The Origins of Postmodernity
(Perry Anderson. London: Verso, 1999)
1) The principal aim of the essay is to offer a more historical account of origins of the idea of postmodernity than is currently available (set its different sources more precisely in their spatial, political and intellectual settings, and with greater attention to temporal sequence and topical focus than has become customary).
2) A secondary purpose is to suggest, more tentatively, some of the conditions that may have released the postmodern - not as idea, but as phenomenon.
1. PRODROMES
Lima - Madrid - London
Contrary to conventional expectation, both were born in a distant periphery rather than at the centre of the cultural system of the time: they come not from Europe or the United States, but from Hispanic America. (3)
We owe the coinage of 'modernism.'as an aesthetic movement to a Nicaraguan poet, writing in a Guatemalan journal, of a literary encounter in Peru. Ruben Daria's initiation in 1890 of a self-conscious current that took the name of modernismo drew on successive French schools - romantic, parnassian, symbolist - for a 'declaration of cultural independence' from Spain that set in motion an emancipation from the past of Spanish letters themselves, in the cohort of the 1890's. Where in English the notion of 'modern ism' scarcely entered general usage before mid-century, in Spanish it was canonical a generation earlier. (3)
So too the idea of a 'postmodernism' first surfaced in the Hispanic inter-world of the 1930's, a generation before its appearance in England or America. (3-4)
It was a friend of Unamuno and Ortega, Federico de Onis, who struck off the term postmod ernismo. He used it to describe a conservative reflux within modernism itself: one which sought refuge from its formidable lyrical challenge in a muted perfectionism of detail and ironic humour, whose most original feature was the newly authentic expression it afforded women. (4)
Minted by De Onis, the idea of a 'postmodern' style passed into the vocabulary of Hispanophone criticism, if rarely used by subsequent writers with his precision; but it remained without wider echo. It was not until some twenty years later that the term emerged in the Anglophone world, in a very different context - as an epochal rather than aesthetic category. See: Study of History, by Arnold Toynbee, published in 1934. (4-5)
In his eighth volume, published in 1954, Toynbee dubbed the epoch that had opened with the Franco-Prussian War the 'post-modern age’. But his definition of it remained essentially negative. Non-Western countries would master the secrets of modernity and turn them against the West. Toynbee's most sustained reflections on the emergence of a postmodern epoch focused on the latter. His examples were Meiji Japan, Bolshevik Russia, Kemalist Turkey, and - just born - Maoist China. (5-6)
End of History: In one sense, Western civilization - as the unbridled primacy of technology had become universal, but as such promised only the mutual ruin of all. A global political authority, based on the hegemony of one power, was the condition of any safe passage out of the Cold War. But in the long run, only a new universal religion which would necessarily be a syncretistic faith - could secure the future of the planet. (6)
Shaanxi - Angkor – Yucatan
Toynbee's empirical shortcomings, and vatic conclusions, combined to isolate his work at a time when commitment to the battle against Communism was expected to be less nebulous. After initial polemics, it was quickly forgotten, and with it the claim that the C20th could already be described as a postmodern age. (6-7)
Charles Olson, writing to his fellow-poet Robert Creeley on return from Yucatan in the summer of 1951, started to speak of a 'post-modern world' that lay beyond the imperial age of the Discoveries and the Industrial Revolution. (7)
On 4 November 1952, the day Eisenhower was elected President, Olson - ostensibly supplying information for a biographical directory of Twentieth Century Authors- set down a lapidary manifesto, beginning with the words: “My shift is that I take it the present is prologue, not the past”, and ending with a description of that “going live present” ' as “post-modern, post- humanist, post-historic”. (7) Poetic project, renounced public office but not political responsibility – pro- socialism.
Olson's aesthetic manifesto, Projective Verse, advocated open-field composition as a development of the objectivist line of Pound and Williams became his most influential statement. But the reception of it generally failed to respect the motto he adopted from Creeley - 'form is never more than an extension of content - to Olson's poetry itself. Few poets have been treated more formally since. (11)
A fierce critic of rationalist humanism - 'that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects – link to a Heideggerian sense of Being as primal integrity. (11)
Yet he treated automobiles as domestic familiars in his verse, and was the first poet to draw on Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. He was much attracted to ancient cultures, Mayan or pre-Socratic, regarding the birth of archaeology as a decisive progress in human knowledge, because it could help recover them. (11)
A democrat and anti-fascist, Olson assumed the persona of Yeats to defend Pound from prison, and as a patriot produced perhaps the only unmystified poem on the US Civil War. Contemporary revolution came from the East, but America was subjoined to Asia: the colours of dawn in China and of flight into the West reflected the light of a single orbit. (11)
It was here, then, that the elements for an affirmative conception of the postmodern were first assembled. In Olson, an aesthetic theory was linked to a prophetic history, with an agenda allying poetic innovation with political revolution in the classic tradition of the avant-gardes of pre-war Europe. In the years of reaction, his poetry became more straggling and gnomic. The referent of the postmodern lapsed. (11)
New York - Harvard – Chicago
By the end of the fifties, when the term reappeared, it had passed into other - more or less casual - hands, as a negative marker of what was less, not more, than modern. (12)
The sociologist C. Wright Mills used the term to denote an age in which the modern ideals of liberalism and socialism had all but collapsed, as reason and freedom parted company in a postmodern society of blind drift and empty conformity. The critic Irwin Howe borrowed it to describe a contemporary fiction unable to sustain modernist tension with a surrounding society whose class divisions had become increasingly amorphous with post-war prosperity. (13)
In 1959 Harry Levin, drawing on Toynbee's usage, gave the idea of postmodern forms a much sharper twist, to depict an epigone literature that had renounced the strenuous intellectual standards of modernism for a relaxed middle-brow synthesis - the sign of a new complicity between artist and bourgeois, at a suspect cross-roads between culture and commerce. Here lay the beginnings of an unequivocally pejorative version of the postmodern. (12-13)
In the mid-sixties, it changed as - still largely - adventitious sign again. The critic Leslie Fiedler celebrated the emergence of a new sensibility among the younger generation in America, who were 'drop outs from history' - cultural mutants whose values of nonchalance and disconnection, hallucinogens and civil rights, were finding welcome expression in a fresh postmodern literature. (13)
By 1969 Fiedler's rendition of the postmodern could be seen, in its claims of demotic emancipation and instinctual release, as offering a prudently depoliticized echo of the student insurgency of the time, otherwise scarcely to be attributed with indifference to history. (14)
Since the modern - aesthetic or historical - is always in principle what might be called a present-absolute, it creates a peculiar difficulty for the definition of any period beyond it that would convert it to a relative past. In this sense, the makeshift of a simple prefix - denoting what comes after - is virtually inherent in the concept itself, one that could be more or less counted on in advance to recur wherever a stray need for a marker of temporal difference might be felt. Resort of this kind to the term 'post modern' has always been of circumstantial significance. But theoretical development is another matter. The notion of the postmodern did not acquire any wider diffusion till the seventies. (14)
2. CRISTALLIZATION
Athens - Cairo - Las Vegas
The real turning point came with the appearance in fall 1972 at Binghamton of a journal expressly subtitled a Journal of Post modern Literature and Culture. The legacy of Olson had re-surfaced. The keynote essay in the first issue, by David Antin, was entitled: 'Modernism and Post Modernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry'. Antin raked the whole canon running from Eliot and Tate to Auden and Lowell, with glancing fire even at Pound, as a surreptitiously provincial and regressive tradition, whose metrical-moral propensities had nothing to do with genuine international modernism - the line of Apollinaire, Marinetti, Khlebnikov, Lorca, Jozsef, Neruda - whose principle was dramatic collage. In post-war America, it was the Black Mountain poets, and above all Charles Olson, who had recovered its energies. [Orson’s projective literature beyond humanism was remembered and honoured but his political attachment to an unbidden future beyond capitalism passed out of sight]. It was this reception that for the first time stabilized the idea of the postmodern as a collective reference. In the process, however, it underwent an alteration. (15-16)
At the height of the Vietnam War, his aim was to “get literature back into the domain of the world', at a time of 'the most dramatic moment of American hegemony and its collapse', and to demonstrate that 'postmodernism is a kind of rejection, an attack, an undermining of the aesthetic formal ism and conservative politics of the New Criticism”. But the course of the journal was never quite to coincide with its intention. (16)
Among early contributors to the journal was Ihab Hassan, his original interest had lain in a high modernism pared to an expressive minimum (what he called a 'literature of silence', from Kafka to Beckett). Hassan advanced the notion of postmodernism into a much wider spectrum of tendencies that either radicalized or refused leading traits of modernism: a configuration that extended to the visual arts, music, technology, and sensibility at large. (17)
When Hassan concluded his survey of the motley indices of postmodernism - running from Spaceship Earth to the Global Village, faction and happening, aleatory reduction and parodic extravaganza, impermanence and intermedia - and sought to synthesize them as so many 'anarchies of the spirit', playfully subverting the aloof verities of modernism, the composer John Cage was one of the very few artists who could plausibly be associated with most of the bill. (18)
In subsequent essays, Hassan enlisted Foucault's notion of an epistemic break to suggest comparable shifts in science and philosophy, he argued that the underlying unity of the postmodern lay in 'the play of indeterminacy and immanence', whose originating genius in the arts had been Marcel Duchamp. The list of his successors included Ashbery, Barth, Barthelme and Pynchon in literature; Rauschenberg, Warhol, Tinguely in the visual arts. By 1980, Hassan had annexed virtually a complete roster of poststructuralist motifs into an elaborate taxonomy of the difference between postmodern and modern paradigms, and expanded his Gotha of practitioners yet further. (18)
But a larger problem remained. Is postmodernism, he asked, “only an artistic tendency or also a social phenomenon?” and “if so, how are the· various aspects of this phenomenon - psychological, philosophical, economic, political - joined or disjoined?”. To these questions, Hassan returned no coherent answer, though making one significant observation. “Postmodernism, as a mode of literary change, could be distinguished from the older avant-gardes (Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism etc) as well as from modernism”. According to him postmodernism suggests a different kind of accommodation between art and society'. (19)
What kind? If the difference was to be explored, it would be difficult to avoid politics. He attacked Marxist critics for submission to “the iron yoke of ideology” in “their concealed social determinism, collectivist bias, distrust of aesthetic pleasure”. Preferable by far, as a philosophy for postmodernity, was “the bluff tolerance and optative spirit of American pragmatism”, above all in the expansive, celebratory shape of William James, whose pluralism offered ethical balm for current anxieties. As for politics, the old distinctions had lost virtually any meaning. Terms like “left and right, base and superstructure, production and reproduction, materialism and idealism” had become “nearly unserviceable, except to perpetuate prejudice”. (19)
