Steven Helmling

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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).

 

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.”

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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].”

 

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.”

 

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.

 

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.)

 

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.”

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

Note

 

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.