Hey what's up. This is part 9 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.
Hey gang. Just slinking back into your inbox with another instalment of my little Jameson newsletter. This is actually the final chapter of Postmodernism, though there are still like 100 pages worth of “secondary elaborations” that I’ll get to eventually as well, though I’m not going to make any promises about when. But before we get rolling here I did just want to say hello and thank you to everyone who has subscribed to this thing. I finished my PhD this summer and since my job is only just barely “alt-ac” it’s cool to have an outlet for casually bullshitting about literary criticism, and I probably would not be doing this at all if people did not seem interested. So thanks for subscribing, thanks for reaching out, thanks for telling your friends. It really does mean a lot. Okay let’s get into it.
Chapter 9: Nostalgia for the Present
The 1950s vs “The fifties”
So Jameson starts this one with a little discussion of Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, a novel published in 1959 that opens on a small American town that, in retrospect, neatly captures certain cultural stereotypes about “the fifties” in America. Eisenhower on tv, game show, poodle skirt, sputnik, milk man, etc etc. Jameson calls it “a world of neighbours and PTAs” (279). He notes that these are all stereotypes, but they are also authentic in some sense: There really were poodle skirts and milk men at some point. But these things are, in the terminology of this project, now “icons” of a particular aesthetic that we think of as “the fifties” and in turn associate with a specific historical period.
More interestingly, these icons impose a way of thinking about the fifties that we can read as the kind of spacial allegory that Jameson has been toying with throughout the book. The fifties’ preoccupation with the small town, the neighborhood, or the kind of closed-off (often racially homogenous) community, “also functioned as an allegorical expression for the situation of Eisenhower America in the outside world as a whole— contented with itself, secure in the sense of its radical difference from other populations and cultures, insulated from the vicissitudes and from the flaws in human nature so palpably acted out in their violent and alien histories” (281).
So there is a kind of distinction to be drawn here between “the 1950s” as a particular historical period in which people actually lived and thought about stuff, and “the fifties” as a kind of floating set of aesthetic symbols of the sort that we’ve been dealing with throughout this book. But the question is, then, did people in the 1950s experience that period as an aesthetic as well? Because as Jameson notes, the set of aesthetic symbols that constitute our conception of “the fifties” are largely generated by people from the historical period itself. Here’s Jameson:
to shift from the realities of the 1950s to the representation of that rather different thing, the ‘fifties,’…obligates us in addition to underscore the cultural sources of all the attributes with which we have endowed the period, many of which seem very precisely to derive from its own television programs; in other words, its own representation of itself. (281)
Of course, this isn’t to suggest that the cultural output of the 1950s can be interpreted as the sum total of what the 1950s were like. In fact, for Jameson it’s at least plausible that “the deeper realities of the period…have little to do with either our cultural stereotypes of years thus labeled and defined in terms of generational decades.” And by “deeper realities” he means something like the global power dynamics and economic conditions that are somewhere upstream from cultural production.
This plausibility gives way to an even larger claim about the relationship between between actual historical periods and their representations. And the stakes are quite high indeed. Here’s Jameson again:
There is however an even more radical possibility; namely, that period concepts finally correspond to no realities whatsoever, and that whether they are formulated in terms of generational logic, or by the names of reigning monarchs, or according to some other category of typological and classificatory system, the collective reality of the multitudinous lives encompassed by such terms is nonthinkable…and can never be described, characterized, labeled, or conceptualized. This is, I suppose, what once could call the Nietzschean position, for which there are no such things as ‘periods,’ nor have there ever been. In that case, of course, there is no such thing as ‘history’ either, which was probably the basic philosophical point such arguments sought to make in the first place.
Let’s see how ol’ Freddie Jameson wriggles his way out of this jam.
Science fiction and historicity
Okay so let’s go back to Time Out of Joint for a second. The twist of the book, and crucially the thing that makes it sci-fi, is that the little 1950s town is revealed to be not an actual 1950s town at all, but rather a fake town constructed by people in 1997 (which for Dick would have been several decades into the future), as part of a ruse to trick some guy into doing something, or whatever. The plot is some Ricky Morty nonsense and does not matter for our purposes. What Jameson is interested in is the way in which Dick uses the future dystopia (a hallmark of sci-fi) as a means of rendering “the present” as a construct that has a kind of historical situatedness.