Hassan's construction of the postmodern, pioneering though across the arts, marks later widely accepted end of the eighties. But there was another, internal to his account of the arts themselves. Hassan's original commitment was to exasperated forms of classic modernism – Duchamp or Beckett. Many year after, when he came to write the introduction to his collected texts on the topic, The Postmodern Turn in 1987, he made it clear the title was also a kind of farewell: “Postmodernism itself has changed, taken, as I see it, the wrong turn. Caught between ideological truculence and demystifying nugacity, caught in its own kitsch, postmodernism has become a kind of eclectic raillery, the refined prurience of our borrowed pleasures and trivial disbeliefs” (20)
In the very reason why Hassan became disabused with the postmodern, however, lay the source of inspiration for the most prominent theorization of it to succeed his own. Ironically, it was the art to which he gave least attention that finally projected the term into the public domain at large. (20)
Charles Jencks, the first edition of whose Language of Post-modern Architecture appeared in 1977. was initially hesitant about calling these values 'post-modern', since the term was - he confessed - 'evasive, fashionable and worst of all negative'. His preferred architecture would be better described as 'radical eclecticism', even 'traditionalesque', and its only accomplished exemplar to date was Antonio Gaudi. Within a year Jencks had changed his mind, fully adopting the idea of the postmodern and now theorizing its eclecticism as a style of 'double-coding': that is, an architecture employing a hybrid of modern and historicist syntax, and appealing both to educated taste and popular sensibility. It was this liberating mixture of new and old, high and low, which defined postmodernism as a movement, and assured it the future. (22)
His most significant move was to distinguish, early on, 'late modern' from 'post-modern' architecture. Dropping the claim that modernism had collapsed in the early seventies, Jencks conceded that its dynamic still survived, if in paroxysmic form, as an aesthetic of technological prowess increasingly detached from functional pretexts - but still impervious to the play of retrospect and allusion that marked postmodernism: Foster and Rogers as against Moore and Graves. This was the architectural equivalent of the literature championed by Hassan - ultra-modernism. (23)
By the mid-eighties Jencks was celebrating the Post-Modern as a world civilization of plural tolerance and superabundant choice, that was 'making non sense' of such outmoded polarities as 'left- and right-wing, capitalist and working class'. In a society where information now mattered more than production, 'there is no longer an artistic avant-garde', since 'there is no enemy to conquer' in the global electronic network. Out of their kaleidoscopic creations, it was to be hoped, might emerge 'a shared symbolic order of the kind that a religion provides' - the ultimate agenda of post modernism. In aesthetic cross-dress, Toynbee's syncretistic dream had returned. (23-24)
Montreal – Paris
The first philosophical work to adopt the notion was Jean-François Lyotard's La Condition Postmoderne, which appeared in Paris in 1979. Lyotard had acquired the term directly from Hassan. Declaring 'the stakes of post modernism as a whole' were 'not to exhibit truth within the closure of representation but to set up perspectives within the return of the will', Lyotard extolled Michael Snow's famous experimental film of an empty Canadian landscape scanned by an immobile swivelling camera, and Duchamp's spatial projections. The immediate occasion of La Condition Postmoderne, however, was a commission to produce a report on the state of 'contemporary knowledge' for the university council of the government of Quebec, where the nationalist party of Rene Levesque had just come to power. (25)
For Lyotard, the arrival of postmodernity was linked to the emergence o f a post-industrial society - theorized by Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine - in which knowledge had become the main economic force of production in a flow by-passing national states, yet at the same time had lost its traditional legitimations. For if society was now best conceived, neither as an organic whole nor as a dualistic field of conflict (Parsons or Marx), but as a web of linguistic communications, language itself - 'the whole social bond' - was composed of a multiplicity of different games, whose rules were incommensurable, and inter-relations agonistic. In these conditions, science became just one language game among others: it could no longer claim the imperial privilege over other forms of knowledge to which it had pretended in modern times. In fact, its title to superiority as denotative truth over narrative styles of customary knowledge concealed the basis of its own legitimation, which classically rested on two forms of grand narrative itself. The first of these, derived from the French Revolution, told a tale of humanity as the heroic agent of its own liberation through the advance of knowledge; the second, descending from German Idealism, a tale of spirit as the progressive unfolding of truth. Such were the great justifying myths of modernity. (25)
The defining trait of the postmodern condition, by contrast, is the loss of credibility of these meta-narratives. For Lyotard, they have been undone by the immanent development of the sciences themselves: on the one hand, by a pluralization of types of argument, with the proliferation of paradox and paralogism - anticipated within philosophy by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Levinas; and on the other hand, by a technification of proof, in which costly apparatuses, commanded by capital or the state, reduce 'truth' to 'performativity'. Science in the service of pow er finds a new legitimation in efficiency. But the genuine pragmatics of postmodern science lies not in the pursuit of the performative,' , but in the production of the paralogistic - in micro-physics, fractals, discoveries of chaos, 'theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable and paradoxical' . (25)
If the dream of consensus is a relic of nostalgia for emancipation, narratives as such do not disappear, but become miniature and competitive: 'the little narrative remains the quintessential form of imaginative invention'. Its social analogue, on which The Postmodern Condition ends, is the trend towards the temporary contract in every area of human existence: occupational, emotional, sexual, political - ties more economical, flexible, creative than the bonds of modernity. If this form is favoured by the 'system', it is not entirely subject to it. We should be happy it is modest and mixed, Lyotard concluded, because any pure alternative to the system would fatally come to resemble what it sought to oppose. (25-26)
In title and topic, The Postmodern Condition was the first book to treat postmodernity as a general change of human circumstance. The vantage point of the philosopher assured it a wider echo, across audiences, than any previous intervention: it remains to this day perhaps the most widely cited work on the subject. But taken in isolation - as it usually is - the book is a misleading guide to Lyotard’s distinctive intellectual position. For The Postmodern Condition, written as an official commission, is confined essentially to the epistemological fate of the natural sciences - about which, as Lyotard later confessed, his knowledge was less than limited. (26)
What he read into them was a cognitive pluralism, based on the notion - fresh to Gallic audiences, if long staled to Anglo-Saxon - of different, incommensurable language-games. The incoherence of Wittgenstein's original conception, often noted, was only compounded by Lyotard’s claim that such games were both autarchic and agonistic, as if there could be conflict between what has no common measure. The subsequent influence of the book, in this sense, was in inverse relation to its intellectual interest, as it became the inspiration of a street-level relativism that often passes - in the eyes of friends and foes alike - for the hallmark of postmodernism. (26)
What the ostensibly scientific framework of Lyotard's 'report on knowledge' left out of view was either the arts or politics. The curiosity of the book lay in the fact these were his two principal passions as a philosopher. (27)
With Economie Libidinale (1974), Lyotard went a step further to unmask 'the desire named Marx', a complete transcription was needed of political into libidinal economy, that would not shrink from the truth that exploitation itself was typically lived - even by the early industrial workers - as erotic enjoyment: masochistic or hysterical delectation in the destruction of physical health in mines and factories, or disintegration of personal identity in anonymous slums. Capital was desired by those it dominated, then as now. Revolt against it came only when the pleasures it yielded became 'untenable', and there was an abrupt shift to new outlets. But these had nothing to do with the traditional sanctimonies of the Left. (28)
The Gaullist consensus of the early sixties had convinced him that the working class was now essentially integrated into capitalism. The ferment of the late sixties gave him hope that generation rather than class - youth across the world - might be the harbinger of revolt. The euphoric wave of consumerism that washed over the country in the early and mid-seventies then led to (widespread) theorizations of capitalism as a streamlined machinery of desire. (28)
In The Postmodern Condition just one 'master narrative' lay at the origin of the term: Marxism. Fortunately, its ascendancy was now at last eroded by the innumerable little tidings from the Gulag. It was true that in the West there existed a grand narrative of capital too; but it was preferable to that of the Party, since it was 'godless' - 'capitalism has no respect for any one story', for 'its narrative is about everything and nothing' (29)
'If you describe the workers' fate exclusively in terms of alienation, exploitation and poverty, you present them as vic tims who only suffered passively the whole process and who only acquired claims for later reparations (socialism). You miss the essential, which isn't the growth of the forces of production at any price, nor even the death of many workers, as Marx often says with a cynicism adorned with Darwinism. You miss the energy that later spread through the arts and sciences, the jubilation and the pain of discovering that you can hold out (live, work, think, be affected) in a place where it had been judged senseless to do so. Indifferent to sense, hardness.' (30)
The 'report on knowl edge' left the two questions of most abiding concern to Lyotard suspended. What were the implications of postmodernity for art and politics? Lyotard was quickly forced to reply to the first, where he found himself in an awkward position. When he wrote The Postmodern Condition he was quite unaware of the deployment of the term in architecture, perhaps the only art on which he had never written, with an aesthetic meaning antithetical to everything that he valued. This ignorance could not last long. By 1982 he was apprised of Jencks's construction of the postmodern, and its widespread reception in North America. His reaction was acrid. Such postmodernism was a surreptitious restoration of a degraded realism once patronized by Nazism and Stalinism and now recycled as a cynical eclecticism by contemporary capital: everything the avant-gardes had fought against. (30-31)
What this slackening of aesthetic tension promised was not just the end of experimentation, but a cancellation of the impetus of modern art as such, whose drive had always come from the gap between the conceivable and the presentable, that Kant defined as the sublime as distinct from the merely beautiful. What then could authentic postmodern art be? Preempted by a usage he execrated, Lyotard's answer was lame. The postmodern did not come after the modern, but was a motion of internal renewal within it from the first - that current whose response to the shattering of the real was the opposite of nostalgia for its unity: rather a jubilant acceptance of the freedom of invention it released. But this was no luxuriance. The avant-garde art Lyotard singled out for approval a year later was Minimalism - the sublime as privation. What buoyed the art market, by contrast, was the kitsch celebrated by Jencks: 'amalgamation, ornamentation, pastiche - flattering the "taste" of a public that can have no taste' (31)
