The Origins of Postmodenity (Perry Anderson 1999)

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)

Gothic (Fred Botting 1996)

Criticism (p. 17-20)

The approach of this book has been made possible by recent developments in literary critical and cultural theory. This is no to say, however, that earlier scholarship and critical enthusiasm for Gothic writing has been neglected, far from it. While work of this kind sustained serious interest in forms marginalised, if not forgotten, by canons as curiosities in the history of literary production and consumption, the shift in values in perspective provided by recent theories has significantly altered attitudes to Gothic texts. By challenging hierarchies of literary value and widening horizons of critical studies to include other forms of writing and address different cultural and historical issues, recent critical practices have moved Gothic texts from previously marginalised sites to designated as popular fiction or literary eccentricity. This questioning of boundaries in recent criticism is highly appropriate to studies of Gothic texts.

This introductory volume draws on different issues and perspective informing and structuring critical interpretations and reinterpretations: it is an effect of previous writing, a selective composite of various critical readings which, while referring to no specific critical statement other than those by contemporary reviewers, remains indebted to the history of Gothic criticism. The most informative work on different aspects of Gothic writing and using different approaches is cited in the bibliography. The following overview will indicate the variety of ways criticism has engaged with Gothic writing, engagements which are clearly affected by changing of critical positions. In the early part of the 20th century, from the 1920s, Gothic writing was discussed as a subgenre, of peripheral interest as part of general literary historical surveys discussing the development of the novel. Michael Sadleir's interest was a result of the list of 'horrid' novels cited in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818). In J. M.S. Tompkins's study of popular novel various themes and characteristics of Gothic were situated within a general literary historical context, while Edith Birkhead examined particular tales more closely in terms of their literary merit. More favourable accounts of Gothic novels were offered in Mortague Summers's, and subsequently, in Devendra Varma's, critical histories. The appeal, for them, of Gothic writing lay in opposition to realism and rationalism, in its quest for a realm beyond the empirical and material world, for a realm of the mysterious, mystical and holy. For them, terror and horror are linked to awe and dread as ways of representing a human quest for metaphysical, religious experience in a secular age.While in The Gothic Quest (1938), Summers traced Gothic influences into the 20th century, it is examining the classical Gothic texts and in Romanticism that his work holds the most interest. He initiated attempts at classifying different Gothic texts. Categories of 'supernatural-', 'historical-', 'rational-' and terror-Gothic' have, since Summers, been amended in Varma's work, in G.R. Thompson's collections, and in Robert Hume's and Robert Platzner's debate, in order to account for different Gothic features and effects, especially that of horror.

Much of this critical work focuses on the relation between Gothic and Romantic writing. Broader definition of Romanticism, like those by Eino Railo and Mario Praz, include Gothic writings, but as examples of less ideal themes of violence, incest, passion and agony: Gothic becomes the dark or negative side to Romanticism. In contrasts displayed in Gothic presentations of darker themes, criticism finds an explicit invitation to indulge in the traditional psychoanalysis: Gothic becomes a fiction of unconcious desire, a release of repressed energies and antisocial fantasies. Themes of the divided nature of the human constitution have become established ways of discussing Gothic texts: dualities of mind and body, reason and desire, are repeatedly invoked. Popular Freudianism, assimilated by 19th century notions of human duality, is ubiquitous, informing texts like Robert Kiely's and Masao Miyoshi's on the romantic novel and the divided self.

David Punter's exhaustive survey of Gothic literature is similarly Freudian, though heavily tempered by Marxism criticism. Punter's analysis, like Franco Moretti's accounts of Frankenstein and Dracula, focuses on issues of class by relating Gothic texts to anxieties about aristocratic and bourgeois power, as well as fears abut the monstrous proletariat and forms of alienation. Since Sade's 'reflection on the novel', Gothic has been linked to revolutionary energies, a connection recently examined by Ronald Paulson. With Ellen Moers's notion of 'female Gothic' as a mode of addressing fears about sexuality and childbirth, one of the most significant directions in recent Gothic criticism was laid out. A challenge to, or interrogation of, forms of fiction dominated by patriarchal assumptions, Gothic novels have been reassessed as part of a wider feminism critical movement that recovers suppressed or marginalised writing by women and addresses issues of female experience, sexual oppression and difference.

Extensive interrogations of traditional literary and cultural institutions, related to those enunciated in Marxist and feminist criticism, have emerged in the wake of structuralist theory. Stressing the role of linguistic structures and differences in the formation of cultural meanings, post-structuralist criticism have attended relations of textual sexual and historical production and reproduction. Eve Kosofsky Sedwick's book on GOthic conventions disclosed the textuality of the genre, the play of narrative surfaces and metaphors that undermine assumptions of depth and hidden meaning. The link between textuality, power and desire in Gothic fiction has been theorised by Jerold Hogle, and a recent book, Gothic Writing (1993), by Robert Miles has examined the discursive framworks enabling the production of earlier GOthic writing. Several critical essays on specific Gothic texts have begun to interpret the genre's relation to notions of identity, sexuality, power and imperialism. Indeed, from the 18th century onwards, Gothic texts have been involved in constructing and contesting distinctions between civilisation and barbarism, reason and desire, self and other.

