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Jameson's Postmodernism: Version 2.0

Steven Helmling
University of Delaware
helmling@odin.english.udel.edu

© 1999 Steven Helmling.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the
Postmodern, 1983-1998. Verso: London and New York, 1998.

Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity. Verso: London and
New York, 1998.

1. Fredric Jameson's new volume offers itself as a compendium of his
"key writings" on postmodernism; but let the buyer beware that it
does not contain the famous "Postmodernism" essay published in
New Left Review (1984) and reprinted as the opening chapter of
Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).
Instead it opens with that essay's earliest, much shorter, first
take, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"--the kernel that grew,
at about three and a half times its original length, into the
"landmark" essay.[1] Presumably, the decision to reprint the
earlier version was about marketing: publishers want to minimize
overlap between competing products. But motivation aside,
reprinting the earlier version has the effect of highlighting a
little-noticed feature of Jameson's thinking about postmodernism
since the big essay, namely that ever since its first appearance
and astonishing impact, Jameson has been moderating its grandest
claims, qualifying just what had excited its enthusiastic readers
most.

2. On the evidence, the enormous success of the 1984 essay was not
altogether what Jameson had hoped for. Many read it as a
manifesto on behalf of the "postmodern"--modernism was dead, long
live postmodernism--despite Jameson's cautions in the essay
itself against any such for-or-against reading. Granted, Jameson
here and elsewhere in his '80s writing allowed himself
considerable hope on the score of postmodernism, but even in the
essay itself, the culminating theme of "the sublime" was
inflected as much with terror as with hope. "The sublime" was
"unrepresentable," and since we can't understand what we can't
represent, the chronic Jamesonian burden of "Marxist hermeneutic"
("we are condemned to interpret at the same time that we feel an
increasing repugnance to do so" [Jameson, Ideologies 6]) was for
the nonce "relieved." Jameson seemed, at last, to have joined the
clamor (from Susan Sontag to Deleuze and Guattari) "against
interpretation"; and the aesthetes of jouissance delighted to
hear him talking the talk of "delirium," "euphoria," and
"intensity." This release involved others: like dominoes, all the
direr Jamesonian themes seemed to be falling, as Hegelian "time"
(History, temporality, the diachronic, narrativity) yielded to
the favored pomo category of "space" (the synchronic, the visual,
geographies [plural], cognitive mapping).

3. And these were shifts not merely of theme, but of Jameson's
actual writing practice: dense and compact, The Political
Unconscious had told a (Hegelian) story; by contrast, the vast
and sprawling Postmodernism scanned, from varying altitudes,
diverse cultural terrains whose roughly synchronous disjunctions
were no small part of the point. These macrolevel gestures were
sustained at the microlevel in the very textures of the prose as
well: The Political Unconscious had elaborated the premise of
revolution's "inevitable failure" in a "stoic" and "tragic" prose
that enacted the "labor and the suffering" of "the dialectic of
utopia and ideology"; whereas "Postmodernism" (both essay and
book) continuously evoked, in the feel and sound of the writing
itself, "the relief of the postmodern generally, a thunderous
unblocking of logjams and a release of new productivity that was
somehow tensed up and frozen, locked like cramped muscles, at the
latter end of the modern period" (Jameson, Postmodernism 313).
Throughout Postmodernism, this promising prospect motivated not
merely a thematics, but also a stylistics of "the sublime."

4. But "the sublime," and everything I've just linked it with above,
constitutes new material added between the earliest version of
the essay, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" and the
now-canonical "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism." And it is precisely "the sublime" (etc.) that The
Cultural Turn elides by reprinting the former rather than the
latter. (Arguably, even the choice among the available "earlier"
versions supports this point, since The Cultural Turn reprints
the one that substitutes a discussion of the Westin Bonaventure
for the earliest version's pages on the proto-"sublime" theme of
"the schizo" [see endnote 1].) In thus reverting, as it were, to
this earlier, pre-"sublime" version, and making it the starting
point for a new itinerary through Jameson's "selected writings on
the postmodern," The Cultural Turn could be read as a thoroughly
revisionist retrospect, a corrective alternative genealogy to the
received understanding of "Jameson on postmodernism." Whether or
not Jameson intended anything like this, there's no question that
readers who rely on The Cultural Turn for their sense of
Jameson's role in the postmodern debate will derive a picture
very different from that still governed by memories of the 1984
version's initial impact.

