T Origins of Posmodrniy
ERRY ANDERSO
ERO Nw Yk
Firt published by Vero 1998 Per Anderon 1998 rght reerved
©
A
( Reprinted 1998,
T he moral right right of the author have been aerted aerted
rso
UK 6 Meard Street,London W 1V 3HR USA: 180 Vaick Street,NewYork 10014-4606 Vero i the mprint of New Le Book ISBN 1�8598 222-4 (pbk) ISBN 1-859886 8
Britis Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for thi book i available om the Britih Libar
Library o Congrss CataloginginPublicaon Data A catalog record for thi book i avaabe om the Librar of Cogre Typeet by SetSytem Ltd Saon Walden Printed by Bidde Ltd Guidford and King' Lynn
Firt published by Vero 1998 Per Anderon 1998 rght reerved
©
A
( Reprinted 1998,
T he moral right right of the author have been aerted aerted
rso
UK 6 Meard Street,London W 1V 3HR USA: 180 Vaick Street,NewYork 10014-4606 Vero i the mprint of New Le Book ISBN 1�8598 222-4 (pbk) ISBN 1-859886 8
Britis Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for thi book i available om the Britih Libar
Library o Congrss CataloginginPublicaon Data A catalog record for thi book i avaabe om the Librar of Cogre Typeet by SetSytem Ltd Saon Walden Printed by Bidde Ltd Guidford and King' Lynn
C
Foreword 1 Prodromes
3
. Crystallzaton
15
3 Capture
47
4 Atereects
78
Index
13
Fwd
This essay started when I was asked to introduce a new collection o writings by Fredric Jameson, he Cultural urn In the event, it became too long or the purpose In publishing it as a text by itsel, however, I have not wanted to alter its orm: it is best read in conjunction with the volume that inspired it Although I have never written about a body o work that I did not, in one way or another, admire, an element o resistance was in the past aways an ingredient in the impulse to do so Intellectual admiration is in any case one thing, political sym pathy another This short book tries do something else, which I have always ound dicult: to express a sense o the achieve ment o a thinker with whom, it might be said, I lack the saety o sucient distance I have no assurance that I have succeeded But some larger debate around Jameson's work in general is overdue, and this attempt may at least help to encourage it he title o the text has a twood reerence The principa aim o the essay is to oer a more historical account o origins o the idea o postmodernity than is currently avail one that tries to set its dierent sources more precisely in spatial, political and intellectua settings, and with attention to tempora sequence - also topica ocus than s become customary Only against this background, my argumet goes, does the peculiar stamp o Jameson's contribution emerge in ull relie A secondary purpose is to suggest, more tentativey, some o the conditions that may have released the postmodern not as idea, but as phenomenon In part, these are comments that seek to revise an earlier attempt to sketch the premises o v
FOREWORD
modernism in the previous n de sicle and in pat they try to engage with the ivey contemporary literature on these questions
I woud ike to thank the hep o the Wissenschatskoleg, Berin, where ths work was competed, and its exceptiona brarians; and express my debts generally to Tom Mertes and my students in Los Angees
Vl
Pd
Lima Madrid - London
Postmodernism' as term and idea supposes the currency of modernism' Contrary to conventional expectation, both were born in a distant periphery rather than at the centre of the cutura system of the time: they come not from Europe or the United States, We owe the coinage of an aesthetc to a Nicaraguan poet, writing in a Guatemaan journa, of a literary encounter in Peru Rubn D ar's initiation in 1890 of a sefconscious current that took the name of modernismo drew on successive French schools - romantc, parnassian, symbost - for a decaration of cutura independence' from Span that set n motion an eman cpation from the past of Spanish etters themseves, in the cohort of the 1890's Where in Egish the notion of modern ism' scarcey entered genera usage before midcentury, i Spanish t was canonica a generation earlier. Here the bac ward pioneered the terms of metropoitan advance much the nneteenth century, beraism' was an inventon of Spansh risng against French occupation in the epoch Napoleon, an exotc expression from Cdiz at home ony m ater n the drawngrooms of Paris or London. So too the idea of a postmodernism' rst surfaced in the icardo
Palma Obras Completas ol 2, Madrid 1950 p. 19 the ew spirit that aimates a small but proud ad triumphat group of writers ad poets i Spaish America today: modeism. 3
THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY
Hispanic interword of the 190's, a generation before its appearance in Engand or America. It was a friend of Unamuno and Ortega, Federico de Ons, who struck off the term postmod ernismo He used it to describe a conservative reux within modernism itsef: one which sought refuge from its formidabe yrica chaenge in a muted perfectionism of detail and ironic humour, whose most origina feature was the newly authentic expression it afforded women. De Ons contrasted this pattern - shortlived, he thought - with its seque, an ultramodernsmo that intensied the radical impulses of modernism to a new pitch, in a series of avantgardes that were now creating a rigorousy contemporary poetry' of universal reach. De Ons's famous anthoogy of Spanishanguage poets, organized accord ing to this schema, appeared in Madrid in 194, as the Left took ofce in the Republic amid the countdown to the Civi War Dedicated to Antonio Machado, its panorama of utra modernism' ended with Lorca and Vallejo, Borges and Neruda.