Gothic excesses repeatedly return to particular images and particular loci. Familial and sexual relations, power and suppression, turn of the roles and figures of father and daughter. In villains masculine sovereignty is staged and scrutinised. Old castles, houses and ruins, as in wild landscapes and labyrinthine cities, situate heroines and readers at the limits of normal worlds and mores. Historical events or imagined pasts, also, delineate the boundaries of the normalised present in a movement, an interplay, that leaves neither where they where. In its crossing of boundaries, however, Gothic is a mobile and specific form. For the images and figures that are reiterated constitute a place where cultural fears and fantasies are projected. Thus similar figures have different significances, depending on the culture that uses them. Indeed, this is the pattern of Gothic as a genre that, in generating and refracting diverse objects of fear and anxiety, transforms its own shape and focus. In structuring this book along conventional and chronological lines, cultural and historical discontinuities as well as continuities can be plotted, demonstrating the major shifts in Gothic production as well as the persistence of certain patterns. Drawing on newer critical work as well as earlier studies, this introduction anticipates future examinations of the ways Gothic texts produce, reinforce and undermine received ideas about literature, nation, gender and culture.

Why horror? (Andrew Tudor 1997)

WHY HORROR? THE PECULIAR PLEASURES OF A POPULAR GENRE.
Cultural Studies , Volume 11, Number 3, 1 July 1997 , pp. 443-463(21), Routledge.

Abstract:
What is the appeal of horror? Various attempts have been made to answer this question, generally combining arguments about the nature of horror texts with arguments about the distinctive character of horror consumers. The most common attempts at general explanation are grounded in concepts drawn from psychoanalytic theory, some depending quite directly on Freud's 'return of the repressed' argument in his discussion of 'the uncanny', others utilizing the framework of 'structural psychoanalysis' to explore the ways in which the unconscious structures forms of representation. Examples of both forms of analysis are discussed - largely in relation to horror movies - exemplified in the recent work of Wood, Twitchell, Creed and Clover. General explanations which do not use psychoanalytic arguments are less common, though Carroll has recently offered one such approach which is given consideration here. It is argued that these attempts at posing general explanations of the appeal of horror are, at worst, inappropriately reductive and, at best, insufficiently specific, failing to distinguish the diverse pleasures that heterogeneous horror audiences take from their active involvement in the genre. Alternative, more particularistic approaches are considered (exemplified in aspects of work by Biskind, Carroll, Dika, Jancovich and Tudor) which seek to relate textual features to specific social circumstances. It is argued that such approaches pre-suppose a social ontology centred upon active social agents who use cultural artefacts as resources in rendering coherent their everyday lives. This is in some contrast to attempts to provide general explanations of horror's appeal where the tacit model is one in which human agents are pre-constituted in key respects, horror appealing, therefore, because it gratifies pre-established desires. It is suggested that the former, active and particularistic conception is to be preferred and that this necessitates a renewed attempt to grasp the diversity of what is, after all, a heterogenous audience capable of taking diverse pleasures from their favoured genre.

Vera Cruz: imagens e historia do cinema brasileiro (Sergio Martinelli et al ) Sao Paulo: abooks 2005.

A Vera Cruz nunca faliu. Endividada, passou as acoes para o Banespa (Banco do Estado de SP) em 1954 que colocou um interventor acabando com a gestao de Franco Zampari (produtor do sucesso internacional O Cangaceiro - 1953- Lima Barreto).

Abilio Pereira de Almeida crious um empresa paralela de producao e distribuicao, chamada Brasil Filmes, que continuou produzindo dentro da Vera Cruz. Nesse periodo mais de sete longa metragens foram produzidas, inclusive dando oportunidade para varios cineastas novos da epoca, sendo um dele o proprio Walter Hugo Khouri, que filmou O Estranho Encontro. A producao da Brasil Filmes pode ser considerada como pequena, de baixo custo e obrigatoriamente de rapida producao, um conceito diferente do que existia na Vera Cruz. Mesmo assim o Banespa resolveu fazer a liquidacao da empresa. Nesse momento, Walter Hugo Khouri, que havia trabalhado na empresa e era apaixonado pelo projeto, iniciou um verdadeiro "trabalho de formiga", descobrindo quais eram os outros acionistas minoritarios, entrando em contato com cada um, comprando acoes, as vezes recebendo como doacoes.Com isso conseguiu reunir um volume suficiente para impedir a liquidacao da empresa, em assembleia que o banco realizaria.

The matter of misogyny in horror films

Linda Williams’s (1983) claim regarding women’s identification with the monster via a shared sense of being a social ‘outcast’, is similarly pursued in Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993). Creed engages with an exploration of horror cinema from a psychological perspective, with particular reference to “mothering functions” and female monsters. Her core argument proposes that when the ‘feminine’ is constructed as monstrous it is frequently done in conjunction with the woman's reproductive body, which she divides in seven categories. The seven faces of the monstrous-feminine are: the archaic mother, the monstrous womb, the vampire, the witch, the possessed body, the monstrous mother and the castrator or female castratice. Creed’s discussion of sexual differences attacks Freudian explanations of the human physique (based on the centrality of the Oedipus complex) which present the woman as the sexual other of the man and often cast the woman as the victim. While Freud suggests that a woman terrifies because she is a castrated human being, Creed counters this by proposing that women are primarily terrifying because they might castrate. She inverts and dismantles Freud’s assumptions about the human mind framework by claiming that the monstrous-feminine is the manifestation of men’s fear of the woman as the “castrating other”. According to Creed, the woman is whole without a penis and this, along with her reproductive body, is what inspires fear in men. The vagina dentata is the image she uses to illustrate the masculine fear of castration and to challenge a patriarchal worldview. Her study of horror films draws largely on the literary concept of “abject”, proposed by French feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (1982). The idea of social otherness which underpins both Williams’ and Creed’s work is illuminating; however, their women-as-the-monster claims can be challenged with the argument that the majority of monsters and serial-killers are in fact male, not female (Neale 1980: 61).

