Star Wars and Postmodernism

Boys and their toys, Then, and Now

Like most boys, I spent a lot of time playing war. But unlike American boys of the 50s and 60s, who grew up imagining themselves as patriotic GI Joes, my friends and I didn't play with army men. We were born into the rain shadow that followed the Vietnam War, during which, Hasbro stopped making soldier toys. We still played war, but instead of American soldiers,  played with Star Wars. Unlike boys just a few years older than us, we were no longer fantasizing about being grunts of the Greatest Generation defending American freedom from Fascism; our imaginary enemies wielded weapon of mass destruction and were fascists with a lowercase "f' (I spell out the difference I see between Fascism and fascism HERE). The story we were all reenacting was an upside-down fantasy of North Vietnamese-like space guerrillas battling American Modernism in Nazi drag. We were replacing the story of one kind of authority, with a new, very different story of authority. It looked like a childish fad, but, in the context of that particular moment, it was subversive. 

Star Wars Highbrow: Thesis Antithesis Synthesis

Joshua Glenn's final revision of my Star Wars Klein group diagram 

Above is another variant on my Star Wars Klein Group Diagram. I heard from HiLoBrow.com's Joshua Glenn. turns out the first version of his Star Wars Semiotic Square I posted was pretty close to the mark, but I got some things mixed up. I left that first version up but guided by his corrections here is the final "fully functional" Joshua Glenn Star Wars Semiotic Square. 

In addition to describing the square above Glenn's original post also discussed his choices for the cardinal points at some length in terms of a "highbrow-lowbrow-middlebrow-nobrow-hilobrow schema." It is a scheme he has charted elsewhere, admitting that "aesthetic and lifestyle choices aren't entirely independent of social class." Until I read Glenn's criticism it hadn't consciously occurred to me to think about lowbrow vs highbrow in any systematic way. I suppose if I thought about it at all, I figured that what I have been doing with my Star Wars & Modernism project is some sort of highbrow take on a lowbrow film, or a lowbrow take on highbrow art and architecture. In his post however  Glenn calls Star Wars "George Lucas’ attempt to cobble together a middlebrow entertainment following Joseph Campbell’s template" and calls Lucas himself a sentimental middlebrow. Once he brought it to my attention, it made perfect sense, lowbrow is not the term of derision, middlebrow is. Posting on the middlebrow (Farting in Church) wet my appetite. The term turns out to be so loaded with connotations, not just of social class, but ideas about cultural and racial superiority left over from the waning years of the age of imperialism, and Star Wars is the perfect vehicle to unpack the biases shadowing the judgement of both high and low.

A  diagram I made according to Joshua Glenn "highbrow-lowbrow-middlebrow-nobrow-hilobrow schema."

Yesterday’s, Kitchen of Tomorrow: The Bauhaus

MoMA’s Bauhaus survey Workshop for Modernity closed this week. All things modern seem to eventually lead to the Bauhaus (if only for a stop over), the kitchen of the future is no exception.

Early this month, when a friend organized a get-together to discuss the exhibit, I went back to take another look and ended up spending my whole visit watching a nine minute long loop of film called:

Wie wohnen wir gesund und wirtschaftlich. IV. Teil: Neues Wohnen. Haus Professor Gropius, Dessau (How we live in a healthy and economic way. Part IV: New Living. The House of Professor Gropius, Dessau) - I tried to find the film online, but all I could find was this smarmy fragment.

The film is of the Walter Gropius' home, and features a series of innovations designed by Bauhausers (Bauhausen? I remember seeing the real term in the exhibition, it was odd-ball, but can’t recall what it was), from dressing rooms with electric lights that automatically turn on and off when you open and shut the doors to chrome tea infusers. What was amazing to me is how much Gropius’ home of the future was spot on, and how odd the wrong bits were.

"When I was young I never expected to be so poor that I couldn't afford a servant, or so rich that I could afford a motor car."Agatha Christie

Gropius had designed a rationalized kitchen with work surfaces closer together to facilitate efficiency of movement; created specialized work stations, like a space for washing with racks for drying dishes: and special built in double sided cabinets to easily move dishes to and from the dining room.

Although watching the film I got the feeling that Gropius himself had never spent an evening washing dishes in his life; everything the young maid did looked a bit awkward. These are the sorts of ergonomic concerns have been carefully worked out and turned into formulas by engineers in the years since - Gropius and other early moderns made those first mistakes that others refine.

But all of Gropius' mistakes/innovations were made with a young maid in mind. Unlike Agatha Christie, Gropius did imagine a world of material plenty, but exactly like Christie he had not imagined that the maid would benefit so much that she would no longer want to work for him. I am sure he understood that the luxuries of his time (electric tea pots) would become common place, but that the common place (maids and even housewives) would become the extraordinary seems to have been harder to predict.

Gropius not only failed to understand that the decedents of his maid would not be working for his decedents, he failed to see that instead of a tiny kitchen hidden from polite company (like a bathroom) her decedents would want big open kitchens; that the kitchen would become the hub of social life – and that the entire family would share in the work, instead of being the soul responsibility of a maid or house wife.

I find myself thinking back to my grandmother’s kitchen; which was a chunk smaller then her bathroom. I remember her discomfort when I would insist on washing dishes after dinner ; it was very much her domain, but it was also her private space. (Although looking back it probably had as much to do with the fact that a 17 year old boy is not going to be as thorough cleaning pots as an 80 year old woman.)

Had the Bauhausites projected the gender equality they aspired towards into the future (evidently they didn't even act on it in the moment, female students were siphoned off to wall paper and textile design) they still could not could have guessed that it would lead to a future of open plan kitchens much less why.