Minted by De Ons, the idea of a postmodern' stye passed into the vocabuary of Hispanophone criticism, if rarely used by subsequent writers with his precision;3 but it remained without wider echo. It was not unti some twenty years ater that the term emerged n the Angophone world, in a very diferent ederico de Os Antologa de a Poesa Espaola e Hispanoamericana Madrid 19 pp. iii-iv. or De Os's view of the specicity of Hispaophoe moderism whose represetative thikers he believed to be Mart ad Uamuo see Sbre e Cocepto del Moderismo La Torre April-Jue 195 pp. 95-10 There is a e sythetic portait of Dr himself i Antologa pp. 1-152 Durig the Civil War fridship with Uamuo restraied De Os but his basic outlook ca be foud i his commemoratio of Machado: Atoio Machado 185-199) La Torre Jauary-Jue 19 p. 1; ad for recollectios of his stace at the time see Aurelio Pego Os e Hombre La Torre JauaryMarch 198 pp 95-9 The iuece of this usage was ot coed to the Spaishspeakig world but eteded to the usoBrazilia as well See for a curious eample Bezerra de reita·s Forma e Expresso no Romance Brasileiro - Do perodo colonial poca md io de Jaeiro 19 where Brazilia moderism is dated from the Semaa de Arte Modera i Sao Paulo i 1922 uder the impact of futurism ad associated essetially with the rupture of Mario de Adrade ad postmoder ism held to have set i with a idigeist reactio by the thirties: pp. 19-2
-
PRODROMES
context - as an epochal rather than aesthetic category. I n the rst voume of his Study of History aso pubished in 194, Arnold Toynbee argued that the concurrence of two powerful forces, Industrialism and Nationaism, had shaped the recent history of the West. Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, they had entered into destructive contradic tion with each other, as the international scale of industry burst the bounds of nationality, yet the contagion of nationaism itself spread downwards into ever smaller and les viabe ethnc communities. The Great War had sprung from the conict between these trends, making it unmistakeaby cear that an age had opened in which national power could no longer be sef sufcient. It was the duty of historians to nd a new horizon appropriate to the epoch, which coud only be found at the higher eve of civiizations, beond the utworn category of nationstates. This was the task Toynbee set himself in the six volumes of his Study pubished - but sti incompete - before 199. By the time he resumed publication fteen years ater, Toyn bee's outook had atered. The Second Word War had vindi cated his original inspiration - a deep hostiity to nationalism, and guarded suspicion of industrialism. Decoonization, too, had conrmed Toynbee's sceptical view oWestern imperiaism. The periodization he had proposed twenty years earier now took on cearer shape in his mind. In his eighth volume, published in 194, Toynbee dubbed the eohhhad opened with the FrancoPrussian War pstmodern a\ But his · denition of it remained essentialy estern com munities became "modern', he wrote, just as soon as they succeeded in producing a bourgeoisie that was both enough and competent enouh to become the peomi·, eement in sociey'.5 By contrast, in the postmodern age midde class was no onger in the sadde. Toynbee was es denite about what folowed. But certainly the postmodern age was marked by two deveopments: the rise of an industrial working cass in the West, and the bid of successive inteigentsias outside A Study of History 1 19 pp. 12-15 A Study of History p. 8
THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY
the West to master the secrets of modernity and turn them against the West Toynbee's most sustained relections on the emergence of a postmodern epoch focused on the latter. His examples were Meiji Japan, Bolshevik Russia, Kemalist Turkey, and - just born - Maoist China.6 Toynbee was no particular admirer of the resultant regimes But he was scathing of the hubristic illusions of the late imperial West. At the close of the nineteenth century, he wrote, an unprecedently prosperous and comfortable Western middle class was taking it as a matter of course that the end of one age of one civilization's history was the end of History itself - at least as far as they and their kind were concerned. They were imagining that, for their benet, a sane, safe, satisfactory Modern Life had miraculously come to stay as a timeless present' Completely awry in the epoch, in the United King dom, Germany and the Northern United States the complacency of a postModern Western bourgeoisie remained unshaken unil the outbreak of the rst postModern general war in A.D. 1914'. Four decades later, confronted with the prospect of a third - nuclear - war, Toynbee decided that the very category of civilization, with which e had set out to rewrite the pattern of human development, had lost pertinence In one sense, Western civilization - as the nbridled primacy of technology had become universal, but as such promised only the mutual rui of all. A global political authority, based on the hegemony of one power, was the condition of any safe passage out of the Cold War But in the long run, only a new universal religion which would necessarily be a syncretistic faith could secure the future of the planet Shaanx Angkor Ycatan
Toynbee's empirical shortcomings, and vatic conclusions, com bined to isolate his work at a time when commitment to the battle against Communism was expected to be less nebulous. A Study of History 8 pp. 9- A Sudy ofHistory 9 195 p. 20 8 A Study of History 9 p. 21
6
PRODROMES
