Modernist spatial form unifies parts into a whole while postmodern spatialization disperses totality

Evidence

6. This is the moment to confront a significant translation problem and to say why, in my opinion, the notion of a postmodern spatialization is not incompatible with Joseph Frank’s influential attribution of an essentially “spatial form” to the high modern. In hindsight, what he describes is the vocation of the modern work to invent a kind of spatial mnemonics, reminiscent of Frances Yates Art of Memory— a “totalizing” construction in the stricter sense of the stigmatized, autonomous work, whereby the particular somehow includes a battery of reand pre-tensions linking the sentence or the detail to the Idea of the total form itself. Adorno quotes a remark about Wagner by the conductor Alfred Lorenz in precisely this sense: “If you have completely mastered a major work in all its details, you sometimes experience moments in which your consciousness of time suddenly disappears and the entire work seems to be what one might call ‘spatial,’ that is, with everything present simultaneously in the mind with precision” (W. 36/33). But such mnemonic spatiality could never characterize postmodern texts, in which “totality” is eschewed virtually by definition. Frank’s modernist spatial form is thus synedochic, whereas it is scarcely even a beginning to summon up the word metonymic for Postmodernism’s universal urbanization, let alone its nominalism of the here-and-now. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 910

Categorization

• DEFINE: Key distinction: modernist spatial form is synecdochic (parts point to total form), postmodern spatialization is metonymic/nominalist (here-and-now only). Essential for the parody/pastiche-adjacent distinction between modern and postmodern style.
• XREF: Connects to Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory (mnemonic spatiality as totalizing technique) — a known reference from prior reading. — connects to: Negation is a constitutive structure of spatial distance itself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 218; Modernist architecture necessarily fixed space within a dynamic historical process — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1779; When aesthetic judgment favors space over time, spatial practices dominate social action. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1300 (+1 more)