Page 34 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

18 Place, Space, and Geography

styles, including that of the red brick houses to your right. It looks like a
model of a red brick house that has been built onto a modern building that

has been modified to look almost classical, with hints of columns. There
are decorative motifs like those in the older red brick buildings, but there
is none of the sense of meaning. Postmodern architecture links to the past
without embracing its values. Christian symbols were obviously taken quite
seriously by the builders of the red brick buildings; these decorative
elements seem present in the postmodern building just for the fun of it.
There is no sense, as in the red brick buildings, of rootedness in a culture
of religious moral values. The cultural world the building embodies might
be one in which everything is a little bit up in the air, like the building itself,
which lacks a single coherent style or dominant ideal. Everything about
it seems a little haphazard or contingent (there by chance rather than
necessity), even though roughly in harmony. But that might be a good
embodiment of our contemporary postmodern culture, one in which old
values no longer hold and in which a variety of discourses – religious,
political, economic, and social – contend for our attention and our alle-
giance. No single story – as in the Christian cultural world of the red brick
buildings – accounts for every dimension of our lives in a unifi ed way
guided by a single big narrative (the story of Christian suffering and
redemption). Things are more up in the air these days, debatable, contin-
gent, or unsettled and easily changed. There are many small narratives
instead of just one big one to explain our lives to us. Of this building, you
will either think, “ What a mess ” or “ How interesting, ” depending on your
taste. Critics of modern life see this style as embodying the de - centered
character of contemporary existence. Gone are the old verities that held
nineteenth - century society together around a common set of values. We
no longer strive to be moral people in a small social context overseen by a

church community and defined by others ’ opinions of our actions. Our

identities are more fluid and multiple, less localized in one single cultural
model. Our identities are no longer linked to clear, bounded ethnic cultural
traditions. We engage in many cultural traditions. We no longer only
marry solely within our own ethnic group or raise our children in one
ethnic cultural tradition. “ America ” is internally transnational these days,
a hodgepodge of different, mixed makeups that cannot be called an
identity. We are, many would say, more postmodern, and the building in
front of you is an expression of that new cultural reality.
The way these buildings embody American culture becomes more

evident if you think of why Al Qaeda felt justified in attacking the US by