Introduction
From the outset, Jameson’s Postmodernism is positioned as an examination of "a series of semiautonomous and relatively independent traits or features"(x) of Postmodernism, all tethered to this idea of "historical deafness"(xi) but not wholly reducible to it. Still, being Jameson, what this really means is he's going to take a stab at defining the whole thing, and all of these “semiautonomous” features are actually tightly interlocking components of some broader argumentative framework that he’s going to slowly reveal over the course of the book.
The central tension that he’s pushing back against is the idea that "postmodernism" can be hailed as "a wholly new social order" (xii), because any actually new order could only emerge through good old fashion revolutionary struggle. What postmodernism is, then, is "the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself" (xii).
On the other hand, though, there does seem to be something kind of new about it, at least sort of: The lack of historical understanding (or “deafness”) serves to generate "a pathology deeply autoreferential, as though our utter forgetfulness of the past exhausted itself in the vacant but mesmerized contemplation of a schizophrenic present that is incomparable virtually by definition" (xii). So there's a nice little dialectic here between continuity and rupture. And Jameson is having fun with it. He sets up this tension and goes, "in what follows— but for pragmatic reasons I will disclose at the proper time— I have pretended to believe that the postmodern is as unusual as it thinks it is, and that it constitutes a cultural and experiential break worth exploring in greater detail" (xiii). Okay.
Along these same lines, he wants to clarify what exactly he means by "late capitalism," which he traces back to Adorno and Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School guys. This is another one of those terminological problems you still see pop off on twitter every so often, so it's sort of fun to see Jameson weigh in.
What it seems to boil down to for him is a kind of transformation of capitalism beyond Marx's claims about the rise of a monolithic "world market.” Jameson points to "the new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt), new forms of media interrelationship,... computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced Third World areas" etc. etc. etc.
The upshot is that actually periodizing the emergence of "late" capitalism is complicated by a whole bunch of more or less independently operating developments within capitalism that in turn congeal into something much less unified than the "world market" that Marx envisioned: "What 'late' generally coveys is...the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive" (xxi). So like the term "postmodernism," "late capitalism" has this built-in tension between rupture and continuity. It’s this basic tension—or how this tension plays out within a range of “postmodern” cultural artifacts— that animates much of the book.
Chapter 1: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
The first chapter operates in this really uncomfortable zone of attempting to periodize something while simultaneously unpacking why "the very conception of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed" (3). So the question of defining the postmodern “period” is always couched in this broader problem of how postmodernism itself sort of resists the notion of historical periodization in general.
For this reason, he's careful to position postmodernism not as a "style" but rather a "cultural dominant," which allows for "the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features" (4). Because while the bulk of this book is spent doing a fairly typical literary criticism style analysis of a handful of postmodern works, what we’ll find is that the works themselves are useful to Jameson only insofar as they provide a kind of glimpse into the operations of this “cultural dominant,” or the underlying logic of late capitalism. As a result, his analysis of any particular thing is always going to be secondary (or “subordinate”) to that broader argument about this cultural logic.
It’s worth noting that he's acutely aware that that is going to piss people off. As he describes, "what happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic...the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constituting an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself" (5-6).
I get it, man. I hate when my vision is too powerful as well.
Depthlessness
The first thing Jameson wants to do is talk about modernism vs postmodernism through van Gogh's A Pair of Boots and Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes. The van Gogh, which he takes as an archetypal example of "high modernism," can be read as either a kind of utopian aestheticization of peasant life, or, following Heidegger, an effort to render visible a world of toil and material hardship through aestheticization.
What Jameson wants to highlight is that either interpretation of van Gogh's shoes is going to be hermeneutical, "in the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or a symptom of some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth" (8). The meaning of the work is tethered to the world: the peasant shoes carry with them this whole history of peasant labour and pre-industrial labour relations.
The Warhol, by contrast, seems to actively resist any kind of historical contextualization: We're instead presented with "a random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips" (8), and the hermeneutic gesture becomes impossible to complete. This lack of historical context leads Jameson to what is really the central feature of postmodernism: Depthlessness; Images without historical context.
This is the same depthlessness that has impacted academia, which, he notes, is now "for the most part a conception of practices, discourses, and textual play, [wherein] depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces" (12). This might explain, for instance, why academia generates so much hyper-specific disciplinary jargon that usually only serves to make interacting with non-specialists more complicated and annoying. It’s just more surface.