Zé do Caixão (Extras)

Coleção Zé do Caixão: 50 anos do Cinema de José Mojica Marins (Cinemagia, 2002)

VOL.1
* Mojica "O Amor pelo cinema e seus primeiros filmes" (doenças venéreas, mito do toureiro, quadrinhos)

VOL.2
* Ivan Cardoso: "O Universo de Mojica Marins" (1978) 26 mins.
* Rogério Brandão: "Cine Trash" (ZC figura pop, CD Roots - Supultura, Olímpia, Heavy Metal)
* Mojica (figura folclórica criada pelo cinema que foi para a história em quadrinhos)

VOL.3
* Rubens Ewald Filho (Sucesso popular maior que Mazzaropi, rebate o primitivismo: o cinema é mais complexo que a arte plástica, Mojica não fez o Drácula brasileiro, he had not yet become an "artisan" therefore, he was willing to try everything, had yet to learn what was not to do, what lens to use)
* Carlos Primati (Inferno de gesso e pipoca, Bava and Argento do not make Italian horror - i.e. national horor, Jacinto Molina played monsters, Jess Franco horror/sexo explícito)

VOL.4
* Clóvis Molinari Jr. (Coordenador de Documentação Audiovisual - Arquivo nacional do RJ): a chapter apart in the Brazilian film history, processes of censorship, criteria adopted by censors, numerous personalities of Brazilian culture, DCDP interest in recreating films, "surrealismo tropicalista", Mojica's meta-film.

VOL.6
* Jairo Ferreira (vídeos experimentais, Mojica o único que emplacou)
* Nicelmar Leyart (trabalhar com Mojica é um aprendizado em cinema, "Delírios de um Anormal" Arnaldo Jabor contou 4800 cortes - only 20mins of own footage, different sounds to different nightmares.

On the Horror (M. Jancovich 2007)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/26/ohthehorror

The Guardian, Monday 26 November 2007 8.30GMT

On the horror

The genre of horror is culturally significant, and should no longer be seen as a political football for left or rightwing viewsComments (…) Mark Jancovich guardian.co.uk, Monday 26 November 2007 08.30 GMT

When I began to study horror movies, I was motivated partly by my enjoyment of these films, but also by their cultural significance. In the 1980s, when I was a young research student, a series of groups on both the left and the right of the political spectrum were engaged in an attack on both horror and pornography, genres that were said to have dangerous effects on their viewers. These claims were often vague and contradictory, but there was a general sense that these genres were supposed to justify or cause violence against women. In other words, horror and porn movies and the people who watched them were dangerous and needed to be policed.

So the study of horror became a way for myself and others to question these claims and the politics on which they were based, and to begin to understand the strange alliance between sections of both the right and the left on these questions. On the one hand, academics such as Carol Clover showed that slasher films, which were often taken to be the epitome of misogynist horror, actually bore little relation to their characterisation by those who would censor them. If these films often featured a male homicidal maniac, these monstrous figures were hardly presented as the heroes of the piece. On the contrary, the movies were usually distinguished by the presence of a female rather than a male hero, a final girl who dispatched the killer and saved the day.

If Clover and others therefore focused on claims about the films themselves, other academics started to think about the audiences for these films, and demonstrated that they were anything but the mindless zombies often implied. Rather than being unquestioningly controlled by these films, the audiences for horror were often shown to be highly sophisticated and discerning viewers, whose responses were quite different from those often attributed to them.

However, as the study of horror became less disreputable, I also started to become concerned about it. As the field grew, academics started to feel less defensive (which is good) but also began to talk among themselves (which is bad). In the mid-1990s, I therefore found myself at a conference where I had the uncomfortable realisation that my work was no longer contentious. It seemed that most academics felt that there were now so many academics working in the field that we had somehow "won the battle".

But what was the battle? If I have jokingly said that my mission in the late 1980s was to get John Carpenter's Halloween onto a university syllabus, it was certainly far more concerned to oppose those who would censor and control what we could watch and discuss. Unfortunately, it seemed that, for many academics, the fact that we had got horror onto the syllabus proved that we had made it: they seemed to have forgotten that this might not mean that we had convinced anyone in the outside world.

Since then, the study of horror has taken several different directions. First, some academics simply study horror in much the same ways as English departments used to study the Gothic novel: they regard it as an important form of historical significance and aesthetic interest. I have no particular problem with this: I don't think it is scandalous to study horror films seriously, and many are more rewarding than many of the more respectable "classics". However, I also feel that this work ignores some pressing issues.

Second, there are the academics that celebrate the shocking extremes of horror, and suggest that shocking middle-class taste is a goal in itself. The argument seems to go that, if something shocks people, then it must be challenging. This approach I find more irritating. It often simply confirms the superiority of the academic and reverses the values of the censors. In other words, sometimes we might be right to be shocked and appalled by things, and simply ridiculing others for being "uptight" seems to have little real significance.

