Perry Anderson. THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY.

New York: Verso, 1998.

 

Perry Anderson, who teaches history at UCLA, began this important essay as an introduction to Fredric Jameson's new book of essays, The Cultural Turn. Happily, he outran the allotted task for the Jameson volume. This book is his expanded text without Jameson's. But Jameson's theorizing about postmodernism remains the subject here.

In "Prodromes" (3-14) and "Crystallization" (15-46) Anderson gathers up the strands of the idea of postmodernity just before Jameson rewrote the terms of inquiry into the cultural turn to postmodernity. Anderson reports that Jameson did that in a lecture at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Arts in the fall of 1982. His speech was the core text of Postmodernism--the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. This watershed piece first appeared in print in New Left Review in spring 1984. It remains the centerpiece of Jameson's theorizing.

The rest of this short book (137 pages) explicates Jameson's idea in "Capture" (47-77) and identifies its influence in "After-effects" (78-137).

Primarily, Anderson's essay presents a history of the idea of postmodernity. His narrative trail takes us from the earliest references to an Hispanic "postmodernismo" by Federico de Onis in the 1930s, through the following avenues:

--Arnold Toynbee's coinage in 1954 to identify declining bourgeois influences after 1870;

--Charles Olson's Black Mountain pronouncements on the end of the industrial-imperial modern age in the 1950s;

--C. Wright Mills's 1959 usage to mark the decline of the modern age;

--Irving Howe's use of the term, also in 1959, to describe the newest problems of fiction as a function in society (the very year, I think, that Norman Mailer's "The White Negro" essay appeared, identifying the appropriation of underclass manners and mores by the now metamorphosing middle class);

--Harry Levin's 1960 usage for a "suspect crossroads between culture and commerce" (an interesting early identification of capital as the central issue);

--David Antin's 1972 article, "Modernism and Post-Modernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry," which resurrected the Olson tradition in boundary 2 at Binghamton, a new journal subtitled Journal of Post-modern Literature and Culture;

--Ihab Hassan's early 1970s identification of postmodernism as "so many anarchies of the spirit" (17);

--Robert Venturi's 1972 manifesto against modernist architecture (with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour) in Learning from Las Vegas;

--Charles Jencks's 1977 Language of Postmodern Architecture;

--Jean-Francois Lyotard's 1979 La Condition Postmoderne, the first philosophical work to adopt the notion of postmodernity, coming out of Canada;

--Juergen Habermas's 1980 attempt to set the agenda for completing the project of modernity, thus supplying a "negative pole" against postmodernism.

Anderson mentions other names from the typical postmodern bibliography but plays less light on their contribution to the main run-up to Jameson, his featured man: Baudrillard; De Man; Derrida; Foucault; Heidegger; Levinas; Nietzsche; Wittgenstein, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Walter Benjamin (the three voices from the Frankfurt School); Rorty. He does not name Deleuze and Guattari.

End of the early narrative trail next>>>

 

And so, with all these antecedent threads identified, Anderson describes the meaning of postmodernism in 1981, just before the voice of Fredric Jameson arose to crystallize the project. (44-46) Yes, it was looking beyond "what had become of modernism" but without a clear direction. He finds in the discourse of postmodernism at this point "discursive dispersion," a lack of coherence between the philosophical overview (brought by Lyotard and Habermas) and aesthetic content. Though it was now "on the agenda," it lacked "intellectual integration."

However, in one way postmodernism was showing an ideologically consistent position. It stood against the Left, with its discredited "grand narrative" of socialism. It turned toward the Right, where there "could be nothing but capitalism." It gave new value to play and indeterminacy, unrestrained by plans and programs.

End of discursive dispersion in search of a crystallizing voice next>>>

 

(Anderson makes something of the non-Western associations of early concepts of postmodernism. He marks its traces in China, Mexico, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Quebec. This resonates with Enrique Dussel's striking thesis [Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity, in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds. THE CULTURES OF GLOBALIZATION. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998]. Dussel holds that "two opposing paradigms, the Eurocentric and the planetary, characterize the question of modernity." (3) Dussel argues that modernity was not an exclusively internal European development that diffused itself to the entire world. Rather, modernity arose as the culture of the center of a "world-system." His perspective is, from the first, planetary. This relativizes European modernity in a world-wide process. As Dussel sees it, this shift of paradigm changes not only the concept of modernity ("its origin, development, and contemporary crisis") but also the content of postmodernity. I examine Dussel's theory elsewhere in greater detail, but reference to it here gives added significance to the non-Western associations made by Anderson.)

