From aestheticism to postmodernity.

Against the ephemeral modernity of the 20th century

Abstract

The modernity of standardization and standardized formal rigor, attacked by figures such as Walter Benjamin (1989, 185), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1998), Herbert Marcuse (2007) or Arnold Hauser (1965), is not only that of the technocracy and the hegemony of instrumental reason in the case of fascism and Stalinism; it was also key to the establishment of other totalizing discourses, as in the case of the institutional context of the West, where it still feeds the myths that shape our global image of the 20th century. A century in which, however, and as this article intends to highlight, was dominated from its beginnings by aestheticist tendencies and, at its conclusion, by postmodernism. The phase of overcoming relativism, and the modern myths that bear the illusion of this overcoming —among which we must highlight the image of the modern movement built from the institutionalized discourse of the modern architectural discipline—, were nothing more than an ephemeral tour de force that, even today, delay and hinder our understanding of the present.