Furthermore, this kind of work rarely demonstrates any real engagement with the cultural politics of shocking images. If I was originally motivated by the campaigns against horror and pornography in the 1980s, there are now new campaigns against sexual and violent imagery. The government has introduced truly dangerous new legislation (see Section 6 of the proposed bill on the criminalisation of the possession of extreme pornography (pdf)), while a bubbling liberal consensus emerges around the new forms of horror represented by film series such as Saw and Hostel. In short, simply celebrating the shocking hardly engages with the logic of government legislation or more general cultural attitudes developing around horror.

However, there are also two key trends to which I am more sympathetic. The first is best represented by Martin Barker, whose work around audiences and censorship makes a real contribution to policy issues (see his study for the British Board of Film Classification, Audiences and Receptions of Sexual Violence in Contemporary Cinema (pdf)). The second trend is the historical studies of horror such as that of Kevin Heffernan, who has gone beyond a simple history of the films to analyse the ways in which 1950s horror films were crucial to a series of changes within the production, distribution and consumption of cinema in the period.

An understanding of history can enable us to show that campaigns against horror are anything but new, and that they have a rather worrying and unsavoury history. While those who condemn horror and pornography today may feel themselves to be on the side of the angels, an examination of the past quickly dispels any such certainty and may even suggest the opposite.

Comics: the early editorial market in Brazil (Daniel Serravalle de Sá 2008)

Comics: the early editorial market in Brazil

The existence of serialised graphic art in Brazil can be traced to the second half of the nineteenth-century when Angelo Agostini’s illustrations commenced to both instruct and entertain the native population with humorous verbal and visual texts (Lima, 1963; Agostini, 2002). The appearance of Agostini’s visual story-telling in newspapers and magazines such as O Diabo Coxo, O Cabrião, O Mosquito, Don Quixote and Revista Arlequim served as a ‘literary diet’ for a population that was still largely illiterate, but which did not have to be uninformed. The artist’s sequential stories usually occupied a page or two in these publications and the cover, in the case of magazines. These visual narratives depicted a series of self-explanatory sequential images, were often associated with short texts or dialogues. They habitually tended to socio-political commentary, deriding the costumes of the time, especially those related to the Court and their French-ised etiquette. As a mean of mass communication Agostini’s creations were an important vehicle for the making of opinions, his sequential stories purported an ideological model that was republican, abolitionist and economically liberal (Cavalcanti, 2006). One prime example of his militancy can be verified in the sequential narrative ‘As Aventuras de Nhô-Quim, ou Impressões de Uma Viagem à Corte’, which first appeared in the magazine Vida Fuminense in 1869, and ran for nine episodes of two pages each. In 1883 Agostini initiated another successful publication with a fixed character entitled ‘As Aventuras de Zé Caipora’. Although often interrupted, the series published by Revista Illustrada counts thirty-five episodes spread over a number of years. The eight-page magazine consisted of black and white, ink drawn, verbal and visual narratives and had a weekly circulation of four thousand issues (Sodré, 1977; Ribeiro, 2002). The adventures of Zé Caipora featured the first Brazilian female graphic character, the Amerindian heroine Inaiá, whose figure Cardoso acknowledges as primitively sensual and erotic (2002: 10-11). Zé Caipora stories commonly involved themes of conflict between the agricultural and the urban culture. Arguably, Zé Caipora is Agostini’s most successful character; it achieved multimedia impact in the end of the nineteenth-century inspiring a popular song and also a homonymous silent film (As Aventuras de Zé Caipora by Emílio Silva, 1909) with Antônio Serra in the lead role.

Naturally, these serialised narratives still did not have yet all the characteristics of a modern comic book. For example, elements such as speech balloons or the panel composition in tiers were features still being developed by illustrators such as Wilhelm Bush (Max und Moritz), Rudolph Töpffer (The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck), Richard Outcault (Yellow Kid) and Angelo Agostini. Moving away from the single-frame caricature into the creation of serialised narratives, these artists are considered to be precursors to the invention of a comic book language. Although born in Italy, Agostini’s professional career took place in Brazil and was dedicated to the debate of national affairs. In 1888 he naturalised Brazilian and for these reasons Agostini is known as a Brazilian artist. However, with the abolition of slavery (1888) and the advent of Republic (1889) the central issues on which the artist based his work lost a great deal of its critical edge. In spite of this, Agostini continued active for almost every illustrated magazine of the time until his death in 1910.