If Lyotard's problem in theorizing a postmodern art lay in the turn of aesthetic trends away from the direction he had always championed - forcing him to declare artistic postmodernity a perennial principle, rather than periodic category, in patent contradiction of his account of scientific postmodernity as a stage of cognitive development - his difficulty in constructing a postmodern politics became in due course analogous. Here the discomfiture came from the course of history itself. In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard had announced the eclipse of all grand narratives. The one whose death he above all sought to certify was, of course, classical socialism. But the commanding referent always remained communism. What, then, of capitalism? (31-32)
With the sharp change of conjuncture in the eighties - the euphoria of the Reagan boom, and the triumphant ideological offensive of the Right, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet bloc at the end of the decade - this position lost all credibility. Far from grand narratives having disappeared, it looked as if for the first time in history the world was falling under the sway of the most grandiose of all - a single, universal story of liberty and prosperity, the global victory of the market. How was Lyotard to adjust to this uncovenanted development? His initial reaction was to insist that capitalism, though it might seem to represent a universal finality of history, in fact destroyed any - since it embodied no higher values than mere factual security. (32)
By the end of the nineties, Lyotard had found a stronger exit from his difficulty. Capitalism, he had started to argue much earlier, was not to be understood primarily as a socio-economic phenomenon at all. 'Capitalism is, more properly, a figure. As a system, capitalism has as its heat source not the labour force but energy itself, physics (the system is not isolated). As figure, capitalism derives its force from the Idea of infinity. It can appear in human experience as the desire for money, the desire for power, or the desire for novelty. All this can seem very ugly, very disquieting. But these desires are the anthropological translation of something that is ontologically the "instantiation" of infinity in the will. This "instantiation" does not take place according to social class. Social classes are not pertinent ontological categories'. The substitution of history by ontology was a way station, however: within a few years, Lyotard had moved to astro-physics. (33)
The triumph of capitalism over rival systems, he now argued, was the outcome of a process of natural selection that pre-dated human life itself. In the incommensurable vastness of the cosmos, where all bodies are subject to entropy, an aboriginal chance - a 'contingent constellation of energy forms' - gave rise in one tiny planet to rudimentary living systems. Because external energy was limited, these had to compete with each other, in a perpetually fortuitous path of evolution. Eventually, after millions of years, a human species emerged capable of words and tools; then 'various improbable forms of human aggregation arose, and they were selected according to their ability to discover, capture and save sources of energy'. After further millennia, punctuated by the neolithic and industrial revolutions, 'systems called liberal democracies' proved them selves best at this task, trouncing communist or islamist competitors, and moderating ecological dangers. 'Nothing seemed able to stop the development of this system except the ineluctable extinction of the sun. But to meet this challenge, the system was already developing the prostheses that would allow it to survive after solar sources of energy were wiped out. All contemporary scientific research was ultimately working towards the exodus, four billion years hence, of a transformed human species from the earth. (33)
The ultimate motor of capitalism is thus not thirst for profit, or any human desire: it is rather development as neguentropy. 'Development is not an invention of human beings. Human beings are an invention of development'. Why is this not a - quintessentially modern - grand narrative? Because, Lyotard maintains, it is a story without historicity or hope. The fable is postmodern because 'it has no finality in any horizon of emancipation'. Human beings, as witnesses of development, may set their faces against a process of which they are vehicles. 'But even their critiques of development, of its inequality, its irregularity, its fatality, its inhumanity, are expressions of development and contribute to it.' (34)
The intellectual fragility of this late construction hardly needs emphasis. Nothing in Lyotard's original account of meta narratives confined them to the idea of emancipation - which was only one of the two modern discourses of legitimation he sought to trace. The postmodern fable would still be a grand narrative, even were it exempt from the theme. But in fact, of course, it is not. What else would escape to the stars be than emancipation from the bounds of a dying earth? More pointedly still, in the other - interchangeable - register of Lyotard's narrative, capitalism notoriously speaks the language of eman cipation more continually and confidently than ever before. Elsewhere, Lyotard is forced to acknowledge this. Indeed, he admits: 'Emancipation is no longer the task of gaining and imposing liberty from the outside' - rather it is 'an ideal that the system itself endeavours to actualize in most of the areas it covers, such as work, taxation, marketplace, family, sex, race, school, culture, communication'. (35)
The postmodern condition, announced as the death of grand narrative, thus ends with its all but immortal resurrection in the allegory of development. The logic of this strange denouement is inscribed in Lyotard's political trajectory. From the seventies onwards, so long as communism existed as an alternative to capitalism, the latter was a lesser evil - he could even sardonically celebrate it as, by contrast, a pleasurable order. (35)
Rather than confronting the new reality on a political plane, his solution was a metaphysical sublimation of it. Suitably projected into inter-galactic space, his original energetics could put capitalism into perspective as no more than an eddy of a larger cosmic adventure. The 'postmodern fable' did not spell any final reconciliation with capital. On the contrary, Lyotard now recovered accents of opposition long muted in his work: a denunciation of global inequality and cultural lobotomy, and scorn for social democratic reformism, recalling his revolutionary past. (35)
Frankfurt - Munich
The Postmodern Condition was published in the autumn of 1979. Exactly a year later, Jurgen Habermas delivered his address Modernity - an Incomplete Project in Frankfurt. The lecture occupies a peculiar place in the discourse of postmodernity. Its substance touches only to a limited degree on the postmodern; yet the effect was to highlight it as a henceforth standard referent. For the first time since the take-off of the idea of postmodernity in the late seventies, it received abrasive treatment. If the emergence of an intellectual terrain typically requires a negative pole for its productive tension, it was Habermas who supplied it. However, a misunderstanding has traditionally been attached to his text. Widely read as a response to Lyotard's work, because of the proximity of dates, in fact it was probably written in ignorance of the latter. (37)
Habermas began by acknowledging that the spirit of aesthetic modernity, with its new sense of time as a present charged with a heroic future, born in the epoch of Baudelaire and reaching a climax in Dada, had visibly waned; the avant-gardes had aged. The idea of postmodernity owed its power to this incontestable change. The real aporias of cultural modernity laid in the Enlightenment project of modernity had two strands. One was the differentiation for the first time of science, morality and art - no longer fused in a revealed religion – into autonomous value-spheres, each governed by its own norms - truth, justice, beauty. The other was the release of the potential of these newly liberated domains into the subjective flux of daily life, interacting to enrich it. This was the programme that had gone astray. (37-38)
In the course of the nineteenth century art became a critical enclave increasingly alienated from society, even fetishizing its own distance from it. In the early twentieth century, revolutionary avant-gardes like surrealism had attempted to demolish the resultant division between art and life by spectacular acts of aesthetic will. But their gestures were futile: no emancipation flowed from destruction of forms or desublimation of meanings - nor could life have ever been transfigured by the absorption of art alone. That required a concurrent recovery of the resources of science and morality too, and the interplay of all three to animate the life-world. (38)
The project of modernity had yet to be realized. But the outright attempt to negate it - a counsel of despair - had failed. No less than three distinct brands of conservatism were now on offer. The anti-modernism of 'young' conservatives appealed to archaic, dionysiac powers against all rationalization, in a tradition running from Bataille t o Foucault. The pre-modernism of 'old' conservatives called for a substantive cosmological ethics of quasi-aristotelian stamp, along lines intimated by Leo Strauss. The postmodernism of 'neo conservatives' welcomed the reification of separate value spheres into closed domains of expertise armoured against any demands of the life-world, with conceptions of science close to those of the early Wittgenstein, of politics borrowed from Carl Schmitt, of art akin to those of Gottfried Benn. In Germany, a lurking blend of anti- and pre-modernism haunted the counter culture, while an ominous alliance of pre- and post-modernism was taking shape in the political establishment. (38-39)
Habermas's argument, compact in form, was nevertheless a curious construction. His definition of modernity, uncritically adopted from Weber, essentially reduced it to mere formal differentiation of value-spheres - to which he then subjoined, as an Enlightenment aspiration, their reconfiguration as inter communicating resources in the life-world, an idea foreign to Weber and hard to detect in the Aufklarung (as distinct from Hegel) itself. What is clear enough, however, is that the 'project' of modernity as he sketched it is a contradictory amalgam of two opposite principles: specialization and popularization. How was a synthesis of the two at any stage to be realized? So defined, could the project ever be completed? But if in this sense it looks less unfinished than unfeasible, the reason lies in Habermas's social theory as a whole. (39)
On the lecture 'Modern and Postmodern Architecture' in Munich, Habermas engaged with the real stronghold of postmodern aesthetic theory, displaying an impressive knowledge and passion about his subject. He started by observing that the modern movement in architecture - the only unifying style since neo-classicism - sprang from the spirit of the avant-garde, yet had succeeded in creating a classic tradition true to the inspiration of occidental rationalism. Today, it was under widespread attack for the monstrous urban blight of so many post-war cities. But 'is the real face of modern architecture revealed in these atrocities, or are they distortions of its true spirit'? To answer this question, it was necessary to look back at the origins of the movement. (41)
In the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution had posed three unprecedented challenges to the art of architecture. It required the design of new kinds of buildings - both cultural (libraries, schools, opera-houses) and economic (railway stations, department stores, warehouses, workers' housing); it afforded new techniques and materials (iron, steel, concrete, glass); and it imposed new social imperatives (market pressures, administrative plans), in a 'capitalist mobilization of all urban living conditions'. These demands overwhelmed the architecture of the time, which failed to produce any coherent response to them, disintegrating instead into eclectic historicism or grim utility. Reacting to this failure in the early twentieth century, the modern movement overcame the stylistic chaos and factitious symbolism of late Victorian architecture, and set out to transform the totality of the built environment, from the most monumental and expressive edifices to the smallest and most practical. (41)