The future itself—Dick’s 1997— is not…centrally significant as a representation or an anticipation; it is the narrative means to a very different end, namely the brutal transformation of a realistic representation of the present, of Eisenhower America and the 1950s small town, into a memory and a reconstruction. (285)
So for Dick, the point is not so much to represent or anticipate the future as such, but rather to use it as a means of rearticulating the present in a way that functions “historically”: The 1950s (this actual historical period in which the novel was written) becomes “the fifties.” The little Potemkin village of the novel (which the reader first incorrectly identifies as “the present”) is revealed to be a thing constructed from the vantage of an imagined future.
It’s in this sense, for Jameson, that sci-fi offers something like a counterpoint to the sort of historicizing operation that used to be a function of the historical novel.
To put it a little crudely, the “historical novel,” as theorized by Lukacs and typified by someone like Sir Walter Scott or Tolstoy, made the present thinkable as a part of “history” by situating it in relation to a (largely imagined) past. The historical novel provides a kind of scaffolding against which people could see themselves, their lives, their concerns, as part of the dialectical progression of of history.
Or at least it used to. As much of this book has been working to explain, one of the defining characteristics of postmodernism as such is that we’re no longer able to experience history in this way. “The past” is reduced to a set of aesthetic signifiers or icons that bear no relationship to any kind of “grand narrative” by which we could orient ourselves in “the present.”
But for Jameson, this is where sci-fi steps in as a kind of counterbalance:
if the historical novel ‘corresponded’ to the emergence of historicity…science fiction equally corresponds to the waning or blockage of that historicity, and, particularly in our own time (the postmodern era), to its crisis and paralysis, its enfeeblement and repression. (284)
In this account, Time Out of Joint makes the present thinkable through a kind of reversal of the move made by the historical novel: The present is revealed to be the reconstructed past of an imagined future, allowing the reader to grasp it as a kind of historical entity, with particular characteristics (poodle skirt, milk man) and preoccupations (the calming and vaguely regressive geopolitical isolation represented by the small town).
Of course, not all sci-fi does this, nor is it entirely clear whether contemporary sci-fi is even still capable of this kind of historicizing work. As Jameson notes, “perhaps…we can no longer imagine the future at all, under any form—Utopian or catastrophic. Under those circumstances, where a formerly futurological science fiction (such as so-called cyberpunk today) turns into mere ‘realism’ and an outright representation of the present, the possibility that Dick offered us—an experience of our present as past and as history—is slowly excluded” (286).
But contemporary sci-fi, and contemporary art more generally, does maintain a kind of interest in history and a particular sort of historical thinking that Jameson characterizes as “an omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for dead styles and fashions” (286), and which “includes at least the will and intent to return upon our present circumstances in order to think of them—as the nineties, say—and to draw the appropriate marketing and forecasting conclusions” (286-87).
Postmodern nostalgia
So we’ve found ourselves faced with a familiar conundrum. We want to historicize, but the nature of postmodernity makes it hard to know how to do that. Not to give away too much of the game here but if you’ve been following along with this newsletter you can probably already figure out where this chapter is headed. Phil Dick is good because he historicizes. But postmodernity has made it difficult to do what he did back in the 1950s. Instead, what we’re left with is art that depicts “a collective unconscious in the process of trying to identify its own present at the same that that [it illuminates] the failure of this attempt, which seems to reduce itself to the recombination of various stereotypes of the past” (296).
To that end, the rest of this chapter is actually taken up by a neat little pair of readings of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which both offer their own version of this self-conscious failure to achieve historicity. I’m not going rehearse either of those readings here, other than to say that they are fun and plausible if you squint at them a bit but mostly just kind of exhausting. Like for instance here is a chart that he gives you mapping the “semic organization” of Something Wild.
Which, you know, sure.
Here’s how Jameson wraps things up:
Dick used science fiction to see his present as (past) history;…The two 1986 movies [Something Wild and Blue Velvet], while scarcely pioneering a wholly new form (or mode of historicity), nonetheless seem, in their allegorical complexity, to mark the end of that and the now open space for something else (296).
So the knot at the core of postmodernism remains intact and continues to yield some fun opportunities for Jameson to flex his seemingly limitless capacity for weird and exhausting interpretations of books and movies. Not a bad deal!
Okay! That’s all folks. Next time we’ll start in on the big concluding section.