Lol hey what’s up. Took a quick year off of this project but I’m back. Here’s my notes on the Secondary Elaborations, the big 100 page thing at the end of Postmodernism. It’s broken into 12 parts, I’ve broken my commentary into three instalments, the first of which is below. You can read the previous instalments here. Thanks for your patience. Also hello to all the new subscribers who signed up for this thing during my unannounced hiatus. There’s a lot of fun stuff here so let’s get into it:
I. Prolegomena to Future Confrontations Between the Modern and the Postmodern
Jameson opens this one with a bit of conceptual housekeeping, trying to distinguish between taste (or “opinion”) and analysis: “’Taste’, in the loosest media sense of personal preferences, would seem to correspond to what used to be nobly and philosophically designated as ‘aesthetic judgement’… ‘Analysis’ I take to be that peculiar and rigorous conjuncture of formal and historical analysis that constitutes the specific task of literary and cultural study” (298).
Jameson obviously sees himself as someone who is primarily engaging in the latter, but he does use this section to lay out some of his own aesthetic judgements about expressions of postmodernism in various mediums: He likes the architecture and photography, but he doesn’t like the novels, or at least the serious literary postmodern novels, which he says are “excelled by [their] narrative counterparts in film and video” (298).
He argues that none of these aesthetic judgements have had any impact on his analysis, so I guess it’s just a coincidence that his aesthetic judgements are exactly what you’d expect them to be based on the proceeding 300 pages of analysis. Anyway it’s kind of funny to see him “indulge in a personal note” trying to distinguish what he’s doing from the more vulgar world of taste and opinion only to reveal that the postmodern stuff he likes just happens to be perfectly aligned with his central claims about the nature of postmodernism.
II. Notes Toward a Theory of the Modern
Anyway enough prolegomena lets get into the confrontation:
He outlines a bunch of problems with identifying modernism as such. Modernism is an uneven process, and some places “modernize” before others. He tries to identify a central theme to which modernism is generally a response or reaction, starting with “industrial progress, rationalization”, but (following Perry Anderson) identifies “rather their hostility to the market itself” (305), which is clarifying because of postmodernism’s implicit embrace of the market. Recall the nice bit of thinking about markets being anti-narrative; everything is equidistant from everything else, meaning its difficult to generate plot or any kind of narrative tension.
He offers a neat read on Kafka and The Trial, the main takeaway of which is that postmodernism’s ahistoricity is a kind of completion of the project of modernism, which can be retroactively understood as an inconsistent process of modernization: The Trial’s Joseph k is an anonymous modern office guy but all the real fun stuff in the story is the old timey judicial bureaucracy with which he is forced to interface. This uneven distribution is something we don’t encounter anymore, because everything has been flattened out; there are no archaic systems, only archaic “signs” or “logos” or whatever: “Ours is a more homogeneously modernized condition; we no longer are encumbered with the embarrassment of non-simultaneities and non-synchronicities. Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or rationalization (at least from the perspective of the "West"). This is the sense in which we can affirm, either that modernism is characterized by a situation of incomplete modernization, or that postmodernism is more modern than modernism itself.” (310). This is a neat read, but I don’t really think this holds up to scrutiny. It’s maybe reflective of how pervasive “end of history” style thinking was in the 90s, but its also sort of consistent with the other kinds of homogeneities that Jameson has attributed to postmodernism up to this point. But it rings particularly false because the quotidian unevenness of modernity is something we still experience constantly: I’m still “encumbered” by “non-simultaneities” every time a government agency asks me to print and physically mail a form. It’s why people still read Kafka, can describe certain encounters as “kafkaesque”, etc.
III. Cultural Reification and the ‘Relief’ of the Postmodern
Still, one of the nice (?) consequences of postmodernism as a cultural logic is that it really does get things moving again, in all kinds of new and potentially interesting ways. We’re no longer weighed down by stuff like historical context and canon, so you can pretty much just go nuts out there, finding novel combinations of newly loosened cultural artifacts. Jameson characterizes this as a kind of relief:
“If modernism thought of itself as a prodigious revolution in cultural production…postmodernism thinks of itself as a renewal of production as such after a long period of ossification and dwelling among dead monuments.” (314).
The way in which everything from Instagram posts to full feature length movies are now “content,” and anyone who is involved in any sort of cultural production is encouraged to see themselves as a “content creator” is kind of a grim evolution on this basic trend. Presciently, Jameson notes that price of all of this relief is “the preliminary destruction of modernist formal values (now considered "elitist"), along with a range of crucial related categories such as the work or the subject” (317). So no big deal!