The beginning of the twentieth-century saw the creation of many publications among which can be mentioned: O Tagarela, A Avenida, O Malho, A Ilustração Brasileira, Leitura Para Todos and Careta. One of the most influential and long-lasting magazines was O Tico-Tico (1905-1957), founded by a group led by journalist Luís Bartolomeu de Souza e Silva. The publishers spotted a niche in the editorial market and decided to produce a ‘model’ magazine for the Brazilian youth. The publication was partially based on the French La Semaine de Suzette, also founded in 1905, which featured comic illustrations, a large amount of text in short features and serial novelettes. In its own way, O Tico-Tico also aimed at including an educational programme on its pages. As well as the serialised narratives its didactic agenda encompassed games, quizzes, charades, information about history, geography and scientific facts distributed in sections called ‘Lição do Vovô’ and ‘Gaiola do Tico-Tico’, for example. Printed by the group O Malho, this juvenile magazine was surprisingly released with four colour pages already in its first edition, when most magazines printing were black and white. Moreover, O Tico-Tico had an impressive initial circulation of twenty-one thousand issues, which would reach up to one hundred thousand during its best years (Vergueiro and Santos, 2005). Many illustrators who much contributed to the success of O Tico-Tico, sequential artists such as Max Yantok (Kaximbawn, Barão de Rapapé), Nuno Borges (Bolinha e Bolonha), Alfredo Storni (Zé Macaco e Faustina), Miguel Hochman (Chiquinho e Jagunço) and Luiz Sá (Réco-Réco, Bolão e Azeitona), were active not just as children illustrators and left a highly collectible work with the passing years. O Tico-Tico is regarded by some critics to be the first ever Brazilian ‘comic book’ (Vergueiro and Santos, 2005), although such nomenclature for this kind of magazine was not yet adopted. O Tico-Tico’s importance is indeed far-reaching, not only for the national editorial market, but also for the formation of twentieth-century Brazilian literary culture. Writers such as Josué Montello, Olavo Bilac, Oswaldo Orico, Coelho Neto, José Lins do Rego, Catulo da Paixão Cearense, among others, contributed for the magazine’s content and, thus, assisted in the formation of a posterior generation of writers (and confessed readers of O Tico-Tico) such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Érico Veríssimo, Gilberto Freyre, Luís da Câmara Cascudo, Ana Maria Machado, Monteiro Lobato, Lygia Fagundes Telles and Mario Quintana, to mention a few (Moya, 1977; Vergueiro and Santos, 2005; Carvalho, 2006).

When O Tico-Tico first came out in the early twentieth-century an important sequential artist was just initiating his professional life. In many ways, J. Carlos, short for José Carlos de Brito e Cunha, would shed a new light on sequential art produced in Brazil. He instituted an extremely limpid drawing style which was considered an innovation for his artistic generation. J. Carlos worked for some of the most important magazines of the time and created many typical Rio de Janeiro characters, such as Almofadinha and Melindrosa. His visual representations are considered valuable historical material for the understanding of Brazilian identity at the time. He registered the ongoing socio-political changes and the fast-paced formation of national culture in the early republican era or Primeira República. His portrayal of the carnival, the beaches, and the current fashion provides admirable insights about the Brazilian customs of the period and how the establishing of a state of ‘Brazilianess’ was in operation. J. Carlos also worked for juvenile magazines and developed memorable characters such as Juquinha and the little girl Lamparina. The artist is also credited to have developed the character of an anthropomorphised parrot that displayed emblematic ‘Brazilian manners’. This character can be first seen on the cover of the magazine Careta from 1941 and it is said to have inspired Walt Disney to create Zé ‘Joe’ Carioca, which appeared in the film Saludos Amigos (1943) and from this time forth in many Disney’s products. J. Carlos’ encounter with Walt Disney in Brazil did not come to a further collaboration but, Zé Carioca remains in Disney’s line of characters until the present day (Lustosa, 2006).

In the 1940s the production and consumption of magazines and sequential art in Brazil augments in a significant manner, as the culmination of a process that started in the previous decade. Such transformation was largely triggered by the importing of U.S. superhero ‘comics’. Technically, these are not yet the ‘comic book’ as we know the today but the Sunday page comic strips, which according to Tom Morris ‘constitutes one of those original American art forms […] that have reached out to the world and made a distinctive impact across cultures.’ (Morris and Morris, 2005: X). Imported comics were not a novelty in Brazil, as Roberto Elísio dos Santos (2002) states O Tico-Tico had already introduced Brazilian readership to the vigorous production of North-American comics, for example, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, was first published in Brazil in 1910. Other North-American characters would be published in O Tico-Tico later on, among which can de mentioned: Bocoió (Elzie Crisler Segar’s Popeye), Gato Maluco (George Herriman’s Krazy Kat), Gato Félix (Pat Sullivan’s Felix, the cat) and Ratinho Curioso (Disney’s Mickey Mouse). However, from the 1940s, the publication of superheroes visual narratives becomes the new trend in the Brazilian editorial market and they started to occupy an eminent position in national newspapers. A mark of this process is the distinct characterization of superheroes stories and their drawing style. The former caricature and humoristic trace practiced in Brazilian juvenile magazines now competes with a more realistic drawing style originated abroad. One prime example of this new fashion in comics is Harold Foster’s Tarzan, first published in 1929 for the Metropolitan Newspaper Syndicate. Tarzan inhabits a world of fantasy that is very different from all the previously mentioned ‘comic’ characters, his action-packed adventures demand a more lifelike and dramatic representation. For the next two decades these North-American superheroes will fight enemies all over the world and will become important references during the Second World War, these years are considered the golden age of U.S. comics.