5. And in any case, such revisionist impulses manifested themselves
in Jameson's work even before Postmodernism came out (and indeed,
in Postmodernism itself)--for example, in "Marxism and
Postmodernism" (1989), which appeared as a reply-to-critics in
Douglas Kellner's casebook, Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique (1989;
parts of this essay were also cannibalized for the "Conclusion"
to Postmodernism). And in the work that followed Postmodernism,
Jameson returned to the supposedly retro interests (Hegelian,
Marxist, phenomenological) that Postmodernism had seemed to
downplay or eschew: Signatures of the Visible and The
Geopolitical Aesthetic (both 1992) renewed hermeneutic
commitments; and The Seeds of Time (1994), as the last word of
the title hints, conjured the phenomenological thematics of
temporality. The latter book's first and strongest chapter, the
obvious program piece for the whole, is called "The Antinomies of
Postmodernism," a meditation on the contemporary (postmodern)
ideology of standoff and standstill, of (Kantian) "antinomy"
usurping the analytic/interpretive space where (Hegelian)
"dialectic" should be. By now no one should have missed that
Jameson was seeing the "postmodern condition" as much less
"euphoric" and "joyous" than he had earlier seemed to do.

6. The choice of "Selected Writings" in The Cultural Turn gives this
tendency in Jameson's work the sanction of a volume, and to that
extent, The Cultural Turn is less a sequel to Postmodernism than
a revision of it--an update, as my title here means to suggest.
(After all, the 1991 volume was also a "Selected Writings on the
Postmodern"). Besides reprinting the two essays ("Marxism and
Postmodernism" and "The Antinomies of Postmodernity") I've just
discussed, The Cultural Turn presents four new essays that make
Jameson's dissent from pomo-as-usual almost aggressively
insistent. Two of these offer yet another of Jameson's periodic
attempts to rehabilitate the irredeemably out-of-fashion Hegel;
the other two extrapolate from the problem of "finance capital"
Jameson's most jaundiced take yet on The Way We Live Now.

7. Of the two latter essays, the first, "Culture and Finance
Capital," takes up Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century
with an eye to the question whether "finance capital" is the
distinctive or constitutive feature of late capitalism; the
second, "The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism, and
Land Speculation" treats aesthetic issues: the paradoxes of the
artwork's "symbolic act" (is it "act" at all, or "symbol"
merely?--a question for the centrality of which, recall the
subtitle of The Political Unconscious: "Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act"). This problematic prompts the related question of
what constitutes, and what is the use of, a critical account of
cultural forms. The discussion here interestingly enlarges
Jameson's previous accounts of Manfredo Tafuri, the Marxist
architectural historian who, for Jameson, has long instantiated
the very problems of "dialectical writing" that Jameson's own
writing chronically raises for itself: how to own the "inevitable
failure" of the revolutionary past without making a fatal
defeatism the foregone conclusion of its future?

8. But interesting as these issues are, I want to give the space
remaining to the two Hegelianizing essays here, "'End of Art' or
'End of History'?" and "Transformations of the Image in
Postmodernity." The first of these urges what can only be called
a Hegelian full-court press: Jameson has been rereading the
Phenomenology, the Aesthetics, and the Philosophy of History, and
this return to Hegel quite contravenes the anti- or un-Hegelian
carriage of Postmodernism. Indeed, this essay's Hegelianizing
makes that of The Political Unconscious seem mild; some of the
more high-rolling passages leap from one continent of thought to
a whole other galaxy, in a single bound and several times per
paragraph, in ways actually reminiscent of Hegel himself. (When
Jameson adverts to "Hegel's immense dictée--the compulsive
graphomanic lifelong transcription of what some daimon of the
absolute muttered to him day-in day-out at the very limits of
syntax and language itself," it is hard not to see his own
oeuvre, however momentarily, in similar terms.) In this
distinctly Hegelian spirit, both essays pursue distinctly
Hegelian themes. One array of these is gathered under the rubric
of the "end of" problem, as instanced in "the sublime" and its
relation to "the postmodern" (in which "end of" motifs
proliferate, including Derrida's meta-twist, the end of "the end
of"). The other principle thematic is that of "theory" itself,
whose "end," in another sign of our accelerating times, we
increasingly hear announced.

9. There is considerable overlap between the two essays, because the
"transformations in the image" (i.e., in the visual) tracked in
the former prove an instance of the transformations (i.e., in
part, endings) explored in the latter. For Jameson, the
increasing hegemony of "the visual" attests a contemporary
"return of the aesthetic"; and to the extent that the latter is a
reaction against the self-transcending "anti-aesthetic" of
modernism, postmodernism appears as a reversion from "the
sublime" back to "the beautiful"--equivalent for Jameson with the
merely "culinary" or "decorative" kind of art that Hegel's
prophecy of the triumph of philosophy, and modernism's
"anti-aesthetic" of shock and ugliness, both aimed, in what
Jameson projects as their different but related ways, to "end."
Jameson sketches "self-transcendence" as one of the keys to the
dialectic of "the sublime," from Kant's "sublime," which
transcends "the beautiful," and Hegel's "end of art" (in which
sensuous figuration [the aesthetic] is sublated in the
trans-sensuousness of the Absolute [philosophy]) through
modernism to our own day.

