Modernist forms were degraded by state bureaucratic adoption before postmodernism displaced them

Evidence

For the other arts, however, canonization and the “corrupting” influence of success will clearly take very different forms. In architecture, for instance, it seems clear that the built equivalent of reception in the academy is the appropriation by the state of high modernist forms and methods, the readaptation by an expanded state bureaucracy (sometimes identified as that of the “welfare state” or social democracy) of Utopian forms now degraded into anonymous forms of large-scale housing and office construction. The modernist styles then become stamped with just such bureaucratic connotation, so that to break with it radically produces some feeling of “relief,” even though what replaces it is neither Utopia nor democracy, but simply the private-corporate constructions of the post-welfare state postmodern. Overdetermination is present here to the degree that the literary canonization of the modern also expressed a prodigious bureaucratic expansion of the university system in the 1960s. Nor should one in either case underestimate the active pressures in such developments of popular demands (and demography) of a more truly democratic or “plebeian” kind. What we need to invent is a notion of “overdetermination in ambivalence” in which works become endowed with associations at one and the same time “plebeian” and “bureaucratic,” with the not unexpected political confusion inherent in such ambivalence. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 685

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the way canonization defuses radical texts (Jameson’s own earlier point in this chapter) and the dynamics of co-optation discussed in critiques of ‘selling out’.
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘overdetermination in ambivalence’ — a concept worth defining for explaining how a style can carry contradictory political associations at once.