End of a parenthesis on non-western associations next>>>

 

Jameson, then, came to a concept of postmodernism because, as a literary critic, he saw an irreconcilable problem of artistic forms and styles of life.

An earlier realism was defunct because it referred to an already extinct kind of life; he associated that life with classical capitalism. The modernism (I want to think of it as the Symbolism explored by Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle--though Bertolt Brecht is the example drawn from Jameson by Anderson) that followed it, he believed, was equally intolerable. "The estranging techniques of modernism had degenerated into standardized conventions of cultural consumption." (49) Jameson therefore believed that the "habit of fragmentation" implanted by these modernist techniques needed to be overcome. As realism was consonant with classical capitalism, so modernism was consonant with consumer capitalism.

Jameson sought the third turn, the turn to postmodernism in "late capitalism", defined by Ernest Mandel in a book of that title. Jameson saw both classical and consumer capitalism (and therefore their formal modes of expression, realism and modernism) overcome by the novelty of the new modes of organization of capital that emerged in the decades after World War II, explicated by Mandel. (I think this causative interpenetrating of the aesthetic and the social/economic must remain always in view to understand Jameson's undifferentiated explication of the entire Western experience.)

Jameson in the 1970s had begun to seek the resolution of the dilemma of realism and modernism. His medium was the idea of textuality that emerged in the work of Roland Barthes and others. But he needed other influences to take him finally to the insight of his 1982 lecture. They included, in addition to the critically important book by Mandel, the following:

--Baudrillard's new idea of the "simulacrum"-- the reality without a referent;

--his association at Yale with Robert Venturi and others who were moving against modernist conventions in architecture and ideas;

-- and Lyotard's important study, The Postmodern Condition, which assaulted "grand narratives" as the essence of the modernist problem.

End of Jameson enters the story next>>>

 

So primed, he gave his speech at the Whitney. It was the nucleus of the full-blown essay that appeared in 1984 in New Left Review as Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. It is the canonical text that opens his later book of the same title, which I have notated. In Anderson's view, the essay marks the turning point in the study of postmodernity because it set the terms of discourse for analysts since then.

I made my own summation of Jameson's "late capitalism" text long before reading Anderson's. His analysis of it has a conceptual tightness lacking in my notes. I therefore outline it below, expecting this not so much to augment my notes as to organize them.

Anderson finds that Jameson makes "five moves" in the course of defining postmodernism.

1. He anchored postmodernism in the newest transformation of capitalism. This involved multi-national corporations and the technological explosion, especially in information. This "late" capitalism superseded the consumer capitalism of modernism, which had earlier superseded the first stage, classical capitalism. Late capitalism was different because it replaced nature (which was still a referent under modernist consumer capitalism) with a "second nature," composed of the culture of commodities. (55) This transformed the structures of bourgeois society.

2. He identified the death of the modern subject as a major result of the transformed capitalist situation. As Anderson says, Jameson explored "the metastases of the psyche" in the new economic landscape. The modernist self, he said, lost an active sense of the past. A spatial presentness replaced a temporal depth. A depthless psychic life thus became spasmodic in a flattened social environment lacking "generational markers." (57) The individual psyche was subject to highs and lows, linked to the pervasive commodity consumerism.

3. He expanded the purview of postmodernism to include "virtually the whole spectrum of the arts, and much of the discourse flanking them." (58-59) The postmodernization of architecture was foremost for Jameson. He theorized cinema, and tracked the interpenetrating of the fine arts with graphic design and advertising. In literature as in the other arts, he identified the use of "pastiche," the insertion of detached pieces of the past in playful mimicry; this was possible now because the past as a continuous process died under the conditions of the new capitalism.

Most important to the academy, Jameson found that the academic disciplines in the arts and social sciences, those that dealt with the culture and its artifacts, imploded in the conditions of late capitalism. The "structural differentiation" of modern scholarship, seen in the familiar graduate departments, broke down. The pressure of the new conditions to "de-differentiate" the cultural spheres caused this breakdown. It took the form of "textualization" of the objects of scholarship and a new value given to "commentary."