After initial polemics, it was quickly forgotten, and with it th claim ta< twentieh ce could already be described as a odrn age. Such wot to be the case with the virtually ceprnous - in point of fact, slightly earlier - origination of the term in North America. Charles Olson, writing to his fellowpoet Roert Creeley on return from ucatan in the summer of 191, started to speak of a postmodern world' that lay beyond the imperial age of the Discoveries and the Industrial Revolution. The rst half of the twentieth cenury', he wrote soon afterwards, was the marshalling yard on which the modern was turned to what we have, the postmodern, or post West'. On 4 November 19, the day Eisenhower was elected President, Olson - ostensibly supplying information for a bio graphical directory of wentieth Century Authors set down a lapidary manifesto, beginning with the words My shift is that I take it the present is prologue, not the past', and ending with a description of that "going live present ' as postmodern, post _/ humanist, posthistoric' The sense of these terms came from a distinctive poetic project Olson's background lay in the New Deal. Active in Roosevelt's fourth Presidential campaign as head of the Foreign Nationalities Division of the Democratic National Committee, Olson was wintering in Key West in early 194 with fellow party ofcials after electoral victory, awaiting preferment in the new administration. There, suddenly changing the course of his life, he started to plan an epic entitled West covering the whole history of the Occidental world from Gilgamesh - later Odys seus to the American present, and wrote a poem, originall entitled elegram renouncing public ofce, though not responsibility: the affairs of men remain a chief Returning to Washington, Olson wrote on Melvile defended Pound; and woked for Oskar Lange - a 9 Chales Olso ad obert Creeley
The Complete Correspondence ol Saa osa 198 pp. 5 115 21 letters dated 9851 20851 ad 1051 he last s a eteded statement Olso etitled he aw' where the act o uclear terror eds the moder age. Quite recetly a door wet bag shut Olso writes. Bo chemistry is postmoder. Ad electroics is already a scece o commucatio the huma" is already the image" o the computig machie: p. 2 Twentieth Century Authors - First Supplement New Y1955 pp. 12 7
THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY
friend, now Polish Ambassador to the U lobbying the administration for the new government in Warsaw. Shaken by the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he opposed Truman's renomination as a delegate to the Democratic Con vention in 1948. By the time he was ready to take up his epic theme, its compass had altered. In mid48, he wrote in otes for the Proposition Man is Prospectie Space is the mark of new history, and the measure of work now afoot is the depth of the perception of space, both as space informs objects and as it contains, in antithesis to time, secrets of a humanitas eased out of contemporary narrows . . . Man as object, not man as mass or economic integer, is the buried seed in all formulations of collective action stemming from Marx. This seed, not its tatic which merely secures it votes or coups d'etat, is the secret of the power and claim of collectivism over men's minds. It is the grain in the pyramid, and if it is allowed any longer to rot unrecognized, collectivism will rot as it did in nazism and as � capitalism has by a like antinomian law. (Add: the persisting ailure to count what Asia will do to collectivism, the mere quantity of her people enough to move the earth, leaving aside the moral grace of such of her leaders as Nehru, Mao, Sjahrir )' . Of these last, one was of especial moment to Olson. n 1944, liaising with the White House for the Ofce of War nformation, he had been angered by the bias of US policy towards the KMT regime in China, and hostility to the Communist base in Yenan. After the war, two friends kept him in touch with Chinese developments: Jean Riboud, a young French banker active in the Resistance, now an associate of CartierBresson in New York; and Robert Payne, an English writer of Malrauvian cast, lecturer in Kunming during the SinoJapanese War and reporter from Yenan after it, whose diaries offer an indelible image of the moral collapse of Chiang Kaishek's regime, and the rise of Mao's alternative to it on the eve of the Civil War. 3 See Tom Clark Charles Olson The Allegory of a Poets Life New York 1991, pp. 893, 107-1 12, 138. Notes or the Propositio: Ma is Prospective' boundary 1-2, all 1973-Wr 197, pp. 23. obert Paye Forever China New York 195; China Awake New York 1 9.
PRODROMES
On the last day of January 1949, after a peaceful siege, Communist troops marched into Beijing, completing the libera tion of NorthEast China Almost immediately, Olson started to compose a poem conceived as a response to Eliot's modernist masterpiece - n his own words, an AntiWasteland He nished a rst draft before the PLA crossed the Yangtze. The poem was completed in the summer at Black Mountain. Shang hai had fallen, but Guangzhou and Chongqing were still under KMT control; the People's Republic had not yet been pro claimed. he Kingshers with its great monosyllabic exordium: What does not hange is the will to hange places the Chinese revolution not under the sign of the new, but of the ancient The poem opens with the legend of Angkor Wat's trade in the bluegreen plumage of the kingsher and the enigma of Plutarch's rock at Delphi, intersecting Mao's report to the CCP - time and space in counterpointed balance: I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said la lumire but the kingsher de l'aurore but the kingsher lew west est devant nous!' he got the oor of his breast from the heat of the setting sun!