In doing so, it met the first two challenges of the industrial revolution triumphantly, with extraordinary formal creativity. But it was never able to master the third. Architectural modernism, virtually from the start, vastly overestimated its ability to re-shape the urban environment: a miscalculation famously expressed in the hubris of the early, utopian Le Corbusier. This was certainly a more telling account of the fate of aesthetic modernity, in the most socially sensitive of all the arts, than the Frankfurt lecture. But the Munich address, though much richer and more precise, still posed the same underlying problem. What had ultimately caused the downfall in public esteem of the modern movement in architecture? On the surface, the answer was clear: its inability to resist or outflank the constraints of post-war money and power: 'the contradictions of capitalist modernization', as Habermas at one point puts it. (41-42)
For the ultimate error of modernism, he explains, was not so much lack of vigilance towards the market, as too much trust in the plan. Not the commands of capital, but necessities of modernity - the structural differentiation of society, rather than the pursuit of rent or profit - condemned it to frustration. 'The utopia of preconceived forms of life that had already inspired the designs of Owen and Fourier could not be realized, not only because of a hopeless underestimation of the diversity, complexity and variability of modern societies, but also because modernized societies with their functional interdependencies go beyond the dimensions of living conditions that could be gauged by the imagination of the planner' (43)
It was not just modernist dreams of a humane city that were impracticable. The very idea of a city at all is condemned to obsolescence by the functional exigencies of impersonal coordination, that render any attempt to recreate coherent urban meaning futile. From the beginning, proletarian housing could never be integrated into the metropolis; and as time went on, proliferating sub-zones of commercial or administrative activity dispersed it yet further into an ungraspable, featureless maze. There is no turning back from this fate. 'Urban agglomerations have outgrown the old concept of the city we still keep in our hearts. However, that is neither the failure of modern architecture, nor of any other architecture'. It is written into the logic of social development, beyond capital or labour, as a requirement of modernity itself. Not financial accumulation but systemic coordination, that cannot be cancelled, renders urban space indecipherable. (43-44)
Habermas ends by expressing a guarded sympathy for vernacular currents in architecture that encourage popular participation in design projects, as a trend wherein some of the impulses of the Modern Movement defensively survive. But - just as in the wider counter-culture - 'nostalgia for de-differentiated forms of existence bestows on these tendencies an air of anti-modernismtheir tacit appeal to a Volksgeist recalls the dire example, however distinct in monumental intention, of Nazi architecture. If Habermas concedes, without enthusiasm, that there is a good deal of 'truth' in this form of opposition, what he does not - cannot - say is that there is any hope in it. (44)
Thirty years after a sense of it was first aired by Olson, the postmodern had· crystallized as common referent and competing discourse. In its origins, the idea was always brushed by associations beyond the West - China, Mexico, Turkey; even later, behind Hassan or Lyotard lay Egypt and Algeria, and the anomaly of Quebec. Space was inscribed in it from the start. Culturally, it pointed beyond what had become of modernism; but in what direction, there was no consensus, only a set of oppositions going back to De Onis; and in what arts or sciences, only disconnected interests and criss-crossing opinions. The coincident interventions of Lyotard and Habermas for the first time sealed the field with the stamp of philosophical authority. But their own contributions were each strangely indecisive. (45)
The original back ground of both thinkers was Marxist, but it is striking how little of it they brought to their accounts of postmodernity. Neither attempted any real historical interpretation of the postmodern, capable of determining it in time or space. Instead, they offered more or less floating or vacant signifiers as the mark of its appearance: the delegitimation of grand narratives (dateless) for Lyotard, the colonization of the life-world (when was it not colonized?) for Habermas. Paradoxically, a concept by definition temporal lacks periodic weight in either. (45)
Usage as aesthetic category: Both Lyotard and Habermas were deeply attached to the principles of high modernism; but far from this commitment enabling them to bring postmodernism into sharper focus, it seems to have occluded it. Recoiling from unwelcome evidence of what it might mean, Lyotard was reduced to denying that it was other than an inner fold of the modernism itself. Habermas, more willing to engage with the arts in view, could acknowledge a passage from the modern to the postmodern, but was scarcely able to explain it. Neither ventured any exploration of postmodern forms to compare with the detailed discussions of Hassan or Jencks. The net effect was a discursive dispersion: on the one hand, philosophical overview without significant aesthetic content, on the other aesthetic insight without coherent theoretical horizon. (45-46)
The field, however, did display another kind of unity: it was ideologically consistent. The idea of the postmodern, as it took hold in this conjuncture, was in one way or another an appanage of the Right. Hassan, lauding play and indeterminacy as hall marks of the postmodern, made no secret of his aversion to the sensibility that was their antithesis: the iron yoke of the Left. Jencks celebrated the passing of the modern as the liberation of consumer choice, quietus to planning in a world where painters could trade as freely and globally as bankers. For Lyotard the very parameters of the new condition were set by the discrediting of socialism as the last grand narrative - ultimate version of an emancipation that no longer held meaning. Habermas, resisting allegiance to the postmodern, from a position still on the Left, nevertheless conceded the idea to the Right, construing it as a figure of neo-conservatism. Common to all was subscription to the principles of what Lyotard - once the most radical - called liberal democracy, as the unsurpassable horizon of the time. There could be nothing but capitalism. The postmodern was a sentence on alternative illusions. (46)
3. CAPTURE
When Fredric Jameson gave his first lecture on postmodernism in the fall of 1982. Two works had established him as the world's leading Marxist literary critic: Marxism and Form (1971) and The Prison-House of Language (1972). (47)
Sources
For Jameson, writing just as notions of postmodernism were beginning to circulate in literature departments, what was at stake in these exchanges was 'the aesthetic conflict between realism and modernism, whose navigation and renegotiation is still unavoidable for us today'. If each retained its truth, yet neither could any longer be accepted as such. While noting the deficiencies of Lukacs's attempt to prolong traditional forms of realism into the present, he pointed out that Brecht could not be taken simply as a modernist antidote, given his own hostility to purely formal experimentation. Brecht and Benjamin had indeed looked towards a revolutionary art capable of appropriating modern technology to reach popular audiences - while Adorno had more speciously contended that the formal logic of high modernism itself, in its very autonomy and abstraction, was the only true refuge of politics. But the post-war development of consumer capitalism had struck away the possibility of either: the entertainments industry mocking the hopes of Brecht or Benjamin, while an establishment culture mummified the exempla of Adorno. (47)
The result was a present in which 'both alternatives of realism and modernism seem intolerable to us: realism because its forms revive an older experience of a kind of life that is no longer with us in the already decayed future of consumer society; modernism because its contradictions have in practice proved more acute than those of realism'. (48)
What is striking in retrospect, however, is not so much that this resolution is avoided. It is considered and rejected. 'An aesthetic of novelty today - already enthroned as the dominant critical and formal ideology - must seek desperately to renew itself by ever more rapid rotations of its own axis, modernism seeking to become postmodernism without ceasing to be modern. 'The signs of such involution were the return of figurative art, as a representation of images rather than things in photo-realism, and the revival of intrigue in fiction, with a pastiche of classical narratives. Jameson's conclusion was a calculated defiance of this logic, turning its terms against itself. (48)
'In circumstances like these, there is some question whether the ultimate renewal of modernism, the final dialectical subversion of the now automatized conventions of an aesthetic of perpetual revolution, might not simply be … realism itself!'. Since the estranging techniques of modernism had degenerated into standardized conventions of cultural consumption, it was their 'habit of fragmentation' that now itself needed to be estranged in some freshly totalizing art. (49)
Jameson argued that Barthes could be read as a kind of replay of the realism/ modernism controversy. Transformed by Barthes into an opposition between the legible and the scriptible, the duality encouraged censorious judgements of realist narratives, whose moralism functioned as compensation for an inability to situate formal differences in a diachronic history, without ideological praise or blame. The best antidote to such evaluations was to 'historicize the binary opposition, by adding a third term'. For 'everything changes, the moment we envisage a "before" to realism itself' - mediaeval tales, renaissance novellas, which reveal the peculiar modernity of nineteenth century forms themselves, as a unique and unrepeatable vehicle of the cultural revolution needed to adapt human beings to the new conditions of industrial existence. In this sense, 'realism and modernism must be seen as specific and determinate historical expressions of the type of socio-economic structures to which they correspond, namely classical capitalism and consumer capitalism.' If this was not the place for a full Marxist account of that sequence, 'it certainly is the moment to square accounts with the ideology of modernism which has g1ven its title to the present essay'. (50)
'The attempt to unsettle this seemingly ineradicable dualism by adding a third term, in the form of some "classical" - or pre-capitalist - narrative proved to have only partial success, modifying Barthes's working categories but not his fundamental historical scheme. Let us therefore attempt to displace this last in a different way, by introducing a third term as it were at the other end of its temporal spectrum. The concept of postmodernism in fact incorporates all the features of the Barthesian aesthetic'. (51)
The very first pages of Marxism and Form stressed the sundering of all continuity with the past by the new modes of organization of capital. 'The reality with which the Marxist criticism of the 1930's had to deal was that of a simpler Europe and America, which no longer exist. Such a world had more in common with the life-forms of earlier centuries than it does with our own'. The receding of class conflict within the metropolis, while violence was projected without; the enormous weight of advertising and media fantasy in suppressing the realities of division and exploitation; the disconnexion of private and public existence - all this had created a society without precedent. 'In psychological terms, we may say that as a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience: never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and of the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless'. (51)
When an English translation of La Condition Postmoderne was at length ready in 1982, Jameson was asked to write an introduction to it. Lyotard's assault on meta narratives might have been aimed specifically at him. For just a year before he had published a major work of literary theory, The Political Unconscious, whose central argument was the most eloquent and express claim for Marxism as a grand narrative ever made. 'Only Marxism can give us an adequate sense of the essential mystery of the cultural past', he wrote - a 'mystery [that] can only be reenacted if the human adventure is one'. Only thus could such long-dead issues as a tribal transhumance, a theological controversy, clashes in the polis, duels in nineteenth century parliaments, come alive again. These matters can recover their urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme - for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity; only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot'. (53)
