Hey what's up. This is part 11 of my ongoing series summarizing Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. To see previous entries in this series, check the archive. This part in particular is a summary of sections vii-ix of the Secondary Elaborations, the concluding essay of Postmodernism. I’ll do some recap throughout but you can read my summaries of i-vi here.
VII: Demographies of the Postmodern
Last time, Jameson set up a confrontation between Marxists and the “new political movements”— a somewhat nebulous discursive formation that we might understand to mean “cynically identity-focused liberalism.” Taken as a whole, the rise of these new identity-focused political movements has “forced” people to recognize a much more diverse range of political subjects.
This is a new form of social and political awareness that he notes may be limited to First World elites, which is “all the more reason to factor it into the description of the postmodern, where it emerges—somewhat more crudely (or materialistically) as I began to put it—in the form of sheer demography itself. There are more people now, and that ‘fact’ has implications that transcend mere spatial discomfort and the prospect of the intermittent shortage of luxury goods.” (357-58)
By demography, he means thinking about the human population in aggregate. Historically, discussions of population as such have been dominated by Malthusians and the right.
Briefly, for context: Thomas Malthus was the guy in the early 19th century who was like, “more food means more people, and more people means a lower standard of living for everybody,” and is essentially the progenitor of a lot of the concern over overpopulation, especially as an explanation for poverty. “Poor people are poor because there are too many of them” etc. etc.
As you might expect, Marx and Engles both wrote a lot about Malthus and his ideas about population. Here’s a nice bit from Engles, from a letter to Oskar Lange:
Too little is produced, that is the cause of the whole thing. But why is too little produced? Not because the limits of production…are exhausted. No, but because the limits of production are determined not by the number of hungry bellies but by the number of purses able to buy and to pay. Bourgeois society does not and cannot wish to produce any more. The moneyless bellies, the labour which cannot be utilized for profit and therefore cannot buy, is left to the death-rate. (Marx and Engels on Malthus 82)
Just for fun here’s a quote from vol. 1 of Capital, which is less substantive but just some classic Marx shit talk: “If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose ‘Essay on Population’ appeared in 1798, I remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, etc., and does not contain a single sentence thought out by himself.” Get his ass dude.
Anyway these guys did not like Malthus. And the conventional Marxist move here is to say well no, poor people are poor as a result of capitalism, and over time Marxists have tended to essentially counterpose class relations for demography and population. Wally Seccombe wrote a really good essay about this for NLR in the 1980s, arguing that the Left has ceded too much ground on population and demography to the right, and maybe its time to develop a meaningful materialist perspective on demography.
So Jameson is going to take that seriously. He asks: what does it look like look like to take a materialist perspective on demography, especially in the context of the postmodern era, where “according to some reports…the quantities of human beings now alive today on earth…is rapidly approaching the total number of hominids who have already lived and died no the planet since the beginning of the species” (360). Incidentally, this little factoid is not true, and by some estimates the earth would need to have about 10 times its current population for this claim to be anywhere near plausible. So Jameson’s materialist demography is off to a pretty rough start.
But consider the implications if it was true. Here’s Jameson:
If this is so, then the relationship of the postmodern to historical consciousness now takes on a very different appearance, and there is some justification, and a plausible argument to be made, for consigning the past to oblivion as we seem to be doing; now that we, the living, have the preponderance, the authority of the dead—hitherto based on sheer numbers—diminishes at a dizzying rate. (360)
So he’s maybe having a bit of fun here, and it honestly doesn’t matter too much that this is just kind of riffing based on a false demographic factoid, because as we’ve talked about repeatedly throughout this newsletter, a fundamental characteristic of Postmodernism is that us postmodern subjects have no meaningful concept of history, so we’re effectively behaving as though the past really doesn’t matter that much.
More generatively, this leads him into some nice stuff on existentialism and Sartre, ”the philosopher of small-group politics”(362), who gives us a nice way of thinking about the lived experience of the postmodern, ahistorical subject, for whom planet-scale concepts like population and the global proletariat are “somehow real but untrue, thinkable but unrepresentable, and thus doubtful and unverifiable for an existence philosophy that above all wants to avoid being cheated or shortchanged in its life experience” (363).