The lyrical transfusion is brief: ornithology dispels the attributes of the For Quartets he legends are egends. ead, hung up, the kingsher wi not indiate a favoring wind, or
Olso's mascript ote deig his poem agaist Eliot's see George Btterwick's magisterial essay Charles Olso's The igshers" ad the Poetics o Chage' American Poetry No 2 Witer 1989 pp. 5657.
T H E O RI G I N S O F P O S T M O D E R NI T Y
r avert the thnderblt. Nr, by its nestin, stil the waters, with the new year, fr seven days. Away from any current, deep in the tunnel of a bank, the westering bird creates a foul nest from the remains of its pre. What is aerial and iridescent is nurtred in lth and darkness: n these reetamenta (as they amlate they frm a pshaped strtre) the yn are brn. And, as they are fed and rw, this nest f exrement, and deayed sh bemes a drippin fetid mass Ma cnded: ns devns ns ever et air! The poem, however, comprehensively persists: he ht is in the east. Yes. nd we mst rse, at. Yet in the west, despite the apparent darkness (the whiteness whih vers al) if y k, if y an bear, if y an, ln enh as n as it was neessary fr hi, my ide t lk int the yelw f that nestlastin rse, s y mst For the orginal peoples of America once came from Asia, and their civiliations however sombre - were less brutal than those of the Europeans who conquered them, leavng to their descendants runes of a lfe stll to be recovered. Echoing a lne Mao's call forms the al words of his eport to the meetig of the Cetral
Committee of the CCP held o 2528 December 19 at Yagjiagou i Shaai. See e Preset Situatio ad Our asks' Selected Works ol Beijig 199 p. 1 Olso cited them i the rech traslatio of the speech passed to him by Jea iboud.
PRODROMES
from Neruda's Alturas de MacchuPicchu translated a few months before Nt ne death bt many, nt amlatin bt hane, the feedbak prves, the feedbak is the law - the poem ends with the search for a future hidden in grubs and ruins: I pse y yr qestin: shal y nver hney where mats ae I hnt amn stnes Olson's aesthetic manifesto, Proectie Verse appeared the followin year Its advocacy of openeld composition as a development of the objectivist line of Pound and Wllams became hs most inluential tatement But the reception of t generally failed to respect the motto he adopted from Creley form is never more than an extension of content'6 - to Olson's poetry itself Few poets have been treated more formally since In fact, Olson's themes make up a complexio oppositorum nlike any other A erce critic of ratonalst humanism - that peculiar presumpton by whch western man has nterposed hmself between what he is as a creature of nature and those other creation f nature whch we may, with no derogaton, call objects' - Olson could seem close to a Heideggerian ses of Being as primal integrty Yet he treated aool domestic familars n hs verse, and was the rst poet to on Norbert Wener's cybernetics He was much ancient cultures, Mayan or preSocratc, regardng the birth archaeology as a decisive progress in human knowledge, because it could help recover them But he saw the future as a collective Projective erse' Selected Writings of Charles Olson edited by obert Creeley New York 1966, p. 16 Projective erse' p. 24
THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY
project of human selfdetermination - man as prospective' Anaximander lay at one end of his imagination, Rimbaud at the other A democrat and antifascist, Oson assumed the persna of Yeats to defend Pound from prison, and as a patriot produced perhaps the ony unmystied poem on the US Civi War Contemporary revoution came from the East, but America was subjoined to Asia: the colours of dawn in China and of ight into the West reected the light of a single orbit The phrase Olson used to describe himself - after the dispersion, an archaeologist of morning' - catches most of these meanings It was here, then, that the elements for an afrmative concep tion of the postmodern were rst assembled In Olson, an aeshetic theory was inked to a prophetic history, with an agenda allying poetic innovation with political revolution in the classic tradition of the avantgardes of prewar Europe The continuity with the original Stimmung of modernism, in an electric sense of the present as fraugt with a momentous future, is striking But no commensurate doctrine crystallied Olson, who thought of himself as timorous, was interrogated by the FBI for suspect wartime associations in the early fties Black Mountain Colege, of whic he was the last Principal, shut its doors in 194. In the years of reaction, his poetry became more straggling and gnomic The referent of the postmodern lapsed New York - Harvard - Chicago