4. He saw late capitalism reshuffling the class divisions of the older modernist society, with new corporate affluents, attached to popular culture, at the top and segmented, weakened workers at the bottom, nationally and worldwide. This dissolved the difference between a class-based "high" and "low" culture. Populist postmodern style, carried by capitalist commodification, became dominant, shared by all classes. (Anderson does not bring up the function of "cool" in these new social circumstances of culture; the "cool" designation, mobile and never-endingly fungible, became a differentiator of otherwise undifferentiated cultural products.) Importantly, Jameson found the new postmodern style "global in scope."

5. Finally, Jameson decided against the moral dismissal or condemnation of the conditions of the postmodern situation, expecting, instead, that a thoroughgoing theorization of it would produce transformation enough. The dialectical analysis of its global economic conditions, he believed, should proceed as a Marxist project.

In a follow-up section, "Outcomes," Anderson tells how Jameson's Postmodernism essay gathered up the complex historical strands of Western Marxist cultural theory. Of particular interest to me was the way in which Anderson tied Jameson's work with that of the Frankfort School critics of culture and society, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Benjamin. Beyond that, I am not going to summarize "Outcomes" here. (66-77)

End of Jameson's five moves capture postmodernism next>>>

 

In his final chapter, After-effects, (78-137) Anderson tells how Jameson's "capture" of postmodernism in the 1984 essay "set the terms of subsequent debate." Anderson examines numerous points in that debate:

(a) Timing (the issue of periodization--when did postmodernism happen?);

(b) Polarities (how did postmodernism play out in contrast to modernism and what kind of cultural product does it lead to?);

(c) Inflections (how has subsequent criticism by Jameson changed pitch since the 1984 piece?);

(d) Scope (did Jameson's theory remain too close to the Euro-American system and exclude postcolonial developments);

(e) Politics (how has Jameson's later writing become more directly interested in the political, in tandem with his primary emphasis on the interplay of aesthetics and economy?).

End of Jameson sets the terms of debate next>>>

 

 

Of these points, that on Timing held the most interest for me. Anderson provides an intriguingly complex account of the last decades of modernism and the emergence from it of Jamesonian postmodernism. He offers a fascinating history of the rise of high modernism in the inter-war years. He highlights its unstable economic and artistic evolution after World War II. He sees a "gradual degradation" of modernism rather than an abrupt halt in the 25 years after WWII. In that time, the foundations of modernism eroded. He identifies this erosion in the following four dimensions:

(1) The bourgeoisie as a class became all but extinct, by about 1975. With it went the bourgeois "moral codes and cultural habitus." (p.85) Anderson suggests that we think of the change coming when men stopped wearing hats. In place of their style of life came a "democratization of manners and disinhibition of mores." (p.86)

(2) The academicist establishment in modernism sustained a "high" culture tied to bourgeois values. This vanished in the 1970s, along with the bourgeoisie itself. When it disappeared, its function as an aesthetic foil in opposition to an avant-garde died too. That left the avant-garde with no established antagonist against which to push. "Modernism, from its earliest origins in Baudelaire or Flaubert onwards, virtually defined itself as 'anti-bourgeois.' Postmodernism is what occurs when, without any victory, that adversary is gone." (p. 86)

(When we compare the unrestrained exhibitionism of much postmodern art to the relatively tame works that created such a social furor in earlier decades, we come to see the significance of this insight. How inconceivable today it seems that an established bourgeois-based authority could resist an avant-garde production of, say, the stature of Joyce's Ulysses.)

(3) The evolution of technology in high modernism produced an exciting plethora of inventions that transformed the culture. However, the adulation of the machinic environment abated when technological power led to the destructiveness of the atom bomb in 1945. The original modernist luster left technology until the arrival of color television in the 1970s. "Once, in jubilation or alarm, modernism was seized by images of machinery [think of the iconic cover of the first issue of Life in 1936--the dam of dams]; now, postmodernism was sway to a machinery of images." (p.88) Jameson saw color TV and its extension, the computer terminal, as the perpetual producer of the "popular imaginary" that populates postmodernism.

