David Parker and Paul Long 'The Mistakes of the Past'? Visual Narratives of Urban Decline and Regeneration

The reading follows the urban development of Birmingham city. It tells the story of the city's architecture and infrastructure changes. It also provides information about recent cultural events, such as exhibitions of photographers and visual artists. It is suggested that the vision of the artists mentioned has been influenced by post- war Birmingham's architecture. The image of the city creates a narrative of modernisation, both achieved and yet to come. There is an urban renaissance is the redevelopment of contemporary British cities.
Birmingham has paid a heavy price for embracing redevelopment. Nevertheless, the city has gone through major changes including housebuilding and office developments, building shopping centres and other city landmarks. The formation of post-war Birmingham has been an interplay between economics and engineering. Four landmarks defined the image of the city: The Bull Ring Centre opened in 19654,The Rotunda built in 1965, The Central Library which opened 1973 and The Town Hall and the Council House building.
In early post-war period the priority was the free movement of exported goods within and out of Britain. Today commerce depends more on the consumption of imported goods by pedestrians, the tourists.

Performatism, or the end of post-modernism

Performatism, or Post- Postmodernism is a term applied to set developments in culture, art, philosophy that are emerging and reacting to postmodernism. Performatism is heterogeneous and hence impossible to define summarily. It is antithetical to conceptions of postmodernism based on the absence of perspectival view and an ironic coexistence of temporalities. Performative works create their own temporalities and perspectives. They create worlds and ways of seeing performances in and of context.

An appropriated formulation from George Quasha and Chuck Stein: "If traditional representational art is 'figurative,' in the sense that it seeks to capture the 'figure'-the structure and shape-of the object it represents; and if art that moves away from the figurative is 'abstract' (in the precise sense of 'drawn away from'); then later art that allows a non-referential yet identifiable image to form anew can be thought of as con-figurative or re-configurative." Or performative.

Popular readings of Jacques Derrida in comparison to the actual content of his texts provide an interesting analogue for the distinction with "postmodernism". Widely considered to be a figurehead of the version of postmodernism under consideration here, Derrida has been charged with denying and dissolving any standards of evidence and argument, asserting that all texts and all interpretations of texts are on par. A purely negative project. Destruction of all points of view.

His own words and explicit refutations of these accusations suggest a different picture. It would be more appropriate to say that his project undermines a strain of thought present in Western discourse since its inception, one which relies on the illusion of hegemony and the suppression of all alternative forms of thought. Language as vehicle, something external and incidental and used. Referential. Limiting oneself to the words of one sentence when an entire--living, polymorphic--language is available. Entirely different ways of expression and communication. Communication as communion.

The principles developing in this context are not new, but they do run counter to certain entrenched cultural sentiments. This website is intended to focus energies that are otherwise already operative. Promoting community. Noticing overlaps as well as discrepancies. Exploring the question: how do these creative non-referential forms appear?

Dick Hebdige- Postmodernism and "The Other Side"

The term postmodernism could be described within a varied range of critical and descriptive discourses. It gets stretched in all directions between different debates, different disciplinary and discursive boundaries. As it is been used to designate so much it could be argued it might become a meaningless term. Although words as complex and contradictory as this, have formed the focus for historically significant debates and have occupied a semantic ground in which something important felt to be embedded.

There are three closely linked negations which bind the compound of modernism together and thereby serve to distinguish it in an approximate sort of way from other similar beliefs. They are: against totalisation, against teleology and against utopia. All of these negotiations incidentally serve as an attack on Marxism as a total explanatory system. They could be tracked back to two sources. On the one hand historically to the blocked hopes and frustrated rhetoric of the late 1960s and the student revolts. On the other hand through the philosophical tradition to Nietzsche.

Gramsci's approach requires us to negotiate and engage with both power and popular through a range of populist discourses. To engage with the popular we need to force into purely theoretical analysis of a 'negative dialectic '(Adorno) in favour of a more 'sensous (and strategic)logic'. "The Gramscian model demands that we grasp these processes not because we want to use them but because we want to expose them or to understand them in the abstract...".