10. And here it becomes clear that if Jameson has downplayed
sublimity in these recent writings, it is not to discount "the
sublime" itself, but rather to deny its continuing potencies to
"the postmodern." This move directly reverses that of the 1984
essay, in which the thwarted energies of a "cramped" and "frozen"
modernism were relieved in the "thunderous unblocking" of a
postmodern sublime. That was then, this is now: in these two new
essays, it is the "anti-aesthetic" of modernism that
authentically mobilizes "the sublime"; postmodernism, by
contrast, works merely reactively to secure the commodification
of all sensuous experience to the "pleasure" of the merely
"culinary" or "consumable" (in the "Transformations" essay, to
the visual, to the "image" in Guy Debord's sense, "the final form
of commodity reification"):

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 and the appeal to it by contemporary
pseudo-aestheticism is an ideological maneuver and not a
creative resource. (Cultural Turn 135)

Compare this dour pronouncement with the brighter prospects on
"the visual" in Signatures of the Visible, which attest that
Jameson himself had once entertained some such hope of "a
negation of the logic of commodity production from [the image]."

11. All these moves revisit, and revise, Jameson's perennially
in-process triad of realism/modernism/postmodernism; and in the
present discussion, "theory" itself is drastically dichotomized:
there is a "heroic" (i.e., still-modernist) founding
cohort--"from Lèvi-Strauss to Lacan, from Deleuze and Barthes to
Derrida and Baudrillard" (Cultural Turn 85)--followed by more
recent (unnamed) epigones whose premature and depoliticized
celebrations of utopian jouissance, as in some "theory" avatar of
"infantile leftism," effectively domesticated jouissance itself
(along with such other once-subversive themes as deconstruction,
negation, dedifferentiation, etc.). Thus do our utopian and
revolutionary inventions reify, in our very hands, into clichés:
consumables, commodities, staples, fixed relay points in a
routinized stimulus-response circuit of a variously libidinal and
cerebral, but in any case depoliticized, "desire." (Jameson has
attempted to prevent, to repoliticize, this temptation of theory
before, in "Pleasure: A Political Issue" [1983].) Onto this
binary of "modern" versus "postmodern" varieties of theory,
Jameson projects that of "the [critical, self-transcending or
-negating, anti-aesthetic] sublime" versus the "domestic,"
"culinary," neo- or pseudo-aestheticizing of "the beautiful."

12. But for the Hegelian Jameson, no "end of" thematic can evade the
question of its own aftermath, and thereby the question, and the
necessity, of continuations--of "the sublime," of "the modern,"
of "theory" in the heroic mode--in however altered a form. In
thus "preserving" what (some) theory too hastily (and
complacently) "cancels," Jameson, as usual, opposes the
foreclosures of such contemporary ideological inflections as
Fukuyama's "end of history," whose "end of" refrain Jameson
startlingly, and cogently, compares to Turner's closing of the
frontier thesis a century ago. Here the point above--that Jameson
aims not to discount "the sublime," but to align its force rather
with "the modern" against postmodernism--unveils its utopian
potential:

Whether the Sublime, and its successor Theory, have that
capacity hinted at by Kant, to... crack open the
commodification implicit in the Beautiful, is a question we
have not even begun to explore; but it is a question and a
problem which is, I hope, a little different from the
alternative we have thought we were faced with until now:
whether, if you prefer modernism, it is possible to go back
to the modern as such, after its dissolution into full
postmodernity. And the new question is also a question about
theory itself, and whether it can persist and flourish
without simply turning back into an older technical
philosophy whose limits and obsolescence were already
visible in the nineteenth century. (Cultural Turn 87)

Vintage Jameson: defying the closure of the postmodern, thus to
contrive a fresh opening, to pose a fresh set of questions, to
propose a fresh (daunting: impossible?) project, to propose fresh
terms with which to assess the success or failure of any "theory"
aspiring to be worthy of the name.

13. Alongside The Cultural Turn, a virtual co-publication, comes
Perry Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity. Verso originally
commissioned Anderson to write an introduction to The Cultural
Turn, but his effort outgrew that function; the resulting brief
book now stands, predictably enough, if you know Anderson's
previous books, as the most economical, elegant, and incisive
discussion of Jameson extant. The focus is on postmodernism, so
there are vast reaches of Jameson that Anderson doesn't touch,
but within that limitation, Anderson's is and will doubtless
remain the definitive treatment. (In this respect, as a brief
book on a single Jamesonian title, Anderson's text will doubtless
do readers a service comparable to that of William Dowling's 1984
primer on The Political Unconscious.)