IV. Groups and Representation
Another way to parse the distinction in the previous section is that modernism was elitist and postmodernism is populist, such that postmodernism might seem like it “dismantles many of the barriers to cultural consumption that seemed implicit in modernism. What is misleading about this impression is, of course, the illusion of symmetry, since, during its own life span, modernism was not hegemonic and far from being a cultural dominant… when modernism (like the contemporary socialisms) finally did come to power, it had already outlived itself, and what resulted from this posthumous victory was called postmodernism instead.” (318)
Of course, gestures to popularity are always tricky, especially when the population in question includes women and “the international Third World”, who “frequently repudiate the very concept of a postmodernism as the universalizing cover story for what is essentially a much narrower class-cultural operation serving white and male-dominated elites in the advanced countries” (318). Which is true, he says.
But! “But it is no less true that the ‘micropolitics’ that corresponds to the emergence of this whole range of small-group, nonclass political practices is a profoundly postmodern phenomenon, or else the word has no meaning whatsoever.” (318-19)
Well well well. A leftist white guy is about to give his opinions about the political projects of women and people of colour. Everyone gather round!
The emergence of the ‘new social movements’ is an extraordinary historical phenomenon that is mystified by the explanation so many postmodernist ideologues feel themselves able to propose; namely, that the new small groups arise in the void left by the disappearance of social classes and in the rubble of the political movements organized around those. How classes could be expected to disappear, save in the unique special-case scenario of socialism, has never been clear to me…the alternative view, that the small groups are, in fact, the substitute for a disappearing working class, makes the new micropolitics available for the more obscene celebrations of contemporary capitalist pluralism and democracy: the system congratulating itself for producing ever greater quantities of structurally unemployable subjects. (319-20)
Cautiously nodding. He says he’s going to circle back for a more meaningful engagement with some of these “new social movements,” but what he wants to do first is zoom out quite a bit and try to situate them relative to the dominant cultural logic, or capitalism itself. What it boils down to is essentially a question of agency: Are the “new political movements” genuine threats to an existing late capitalist order (i.e., marginalized people exerting their own capacity for resistance), or are they products of the late capitalist system itself (i.e., more consumers looking to be catered to by the market)? This, or some version of this, has become a kind of stock argument that a certain set of leftists used to hash out on Twitter every so often, and it’s neat to watch Jameson think his way through it here before concluding that this amounts to yet another instance of a familiar dilemma between volunteerism and determinism, or, in a slightly different way, mind and body. Which, look. I don’t know. If you squint at it the right way you can sort of see what he’s saying, but this also feels like a classic instance of Jameson jumping way up into the most abstract version of a theoretical position (or in this case, a huge number of different theoretical positions he sums up as “the new political movements”) before even beginning to address any of the theorists he’s talking about on their own terms. It feels a little dismissive!
More broadly, the move here is to sort of downgrade these “new political movements” to “what we can metaphysically call a kind of ‘local politics’” (330), or political projects that are less concerned with political revolution than they are with a kind of incremental adjustment of the current system in certain ways. So where an older form of politics generated a sense of solidity from and understanding that their core aim was to “coordinate local and global struggles” (330), these newer movements (with their narrower “localized” focus) can more easily “drift apart into a disembodied and easily bureaucratized abstract struggle for and around the state, on the one hand, and properly interminable serious of neighbourhood issues on the other.” (330).
Again, leaving aside the obvious lack of engagement with the actual political movements he’s deriding here, if you’ve followed the project this far you’ll probably appreciate how this basic argumentative structure closely mirrors that of the earlier long chapter on New Historicism, where the lack of meaningful historical situation leaves the whole operation feeling kind of hollow. There’s a bunch of activity but none of it can gain purchase because it’s hermetically sealed within its own little set of “local” issues. And just as new historicism and poststructuralist literary criticism more generally leaves us unsatisfied, so too does a political project without meaningfully “global” aspirations. He sums all of this up pretty nicely to end the section:
What is sometimes characterized as a nostalgia for class politics of some older type is generally more likely to be simply a "nostalgia" for politics tout court: given the way in which periods of intense politicization and subsequent periods of depoliticization and withdrawal are modelled on the great economic rhythms of the boom and bust of the business cycle, to describe this feeling as "nostalgia" is about as adequate as to characterize the body's hunger, before dinner, as a “nostalgia for food”. (331)
V: The Anxiety of Utopia
So where does all of this aversion to Real Politics come from? Why have we retreated from the struggles of class politics to the “local” identitarian politics of these “new political movements”?