Eventually the superhero strips start to appear with more regularity and in more quantity in Brazilian newspapers. In a little while they started appearing not only on Sunday pages but three times a week, and soon they were being offered as an independent supplement. The São Paulo based newspaper A Gazetinha (later A Gazeta Infantil) had been publishing comic strips on its pages as early as 1929, however, a watershed event in the Brazilian editorial market happens on 14th March 1934 when businessman Adolfo Aizen inaugurates a newspaper supplement, in tabloid format, which could be completely separable from the main newspaper. This publication, O Suplemento Juvenil, which came as part of Rio’s newspaper A Nação, was based on King Features Syndicate products whose distribution rights Aizen bought while travelling in the United States. As well as the new format Aizen introduced a number of characters which were successful in the U.S.: Príncipe Valente (Prince Valiant), Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, Agente Secreto X-9 (Secret Agent X-9), Mandrake, Popeye, Jim das Selvas (Jungle Jim), Brick Bradford, Terry e os Piratas (Terry and the Pirates) to mention but a few. The enormous success soon led other newspapers to follow the same tabloid size of publication and printing. Each story run only a few pages and was generally part of a continued story from day to day. Other newspaper supplements such as O Globo Juvenil, O Jornalzinho and A Gazetinha now also brought on its pages comics such as Carlinhos (Little Nemo in Slumberland), Barney Baxter, O Fantasma (The Phantom), Super-homem (Superman), Tarzan and others. These superheroes comics reach a great level of popularity and to supply such public demand Brazilian supplements started publishing the visual narratives in a frantic schedule, sometimes even on a daily basis (which was possible because the supplements were composed of multiple stories by different artists). Despite the overwhelming quantity of imported visual narratives not all stories were reprints and Brazilian artists, such as Carlos Thiré, Renato Silva, Tarsila do Amaral, Péricles Andrade Maranhão, among other previously mentioned, also marked their constant presence in the supplements. Among some of the well-known national characters from this period are Nhô Totico, Garra Cinzenta, Amigo da Onça, Chiquinho, Chicote and Chicória, for example.

These newspaper supplements are modified along the years. They start to be sold independent from newspapers and to look more like the modern comic book, as it is known today. One of the problems with the newspaper system of publishing visual narratives was the serialisation of the stories. The division of a story into several episodes proved not to be always convenient for the reader. Other problems concerned a certain level of inefficiency which was perceived in relation to the tabloid format. For example, technical difficulties involving the publication of coloured stories in the newspaper which caused The Phantom’s costume (originally purple) to become red in Brazil. To overcome these disadvantages a new publication format is introduced, once again following U.S. editorial developments. Gonçalo Júnior offers an idea about the impact caused by the introduction of the new template in Brazil:

The comic book was born from a simple but revolutionary idea, both in its handling and commercial practicality. All that was necessary was to fold the tabloid in half and staple it in order to create a magazine with twice as many pages but of similar cost – it was only sometime after that a cover printed in better quality paper was adopted. (Gonçalo Júnior, 2004: 73)

To a certain extent, as the critic acknowledges, the comic book model is a return to the magazine format, which never really ceased to exist. However, as it was mentioned before, for some critics the invention of the comic book in Brazil preceded this period. In the book entitled O Tico-Tico: centenário da primeira revista de quadrinhos do Brasil (O Tico-Tico: centennial of the first Brazilian comic book), Vergueiro and Santos affirm that the ‘comic book’ was already produced in Brazil since the publication of O Tico-Tico. The authors defend that O Tico-Tico already had all the formal attributes which characterise comic books, such as speech balloons, illustration within frames and organisation in tiers, cloud frames to represent dream or imagination, specific typographical symbols to represent snoring or cursing, among other features. On the other hand, Gonçalo Júnior understands the comic book per se a form closely associated with North-American editorial products and, for the most part, visual stories which involves superheroes or adventure narratives. In his book A Guerra dos Gibis (The comic book wars), Gonçalo Júnior delineates his conception of comic book. His definition of comic book has for template the celebrated publication Gibi Mensal (1939), a publication linked to the magazine O Globo. Printed by Roberto Marinho’s Rio Gráfica, Gibi Mensal was the first magazine in Brazil to publish a story with O Tocha Humana (The Human Torch) followed by complete stories with Capitão América (Captain Marvel). The publication set the smaller size format for this kind of publication and such was the success of Gibi Mensal that to this day in Brazil the word ‘gibi’ can be used as a synonym to designate comic books. A discussion which involves the opposition of Brazilian terms (revista infantil, revista ilustrada, tiras cômicas, história em quadrinhos, gibi) versus a definitions of terms which originate in the English language (Sundays, comic strips, comic strips magazines, comic books) and other technical features is in order.

In the 1940s the comic book reached its highest level of popularity and publications such as O Cômico, Guri, Mirim sextaferino, Correio Universal, Lobinho, Sesino, Vida Juvenil, Biriba were further examples of comics of large circulation which have a historical significance in Brazil. In 1945, Adolfo Aizen, having ceased the publication of Suplemento, founds Editoral Brasil América (Ebal)a future great publishing house dedicated to comic books. Its first publication was fittingly called O Heroi (sic - no diacritical mark). The work developed at Ebal exercised a strong influence on subsequent generations of editors, artists and readers. Aizen’s Ebal contributed enormously for the stabilisation of a culture of comic book appreciation and readership in Brazil. As the decade ends there are now in Brazil a number of artists schooled in the language and techniques of serial-art and comic books. Some of the most talented names from this period are Monteiro Filho, Fernando Diaz da Silva, Jayme Cortez Martins, Reinaldo de Oliveira, Álvaro de Moya, Syllas Roberg and Miguel Penteado, to mention but a few. In the 1950s, some of these artists migrate to different sectors such as publicity, cartoons, television, painting, book illustration, teaching, and areas more closely related to the editorial market, not always with success. But, one name worth mentioning is José Lanzellotti’s, a former illustrator who participated in the brothers Villas-Boas anthropological expeditions into the north and northeast of Brazil. Afterwards Lanzelloti would work for the production team in the film O Cangaçeiro (Lima Barreto, 1953), his previous research on cangaçeiros (Brazilian cowboys-cum-banditti) supported him in the creation of the outfits and accessories used by the characters. The bigger, more exuberant and allegorical hats seen in the film is his work which, although not verisimilar, is justified in the superior ‘plastic’ effect they resulted. Lanzelloti’s touch can be verified by contrasting photographs of real cangaçeiros with the ones in Lima Barreto’s film and the elaborated drawings the artist made for his Brazilian folkloric collection printed by Editora Três.