By the end of the fties, when the term reappeared, it had passed into other - more or less casual hands, as a negative marker of what was not more, than modern In 199 C Wright Mills and Irving Howe - not coincdentally: they belonged to a common miieu of the New York Left - both emloyed it in this sense The sociologist, in more caustic fashion, used the term to denote an age in which the modern ideals of liberalism and socialism had all but colapsed, as Anecdotes of the Late War which starts: the lethargic vs. violece as alteratives
o each other/or los americaos ad eds: Grat didt hurry./He just had the most.//More o the latter died. Compare the wellmeaig pieties o For the Union
Dead
PRODROMES
reason and freedom parted company in a postmodern society of blind drift and empty conformity The critic, in milder tones, borrowed it to describe a contemporary ction unable to sustain modernist tension with a surrounding society whose cass divisions had become increasingly amorphous with postwar prosperity A year later Harry Levin, drawing on Toynbee's usage, gave the idea of postmodern forms a much sharper twist, to depict an epigone literature that had renounced the strenuous intellectual standards of modernism for a relaxed middlebrow synthesis - the sign of a new compicity between artist and bourgeois, at a suspect crossroads between culture and com merce Here lay the beginnings of an unequivocally pejorative version of the postmodern In the sixties, it changed as - stil largely - adventitious sign again Halfway through the decade the critic Leslie Fieder, temperamenta antithesis of Levin, addressed a conference spon sored by the Congress of Cultural Freedom, set up by the CIA for work on the intellectual front of the Cold War In this unlikely setting, he celebrated the emergence of a new sensibility among the younger generation in America, who were drop outs from history - cultural mutants whose values of noncha lance and disconnexion, hallucinogens and civil rights, were nding welcome expression in a fresh postmodern literature W e are at the ending of what is ca lled The Modern A ge. Just as Antiquity was followed by several centuries of Oriental ascendancy, which Westerners provincially call the Dark Ages, so now The Modern Age is being succeeded by a postmodern period': C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, New York 1 959 19
pp. 15-1 Irvig Howe, Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction',
Partisan Review, 1959, pp. 420-436; reprinted in Decline of the New, New York 19 pp. 190-207 with a postscript. Howes article, although it makes no referen Millss work, is clearly dependent on it, especially White Collar: see in part
his description of a mass society' that is halfwelfare and half-garrison', in
coheret publics all apart. What was Moderism? The Massachusetts Review August 190 pp. 09- reprtd i Refractions New York 19 pp. 21295 with a preatory ote. The New Mutats Partisan Review Summer 195 pp. 505-525; reprited i Collecte Paers ol 2 New York 191 pp. 9-00 Howe as might be epected complaied about this tet i a querulous survey The New York Itellecuals Commentary October 198 p. 9; reprited i The Decline of the
New 20-21
3
THE ORIGINS OF POSTMOERNITY
is, Fiedler later explained in Playboy wold cross classes and mix genres, repdiating te ironies and solemnities of modern ism, not to spea of its distinctions between ig and low, in an ninibited retrn to te sentimental and brlesqe By 199 Fiedler's rendition of te postmodern cold be seen, in its claims of demotic emancipation and instinctal release, as offering a prdently depoliticied eco of te stdent insrgecy of te time, oterwise scarcely to be attribted wit indifference to istory3 A similar refraction can be detected in te sociology of Amitai Etioni, later famos for is preacing of moral commnity, wose boo he Actie Society - dedicated to is stdents at Colmbia and Bereley in te year of camps rebellion - presented a postmodern' period, databe from te end of te war, in wic te power of big bsiness and establised elites was declining, and society cold for te rst time become a democracy tat was master of itsel£' e inversion of te argment of he Sociological Imagination is all bt complete Bt if te sages of Howe and Mills were reversed wit disciplinary symmetry by Fiedler and Etioni, all were still terminological improvisatin or appenstance Since te modern - aestetic or istorical - is always in principle wat migt be called a presentabsolte, it creates a pecliar difclty for te denition of any period beyond it, tat wold convert it to a relative past In tis sense, te maesift of a simple prex - denoting wa comes after - is virtally inerent in te concept itself, one tat cold be more or less conted on in advance to recr werever a stray need for a marer of temporal difference migt be felt Resort of tis ind to te term pos modern' as always been of circmstantial signicance Bt teoretical development is anoter matter e notion of te postmodern did not acqire any wider diffsion till te seventies Cross the Border Close the Gap Playboy December 1969 pp 151 23 252-258; reprited i Collected Papers ol 2, pp 61-85. The Active Society New York 196 8 pp vii 528.