But if in this sense The Postmodern Condition must, when he came upon it, have been the most direct challenge to Jameson conceivable, another side of Lyotard's argument was uncannily similar to his own. For the premise of both thinkers - spelt out, if anything, even more emphatically by Lyotard than Jameson was that narrative was a fundamental instance of the human mind. Lyotard's case was certainly striking. But in its concen tration on the sciences, it said little about developments in culture, and was not very forthcoming about politics, or their ground in changes in socio-economic life. Here was the agenda to which Jameson would now turn. (54)
Five Moves
The founding text which opens The Cultural Turn, Jameson's lecture to the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Arts in the fall of 1982, which became the nucleus of his essay 'Postmodernism - the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' published in New Left Review in the spring of 1984, redrew the whole map of the postmodern at one stroke - a prodigious inaugural gesture that has commanded the field ever since. Five decisive moves marked this intervention. (54)
The first, and most fundamental, came with its title - the anchorage of postmodernism in objective alterations of the economic order of capital itself, postmodernity becomes the cultural signal of a new stage in the history of the regnant mode of production. It is striking that this idea, before which Hassan had hesitated and then turned away, was quite foreign to Lyotard and Habermas, although both came from Marxist backgrounds by no means altogether extinct. (55)
Jameson pointed to the technological explosion of modern electronics, and its role as leading edge of profit and innovation; to the organizational predominance of transnational corporations, outsourcing manufacturing operations to cheap wage locations overseas; to the immense increase in the range of international speculation; and to the rise of media conglomerates wielding unprecedented power across communications and borders alike. These developments had profound consequences for every dimension of life in advanced industrial countries - business cycles, employment patterns, class relation ships, regional fates, political axes. But in a longer view, the most fundamental change of all lay in the new existential horizon of these societies. Modernization was now all but complete, obliterating the last vestiges not only of pre-capitalist social forms, but every intact natural hinterland, of space or experience, that had sustained or survived them. (55)
In a universe thus abluted of nature, culture has necessarily expanded to the point where it has become virtually coextensive with the economy itself, not merely as the symptomatic basis of some of the largest industries in the world but much but more deeply, as every material object and immaterial service becomes inseparably tractable sign and vendible commodity; Culture in this sense, as the inescapable tissue of life under late capitalism, is now our second nature. Where modernism drew its purpose and energies from the persistence of what was not yet modern, the legacy of a still pre-industrial past, postmodernism signifies the closure of that distance, the saturation of every pore of the world in the serum of capital. What have been the consequences of this change in the object world for the experience of the subject? (55-56)
Jameson’s second distinct move was an exploration of the metastases of the psyche in this new conjecture. This was a psychic landscape, he argued, whose ground had been broken by the great turmoil of the sixties - when so many traditional casings of identity were· broken apart by the dissolution of customary constraints - but now, after the political defeats of the seventies, purged of all radical residues. Among the traits of the new subjectivity, in fact was the loss of any sense of history, either as hope or memory. The charged sense of the past - as either ague-bed of repressive traditions, or reservoir of thwarted dreams; and heightened expectancy of the future - as potential cataclysm or transfiguration - which had characterized modernism, was gone. At best, fading back into a perpetual present, retro-styles and images proliferated as surrogates of the temporal. (56)
In the age of the satellite and optical fibre, on the other hand, the spatial commands this imaginary as never before. The electronic unification of the earth, instituting the simultaneity of events across the globe as daily spectacle, has lodged a vicarious geography in the recesses of every consciousness, while the encircling networks of multinational capital that actually direct the system exceed the capacities of any perception. The ascendency of space over time in the make-up of the postmodern is thus always off-balance: the realities to which it answers constitutively overpowering it - inducing, Jameson suggests in a celebrated passage, that sensation which is only to be captured by a sardonic updating of the lesson of Kant: the 'hysterical sublime'. (56-57)
The result is a new depthlessness of the subject, no longer held within stable parameters, where the registers of high and low are unequivocal. Here, by contrast, psychic life becomes unnervingly accidented and spasmodic, marked by sudden dips of level or lurches of mood, that recall something of the fragmentation of schizophrenia. This swerving, stammering flux precludes either cathexis or historicity. Signifi cantly, to the vacillations of libidinal investment in private life has corresponded an erosion of generational markers in public memory, as the decades since the sixties have tended to flatten out into a featureless sequence subsumed under the common roster of the postmodern itself. But if such discontinuity weak ens the sense of difference between periods at the social level, its effects are far from monotone at the individual level. There, on the contrary, the typical polarities of the subject run from the elation of the 'commodity rush', the euphoric highs of spectator or consumer, to the dejection at the bottom of 'the deeper nihilistic void of our being', as prisoners of an order that resists any other control or meaning. (57)
Having set out the force-field of postmodernity in structural changes of late capitalism, and a pervasive laddering of identities under them, Jameson could make his third move, on the terrain of culture itself. Levin and Fiedler had detected it in literature; Hassan enlarged it to painting and music, if more by allusion than by exploration; Jencks concentrated on architecture; Lyotard dwelt on science; Habermas touched on philosophy. Jameson's work has been of another scope - a majestic expansion of the postmodern across virtually the whole spectrum of the arts, and much of the discourse flanking them. The result is an incomparably richer and more comprehensive mural of the age than any other record of this culture. (57-58)
Architecture, the spur to Jameson's turn beyond the modern, has always remained at the centre of his vision of what succeeded it. His first extended analysis of a postmodern work was the great set-piece on Portman's Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles, whose debut is to be found below - on the evidence of citation, the most memorable single exercise in all the literature on postmodernism. (58)
The paramountcy of space in the categorical framework of postmodern understanding, as he read it, more or less ensured that architecture would have pride of place in the cultural mutation of late capitalism at large. Here, Jameson has consistently argued, explosive energies of invention have been released, in a range of forms from the spare to the sumptuous, that no rival art today can match; while at the same time also figuring, more graphically than any other art, different kinds of subsumption to the new world economic system, or attempts to elude it - not only in the practical dependence of its airports, hotels, bourses, museums, villas or ministries on estimates of profit or whims of prestige, but in the tangibility of its shapes themselves. (58)
Next in the system of postmodern arts comes the cinema. Surprising though it may seem in retrospect, film was a conspicuous absence in earlier discussion of postmodernism. Not that this silence was quite inexplicable. The principal reason for it can probably be found in a famous remark of Michael Fried: 'the cinema is not, even at its most experimental, a modernist art. He meant in part that film, as the most mixed of all mediums, was debarred from that drive to a purity of presence specific to each art, absolved of reference to any other, that Greenberg had held to be the royal road of the modern. But the judgement could be taken in another, more widely felt sense. For had not the triumph of Hollywood realism actually reversed the trajectory of modernism, Technicolor banishing the audacities of silent cinema to the pre-history of the industry? Such, at any rate, was the challenge that Jameson came to take up. (58-59)
His initial interest was caught by a filmic genre that he eventually dubbed with a suggestive oxymoron 'nostalgia for the present': films like Body Heat or in another key Star Wars, or yet again Blue Velvet, that express even more deeply than the wave of mode nitro movies proper - over two decades of output now, from American Graffiti to Indochine - the peculiarly postmodern loss of any sense of the past, in a hidden contamination of the actual by the wistful, a time yearning for itself at an impotent, covert remove. If such forms, surrogates or displacements of true periodic memory, trace a corruption of the temporal, other genres can be read as responses to the arrival of the ultra-spatial: above all, the conspiracy film - Videodrome or The Parallax View, interpreted as blind allegories of the unrepresentable totality of global capital and its impersonal net works of power. (59)
In due course, Jameson proceeded to the fuller theorization of the history of the cinema which lay in the logic of his enquiry. There were two separate cycles in the development of this art, he argued. Silent film had indeed followed a path from realism to modernism, if one - by reason of its timing as a technical possibility - out of rhythm with the move from national to imperial capitalism that otherwise presided over this transition. But this development was cut off by sound before there could be any chance of a postmodern moment. A second cycle then recapitulated the same phases at a new technological level, Hollywood inventing a screen realism with a panoply of narrative genres and visual conventions all its own, and the European art cinema of the post-war years producing a fresh wave of high modernism. If the postmodern cinema that had since appeared was stamped by the compulsions of nostalgia, the fortunes of the moving image in this period were by no means locked on them alone. Indeed, video was more likely to emerge as the peculiarly postmodern medium - whether in the dominant forms of commercial television, in which entertainment and advertising were now virtually fused, or in the oppositional practices of underground video. Inevitably, the criticism of the future would have to concern itself increasingly with these. (59-60)
Peculiar to this culture, Jameson remarks, is a privilege of the visual that marks it off from high modern ism, in which the verbal still retained most of its ancient authority. Not that literature has been less affected by the change of period; but in Jameson's view less original work has been generated by it. For here, perhaps more than in any other art, the most insistent motif of the new was a - playful or portentous - parasitism on the old. In Jameson's texts, the name of this device is pastiche. (60)
Pastiche was a 'blank parody', without satiric impulse, of the styles of the past. Spreading from architecture to film, painting to rock-music, it had become the most standardized signature of the postmodern, across every art. But it might be argued that fiction was now the domain of pastiche par excellence. For here mimicry of the defunct, unhampered by building codes or box office constraints, could shuffle not only styles but also periods themselves at will - revolving and splicing 'artificial' pasts, blending the documentary and fantastic, proliferating anachronisms, in a massive revival of - what must perforce still be termed - the historical novel. (61)
Alongside these changes in the arts, and sometimes indeed directly at work within them, the discourses traditionally con cerned with the cultural field have undergone an implosion of their own. What were once the sharply separate disciplines of art history, literary criticism, sociology, political science, history started to lose their clear edges, and cross with each in hybrid, transverse enquiries that could no longer easily be allotted to one or other domain. (61)