A discussion about the formation and development of the Brazilian editorial market can not ignore the cultural invasion of Latin America by the United States via the ‘Good Neighbor Policy’. At a time when international conflicts were beginning to rise once again, the United States wished to have good relations with southern countries in the American continent, and this policy was to some extent intended to garner Latin American support. Created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 this foreign policy of administration renounced military intervention and invested in other methods to consolidate its influence over Latin America. Among other strategies the proposition of ‘Pan-Americanism’ involved support for dedicated local leaders, the training of national guards, economic and cultural penetration, bank loans, financial supervision, and political subversion.

This scenario which persisted in 1930s and 1940s should be kept in mind as the historical background of a larger process of political and cultural domination enforced on Brazil and other Latin American countries. The main characteristic of this process of penetration of undeveloped economies by the U.S. political and economic apparatus was felt in the extractive, commercial, manufacturing and financial sectors. The political and economical realities of dependency that was created conditioned the very nature of Brazilian cultural production. Looking at a specific example of this dependency, it is being argued here that North-American comic books (or films), having already covered their costs on the domestic market, were sold to Brazil at very low prices. As result the flow of culture has been unidirectional and, from the 1930s onwards, Brazilian editorial (and film) market was shaped by the characteristics of North-American cultural and economic development.

In their pursuit for quick profit, these Brazilian entrepreneurs who brought imported comics to the country embraced a situation that was already given. Conveniently they bought the product offered by the U.S., but invested little to the advancement of an autonomous national industry. Nevertheless, these foreign comic books also brought positive contributions. The reprint of imported sequential art plays an undeniable role in the development of the editorial sector. As a mass-distributed form these U.S. comics helped to boost the readership and generated numerous jobs ranging from the production to the distribution and constituting a significant material for the growth of Brazilian editorial market.

From the early twentieth-century juvenile magazines (revista ilustrada) to the 1940s superhero comic book, the national publishing sector developed in an incredibly fast pace. From the initial layout and adaptation to newsprint to the final distribution on newsagent shelves and market stalls, there was a complex chain-process which generated a number of jobs and boosted the economy. For example, it is necessary to think that the Brazilian situation worked under different circumstances from those explained by Martin Barker when he discusses the importing of U.S. to Britain (1995: 8-17). The U.S. material imported in bulk had to be adapted in a process which involved a restructuring of some features, especially translation and lettering. The original text had to be not only translated but modified in order to fit the speech balloons (sentences in English tend to be more concise than in Portuguese). This process involved virtually the recreation of original dialogues. Then comic strips or frames had to be arranged in a new layout, and the work had to be art-finalised before the mass printing. These comics continued generating capital even after the re-production process in a number of indirect jobs involving packaging, logistic distribution and transportation of the material before it reached its final point, the reader.

As a result of the political infiltration of the North-American cultural products, the Brazilian editorial market acquired technological know-how and developed some intrinsic expertise. This initial market for comics enabled the subsequent ascension of many talented Brazilian artists such as Henfil (Gaúna, Zeferino), Ziraldo (A Turma do Pererê, O Menino Maluquinho) de André LeBlanc (Morena Flor) and Maurício de Souza (A Turma da Mônica). The unidirectional cultural flow is the mark of U.S.-Brazil relationships but, in a rare cultural exchange, the latter two artists managed to be distributed (though they did not reach the mainstream). It should also be observed that the enormous public success of these comic books contributed to the making of some of the largest Brazilian fortunes. Roberto Marinho’s Globo multi-media empire, Victor Civita’s Editora Abril and Assis Chateaubriand’s network of news agencies, radio and television stations, all started their personal fortunes in the publishing sector and built their capital largely on the success of the comic book sales.

U.S. comic books come from a distinct tradition of publication from that previously known in Brazil and this has caused noteworthy cultural impact on the national production. The comic book model set by O Tico-Tico in the early twentieth-century suggested an entertainment magazine characterised by the humorous tone and the caricature-like illustrational style. Taking after Angelo Agostini’s informative approach to serial-art, O Tico-Tico set a standard for nationally-produced magazines which included a cultural agenda aiming at both instructing and entertaining its readership. This way of thinking about comic books in Brazil starts to change drastically with the entrance of larger numbers of U.S. comics. By the mid-1930s a different world of fantasy disputed the Brazilian entertainment tradition by representing mighty heroes often surrounded by curvaceous women, battling power-craze villains in exotics landscapes inhabited by sub-moronic natives. The new North-American material was characterised by a more dramatic visual narratives which employed a more realistic drawing technique. Such exciting adventure stories drawn in a lifelike manner are factors partially responsible for the success of these comics in Brazil, ushering the national editorial market into an era of heroic characters.

It is not being said here that North-Americans comic books lacked a didactic dimension. As a matter of fact their instructive and ideological agenda operated in a less scholarly way than Brazilian comics, but not lees effective. Bradford W. Wright associates the ascension of superheroes with socio-historical traumas, namely the Second World War (2003: 30-85). This implicates that North-American publishers ‘sought to boost their image by linking their products to patriotism and war effort’, and Franklin Roosevelt, who had made skilful use of the media to further his policies during the Depression, now did it again during wartime.

