This often is masked as despair or hard-boiled realism; but it is regret that we hear.
The modernist voice regrets the loss of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century in the Western world came together. Its dominant note was self-affirmation.
The enormity of the destruction of values caused by World War I made self-affirmation, as the West had known it, absurd. This loss determined the modernist motif of regret.
At the surface, the moderns railed against the strictures and stupidities of Victorianism. They purportedly opposed the quintessence of the nineteenth century because of their delusional belief in the superiority of the new modern world in which they were obliged to live.
In truth, the moderns had to accept what historical circumstance handed them. Their attack on Victorianism merely sought to rationalize the new state of affairs. Their alternative was to go insane. (Many did anyway.)
If you see modernism in this light, you will see postmodernism more clearly. In the postmodern period, regret has gone. We have what we have. In spite of appearances to the contrary, this makes for a more optimistic climate than the moderns had. At least it is less desperate. There is no hope to speak of, to be sure. However, at the same time, there is no longer any memory of the hope that was lost.
So we now do not hear the note of regret, which often seemed like a kind of nostalgia or a self-centered resignation. The use of pieces of the past, as in Venturi's architecture, is not nostalgia. Rather, it reflects the attitude that we no longer have an emotional investment in the living totality of the past. We do not remember it; we do not have an attachment to it; we do not regret its passing. It is acceptable, then, to pick up parts of it for our present-day constructions. We paste them in because they are powerless now in our hands. Once, for those in the modern temper, they were too hot to handle.
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