Beyond its immediate effects, what this reorganization of the intellectual field signalled was a more fundamental break. The hallmark of modernity, Weber had classically argued, was structural differentiation: the autonomization of practices and values, once closely mingled in social experience, into sharply separate domains. This is the process that Habermas has always insisted cannot be cancelled, on pain of retrogression. On such premises, there could be no more ominous symptom of some cracking in the modern than the breakdown of these hard-won divisions. This was the process Fried had foreseen and feared in 1967. A decade later, it had not just spread from the arts into the humanities or social sciences, but with the arrival of the philosophical post-card and the conceptual neon-sign, was eroding the line between them. What postmodernity seemed to spell was something the great theorists of modernization had ruled out: an unthinkable de-differentiation of cultural spheres. (61-62)
Anchorage of postmodernism in the transformations of capital; probing of the alterations of the subject; extension of the span of cultural enquiry - after these, Jameson could make a logical fourth move. What were the social bases and geopolitical pattern of postmodernism? Late capitalism remained a class society, but no class within it was quite the same as before. The immediate vector of postmodern culture was certainly to be found in the stratum of newly affluent employees and professionals created by the rapid growth of the service and speculative sectors of the developed capitalist societies. Above this brittle yuppie layer loomed the massive structures of multinational corporations themselves - vast servo-mechanisms of production and power, whose operations criss-cross the global economy, and determine its representations in the collective imaginary. Below, as an older industrial order is churned up, traditional class formations have weakened, while segmented identities and localized groups, typically based on ethnic or sexual differences, multiply. On a world scale - in the postmodern epoch, the decisive arena - no stable class structure, c comparable to that of an earlier capitalism, has yet crystallized. Those above have the coherence of privilege; those below lack unity and solidarity. A new 'collective labourer' has yet to emerge. These are conditions, still, of a certain vertical indefinition. (62)
The culture of modernism was inescapably elitist: produced by isolated exiles, disaffected minorities, intransigent vanguards. An art cast in heroic mould, it was constitutively oppositional: not simply flouting conventions of taste, but more significantly, defying the solicitations of the market. (63)
The culture of postmodernism, Jameson has argued, is by contrast far more demotic. For here another and more sweeping sort of de-differentiation has been at work. The bypassing of borders between the fine arts has usually been a gesture in the unaccommodating tradition of the avant-garde. The dissolution of frontiers between 'high' and 'low' genres in the culture at large, celebrated by Fiedler already at the end of the sixties, answered to a different logic. From the start, its direction was unequivocally populist. In this respect the postmodern has been marked by new patterns of both consumption and production. (63)
Whereas in its heyday modernism had never been much more than an enclave, Jameson points out, postmodernism is now hegemonic. This did not mean it exhausts the field of cultural production. Any hegemony, as Raymond Williams insisted, was a 'dominant' rather than a total system, one virtually ensuring because of its selective definitions of reality - the coexistence of 'residual' and 'emergent' forms resistant to it. Postmodernism was a dominant of this kind, and no more. But that was vast enough. For this hegemony was no local affair. For the first time, it was tendentially global in scope. Not as a pure common denominator of the advanced capitalist societies, however, but as the projection of the power of one of them. 'Postmodernism may be said to be the first specifically North American global style'. Jameson alone had firmly identified postmodernism with a new stage of capitalism, under stood in classical Marxist terms. (64)
The temptation to be avoided, above all, was moralism. The complicity of postmodernism with the logic of the market and of the spectacle was unmistakeable. But simple condemnation of it as a culture was sterile. Again and again - to the surprise of many, on left and right alike - Jameson has insisted on the futility of moralizing about the rise of the postmodern. (65)
The enterprise on which Jameson had embarked - he stressed that it required many hands - was something else. A genuine critique of postmodernism could not be an ideological refusal of it. Rather the dialectical-task was to work our way so completely through it, that our understanding of the time would emerge transformed on the side. A totalizing comprehension of the new unlimited capitalism - a theory adequate to the global scale of its connexions and disjunctions - remained the unrenouncable Marxist project. It precluded manichean responses to the postmodern. To critics on the left inclined to suspect him of accommodation, Jameson replied with equanimity. The collective agency necessary to confront this disorder was still missing; but a condition of its emergence was the ability to grasp it from within, as a system. (65-66)
Outcomes
With these parameters in place, a coherent account of postmodernity had arrived. Henceforward, one great vision commands the field, setting the terms of theoretical opposition in the most striking imaginable way. It is a normal fate of strategic concepts to be subject to unexpected political capture and reversal, in the course of discursive struggle over their meaning. In the dominion over the term post modernism won by Jameson, we witness the opposite achievement: a concept whose visionary origins were all but completely effaced in usages complicit with the established order, wrested away by a prodigious display of theoretical intelligence and energy for the cause of a revolutionary Left. This has been a discursive victory gained against all the political odds, in a period of neo-liberal hegemony when every familiar landmark of the Left appeared to sink beneath the waves of a tidal reaction. It was won, undoubtedly, because the cognitive map ping of the contemporary world it offered caught so unforgettably - at once lyrically and caustically - the imaginative structures and lived experience of the time, and their boundary conditions. (66)
Marxism and Form ended by observing that a new kind of modernism, articulated by Sontag and Hassan, had surfaced, which no longer - as an older modernism had - 'reckoned with the instinctive hostility of a middle-class public of which it stood as a negation', but was rather 'popular; maybe not in small mid-Western towns, but in the dominant world of fashion and the mass media'. The films of Warhol, the novels of Burroughs, the plays of Beckett were of this kind; and 'no critique can have any binding force which does not submit to the fascination of all these things as stylizations of reality' (67)
A not dissimilar note is struck in The Prison-House of Language, where the 'deeper justification' of the use of linguistic models in formalism and structuralism lay not so much in their scientific validity, as in the character of contemporary societies, 'which offer the spectacle of a world of forms from which nature as such has been eliminated, a world saturated with messages and information, whose intricate commodity network may be seen, as the very prototype of a system of signs'. (67)
Jameson's writing on the postmodern belongs to a specific intellectual line. In the years after the First World War, when the great wave of revolutionary unrest in Central Europe had receded, and the Soviet state was already bureaucratized and isolated, there developed in Europe a distinctive theoretical tradition that eventually acquired the name of Western Marxism. Born of political defeat - the crushing of proletarian insurgencies in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy which its first great thinkers Lukacs, Korsch and Gramsci had lived through - this Marxism was separated from the classical corpus of historical materialism by a sharp caesura. In the absence of a popular revolutionary practice, political strategy for the overthrow of capital waned, and once the great depression had passed into the Second World War, economic analysis of its transformations tended to lapse too. (69)
In compensation, Western Marxism found its centre of gravity in philosophy, where a series of outstanding second generation thinkers - Adorno, Horkheimer, Sartre, Lefebvre, Marcuse - constructed a remarkable field of critical theory, not in isolation from surrounding currents of non-Marxist thought, but typically in creative tension with them. This was a tradition deeply concerned with questions of method - the epistemology of a critical understanding of society - on which classical Marxism had left few pointers. But its philosophical scope was not merely procedural: it had one central focus of substantive concern, which formed the common horizon of this line as a whole. Western Marxism was above all a set of theoretical investigations of the culture of developed capitalism. The primacy of philosophy in the tradition gave these enquiries a particular cast: not exclusively, but decisively, they remained true to the concerns of aesthetics. (69)
This estimate was based on the renewed radical ferment in Western Europe of the late sixties and early seventies, and on the visible return of intellectual energies towards questions of political economy and strategy that had dominated the older agenda of historical materialism. The French upheaval of May 1968 could be seen as a revolving beacon of this change, flashing out the signal that Western Marxism was now over taken, passing to the rank of an honourable legacy. A shrewder judgement saw the May Revolt in a somewhat different light, not as the end but the climax of this tradition. (70)
It is this verdict Jameson's work has so perfectly belied. His theorization of postmodernism, starting in the early eighties, takes its place among the great intellectual monuments of Western Marxism. Indeed, one could say that here this tradition reached its culmination. Arising once again from an experience of political defeat - the quelling of the turmoil of the sixties - and developing in critical contact with new styles of thought - structuralist, deconstructive, neo-historicist - far from Marxism, Jameson's work on the postmodern has answered to the same basic coordinates as the classic texts of the past. But if in that sense it is the continuation of a series, it is also a recapitulation of the set at a second level. For here different instruments and themes from the repertoire of Western Marxism are blended in a formidable synthesis. From Lukacs, Jameson took his commitment to periodization and fascination with narrative; from Bloch, a respect for the hopes and dreams hidden in a tarnished object-world; from Sartre, an exceptional fluency with the textures of immediate experience; from Lefebvre, the curiosity about urban space; from Marcuse, pursuit of the trail of high tech consumption; from Althusser, a positive conception of ideology, as a necessary social imaginary; from Adorno, the ambition to represent the totality of his object as nothing less than a 'metaphorical composition'. (71)
The Western Marxist tradition was attracted to the aesthetic as involuntary consolation for impasses of the political and economic. The result was a remarkable range of reflections on different aspects of the culture of modern capitalism. But these were never integrated into a consistent theory of its economic development, typically remaining at a somewhat detached and specialized angle to the broader movement of society: taxable even with a certain idealism, from the standpoint of a more classical Marxism. Jameson's account of postmodernism, by contrast, develops for the first time a theory of the 'cultural logic' of capital that simultaneously offers a portrait of the transformations of this social form as a whole. (72)
Jameson's theory of the postmodern has broken this pattern. Its initial formulations were focused principally on North America. But as his work on the question developed, its implications widened: postmodernism, he concluded, was - not additionally, but intrinsically - the cultural ether of a global system that overruled all geographical divisions. Its logic compelled a major turn in Jameson's own field of enquiry. (74)
Jameson's work cannot be described as optimistic, in the sense in which we can say of the Western Marxist tradition that it was pessimist. Its politics have always been realist. 'History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis' - above all in 'the determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history' to date. But utopian longings are not easily repressed, and can be rekindled in the least predictable of guises. It is this note too - the subterranean persistence of the will to change - that has given Jameson's work its force of attraction beyond the precincts of a jaded West. (77)
