” universalism has produced a utopia of ethnic fairness in Vancouver. But the play and rivalry of group difference occurs within an intercultural rather than a tribal system.
It has become a postmodern cliché that universalism is one of the oppressive totalizations of modernism, and that it should therefore give way to such particularisms as gender, ethnicity, or [9] sexual orientation. But for Vancouver and Toronto, at least, it is dangerous to propose such a binary opposition. What is truly postmodern, I would argue, is the simultaneous existence of universalism and particularism as systems in conflict. The modern city has been the original site for a universalist praxis: the freedom to practice one's art, to enjoy religious or ethnic tolerance, and to buy and sell. Indeed, human rights in their classic sense were only available to the citizen - literally, the city-dweller - not to the mere subject. The great model for the contemporary city has been seventeenth-century Amsterdam, where for the first time religious tolerance and economic liberalism were made into equivalent freedoms. (n. 7) In its earlier years, Vancouver practised discrimination against those of Asian origin; but after the Second World War the official regime became universalist, upholding multiculturalism and non-discriminatory immigration. Vancouver now has the highest proportion of citizens of Asian origin of any major North American city, about twenty percent. (n. 8) Other subcultures - gay, bohemian, politically radical - have also found the city a reasonably tolerant place to call home. Vancouver police did not raid gay clubs and bath-houses in the fifties and sixties, when such raids were standard practice in other North American cities. Communists were not purged from public life, and have maintained a foothold in civic politics and in unions until the present day. Such openness has transformed Vancouver since 1945, from a place deeply provincial (in the traditional sense) to the polyglot contemporary city.
Under postmodernism, we have become well aware of the paradox that universalism actually generates increased difference, making it a more intrusive element in the urban experience. Nonetheless, postmodern difference should be seen as complementary with universalism rather than simply making it obsolete. True particularism would be a pre-modern condition of tribalism or peasant autarchy, where the stranger is kept at a distance. Postmodern particularism implies proximity between groups, and their acceptance (even grudgingly) of universalist “rules of the game” that regulate their dealings with each other. Bruce Serafin makes the case here for civility - again, a word deriving etymologically from the city and its values of trade, politeness (cf. polis), and co-existence. If it were not for universalism, differences would become altogether incommensurable, forming a “crazed” pattern of dissociation. Hermetic particularism need [10] not be the postmodern orthodoxy, and there is an alternative in transculturalism or hybridization - which should be distinguished from both a top-down model of domination and assimilation, and a multiculturalism which assigns to each group an essentialized identity. Heesok Chang argues that the ideal or imperative of ethnic “community” is bound to make those included in it uneasy, regardless of whether their membership is asserted from within or imposed on them by the dominant other. Further, essentialist Difference is deconstructed by the local complexities of, say, Vancouver’s Asian communities (not community). Differences within can be as important as differences from.
In the early modern period universalist or Enlightenment values made it possible for successive groups to emerge - typically, in cities - from entrapment in practices of denial, suppression, making invisible. We could mention Jewish emancipation in the nineteenth century, women in the Suffrage movement, gays after the Stonewall raid (1969), ethnics under postwar multiculturalism. More recently, as we know, such groups have often passed beyond the phase of abstract equality and non-discrimination, and adopted a stance where difference rather than sameness is affirmed. In the U.S., this difference has often been displayed in a sharply antagonistic way, reflecting the contradiction between radical individualism on one side and, on the other, the pressure on minorities to conform to a unitary and aggressively nationalist ideal. As a result, the typically urban co-existence of universalism and difference tends to break down, with rigid demarcations between groups (each claiming their “rightful” prerogatives), the social and economic decline of the city core, and re-segregation into ghettoes, suburbs, and other “no-go areas.”
Mike Davis, in an article on the 1992 Los Angeles riots, has identified a “New Spatial Apartheid” in American cities that should give pause to those who assume that particularism, in the form of a militant “identity politics,” is both inevitable and desirable. Davis shows that the dominant particularism of recent years has been “white flight” to the suburbs, leaving the central cities to Hispanics, Asian, and blacks. In 1970, nine of the ten largest metropolitan cores in the U.S. had white majorities, ranging from 55 percent (Detroit) to 82 percent (Boston). Twenty years later, only Philadelphia (51 percent) and Boston (58 percent) were predominantly white [11] (Davis, “Los Angeles” 15). Suburban residents are now the single largest block of voters in the U.S., and even a Democratic president turns aside from the problems of the inner cities. America’s business can be transacted in the new “Edge Cities” of the white periphery, while the ethnic centers revert to a neo-Third-World status (Garreau).
