Last year I taught Donald Barthelme’s story "The Phantom of the Opera's Friend" as an example of postmodernism. I pointed out how it interpolates both the Gaston Leroux character as well as Leroux himself into the same story, and we talked a bit about intertextuality, the funny tension between the Phantom’s theatricality and the quiet and unglamorous lives of the unnamed friend and Leroux himself. "That's postmodernism," I told my students, and they pretended to type that into their computers.
When you describe something as "postmodern"—like a book or a building or whatever— you’re generally identifying something like this. American Psycho is "postmodern." A Frank Gehry building is “postmodern.” Postmodernism usually names a kind of aesthetic sensibility that has to do with pastiche, intertextuality, or the juxtaposition of “high culture” and “pop culture” elements.
But there's this secondary usage that I see on twitter every so often, mostly coming from those right-wing "retvrn to tradition" type guys. For those guys, from what I can gather, identifying something as "postmodernism" signals that it is guilty of something like "anti-Enlightenment" or "anti-Western" thinking, but it also seems to be related to communism somehow. I’m pretty sure those guys inherited this understanding of the postmodern from Jordan Peterson before he passed away or whatever happened to him. He used to talk about "Postmodern neo-Marxists," which has become kind of a punchline now.
When you see someone throwing around “postmodern” like that on the computer, the right move is usually to tell them to fuck off or ignore them. But I do sometimes catch myself wondering what exactly is being lost by allowing these weirdo right-wing guys to define “postmodernism” as a philosophical or theoretical tendency in the public discourse. Because it remains the case that certain “postmodern” philosophical tendencies are still very much a part of “theory” in an academic context, even if very few people identify as “postmodernists," and it seems like a huge unforced error to glibly write off postmodernism as a movement that is definitively over and observable only in its aesthetic remnants.
Because even the more conventional "stylistic" conception of postmodernism is sort of tricky to parse when you actually think about it too much, and it’s hard to imagine deriving a robust sense of what "postmodernism" ultimately is based on the stylistic elements of the works most commonly identified as postmodern. There's obviously a lot of differences between Barthelme and Bret Easton Ellis, but they're lumped together as "postmodern" for reasons that I think have more to do with syllabi modules than some kind of rigorous theorization of the postmodern as such.
So: What might such a rigorous theorization of the Postmodern even look like?
Well folks, hello and welcome to the Book Man Gets Paid newsletter, where over the two and a half months or so I'm going to do a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which is probably the best or at least most systematic effort to describe “the postmodern,” not as a style or ideological position, but rather as an underlying “logic” that is expressed through cultural production. For Jameson, to talk about the postmodern is less about either chastising or celebrating the set of works named “postmodern,” but rather to examine those works as a kind of keyhole into this underlying cultural logic.
It’s a good book. But it’s also long and dense. And while Jameson can be a very clear thinker, he also assumes a familiarity with a wide breadth of material, and he moves through it at a pace that can be kind of uninviting. But the conception of “The Postmodern” that he develops over the course of the book is compelling, and actually provides a lot of fun and useable ideas and arguments for the present cultural and discursive landscape.
If you’re a grad student, or even just someone who likes to act like a grad student on the computer, wrestling “the postmodern” out of the hands of guys like Jordan Peterson and turning it into something you can actually use is probably kind of worthwhile. But for whatever reason, there are about 100000 hours of guys on youtube decrying the evils of postmodern neo-marxism and very few good and in-depth guides to Jameson’s extensive work on the subject.
So that’s basically what this is: I am going to read Postmodernism, and I’m going to tell you about it one chapter at a time, in a way that is hopefully sort of fun and accessible but still basically accurate. And you can subscribe to this thing and either read along or just sit back and wait for me to fuck something up so you can send me a DM about it like the snakes that you are. It’s going to be fun, I think. And hey, at the end of the day maybe that’s what postmodernism is all about just kidding.