4. AFTER-EFFECTS
The capture of the postmodern by Jameson has set the terms of subsequent debate. It is no surprise that the most significant interventions since his entry into the field have likewise been Marxist in origin. The three leading contributions can be read as attempts to supplement or correct, each in its own way, Jameson's original account. Alex Callinicos's Against Postmod ernism (1989) advances a closer analysis of the political back ground to the postmodern. David Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity (1990) offers a much fuller theory of its econ omic presuppositions. Terry Eagleton's Illusions of Post modernism (1996)·tackles the impact ofits ideological diffusion. All these works pose problems of demarcation. How is the postmodern to be best periodized? To what intellectual configuration does it correspond? What is the appropriate response to it? (78)
Timing
If postmodernism was the cultural logic of late capitalism, should they not coincide fairly closely in time? Mandel's Late Capitalism, on which Jameson based his conception of a new stage in capitalist development, dated its general arrival from 1945 - while Jameson put the emergence of the postmodern in the early seventies. Historically, modernism had reached its apogee with the cluster of revolutionary avant gardes between the wars. It was the victory of Stalin and Hitler that finished off these movements. Analogously, postmodernism - aesthetically little more than a minor twist in the downward spiral of modernism, though ideologically of much greater significance - should be seen as a product of the political defeat of the radical generation of the late sixties. (80)
What determined the gradient of technological enthusiasm in the early forms of modernism? Why was Britain seemingly so barren of innovative movements - or was it altogether? Can surrealism be regarded as simply the last in the series of major avant-gardes between the wars, or did it also configure something new? Answers to questions like these would have to look more closely at the national specificities of the different cultures of the time. Schematically, for example, one could envisage a spectrum of ideal attitudes to the new mechanical marvels of the early twentieth century, varying inversely with the extent of their implantation: the two most industrially backward powers of the continent, Italy and Russia, generating the most fervently technicists avant-gardes, in their respective futurisms; while Germany, combining advanced industry in the West with the retrograde landscape of the East, was split between expressionist loathing and Bauhaus wooing of Metropolis; France, on the other hand, with its pattern of modestly prosperous petty production in town and country, permitted a quirkier synthesis in surrealism, entranced precisely by the interlacing of new and old. As for Britain, the failure of its flickering modernist impulses to endure was surely related to the absence of any major insurgent strand in the labour movement. But it was no doubt also a function of early industrialization, and the gradual development of an overwhelmingly urbanized but already tradition-bound economy, whose slowness acted as a buffer against the shock of a new machine-age that galvanized avant-gardes elsewhere. The legacy of the pre-war avant-gardes could not be extinguished overnight, since it necessarily still stood as internal model and memory, no matter how unfavourable the external circumstances for reproducing it. (82-83)
A second condition can be traced to the evolution of technology. Modernism was powered by the excitement of the great cluster of new inventions that transformed urban life in the early years of the century: the liner, the radio, the cinema, the skyscraper, the automobile, the aeroplane, and by the abstract conception of dynamic machinofacture behind them. These provided the images and settings for much of the most original art of the period, and gave all of it an encompassing sense of rapid change. Glamour and speed became, even more than before, the dominant notes in the perceptual register. It was the experience of the Second World War that abruptly changed this whole Gestalt. Scientific progress now for the first time assumed unmistakably menacing shapes, as constant technical improvement unleashed ever more powerful instruments of destruction and death, terminating in demonstrative nuclear explosions. (87)
'These new machines can be distinguished from the older futurist icons in two related ways: they are all sources of reproduction rather than "production" and they are no longer sculptural solids in space. The housing of a computer scarcely embodies or manifests its peculiar energies in the same way that a wing shape or a slanted smokestack do'. (89)
The new apparatuses, by contrast, are perpetual emotion machines, transmitting discourses that are wall-to-wall ideology, in the strong sense of the term. The intellectual atmosphere of post modernism, as doxa rather than art, draws many of its impulses from the pressure of this sphere. For the postmodern is this too: an index of critical change in the relationship between advanced technology and the popular imaginary. (89)
Modernity comes to an end, as Jameson observes, when it loses any antonym. The possibility of other social orders was an essential horizon of modernism. Once that vanishes, something like postmodernism is in place. This is the unspoken moment of truth in Lyotard's original construction. How, then, should the conjuncture of the postmodern be summed up? A capsule comparison with modernism might run: postmodernism emerged from the constellation of déclassé ruling order, a mediatized technology and a monochome politics. (92)
If such may have been the conditions of the postmodern, what can be said of its contours? Historically modernism was essentially a post facto category, unifying after the event a wide variety of experimental forms and movements, whose own names for themselves knew nothing of it. By contrast, postmodernism was much closer to an ex ante notion, a conception germinated in advance of the artistic practices it came to depict. (93)
This pattern is missing in the postmodern. Since the seventies, the very idea of an avant-garde, or of individual genius, has fallen under suspicion. Combative, collective movements of innovation have become steadily fewer, and the badge of a novel, self-conscious 'ism' ever rarer. For the universe of the postmodern is not one of delimitation, but intermixture - celebrating the cross-over, the hybrid, the pot-pourri. In this climate, the manifesto becomes outdated. However, the external unifier of postmodernism has acquired a contemporary salience modernism itself never had, as a comprehensive rubric for them all. The gap between name and time has closed. (93)
This is not to say that there was no discrepancy at all. The history of the idea of the postmodern, as we have seen, starts well before the arrival of anything that would readily be identified as a form of the postmodern today. Nor does the order of its theorization correspond to the order of its phenomenal appearance. The origins of the notion of postmodernism were literary, and its projection to fame as a style was architectural. But long before there were novels or buildings that answered to standard descriptions of the postmodern, virtually all its traits had surfaced in painting. Since the Belle Epoque, this had usually been the most sensitive seismograph of wider cultural changes. For painting is set apart among the arts by a distinctive combination of features, that amount to a special statute. On the one hand, in the scale of resources required as a practice, its costs of production are far the lowest (even sculptors use more expensive materials) - a mere minimum of paint and canvas, within reach of the most indigent producer. By comparison, the capital sums needed for architecture or film are enormous, while writing or composing normally demands quite sizeable outlays to reach publication or performance. Another way of putting this is simply to note that the painter is in principle the only fully independent producer, who as a rule needs no further intermediation to realize a work of art. (93-94)
The postmodern had never completely superseded the modern, the two being always in some sense 'deferred', as so many prefigured futures and reclaimed pasts. But it had inaugurated a range of 'new ways to practice culture and politics. The notion of the postmodern, Foster insists, whatever later misuses were made of it, was not one the left should surrender. (101)
At the very origin of the term, as we have seen, there was a bifurcation. When De Onis first coined postmodernismo, he contrasted it with ultramodernismo, as two opposite reactions to Hispanic modernism, succeeding each other within a brief space of time. Fifty years later postmodernism has become a general term, whose primary connotations remain close to those indicated by De Onis, but which also visibly exceeds them towards the other pole of his construction. (102)
But the general rule holds good that the field of modernism was traversed by two social lines of attraction, with formal consequences. How far can anything comparable be said of postmodernism? The departure of aristocracy, the evanescence of the bourgeoisie, the erosion of working-class confidence and identity, have altered the supports and targets of artistic practice in fundamental ways. It is not that alternative addressees have simply disappeared. New poles of oppositional identification have emerged in the postmodern period: gender, race, ecology, sexual orientation, regional or continental diversity. But these have to date constituted a weaker set of antagonisms. (104)
Wallen's authoritative rewriting of the overall trajectory of modernism stresses that at its origins lay a circulation between low and high culture, periphery and core, whose original outcome was much more disorderly and exuberant than the functionalist aesthetic later clamped down onto it, in the name of a stream lined industrial modernity, enamoured of Americanism and Fordism. But, he argues, there always persisted a heterodox undercurrent of 'difference, excess, hybridity and polysemy' - occasionally visible even in such zealots of purity as Loos or Le Corbusier - which, with the crisis of Fordism, resurfaced in the decorative play of postmodern forms. (104-105)
In this predica ment, contemporary art is pulled in two directions: a desire to 'reassess the Modernist tradition, to reincorporate elements of it as corrective to the new Postmodern visual culture', and a drive to 'throw oneself headlong into the new seductive world of celebrity, commercialism and sensation'.26 These paths, he concludes, are incompatible. In the nature of things, there is little doubt which is likely to bear the heavier traffic. (107)
Inflections
Jameson's book on Adorno is virtually contemporary with Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Since then, can we detect any inflection in his tracking of the postmodern? In the last part of the The Seeds of Time (1994), confessing 'a certain exasperation with myself and others' for over-stating the 'ungovernable richness' of the architectural forms of the postmodern, Jameson proposed instead a structural analysis of its constraints. The result is a combinatory of positions, delimited by four signs - totality, innovation, partiality, replication - which forms a closed system. Such closure does not determine the responses of the architect to its set of possibilities, but does deflate the pluralist rhetoric of postmodernism. (108)
In the final text of The Cultural Turn, it is the speculative structure of globalized finance itself - the reign of fictitious capital, in Marx's terms - that finds architectural shape in the phantom surfaces and disembodied volumes of many a postmodern high-rise. At the centre of The Cultural Turn, Jameson registers a wholesale return within the postmodern of themes once theoretically proscribed by it: a reinstatement of ethics return of the subject, rehabilitation of political science, renewed debates about modernity, and - above all - a rediscovery' of; aesthetics. (109)