4
C
Athens - Cairo - Las Vegas
e real trningpoint came wit te appearance in fall 197 at Bingamton of a jornal expressly sbtitled a Journal of Post modern Literature and Culture - te review boundary 2 e legacy of Olson ad resrfaced e eynote essay in te rst isse, by David Antin, was entitled: Modernism and Post Modernism: Approacing te Present in American Poetry' Antin raed te wole canon rnning from Eliot and ate to Aden and Lowell, wit glancing re even at Pond as
a srreptitiosly provincial and regressive tradition, whose metrical-moral propensities had nothing to do with genuine international modernism - the line of Apollinaire, Marinetti, Khlebnikov, Lorca, J6zsef, Nerda - whose principle was dra matic collage. In postwar America, it was the Black Montain poets, and above all Charles Olson, who had recovered ts energes1 e vitality of te postmodern present, after , breakdown of an enfeebled poetic orthodoxy in the owed every ing to tis example A year later, bounda ' devoted a doubleisse to 'Charles Olson: '
·
The appearace of Olso ad the Black Moutai poets was the begiig of t
ed for te Metaphysical Moderist traditio which was by o meas a moder ist" traditio but a aomaly peculiar to America ad Eglish poetry It was the result of a collisio of strogly atimoderist ad provicial sesibilities with the hybrid modeism of Poud ad the purer moderism of ertrude Stei ad William Carlos Williams': boundary I No 1 p 120 Ati took Olsos great As the Dead Prey Upo Us as his emblem of the ew poetics. 5
T H E O RI G I N S O F P O S T M O D E R NI T Y
Essays, Reviews' - the rst fullscale appreciation sce his death It was this reception that for the rst time stabilied the idea of the postmodern as a collective reference In the process, however, it underwent an alteration Olson's call for a projective literature beyond humanism was remembered and honoured But his political attachment to an unbidden future beyond capitalism - the other side of Rimbaud's courage' saluted in he Kingshers - passed out of sight Not that boundary 2 was devoid of radical impulse Its creator, William Spanos, decided to found the journal as a result of his shock at US collusion with the Greek Junta, while a visiting teacher at the University of Athens He later explained that at that time, "Modern meant, literally, the Modernist literature that had precipitated the New Criticism and the New Criticism which had dened Modernism in its own autotelic terms' In Athens he sensed a kind of complicity' between this established orthodoxy, in which he had been trained, and the callous ofcialdom he was witnessing On returning to America, he conceived boundary 2 as a break with both At the height of the Vietnam War, his aim was to get literature back into the domain of the world', at a time of the most dramatic moment of American hegemony and its collapse', and to demonstrate that postmodernism is a kind of rejection, an attack, an undermining of the aesthetic formal ism and conservative politics of the New Criticism' But the course of the journal was never quite to coincide with its intention Spanos's own resistance to the Nixon Presidency was not in doubt - he was locked up for a demonstration against it But twenty years of Cold War had made the climae unpropitious for a fusion of cultural and political vision: Olson's unity was not retrieved Boundary 2 itself remained, in its editor's own retrospect, essentially a literary journal, marked by A
Conversation with William Spanos' boundary Summer 1990, pp. 1-3 161 . This interview by Paul Bov - Spanos's successor as editor o the oual is a undamental document or a history o the idea o the postmodern. Ater speaking o his arrest in protest against the bombing o Cambodia Spanos acknowledges that I didn't quite associate what I was doing as a citizen with my literary critical perspective. I don't want to say that they were absolutely dis tinguished but I wasn't selconscious o the connections'.
C R YS T A L L IZ A T I O N
an existentialism originally Sartrean in sympathy, and then increasingly drawn to Heidegger The result was to inect Olson's objectivism towards a Heideggerian metaphysics of Being, that in due course became a dominant strand in bounda 2 The intramundane space of the postmodern was thereby so to speak - left vacant It was soon, however, occupied by a lateral entrant Among early contributors to the journal was Ihab Hassan, a critic who had published his rst essay on postmodernism just before it was launched An Egyptian by birth - son of an aristocratic governor between the wars, famous for repression of a nationalist demonstration against British tutelage3 - and engineer by training, Hassan's original interest had lain in a high modernism pared to an expressive minimum: what he called a literature of silence', passing down from Kafka to Beckett When he advanced the notion of postmodernism in 1971, however, Hassan subsumed this descent into a much wider spectrum of tendencies that either radicalized or refused leading traits of modernism: a conguration that extended to the visual arts, music, technology, and sensibility at large An extensive enumeration of trends and artists followed, from Mailer to el Que! Hippies to Conceptualism Within a heterogeneous range, however, a core cluster was discernible Three names recurred with special frequency: John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Buckminster Fuller All of these were associ ated with Black Mountain College Absent, on the other hand, In 1930 Ismael Sidky backed by the Palace and the British closed the Egyptian
parliament. iots broke out across the country and were met with orce. Casualties were particularly heavy at El Mansura. By the day's end si people lay dead i h streets our students in their teens. No one counted the wounded . . . I el loyalties torn between my ather and his oes. Three years later Mustaa el became prime minister o Egypt. My ather was orced to resign' Ihab Hassan of Egypt. Scenes and Arguments of an Autobography Carbondale pp. 46-48: in more than one way a suggestive memoir. or an anguished ee witness account o the massacre seen as an elevenyearold rom a balcony aboe it compare the very dierent memoir o the Egyptian eminist atia Zayyat The Search ondon 1996 pp. 41-43 The background to these events is set out by Jacques Berque L'Egypte Impralsme et Rvoluton Paris 1 96, pp. 452-60 POSTmodeSM: a Paracritical Bibliography' New Lterary Hstory Autumn 191, pp. 5-30; reprinted with some small alterations in The Postmode Turn Ithaca 198, pp 25-5.