14. Anderson's first chapter, "Prodromes," briefly surveys diverse
and often random coinages of "postmodern" going back to the 1890s
and up to the 1960s; this magisterial sketch composes (in just
eleven pages) Ortega y Gasset, Arnold Toynbee, Charles Olson, C.
Wright Mills, Leslie Fiedler, and others, into an ideogram of an
entire cultural milieu. Chapter two, "Crystallization," focuses
the decade between the inaugural issue of boundary 2 and
Habermas's lecture, "Modernity: An Incomplete Project," the
period, Anderson argues, in which the terms of the debate as we
have come to know it "crystallized," largely in the domain of
architecture (Graves, Jencks, Venturi), but also in the work of
such culture-critics as Ihab Hassan and J.-F. Lyotard. In chapter
three, enter Jameson, with an impact registered in the chapter's
title, "Capture"--but if that title seems melodramatic, the
chapter itself quite justifies it. Here, in thirty brisk pages,
Anderson briefly sketches how Jameson's thinking developed to the
culmination achieved in the "Postmodernism" essay, with reference
to "sources" as diverse as Barthes, Baudrillard, and Ernest
Mandel; he then goes on to demonstrate with ungainsayable cogency
why and how Jameson's "intervention" (for once that grandiose
term is appropriate) made such a difference in the "postmodern
debate."

15. For Jameson's "capture" of postmodernism effectively transformed
what had been an incoherent rash of usages into a set of issues
over which debate only then at last became really possible. This
"capture" ensued, Anderson argues, from five "moves": 1) posing
pomo as not a "mere aesthetic break or epistemological shift,"
but nothing less than "the cultural logic of late capitalism"; 2)
an evocation of the new psychic Lebenswelt--the boredom, the
"waning of affect"--concomitant with the achieved hegemony of
consumerism; 3) a conspectus of the cultural surround embracing
specialized discourses on pomo that had theretofore remained
discrete (literature, architecture, philosophy, science), and
extending further to several in which it had not yet played much
of a role (film and media, postcolonial studies); 4) a
consideration of the social effects ("dedifferentiation,"
bourgeoisification of the proletariat and vice versa, "identity"
politics displacing those of class) of the shift from production
to service and information economies; and 5) "Jameson's final
move [and] perhaps the most original of all," a wholesale removal
of the discussion from the plane of mere opinion and facile
for-and-against "debate" on which even such figures as Habermas
had left it: before Jameson, postmodernism was the stuff either
of jeremiads or panegyrics; since, it has become a key to all
mythologies, an ideology of ideologies, but also the theorization
that newly enabled their comprehensive critique as well.

16. Anderson also claims, although without "arguing" the point at any
length, that Jameson's success has much to do with his power as a
writer. This is refreshing. Usually, the difficulty of Jameson's
prose is treated as an unfortunate obstacle readers must
overcome--justified and necessary, but a sort of test of the
reader's fitness to read, as well as an attestation of the work's
importance: if it's worth the trouble, and this is the trouble
it's worth, hey, it's got to be important. Anderson, by contrast,
insists that the prose itself is a major part of Jameson's
accomplishment. Anderson deftly evokes what he lacks the space to
demonstrate: the suppleness of Jameson's syntax, the
evocativeness of his metaphors, the exhilaration and
expansiveness of his encyclopedic allusiveness. Usually, the more
a writer tries to embrace, the more the energies of the writing
attenuate. In Jameson, the reverse seems true: the wider the
focus, the more richly cathected every detail of the scene.

17. So I applaud, and second, Anderson's insistence that in Jameson,
"We are dealing with a great writer" (Origins 72)--but I add that
the assertion introduces a slight dissonance: Anderson has
written the most penetrating and simultaneously the most
sympathetic study of Jameson we have, but he has done so in a
style quite the reverse of Jameson's own. (Thought experiment:
compare and contrast Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism
with Jameson's Marxism and Form.) To that extent it seems
slightly ironic praise to say that Anderson's tight and lucid
prose will make Jameson accessible to many a reader so far
baffled by Jameson's own dauntingly allusive, stratospherically
high-flying, self-consciously "dialectical" scriptible. But it
will. And for some time to come: neither Jameson's work, nor
postmodernity, is going away anytime soon.

Department of English
University of Delaware
helmling@odin.english.udel.edu

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Notes

1. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," originally a 1982
lecture, was first printed in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 111-25. The expansion appeared as
"Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" in New
Left Review 146 (July-August 1984), 59-92, and in substantially
the same form as the first chapter of Postmodernism. But it was
also "reprinted" in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Postmodernism and its
Discontents (London and New York: Verso, 1988), 13-29, but with a
consequential alteration: the section on "schizophrenia" and
Language Poetry was cut and a discussion of the Westin
Bonaventure Hotel, cannibalized from the "big" essay, put in its
place. It is the Kaplan version that The Cultural Turn reprints.

Works Cited

Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory. Vol. 1. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1988.

---. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.