Chapter 2: Theories of the Postmodern
Modernism vs. Postmodernism
This chapter opens with a kind of overview of the critical discourse on "postmodernism,” which Jameson breaks down into a nice clean schematic of antimodern/propostmodern and promodern/antipostmodern, all of which can be more generally characterized "by an acceptance of the new term, which is tantamount to an agreement on the fundamental nature of some decisive break between the modern and the postmodern moments, however these last are evaluated" (59).
As described in the previous chapter, Jameson has been kind of resistant to the idea of this "break," opting instead to characterize postmodernism as something like a heightening of the basic logic of capitalism (which has similarly given way to the both-novel-and-not period of "late capitalism"). Why he's been so evasive on the question of whether the postmodern is a break or extension of the modern is really the big question of this chapter, and he spends a lot of time laying out why its so difficult to identify “postmodernism” as a distinctive historical period.
So: he gives this very cramped little discussion of Lyotard, Habermas, Manfredo Tafuti, Hilton Kramer, and Tom Wolfe that I'm mostly going to sidestep here, in part because describing each of their positions would be tedious and I'm only sort of familiar with like two of these guys, but also because really Jameson is just outlining their various positions to say that the general schematic for distinguishing between the modern and the postmodern is to go, "modernism is good, postmodernism is bad" or vice versa. This, in turn, is being set up to reinforce his big claim at the end of the previous chapter, which is that anyone seeking to figure out whether the phenomenon of postmodern is good or bad is making a category mistake.
He argues: "most of the political positions which we have found to inform what is most often conducted as an aesthetic debate are in reality moralizing ones that seek to develop final judgements on the phenomenon of postmodernism, whether the latter is stigmatized as corrupt or, on the other hand, salute as a culturally and aesthetically healthy and positive form of innovation" (62). Again, the thing about postmodernism for Jameson is that it is a "cultural logic" and not a style. So to exert too much time going like, "it's good!" or "it's bad!" only serves to distract us from our old friend The Dialectic, which is neither good nor bad but simply is.
Populism
So if any attempt to distinguish the modern from the postmodern boils down to a kind of “moralizing structure” where one needs to be affirmed over the other, then how are we supposed to distinguish them? He's already sort of said that they are, somehow, distinguishable. So what gives.
To try and work this out, Jameson turns to architectural theorist Charles Jencks, who distinguishes postmodern architecture from its high modernist counterpart by its relation to populism. As Jameson describes, in an architectural context, "where the now more classical high-modernist space of a Corbusier or a Wright sought to differentiate itself radically from the fallen city fabric in which it appeared...postmodernist buildings, on the contrary, celebrate their insertion into the heterogeneous fabric of the commercial strip and the motel and fast-food landscape of the superhighway American city" (63).
This embrace of populism in postmodern architecture, Jameson says, can serve as a jumping off point for distinguishing postmodernism from modernism in more general terms. As he notes, Postmodernism in all its forms can be characterized by a generalized "effacement of the older distinction between high and so-called mass culture, a distinction on which modernism depended for its specificity" (63). So we're back on solid ground a little bit. Here's a characteristic of the postmodern. And a political one at that. Again, though, there's this little two-step that Jameson is doing, where he's going to extrapolate outward from "style" into this kind of generalization, which as it turns out can be either "moralizing," or, depending on how you look at it, a little keyhole into this underlying "cultural logic."
This, it turns out, is symptomatic of the larger, much weirder problem that he's identifying here. He says, "it seems at least possible that what wears the mask and makes the gestures of 'populism' in the various postmodernist apologias and manifestos is in reality a mere reflex and symptom of a (to be sure momentous) cultural mutation, in which what used to be stigmatized as mass or commercial culture is now received into the precincts of a new and enlarged cultural realm" (64). In this case, "populism," which at one point could have been "moralized" about in accordance with one's ideological leanings, is now robbed of its political dimension and translated into something else: A hollowed out signifier, an aesthetic that gestures toward "that Popular Front class coalition of workers, peasants, and petit bourgeouis generally called 'the people'" (64), but doesn't actually connect with it, because it no longer meaningfully exists as such.
So what you’re left with is a vaguely political-sounding set of ideas that are actually pretty thoroughly depoliticized. This is the problem hinted at in the previous chapter: if postmodernism means that everything is flattened out into "cultural signifiers," then that really means everything, including evocations of any kind of ideological formation that would have held some kind of political weight before the "emergence" of the cultural logic represented by postmodernism. It's just contextless cultural signifiers all the way down.
historicity
So it's a tricky problem. But it's tricky in this really precise and sort of perversely satisfying way: The postmodern, in Jameson's conception, forecloses on any attempt to position itself historically, as any invocation of history is always already (always already!) flattened out into a decontextualized cultural signifier. But this flattening out itself is "new," thus seeming suggesting that there is some kind of historicization in play here, somewhere. Or at least that is what you'd expect! But as soon as you identify it as such, you've effectively played right into the trap. It's a signifier again. The impulse to historicize is eating its own tail.
He describes this whole situation really starkly: "The postmodern thus invites us to indulge a somber mockery of historicity in general, wherein the effort at self-consciousness with which our own situation somehow completes the act of historical understanding, repeats itself drearily as in the worst kinds of dreams, and juxtaposes, to its own pertinent philosophical repudiation of the very concept of self-consiousness, a grotesque carnival of the latter's various replays" (64-65). The somber mockery of historicity! Come on.
I guess the thing to note is that this might feel like we're getting into some vaguely Francis Fukuyama-style "end of history" type problem. If any attempt to point to historical precedent dissolves into "cultural signifiers," then history would seem to be "over," late capitalism having sort of "completed" or I guess prematurely foreshortened the arc of historical progression or whatever.
But that's not quite the point that Jameson is making here: Even if we can't "historicize" in the typical sense, we aren't necessarily "trapped" in the postmodern. What we've lost isn't "history" so much as the critical distance that allows us to engage with history as anything other than a bunch of cultural signifiers. So it’s really a problem of how to talk about history, when the basic move of identifying historical moments or ideological tendencies seems to be foreclosed upon in advance by the historical moment that you’re trying to identify. And Jameson won’t yet say exactly how he's going to get himself out of this particular jam.
But he's got some ideas: "Only the following simple and hygienic recommendation can be proposed: namely, that the dualism be used in some sense against itself...So it is that, rigorously conducted, an inquiry into this or that feature of the postmodern will end up telling us little of value about the postmodern itself, but against its own will and quite unintentionally a great deal about the modern proper, and perhaps the converse will also turn out to be true"(66). Hm. Okay. Tune in next week and we'll see if it does.
#2: Historicize My Ass (I Won't Historicize)
This is great, please don't stop writing! Thanks for breaking it all down, there's definitely a couple of things that went over my head.
This is great, don't stop, I beg you!