In so far as postmodernism in a larger sense, as the logic of capitalism triumphant on a world scale, has banished the spectre of revolution, this recent twist represents in Jameson's reading what we might call a 'restoration within the restoration'. The particular object of his critique is the revival of a pronounced aesthetic of beauty in the cinema. Examples he discusses range from Jarman or Kieslowski at one level, through directors like Comeau or Salas at another, to current Holly wood action pictures; not to speak of the thematics of art and religion associated with the new output of the beautiful. His conclusion is draconian: where once beauty could be a subversive protest against the market and its utility-functions, today the universal commodification of the image has absorbed it as a treacherous patina of the established order. 'The image is the commodity today, and that is why it is vain to expect a negation of the logic of commodity production from it; that is why, finally, all beauty today is meretricious'. (109-110)
Perhaps we should think of the contrasting position of the two arts - cinema and architecture - in popular culture. The first was virtually from inception its centre-piece, while the second has never really acquired much of a foot-hold. There was no filmic counterpart of functionalism. (110)
This can be seen from the focus of Jameson's original attack on filmic beauty - the inauthentic 'cult of the glossy image' in box-office nostalgia pies, whose 'sheer beauty can seem obscene' as 'some ultimate packaging of Nature in cellophane of a type that an elegant shop might well wish to carry in its windows'. It is notable that on that occasion, at the source of his objections, Jameson specified their opposite: those 'historical moments and situations in which the conquest of beauty has been a wrenching political act: the hallucinatory intensity of smeared colour in the grimy numbness of routine, the bitter-sweet taste of the erotic in a world of brutalized and exhausted bodies'. (111)
If those possibilities have so dwindled today, the reason lies in the 'immense distance between the situation of modernism and that of the postmoderns or ourselves' created by the generalized mutation of the image into spectacle - for today 'what characterizes postmodernity in the cultural area is the supersession of everything outside of commercial culture, its absorption-of all culture, high and low', into a single system.36 This cultural transformation, in which the market becomes all-inclusive, is accompanied by a social metamorphosis. Jameson's account of this change is, initially at least, more favourable. Pointing to greater levels of literacy and abundance of information, less hierarchical manners and more universal dependency on wagelabour, he uses a Brechtian term to capture the resultant levelling process: not democratization, which would imply a political sovereignty constitutively missing, but 'plebeianization'. (111)
According to Terry Eagleton in The Illusions of Postmodernism, tideological ambivalence of the postmodern thus might be linked to a historical contrast: schematically - defeat of organized labour and student rebellion concluding in economic accommodation to the market, rise of the insulted and injured leading to political questioning of morality and the state. (116)
The discursive complex that is the object of Eagleton's critique is, as he notes, a phenomenon that may be treated apart from the artistic forms of postmodernism - ideology as distinctfrom culture, in a traditional acceptance of these terms. But, of course, in a wider sense the two cannot be so cleanly separated. How, then, should their relationship be conceived? The doxa of the postmodern is defined, as Eagleton in effect shows, by a primary affinity with the catechisms of the market. What we are looking at, consequently: is in practice the counterpart of the 'citra' - as the dominant strand in postmodern culture - in the ideological field. It is striking how little concerned Jameson has been with it. But if we ask ourselves where the antithetical moment of 'ultra' theory is to be found, the answer is not far to seek. It has often been observed that the postmodern arts have been short of the manifestoes that punctuated the history of the modern. This can be overstated, as the examples of Kosuth or Koolhaas noted above indicate. But if aesthetic programmes can certainly still be found - albeit now more often individual than collective, what has undoubtedly been missing is any revolutionary vision of the kind articulated by the historic avant-gardes. Situationism, which foresaw so many aspects of the postmodern, has had no sequels within it. (116-117)
The theoretical instance the avant-garde form represented has not, however, disappeared. Rather, its function has migrated. For what else is Jameson's totalization of postmodernism itself? In the epoch of modernism, revolutionary art generated its own descriptions of the time or intimations of the future, while for the most part its practices were viewed skeptically, or at best selectively, by political or philosophical thinkers of the left. Trotsky's coolness to futurism, Lukacs's resistance to Brechtian Verfremdung, Adorno's aversion to surrealism, were characteristic of that conjuncture. In the period of postmodernism, there has been a reversal of roles. Radical strands in the arts reclaiming or developing legacies of the avant-gardes, have not been lacking. This postmodernist culture has not produced any confident account of the age, or sense of its general direction. That has been the achievement of Jameson's theory of the postmodern. Jameson's work can be read as a single continuous equivalent of all the passionate meteorologies of the past. (117-118)
Scope
'Modernism', writes Peter Wallen, 'is not being succeeded by a totalizing Western postmodernism but by a hybrid new aesthetic in which new forms of communication and display will be constantly confronted by new vernacular forms of invention and expression', beyond the 'stiflingly Eurocentric discourse' of the latter-day modern and postmodern alike.43 The same kind of objection acquires more doctrinal form in the corpus of 'postcolonial theory '. This body of criticism has developed since the mid-eighties, largely in direct reaction to the influence of ideas of postmodernism in the metropolitan countries, and in particular to Jameson's own construction of the field. (118)
The gravamen of the charge against his theory is that it ignores or suppresses practices in the periphery that not only cannot be accommodated within the categories of the postmodern, but actively reject them. For these critics, postcolonial culture is inherently more oppositional, and far more political than the postmodernism of the centre. Challenging the overweening pretensions of the metropolis, it typically has no hesitation in appealing to its own radical forms of representation or realism, proscribed by postmodern conventions. The champions of the postcolonial 'wish once and for all to name and disclaim postmodernism as neo-imperialist'. For 'the concept of postmodernity has been constructed in terms which more or less intentionally wipe out the possibility of post colonial identity' - that is, the need of the victims of Western imperialism to achieve a sense of themselves 'uncontaminated by universalist or Eurocentric concepts and images'. For this, what they require are not the pernicious categories of a totalizing Western Marxism, but the discrete genealogies of, say, Michel Foucault. (119)
A more substantial objection to Jameson's case for a global dominance of the postmodern comes not from claims for the postcolonial, but rather simply from the lack of full capitalist modernization itself in so many areas of what was once the Third World. In conditions where the minimum conditions of modernity - literacy, industry, mobility - are still basically absent or only patchily present, how can postmodernity have any meaning? Jameson's argument, however, does not depend on any contention - obviously absurd - that contemporary capitalism has created a homogeneous set of social circumstances round the world. Uneven development is inherent in the system, whose 'abrupt new expansion' has 'equally unevenly' eclipsed older forms of inequality and multi plied new ones 'we as yet understand less well'. The real question is whether this unevenness is too great to sustain any common cultural logic. (120-121)
Postmodernism taking over the world has only started. So long as the system of capital prevails, each new advance in the industry of images increases the radius of the postmodern. In that sense, it can be argued, its global dominance is virtually foreordained. (123)
The postmodern may also signify this. 'It is because in late capitalism and in its world system even the center is marginalized', writes Jameson, that 'expressions of the marginally uneven and unevenly developed issuing from a recent experience of capitalism are often mod intense and powerful', and 'above all more deeply symptomatic and meaningful than anything the enfeebled center still finds itself able to say'. (124)
Politics
Uneven development: symptomatic meaning. These are terms of art which bring us to a final crux in Jameson's work. The sense in which Jameson's oeuvre can be seen as a culmination of the Western Marxist tradition has been indicated above. The long suit of that tradition was always aesthetic, and Jameson has played an extraordinary hand with it. But underlying the aesthetic enquiries of this line of thinkers, of course, there was always a set of economic categories derived from Capital that informed their focus and direction. Thus when, twenty years later - at the height of the postwar boom - Jameson was starting to write, the divorce between the aesthetic and economic dimensions of a culture of the left was at its widest - capitalism had prevailed. (124-125)
The traditional complaint about Marxism that it lacks any autonomous political reflection', he writes, 'tends to strike one as a strength rather than a weakness'. For Marxism is not a political philosophy, and while 'there certainly is a Marxist practice of politics, Marxist political thinking, when it is not practical in that way, has exclusively to do with the economic organization of society and how people cooperate to organize production'. The neo-liberal belief that in capitalism only the market matters is thus a close cousin of the Marxist view that what counts for socialism is planning: neither have any time for political disquisitions in their own right. 'We have much in common with the neo-liberals, in fact virtually everything - save the essentials!' (128)
The theory of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism is its dazzling issue. Yet at the same time, precisely here the forclusion of the political poses a paradox. Jameson construes the postmodern as that stage in capitalist development when culture becomes in effect coextensive with the economy. What is the appropriate stance, then, of the critic within this culture? Jameson's answer rests on a three-fold distinction: taste/opinion (little interest), objective study of historical conditions (specific forms) and evaluation ('interrogate the quality of social life by way of the text or individual work of art, or hazard an assessment of the political effects of cultural currentsor movements with less utilitarianism and a greater sympathy for the dynamics of everyday life than the imprimaturs and indexes of earlier traditions' (131)
Jameson's marriage of aesthetics and economics yields a wondrous totalization of postmodern culture as a whole, whose operation of 'cognitive mapping' acts - and this is its intention - as a placeholder of dialectical resistance to it. But its point of leverage necessarily remains in that sense outside the system. Inside it, Jameson was more concerned to monitor than to adjudicate. At this level, he has consistently warned of the dangers of too easy denunciation of specific forms or trends, as pitfalls of a sterile moralism. That did not mean, in the other direction, any concessions to populism, for which Jameson has never had much inclination. There, his rebuke to cultural studies can be taken as a general motto: 'The standardization of consumption is like a sound barrier which confronts the euphoria of populism as a fact of life and a physical law at the upper reaches of the system'. (133)
Still, it remains true that Postmodernism contains no sustained attack on any specific body of work or movement within the culture it depicts, in the conventional sense of the term. In part, this is no doubt a question of psychic economy - this sort of thing has anyway never much attracted Jameson's energies; from each according to their temperament. But that there is also a theoretical issue at stake can be seen, perhaps, from a significant tension - very unusual in this writer - in Jameson's handling of a theme of central importance to his thought: namely, utopian longing. (133)
The aesthetic and the political are certainly not to be equated or confused. But if they can be mediated, it is because they share one thing in common. Both are inherently committed to critical judgement: discrimination between works of art, forms of state. Abstention from criticism, in either, is subscription. Postmodernism, like modernism, is a field of tensions. Division is an inescapable condition of engagement with it. (134-135)