(4) Finally, Anderson guides us through the complex transformation of politics--from the '68 radical dream through its disillusioned cancellation in the 1970s to the triumph of the Right in the Reaganism of the 1980s. Modernism had depended on the Left-Right tension for its vigor. Postmodernism flourished when political alternatives to capitalism, for example, the socialist Left, ceased to challenge it. (p. 92)

Anderson offers us a concrete date for periodizing the clear arrival of postmodernism, following the run-up to it that started between 1970 and 1975. On 12 August 1982, the stock market started its bull run following the Reagan revolution. Jameson gave his speech at the Whitney on postmodernism as the logic of late capitalism three months later. So, with the autumn of 1982, postmodernism, flying all the characteristics identified above, arrived full blown and thoroughly theorized, as Anderson sees it.

Of the other "after-effects" of the theory of postmodernism articulated in 1982 by Jameson, that which deals with the correspondences between art and social structure commanded my attention.

Anderson first offers an interesting picture of two contrasting "value-worlds" in the modernist years, which led to their differing forms of art. Both opposed the capitalist market and bourgeois domesticity. But one moved from a traditional aristocratic order of values ("high culture"). The other moved from the opposite end of the continuum of social values, with the labor movement; it looked to an egalitarian rather than an elitist resolution. Forms of art followed these positions--Eliot representing the first, Brecht the second.

If that polarity characterized modernism, Anderson asks if a similar artistic-social correspondence appears in the subsequent postmodernist period. He finds that the elite-populist distinction has died. He finds that "spectacle" of cultural production, the output of late capitalism, now dominates. (p. 106)

End of the period when postmodernism arose next>>>

 

Anderson's little book has the power to install Fredric Jameson's idea of postmodernity at the center of the argument about current culture. The student of postmodern culture could well accept Jameson (glossed by Anderson) as the central text of a course of study, for a couple of tactical reasons.

(1) IT IS TRANS-DISCIPLINARY: I have found it is immensely difficult to surround the postmodern situation with a comprehensive critical apparatus. The traditional disciplines in the arts, social sciences, and humanities separately do not have the power to develop a credible general vision of the whole range of cultural phenomena. Jameson's multi-disciplinary approach embraces as much as one could expect to embrace and still retain a coherent concept. He widens his conceptual net by linking the socio-economic with the cultural-artistic in a causative relationship. Anderson has glossed this maneuver with cogent insights into the make-up of postmodernism's modernist antecedents, again in the same comprehensive conceptual framework.

(2) IT PERIODIZES PLAUSIBLY: I have wrestled with the definition of postmodernism through a series of readings and notations on them. I leaned by turns toward the philosophical, the esthetic-artistic, even the ethnographic. These excursions persuaded me that periodizing postmodernism is a useful maneuver, though some voices insist that making historical periods out of patchworks of cultural phenomena is not viable. I find that it helps to put the variety of change into a temporal narrative. It conveniently distills postmodernism out of modernism, clarifying the latter in the process. Anderson places Jameson, the commentator, within the period that the commentator creates. I find this a satisfactory way to comprehend the whirlwind of change that postmodernism as a concept attempts to deal with.

Periodization also, for me, implies that something may follow from postmodernism. One damned thing follows another. And the situation that Jameson and Anderson explicate for us will incur the effects of passing time, one way or the other. This is not a theory for breaking out of the "end of history." But it is a commonsense perspective: novelty comes along no matter what. I think it is valuable to think about getting beyond postmodernism. The ethical and moral strategies of humankind cry for efficacy, as long as survival remains a root motive. By wedding one's study of postmodern culture to a period, a finite time, one may be better able to develop a critical apparatus for transforming postmodernist values. This is consistent with Jameson's admonition against moralizing against postmodernism: he called for theory of postmodernism as the way to transcend it. Periodization implies passage: its focus therefore is not on the moral problems of postmodernism but on the problem of moving inevitably on from where we are.

(3) IT OFFERS A WORKING HYPOTHESIS: The pursuit of the idea of postmodernism goes round and round unless it starts from a clear conceptual center. I can accept Jameson's theorizing as just that, with Anderson's gloss, even if I am uncertain how sturdily his whole theoretical edifice stands up. It is the most useful hypothesis I have found to organize the plethora of evidence that virtually inundates us.

The goal of study would be to identify evidence that supports Jameson and evidence that does not fit his logic. That simple strategy of empirical inquiry could supply the basic structure of the introductory course that I am putting together on the idea of postmodernity.

End of themes for a course of study in postmodernism

End of essay review of Perry Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity