These two key parts of Jameson's book touch major categories of our inquiry in the postmodern and provoke us to revisit them.
The breeziness and the audacity of Jameson's swooping, looping style lure us toward an inclusive retrospective of all that we have thought in the light of all that he has thought. Luckily our regular walks down Sixth Avenue by Donny Brook and beside the woods keep us in touch with small realities and mindful of limits. (Two frisky squirrels were doing a kind of madcap dance in the snow.) We will stay within a certain boundary here, although within that boundary we have caged a few pretty big tigers for examination.
First, though, consider the temptation Jameson puts us under to take stock of the whole mind-boggling ball of wax labeled the postmodern. With sizzling syntax sometimes amusing (and occasionally off-putting), he ranges over the field. In addition to our summary notes on the introduction, the following bullets simply suggest his range and serve as a rough summary:
"If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life." (p. 27)
With this broad overview in mind, then, we look to Jamison for reinforcement or readjustment of positions developed in THE PROGRAMME. Those positions are developed in the sections on (a) critical theory, (b) praxis, and (c) creative expression. We revisit those areas below. We are not trying to argue ourself out of or into sharp-edged positions. We simply hope to refine or modify things already said in the light of Jamisonian insight.
CRITICAL THEORY: THE UNSTABLE SELF
The third commandment of postmodern critical theory refers to the disappearance of the unified, enduring, separate bourgeois liberal self. Such a self cannot endure the redefinitions brought by the preeminence of language and text in the making of reality. Jameson accounts for the end of the liberal self not so much in linguistic as in spatial-temporal terms. The old self, rich and redolent in its peculiarities, depended for its uniqueness, its authenticity, upon its endurance. It could survive as a separateness through its past experiences into the present. We derived our pleasure in it from "the elegiac mysteries of memory" (insightful Jamesonian phrase) that it generated through its ability to endure.
In Jameson's view, the connection to the past is broken in postmodernity. This disconnection leaves the erstwhile deep-structured self hanging out in a flattened space. The vision of reality found in Andy Warhol's surface creations accurately shows us what this means. The referent of our present is our present, not our past.
The idea that the self flattens out in spatial-temporal terms complements the idea that the self is a consequence of text. Both ideas contain the kernel of the quintessential postmodern--the instability of the subject. In the next minute, in the next photograph, there will be another image. In the next textual formulation, the last one will be destabilized and a subject momentarily restabilized, in waiting for yet another destabilization. It is this instability, in whatever formulation, that leads to the apparent desperation that some feel when contemplating the postmodern condition.
We feel less desperate about it. That is no doubt a consequence of our span of life. We remember life before the "force field" of postmodernity achieved enough power to alter the directions of all of the objects in its scope. Perhaps the thin thread of attachment we still can maintain with the things of nature along the Avenue helps. In a completely de-natured setting, no doubt the sense of a self continuing through time would be less likely to hold. But the arrival of robins along Donny Brook in early March helps to define us in a way that the arrival of a new film at the movie theatre at 42nd and Broadway would not. As long as something of nature holds, the self will not be wholly decentered.
It is tempting to think of nature as inevitably passing away, of course, especially as we watch fields and woods falling daily to the builder's bulldozers. Our connection with the primeval seems destined to break irrevocably and totally. With that breaking will come, we want to think, the triumph of simulacra, the divorce of ourselves from ourselves as we once thought we were.
We think this impulse in postmodernism goes too far. Even if the logical connection (that is, nature dies; therefore, we as coherent deep-structured selves die) holds, it goes too far. For nature is not going to die. We do not control the ultimate powers within the earth's core. We do not control the insect world: the cockroach may be our most valuable reminder of the limits of our powers. We do not control nature's viruses and bacteria. Currently AIDS holds sway in every corner of earth. When we contain it, we have confidence that something else will come along. These are the deeply rooted realities of our environment, and they help us to hold back from a final plunge into depthlessness and instability of self.
Jameson adheres to the view that space and time are compressed by the dynamics of multinational capital. Presumably, to link with our thought on the survival of nature, he would imagine that the dynamics of multinational capital will destroy nature (he does not explicitly deal with this issue). This would assure the demise of the old liberal humanist self. He argues that in postmodernity multinational capital has the power to commodify everything--including, to be consistent, itself. Our sense of the survival of something of nature outside the control of multinational capital persists, admittedly more out of faith than evidence. Ironically (yes, it may survive), natural disasters and world-wide epidemics may betoken the survival of the self as a deep-structured center of signficance. They may in the end defy commodification and thereby assure the surviving selves of a capacity to experience a depth of sensibility. A recoverable past may not elude a self after all. Of course, many selves, tragically, will have to perish as a price for that capacity.
MULTINATIONAL CAPITAL: WHITHER PRAXIS?
The central place of multinational capital in Jameson's formulation poses something of a question for THE PROGRAMME. The function of capital is that of a corporation, and we lodge corporate activity in our category of "praxis." This denotes the institutionalized structures through which postmodernity becomes active in the society.
What does the programme have to say on certain of its important issues now that it has heard Jameson?
A. The folk around the fire: Jameson compels us to elaborate on this root metaphor in the program. It should get beyond its primitive surroundings and be applied with equal vigor to what has transpired through time, down to the postmodern moment. The basic desire--for comfort--seems to be supported by Jameson when he calls for a new cognitive mapping to reorient us.
The flip side of comfort is adventure: what's out there in the dark? let's just sneak out away from the fire and take a peak! The programme to date has underplayed this countervailing human impulse. Jameson helps us by emphasizing that the euphoric as well as the numbed response can be found in postmodernist expression. He sees a dialectic of catastrophe and progress (p. 47) in an evolutionary relationship.
B. Postmodern expression: Is it designed to mimic the p.m. condition and thus allow us to understand and accommodate? See his thoughts about it being a new realism, which seems paradoxical. (p. 49) Tie in McHale's idea of mimesis. Tie in our notes on whether postmodern art has a cathartic function akin to classical tragedy.
C. Praxis: We put corporate enterprise in praxis. Jameson roots the entire postmodern situation in capitalism. Does this mean the programme is failing to give corporate "agility" movement the centrality it deserves in the programme? We think not, but we need to square the programme's take on the agile corporation with Jameson.
D. Critical theory: Jameson reinforces some of our "commandments." His examination of "pastiche" and the loss of "depth models" elaborates on our Comm andment on the past.
E. UNIQUENESS: Jameson pretends that postmodernism is an historically original situation (p. xiii). But he denies that in the end. Harvey too does not see in it a qualitative difference from modernism. We should square up the programme's take on this issue in the light of Jameson. That might lead to a revision of the "floating" FINAL FORMULATION.
TITLE THEME: Refer to Andy Warhol's "diamond dust shoes" on the cover. Are these shoes made for dancing? Or are they so removed from the real function for which the form originated that they leave us with a sense of nonfunctionality?
J.'s call for a new and as-yet undiscovered "cognitive mapping" is the key to this joining. It is the key to understanding his entire thesis. His call suggests that p.m condition creates a critical need to move through and beyond it. (It does not ask that we try to retrace, go back.) That need grows out of the disorientation caused by the effects of multinational capitalism on us: we cannot function. (This requires analysis: is this a bio-psychological finding or a political/ethical judgment echoing a value system not now able to work?) We need to be able to situate ourselves (a spatial need) in order to function again. The progamme's view--and J.'s, we think--is that if such a need exists, it will only be found by engaging the terms and conditions of the postmodern itself. The problem with that is that the dynamics of multinational capitalism allow it to commodify anything, even the engagement of it in the search for "progress" out of its problems. That is, postmodernism--aka, multinational capitalism--is infinitely able to destroy the critical discourse inherent in it that might seek to change it. This could lead to an ultimate fatalism; it would not even be depressing, since, having lost depth, we postmodern subjects would lack the sense of ambiguity and irony required for psychological depression. We could stare at Andy Warhol's shimmering shoes and "dance" a dance that made no reference to dance on a "dance floor" that made no reference to dance floors. World without end, until death did us part.
But they do not seem to be of OUR experience, of our growing up. Hey, we could dance! We seem to remember....
Warhol's shoes give us small comfort and suggest we don't know where to dance anymore.
We WANT to dance again, but before we can do so we have to relocate the dance floor and ourselves in relation to it.
The rough notes above are fluid and we have a minimal sense of responsibility for their cogency. READ AT YOUR RISK UNTIL FURTHER REVISION!