How do you describe the experiential texture of being tied up in a global class struggle? It’s a tough problem! I’ll note parenthetically that the degree to which it is “thinkable but unrepresentable” is something Jameson will grapple with in several future books, and it produces some really cool writing. This is a big part of Antinomies of Realism, as well as his Detections of Totality (his little book on Raymond Chandler) and Allegory and Ideology. In all of these books, he seems more willing to grant that their representability is not an irresolvable problem but actually more of a skill issue. Here’s a quote to that effect from Allegory and Ideology:
“These new posthuman environments are unknowable only in the sense that they are so far unrepresentable; and political questions about their expansion or modification are inseparable from those—perhaps more artistic—omens of their representability” (36 emphasis mine)
This is another way of describing why art still matters, even though it is somewhere downstream from the actual machinations of politics. It can render these “posthuman environments” legible.
VIII: Spatial Historiographies
Anyway this whole shaky swerve into demography is mostly a means of bringing things back around to spatiality, which “is here registered…as the consequence of some prior specialization—a kind of intensified classification or compartmentalization which I am tempted to describe as a division of labor of the mind and its modes of scanning and mapping the realm.” (370).
In the year or so since I last revisited this book, Jameson’s position on spatiality has been the thing I’ve puzzled over the most. On the one hand, I think I get why he’s so invested in space. His definition of postmodernism is really focused the collapse of time as a meaningful category. As we’ve discussed throughout this newsletter, postmodernism collapses history into a set of disjointed historic signifiers, signs, icons, etc. And so the concept of “space” seems like a natural alternative. But it’s never been totally clear to me how one is meant to “think spatially” or whatever. The stuff about Frank Gehry and “the architectural thought” posed by his house was interesting but also maybe a bit too literal. Like a house is an actual space that you can walk around in, and so in some sense it does “spatialize” whatever ideas motivate its construction. But Jameson seems to want to use “spatiality” to mean something broader. For instance, postmodernism introduces a new mode of pseudo-historical thinking that he calls “spatial historiography”. Here’s Jameson:
“The occasional flash of historical understanding that may strike the ‘current situation’ will..happen by the well-nigh postmodern (and spatial) mode of the recombination of separate columns in the newspaper: and it is this spatial operation that we continue to call (using an older temporal language) historical thinking or analysis.” (374)
Then he hits us with an example of the ‘current situation’ of 1989 that feels grimly (though I guess also illustratively) contemporary:
The [Exxon Valdez] Alaska oil spill thus sits cheek by jowl with the latest Israeli bombing or search-and-destroy mission in southern Lebanon, or follows closely on its heels in the segmentation of television news. The two events activate altogether different and unrelated mental zones of reference and associative fields…No introspective examination of our personal history, but no inspection of the various objective histories either (filed under Exxon, Alaska, Israel, Lebanon), would in itself be enough to disclose the dialectical interrelatedness of all these things, whose legendary Ur-episode can be found in the Suez war, which determined the building of larger and larger oil tankers to circumnavigate the Cape of Good Hope, on the one hand, with its sequel, on the other, in 1967, a sequel that fixed the political geography of the Middle East in violence and misery for more than a generation. (374)
The specific instances here might not be as ready to mind to contemporary readers, but I do think the particular style of news engagement he’s describing here is a familiar one. You read about two news events that are happening simultaneously, and they’re reported on as discrete phenomena. You can then triangulate an additional event or set of events that connects the relationship between the two. This connection won’t be enough to fully exhaust either event (or “disclose” their “dialectical interrelatedness”) but it will be enough to feel like you have some kind of context for what you’re reading.
Jameson wants to describe this as a kind of spatial puzzle-solving:
What I want to argue is that the tracing of such common ‘origins’—henceforth evidently indispensable for what we normally think of as concrete historical understanding—is no longer exactly a temporal or a genealogical operation in the sense of older logics of historicity or causality. The ‘solution’ to a juxtaposition—Alaska, Lebanon—this is not yet even a puzzle until it is solved—Nasser and Suez!—no longer opens up a historiographic deep space or perspectival temporality…[It] lights up like a nodal circuit in a slot machine (and thus foreshadows a computer-game historiography of the future even more alarming).(374)
We’re all Charlie Kelly in the mailroom, stringing together discrete events and calling it “history”. Jameson doesn’t explicitly say this here, but it seems like this becomes a spatial problem largely as a function of scale: The sheer volume of things we’re now aware of as they’re occurring makes the operation of just keeping track of those events feel more spatial than temporally linear, even though the temporal sequencing plays a role in how events tend to unfold (i.e., this happens so then that happens). The task of mapping things out spatially takes the place of slotting things into a meaningfully linear historical trajectory.