T HE O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D E RN I TY
was Olson His place was, as it were, occupied by a fourth gure - Marshal McLuhan In this combination, the pivot was clearly Cage: close friend of Rauschenberg and Fuller, and warm admirer of McLuhan Cage was aso, of course, the eading aesthetician of silence; his composition 4/ famously exceeding the gesture of any wordess drama When Hassan concluded his survey of the motley indices of postmodernism running from Spaceship Earth to the Global Viage, faction and happening, aleatory reduction and parodic extravagana, imper manence and intermedia - and sought to synthesie them as so many anarchies of the spirit, playfully subverting the aloof verities of modernism, the composer was one of the very few artists who could plausibly be associated with most of the bill In subsequent essays, Hassan enlisted Foucaults notion of an epistemic break to suggest comparable shifts in science and philosophy, in the wake of Heisenberg or Nietsche In this vein, he argued that the underying unity of the postmodern lay in the play of indeterminacy and immanence, whose originat ing genius in the arts had been Marcel Duchamp The list of his successors included Ashbery, Barth, Barthelme and Pynchon in literature; Rauschenberg, Warhol, Tinguely in the visual arts By 1980, Hassan had annexed virtually a complete roster of poststructuralist motifs into an elaborate taxonomy of the difference between postmodern and modern paradigms, and expanded his Gotha of practitioners yet further5 But a larger problem remained Is postmodernism, he asked, only an artistic tendency or also a social phenomenon?, and if so, how are the various aspects of this phenomenon - psychological, philosoph ical, economic, political - joined or disjoined? To these ques tions, Hassan returned no coherent answer, though making one signicant observation Postmodernism, as a mode of literary change, could be distinguished from the older avantgardes (Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism etc) as well as from modernism, he wrote Neither Olympian and detached lik he espectively: Cltre Idetermiacy ad Immaece: Margis of the Postmod
er) Age' Humanities in Society No Witer 98 pp 5-85 ad The Qestio of Postmoderism Bucknell Review 980 pp. -2; reprited i The Pst modern Turn pp. -8 ad revised as The Cocept of Postmodeism' pp 89 8
C R YS T A L L IZ A T I O N
latter nor Bohemian and fractious like the former, postmodern ism suggests a different kind of accommodation between art and society 6 What kind? If the difference was to be expored, it woud be difcult to avoid politics But here Hassan drew back I confess to some some distaste for ideoogical rage (the worst are now full of passionate intensity and ack a conviction) and for the hectoring of reigious and secuar dogmatists I admit to a certain ambivaence towards poitics, which can overcrowd our responses to both art and life He was soon more specic about his dislikes, atacking Marxist critics for submission o the iron yoke of ideology in their conceaed socia determin ism, collectivist bias, distrust of aesthetic pleasure Preferable by far, as a phiosophy for postmodernity, was the bluff tolerance and optative spirit of American pragmatism, above all in the expansive, celebratory shape of William James, whose pluralism offered ethica balm for current anxieties As for politics, the old distinctions had lost virtualy any meaning Terms like left and right, base and superstructure, production and reproduction, materialism and idealism had become nearly unserviceabe, except to perpetuate prejudice Hassans construction of the postmodern, pioneering though
many of its perceptions were - he was the rst to stretch it
across the arts, and to note wing-marks ater widely accepted
thus had a buitin limit: the move to the socia was barred This was surely one reason why he withdrew from the eld at the
end of the eighties. But there was another, internal to his
account of the arts themselves Hassans original commitment was to exasperated forms of classic modernism - Ducha Beckett: just what De Ons had presciently termed modernism in the thirties When he started to explore cultural scene of the seventies, Hassan construed it nantly through this prism The strategic role fell to vanguars traceable back to the matrix of Black Mountain Such a he Qestio of Postmoderism' pp. 22-2; the last setece does ot appear i the revised versio pblished i The Postmodern Turn pp 89-9 Plralism i Postmoder Perspective' (98) i The Postmodern Turn p. 8 8 The Postmodern Turn pp. 20-205 22 The Postmodern Tu p 22 9
T H E O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O ER N IT Y
\)
estimate a mc to be sai for it Bt tere as aays anoter aspect of te vie Hassan as trying to escribe, tat as far coser to te angi or ecorative invotion of moernist lan ic De Os a contraste as postmoern ism'. Waro co stan as sortan for tis stran. Hassan's origina conspects ince it, if itot empasis. Over time, oever, e sense tat tis as peraps te overa irection in ic te postmoern as tening. At miecae, a esign exibition in te Gran Paais, Styles ispaying a vast array of postmoern objects from tmbtacks o yacts', e im to a certain revsion: Waking trog te brigt farrago, ectares of esprit paroy, persiage, I fet te smie on my ips freeze'. Wen e came to rite te introction to is coecte texts on te topic, he Postmodern urn in 197, e mae it cear te tite as aso a kin of faree: Postmoern ism itsef as cange, taken, as I see it, te rong trn. Cagt beteen ieoogica trcence an emystifying ngacity, cagt in its on kitsc, postmoernism as become a kin of ecectic raiery, te rene prrience of or borroe peasres an trivia isbeiefs'. In te very reason y Hassan became isabse it te postmoern, oever, ay te sorce of inspiration for te most prominent teorization of it to sccee is on. Ironicay, it as te art to ic e gave east attention tat nay projecte te term into te pbic omain at arge. In 197 Robert Ventri an is associates Denise Scott Bron an Steven zenor pbise te arcitectra manifesto of te ecae Learning from Las Vegas Ventri a areay mae is name it an eegant critiqe of te prist ortooxy of te Inter nationa Stye in te age of Mies, invoking Mannerist, Baroqe, Rococo an Earian masterpieces as aternative vaes for contemporary practice. 2 In te ne book, e an is coeages ance a mc more iconocastic attak on Moernism, in te name of te vita popar imagery of te gambing srip. The Postmodern Turn p. 229.