Importantly as well, this depthlessness is primarily a discursive or cultural phenomenon, and it doesn't really extend to the underlying economic system. As he describes, "if the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to)" (17). This also seems basically correct, and while the question of whether these "faceless masters" either no longer need or are unable to impose their speech is basically moot, it's interesting to think about.
Pastiche
So along with all this depthlessness comes a mode of cultural production that operates through reorganizing these surface level images, or what Jameson calls "Pastiche." As he argues, "Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style...But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists" (17). Think like, Wes Anderson vs. Paul Verhoeven.
But this doesn't exhaust the representational potential opened up by the "cultural logic" of postmodernism: As Jameson points out, this depthless intertextuality can also provide a "new and original way of thinking and perceiving" (31), like Nam June Paik's TV Garden, an installation of scattered television screens and vegetation, which calls upon its viewer "to do the impossible, namely, to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference...to rise somehow to a level at which the vivid perception of radical difference is in and of itself a new mode of grasping what used to be called relationship: something for which the word collage is still only a very feeble name" (31).
This seems like a kind of qualitative judgment on Jameson's part, and I guess it's not entirely clear to me how Paik escapes the vaguely condemnatory designation of pastiche (given that his work is literally just a bunch of surfaces), but again, Jameson is less invested in really unpacking any specific artwork than he is in kind of jamming it into his big overarching structure. Which is frustrating but also kind of fun.
Euphoria
Anyway: the suggestion of the “new and original way of thinking” in Paik’s work hints at something like the new function for postmodern artistic production, which arises in response to the unique challenges posed by postmodernism itself.
If the clash of the modern liberal individual against the depersonalized machinations of industrial society generated what Auden termed the "Age of Anxiety," the collapse of that individual into a heap of decontextualized signifiers has given way to a vaguely psychedelic exhilaration that Jameson terms "euphoria."
As he describes it, it's a sensation that sits halfway between the sublime and Sontag's notion of camp. This whole thing sort of reminds me of when my wife tries to show me something on her computer and she's got like 75 tabs on 3 different browser windows. A totally unassimilable wave of information, evoking what Jameson calls the "postmodern or technological sublime" (37).
As he notes, though, this euphoria isn't just the product of technology as such, but rather emerges through technology as a distorted figuration of globalized capitalism. As he describes, "The technology of contemporary society is… mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp" (37-38).
This is more obvious now than it was in the 80s, and it speaks to the prescience of Jameson's analysis there: The thing that's sublime about being on the computer isn't the technology itself. Being awed by technology is for nerds. What is sublime is the moment in which the incomprehensibly vast networks of technology and information that undergird the global economic system are rendered dimly perceptible to us by the technologies themselves. You catch a brief glimpse of yourself situated within this huge and complex network of stuff that you always knew was out there but can never fully apprehend.
Not a Style
Jameson continually returns to the idea that what he's describing is not a "style" but rather the "cultural dominant of late capitalism" (46). In part, this insistence helps clarify why the book as a whole is less interested in analysis of particular postmodern works than it is in a kind of systematic description of our present historical moment.
But it also provides a nice little rejoinder to the pejorative usage of "postmodernism" that we still see coming from the Right. In Jameson's formulation, if postmodernism is not an individual stylistic choice but rather the non-negotiable underlying logic of late capitalism, there isn't really a point in trying to condemn its practitioners: As Jameson argues, "if postmodernism is a historical phenomenon, then the attempt to conceptualize it in terms of moral or moralizing judgments must finally be identified as a category mistake" (46). Rather than see it in moralizing terms, then, what Jameson advocates is that we attempt to "think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together" (47). It’s the dialectic folks.
But there's another much darker implication of the idea that Postmodernism is not a style but rather a cultural logic. If postmodern cultural production is no longer the result of individuated authorial voice but rather a kind of byproduct of the logic of late capitalism, then what postmodernism signals is the final stage of capitalism's colonization of culture as a whole, as well as the dissolution of any kind of critical distance through which the machinations of capitalism can be meaningfully interrogated and critiqued. This also seems basically true, and we've seen over the last year how easily stuff like "resistance" can be readily integrated right back into capitalism as an aesthetic.
So what is to be done. Hard to say, exactly. Jameson describes the need for "a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system" (54). This is what he was hinting at above, in this notion of the “technological sublime.” He says, ultimately, that "the political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as spatial scale" (54). Sounds good man. Tune in next week and we’ll figure out what that means.
#1: What Are Those
Hell yes this is awesome.