Another important thing to note here is that this mapping activity is also fundamentally irreducible. We don’t have a “master narrative” that can be used as a heuristic to carve off “lesser” discourses from more important ones. Climate change, the opioid crisis, the housing market, covid, etc., etc., etc. All important issues that may interact and overlap in generative ways, but none of which are fully reducible to or explained by the others:
None of these voices can be said to contradict the others; not ‘discourses’ but only propositions do that, and the identity of identity and nonidentity does not seem very satisfactory for this one, for which ‘coexistence’ is too reassuring a term as well, implying some ultimate change of intergalactic collision in which matter and antimatter might finally meet and shake hands…As an ideology that is also a reality, the ‘postmodern’ cannot be disproved insofar as its fundamental feature is the radical separation of all the levels and voices whose recombination in their totality could alone disprove it. (376)
IX: Decadence, Fundamentalism, and Hightech
So as we’ve been describing, postmodernism is an age of conflicting irresolvable discourses and free floating historical signifiers stripped of their historical contexts, in which artistic and cultural production is always a kind of pastiche. It’s also culturally kind of listless: without a meaningful concept of history, us postmodern subjects are just kind of goofing around, tinkering with various “local” political projects but mostly hanging out. In this sense, postmodernism might seem to have a lot in common with 19th century decadence, with its cynicism, self-indulgence, and ennui.
But not so fast!
One would have thought that the world of headphones and Andy Warhol…would have all the qualifications to pass for ripely decadent in the eyes of of any sensible Martian observer; but it is corny to say so, and one of the other tactical achievements of the postmodern discursive system lies in the relegation of the laudator temporis acti to the storeroom of no longer very plausible or believable literary characters. To be sure, where the former norm has become just another ‘life-style,’ the category of the eccentric loses its reason for being (377)
A different way to parse this might be that the moderns had “eccentrics” or laudatores temporis acti (literally “those who praise the past”), but postmodernism just has different types of guys. So what changed? Jameson is going to unpack this one with a neat reading of Marx on capitalism.
So typically Marxists view capitalism as a stage of socio-historical development, and a lot of the current project here has taken that for granted. Postmodernism has been positioned as “the cultural logic of late capitalism”, and we’ve spent a lot of time here both implicitly and explicitly talking about what postmodernism can tell us about capitalism as a stage: what kind of society it generates, how people experience art and relate to each other, etc etc etc. But Jameson notes that this isn’t the only way that we can think about capitalism:
A careful reading of the Manifesto, however, suggests a somewhat different way of thinking about Marx’s view of capitalism as a stage, for it can be grasped as a kind of enormous black box or ‘vanishing mediator,’ one extraordinarily complex and temporally distended and developed laboratory, through which precapitalist peoples must pass in order to be reprogrammed and retrained, transformed and developed, on their way to socialism. (380)
From this perspective, capitalism is a means to an end, or a kind of transitory period through which a society needs to pass in order to develop the means to create socialism. As a result, this whole extensive project of characterizing the nature of postmodernism can be recontextualized as a sort of prefiguration of the coming socialist utopia. As Jameson describes, “it obligates us to reconsider the features attributed to postmodernism in a functional way, as new and intensified forms of a structural tendency Marx famously described in terms of separation and disjunction, reduction, disaggregation, divestment, and the like” (380). Kind of a neat trick.
Of course, this recontextualization feels very modernist: it reasserts a kind of grand narrative, and it situates the capitalist subject within a larger historical trajectory. It also reaffirms something about capitalism itself as a substantial point of departure from the period that came before it.
And here it’s useful to recall our earlier discussion of Kafka and this whole thing about postmodernism being a more “complete” stage of modernism, where “everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development” (310). Jameson now returns to this idea as a way of retroactively understanding “decadence”:
Decadence is clearly something that both resists modernity and comes after it, as a future destiny in which all the promises of the modern go slack and unravel…‘Decadence’ is thus in some way the very premonition of the postmodern itself, but under conditions that make it impossible to predict that aftermath with any sociological or cultural accuracy, thereby diverting the vague sense of a future into more fantastic forms, all borrowed from the misfits and eccentrics, the perverts and the Others, or aliens, of the present (modern) system.” (382)
This in turn gives us another really interesting way to think about the differences between the moderns and postmoderns:
Late capitalism is in that sense a misnomer, insofar as ‘late’ now yields none of the fin-de-siecle or late-Roman overtones we associate with it, nor are its subjects fantasized as being faint and listless with too much experience and history, too much joissance and too many rare and occult intellectual and scientific operations. We have all those things, indeed, but we jog afterward to refresh our constitution, while by the same token computers relieve us of the terrible obligation to distend the memory like a swollen bladder retaining all these encyclopedia references. (383)
We jog afterward to refresh our constitution! How can you not love this guy.
okay let’s leave it here for this week. Next week we’ll do our final instalment. i can’t believe it. we’re almost there. Thanks for reading!