The OWI [Office of War Information] asked the entertainment industry to raise American morale, encourage public participation and cooperation in the war effort, identify the menace of the Axis powers, and inform the audience of the progressive war aims pursued by the United States and its allies, always in ways that cloaked propaganda within the context of good entertainment as much as possible. (Wright, 2003: 34).

Captain America and Wonder Woman, whose costumes which allude to the American flag, are two blatant examples of the comic book definite entry in the culture of the war. And although some critics like Roberto Causo (2003) argue that such comics, pulp magazines and stories from the period were not as influential in Brazil as they were in the United States, the influence goes beyond the level of representation. The presence and influence of North-America comics in Brazil acted on many different fronts with different levels of intensity which makes their complex contribution a difficult task to access. Trying to clarify this reality it was briefly pointed out here the Brazilian editorial tradition and relations with the North-American cultural industry. Such phenomena was not only mimetic, comic books, as representation, is also a technology, which was copied, learned, parodied, and ultimately enriched (as we will see next) by Brazilian underdeveloped industry and subjectivities.

After the Second World War the North-American market for comic books was in crisis. Superhero characters were largely saturated due to their massive utilisation to denigrate the enemies. In order to raise the sales comic book editors had to reach for a new type of narrative and horror narratives presented themselves as the solution that had both a market and creative possibilities which could modify the stagnated reality left by the superheroes. When horror first emerged in the cinema, more specifically in German Expressionist cinema, Germany was a nation devastated by the First World War (Punter, 1996: 96-119). Horror Comic books also have their origins linked to the war context, but with its own specificities. Emerging out of the universe of juvenile and superheroes comic books, the field of horror comics in Brazil embodied a re-nationalization of comics. Brazilian artists found in horror (rather than superheroes) a better way portrayed national reality, industry and thematic environment.

Sacred Terror, Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen (A. Cowan 2008)

Andrew Cowan. Sacred Terror, Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen. Wayco, Tx: Baylor UP, 2008.



* Religious oriented horror cinema relies much of its effect on the direct collision between natural and supernatural. It seeks to frighten people into conformity. The soul is a religious concept that makes little sense apart from the various religious framework in which it comes embedded.

* The metataxis of horror, the inversion or reversal of culturally accepted categories, i.e., church as a place of safety and the clergy as a guardian of decency and moral.

"Religious oriented cinema horror remains a significant material disclosure of deeply embedded cultural fears of the supernatural and an equally entrenched ambivalence about the place and power of religion in society as the principal means of negotiating those fears" (p.9)

In classic horror cinema there is William Castle's The Tingler, about a creature-parasite that lives inside people, feeding on fear but controlled by screams. The creature is chased into a movie theatre filled to capacity. At that point the real screen in the movie theatre goes black and a voice tells the real audience that the Tingler is among them and they must scream to protect themselves.

Cowan affirms the audience are not all scared by the same thngs "Not all stimuli produces the same level of frisson. For some, thoughts of ghosts and discarnate spiritual entities are the height of horror, while zombies leaves the cold. For others demoniac possessions gives the creeps, but they remains entirely unnafected by mummies or slasher films. For me, snakes are interesting and enjoyable as cinema monsters (specially when they are eating annoying cast members), but spiders are virtually impossible for me to watch" (p.20)

According to Cowan, psycological approach is not without value but horror cinema is part of a cinematic lineage that cannot be easily or reductively psycologised, as it has a lenghty social history. Those who seek psychological interpretations often ignore or proscribe that. Approaching any film with a priori assumption is to actively avoid looking for any other meaning that which psychology has set out to find and severely restrict the range of interpretations available.

On the Gothic and eighteenth-century revolutions

Sade's preface Reflections on the Novel in which he states the gothic is “the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded.”
Idées sur Les Romans. edited by Jean Glatier. Bordeaux: Ducros, 1970.

“Uncertainties about nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality dominated Gothic Fiction. They are linked to wider threats of disintegration manifested forcefully in political revolution. The decade of the French Revolution was also the period when the Gothic novel was most popular” (Fred Botting. Gothic. London, Routledge, 1996. p.5)


“… it is important to register that terror had, and continues to have, direct connections with the social political realm. It is, of course, no accident that the roots of Gothic fiction in a time of European revolution, one of those manifestations was the French ‘reign of terror’, established ‘terror’ as a term that you could look outward as well as inward…” (David Punter. “Terror”. IN: The handbook to Gothic Literature. NY: NYU, 1998. p. 235)


“Locked in our distant modern view, the genre [irony, he does not believe it is a genre] looks all too unified, but the fiction market of the 1790s was polarised by a range of contradictory social and political factors …. For writers like Clara Reeve, the Gothick motifs, drawn from the age of chivalry, could used to redress the leveling tendencies that followed in the wake of the French revolution… . In 1800 the Marquis de Sade revealed an equally political interest in the gothick novel, reading ann Radcliffe and Lewis as a partially unconscious response to the upheavals that had recently shaken Europe." (Victor Sage. The Gothick Novel. McMillan, 1990. p. 13).

Shorthand system for technical information

cu = close-up
xcu = extrem close-up
ms = medium shot
fs = full or long shot
3/4s = three-quarter shot
ps = pan shot
s/rs = shot/reverse shot
ct = cut
lt = long take
trs = tracking shot
crs = crane shot
la = low angle
ha = high angle