Since in Europe nativists are also attacking immigrants for changing the character of old-established cities, Vancouver and Toronto have become arguably the most successful pioneers of transcultural urbanism in the world today. A good deal of their success can be credited to the continued authority in these cities of such universalist ideals as civility, an impartial justice system, and comprehensive rights to health care and social security. Part also derives from the relative weakness of the nativism that seeks to protect local identity from foreign intrusions. (n. 9) The obverse of this weakness is the sense of “weightlessness” in Vancouver life that afflicts many immigrants who come here with a burden of memory acquired in the “denser” cultures of Europe, or from experiences of poverty and political strife. In Vancouver they find it hard to resolve these memories: partly because of the mildness of the political climate, partly because the dispersion of ethnic groups makes it difficult for them to keep alive their rituals of commemoration. Only at moments of crisis or celebration do such memories enter the public sphere, animating the general mass of Vancouverites: on Commercial Drive when Italy won the World Cup in 1982, or in Chinatown after Tienanmen Square. But these tempests soon subside, and we return to transcultural business-as-usual. They subside because, in the absence of a strong and visible local practice of ethnic solidarity, memories are not confirmed or extended by the life that is here. If “whatever is opposed grows,” then the immigrant experience in Vancouver suggests that whatever is permitted dilutes itself, through relations across ethnic lines. But that dilution can also be a source of cultural strength, evident in postmodern forms that are more vital and sophisticated than the folkloric expressions encouraged by official multiculturalism (Rosa Ho, Elaine Chang, Heesok Chang and Robert Linsley provide examples here).
Link to Part 2
Notes
1. Expo 86 was a Class II World's Fair, situated on reclaimed land on the North Shore of False Creek, previously used for industry. In 1988 the entire site was sold to the Hong Kong magnate Li Ka-Shing for residential and commercial development. The first construction on the Expo site, a condominium tower, began at the end of 1991.
2. Deyan Sudjic argues that the trend is in the opposite direction: “Only a handful of cities can offer the metropolitan qualities that keep provincialism at bay. Creative and economic power are concentrating ever more sharply” (235). This would have to be debated extensively, but surely one strong counter-example is the dispersal of the headquarters of Fortune 500 companies: New York had 140 of them in 1956, 74 in 1983 (John Davis 188).
3. I am not claiming, of course, that the network merely transmits “reality” from one point to another; in fact, it constitutes reality - but not in such a straightforward way as the old imperial systems of domination.
4. Luc Sante makes the connection with another postmodern phenomenon, the random massacre: “Today’s arsenal demands no particular skill or vantage or even much of an impetus. Any nitwit can do it, erasing people like zapping TV channels with a remote. The lack of difficulty suggests a lack of consequences, which is one reason there are so many killings among teenagers. Sociopaths are by definition not much concerned with consequences. For them a semiautomatic weapon is a magic wand: there is barely a breath between the desire and the cataclysmic effect.”
5. For a critique of “community” as a radical ideal, see Young; also Heesok Chang in this collection. Sudjic, in arguing for a “sharper scrutiny” of the idea of community, observes that “the more that the world retreats, for better or worse, into privacy . . . so the idea of community is celebrated by popular culture with ever more elaboration” (281).
6. For the city of Vancouver, 39.3% are foreign-born (40.6% for Toronto, 21.6% for Montreal); English is not their first language for nearly fifty percent of children in Vancouver schools. For Greater Vancouver, an area with about four times the population of the core city, these proportions would be a good deal lower. Sources: Ontario Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs, Vancouver School Board.
7. “[the town fathers] countinence only Calvinism, but for Trade’s sake they Tolerate all others, except the Papists; which is the reason why the treasure and stock of most Nations is transported thither, where there is full Liberty of Conscience: you may be what Devil you will there, so you be but peacable; . . . It’s the Fair of all the Sects, where all the Pedlars of Religion have leave to vend their Toyes, their Ribbands, and Phanatique Rattles.” (Geraert Brandt, quoted in Murray 1967: 25)
8. In the last few years, the Asian population of Vancouver has been growing at about nine percent per year, compared with under three percent for the total population.
9. The contrast with Montréal is instructive: there, the perceived vulnerability of the host culture has created a less hospitable environment for newcomers, with stronger pressures to assimilate into the French milieu.