Some people (not Jameson) argue that the utopian project represented by socialism “will somehow be a place of renunciation, of the simplification of life…a place, finally, of the return to a simple ‘organic’ village forms of ‘rural idiocy’ from which everything interestingly complex about ‘Western civilization’ has been amputated.” (335)
As Jameson argues, though, the real anxiety here are not so much that Utopia will be boring. That’s also not quite the right way to frame the issue. The anxiety is that a commitment to the utopian project forces a society to see itself from an uncomfortably historicized vantage. He gets a bit psychedelic with it:
“What ultimate anxieties such a [utopian] society involves are materialist and biological, the deconcealment of human history as a dizzying sequence of dying generations and as a generalized demographic scandal for the mind…But the foundational texts for that realm are neither Thomas More nor Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor,” but probably something closer to Kafka’s “Josephina the Mouse-Singer” or perhaps the classics of Buddhism.” (340). We’ll return to the demography stuff in the next instalment.
VI: The Ideology of Difference
Let’s maybe recap a little bit: The confrontation between modernism and postmodernism that Jameson is posing here is beginning to look more like a confrontation between Marxism (which is portrayed here as a modernist utopian project) and the set of “new political movements” that we would now just call “identity politics” (which are portrayed here—perhaps somewhat reductively— as postmodern, anti-utopian, and “local” in their aspirations).
So to frame this confrontation, he starts with a long quote with Linda Hutcheon, who was the other major theorist of postmodernity in the late 80s and 90s. This would take a whole other newsletter to unpack in a comprehensive manner but the relevant thing about Hutcheon for our purposes is she views postmodernism as a much more generative space for politics than Jameson, thanks largely to the same heterodox political groups that Jameson is working to dismiss.
Here’s Hutcheon:
Whatever narratives or systems that once allowed us to think we could unproblematically and universally define public agreement have now been questioned by the acknowledgement of differences…In its most extreme formulation, the result is that consensus becomes the illusion of consensus, whether it be defined in terms of minority (educated, sensitive, elitist) or mass (commercial, popular, conventional) culture, for both are manifestations of late capitalist, bourgeois, informational, post industrial society, a society in which social reality is structured by discourses (in the plural)—or so postmodernism endeavours to teach. (340).
For Hutcheon, postmodernism’s utility is in its polyvocality. Where modernism offers a singular grand narrative, the wider range of discourses that constitute postmodernity force us to acknowledge that political and cultural consensus emerges through a process of privileging and erasure.
What Jameson wants to highlight here is that for Hutcheon (and champions of postmodernism more generally), the enemy is consensus, which, as he notes “now designates representative democracy, with its ballots and public opinion polls, and it is now this that, already objectively in crisis, finds itself politically challenged by the new social movements, none of which find the appeal to majority will and consensus particularly legitimate any longer” (341).
So alright. The point made in the Hutcheon quote is basically correct for reasons that feel like fairly well-worn territory by 2024: “consensus” is a heavily mediated and manufactured phenomenon, and it seems a little naive for Jameson to act like groups that previously had very little say in the establishment of that consensus are wrong or misguided in being distrustful of a system like representative democracy.
His broader point here, though, is more about a distinction between the narrower political aims of individual groups looking for recognition within an existing structure, and the much broader political project of class struggle. Here’s Jameson:
“Classes are few; they come into being by slow transformations in the mode of production…Groups, on the other hand, seem to offer the gratifications of psychic identity (from nationalism to neoethnicity)…The political horror of consensus—mistaken for a dread of ‘totalization’—is then simply the justified reluctance of groups that have conquered a certain pride in their own identity to be dictated to by what turn our to be simply other groups, since now everything in our social reality is a badge of group membership and connotes a specific bunch of people…with the signal exception of the media and the market, which, alone among what ought to be institutions, are somehow universal” (347).
So in place of organized class struggle you get a messy patchwork of indentitarian groups, each gaining a kind of therapeutic gratification from the mere recognition of their status as part of a group. The vehicle for that recognition is the market, which is where our cultural obsession with Representation in Media comes from: The market simply catering to these various groups’ desire to see themselves reflected in their media consumption options. And it should go without saying that for Jameson none of this ever gets anywhere near having a meaningful political impact, because cultural production is downstream from politics.
Look: This does fairly accurately describe a particular kind of identity-focused liberalism, I think, but it’s also a little frustrating that he doesn’t really name names here. It’s a bit of a cop out that he’s willing to get into the weeds on like Jonathan Demme and David Lynch but won’t talk about like the Combahee River Collective or whatever. That kind of direct engagement would have been interesting in its own right, but it also would have helped introduce a bit of nuance into his conception of these “new political movements,” which here seem to represent only the most cynical deployment of the concept of identity. Still! Cynical deployments of identity remain a pretty pervasive issue, and it is remarkable the degree to which his framing of (modernist) class struggle vs. (postmodern) liberal identitarianism remains broadly the correct way to see these issues today.
Okay this is already running a bit long so this seems like a reasonable place to end. I’ve already drafted most of the next instalment so hopefully I’ll post it like next week. I’m locking in. Thanks for reading.