The Postmodern Turn p vii. Complexty and Contradcton n Archtecture New York 1966 Architects ca o oger aord to be itimidated by the puritaicay mora aguage of orthodo Moder architecture - More is ot ess: p 1 6.
C R YS T A L L IZ A T I O N
Hee, tey gued, ws to be found spectcu enew of te istoic ssocition of citectue wit pinting, gpics nd scuptue - n exubent pimcy of symbo ove spce - tt Modenism d to its cost foeswon It ws time to etun to Ruskin's dictum tt citectue ws te decotion of constuction Deiveed wit n i of csu ening, te idbck messge of Learning from Las Vegas ested on pemises tt woud ve dumbfounded Ruskin e commeci stip cenges te citect to tke positive, noncipontesoude view', Ventui nd is coegues wote Ls Vegs's vues e not questioned ee e moity of commeci dvetising, gm bing inteests, nd te competitive instinct is not t issue' .3 Fom nysis of te joyous iot of signs in te deset sky did not necessiy pecude soci judgement, but it did ue out one stndpoint Otodox Moden citectue is pogessive, if not evoutiony, utopin nd puistic: it is disstised wit existing conditions' But te citect's pincip concen ougt not to be wit ougt to be but wit wt is' nd ow to ep impove it' .4 Beind te modest neutity of tis gend wete society ws igt o wong ws not fo us t tt moment to gue' y disming opposition ontsting te pnned monotony of modenist megstuctues wit te vigou nd eteogeneity of spontneous ubn spw, Learning from Las Vegas summed up te dicotomy between tem in pse: Buiding fo Mn' vs Buiding fo men (mkets)' e simpicity of te pentesis sys eveyting Hee, spet out wit beguiing cndou, ws te new etionsip between t nd society Hssn sumised but fied to dene Ventui's pogmme, expessy designed to supesede moden, sti cked nme It ws not ong coming By te tem postmoden' - nticipted decde eie by to cstigte wek istoicism - d enteed te t wod New Yok, wee peps te st citect to use it s Ventui's student Robet ten But te citic wo mde its Learnng from Las Vegas Cambridge Mass. 1972 p 0 sic]. Learnng om Las Vegas pp 0 85. Learnng from La Vegas p 84.
THE ORIGINS OF POSTMOERNITY
fortune was Carles Jencs, te rst edition of wose Language of Postmodern Architecture appeared in 1977. Muc more polemical in is obsequy for modernism - allegedly consigned to obivion in 197, wit te te demolition of a igrise in te MidWest - Jencs was at rst also more critical tan Venturi of American capitaism, and of te collusion between te two in te principa types of postwar building commission. But, wile arguing te need for a broader semiotic range tan Venturi ad allowed, to include iconic as wel as symbolic forms, is prescriptions were essentially based on te ideas of Learning from Las Vegas inclusive variety, popular legibility, contextual sympaty. espite is title, Jencs was initially esitant about calling tese values postmodern', since te term was - e confessed - evasive, fasionabe and worst of all negative'. His preferred arcitecture would be better describe as radica eclecticism', even traditionalesque', and its only accomplised exemplar to date was Antonio Gaud itin a year Jencs ad canged is min, fuly adopting te dea of te postmodern and now teorizing its ececticism as a stye of doublecoding' tat is, an arcitecture empoying a ybrid of modern and istoricist syntax, and appealing bot to educated taste and popular sensibility. It was tis liberatin mxture of new and old, ig and low, wic dened postmod ernism as a movement, and assured it te future In 19 The Language of ostodern Archtecture New Yor 977, . 7. Promted i
art by the wor of the Marist critic Malcolm MacEwa a colleague of Edward homso o The New Reasoner at this stage Jecs offered a eriodizatio o modes of architectural roductio - miicaitalist; welfare state catalist; moooly aitalist or the ew allervasive domiace of the commercial develoer. Several moder rchitects i a deserate attemt to cheer themselves u have decided that sice this is a ievitable situatio it must also have its good oits . . Mai Street is almost all right" accordig to Robert eturi . -2, 35. The Language of PostModern Archtecture revised ad elarged Editio New Yor 978, . 6-8: Modeism sufers from elitism. PostModerism is tryig to get over that elitism by reachig out towards the veracular towards traditio ad the commercial slag of the street architecture which has bee o a eforced diet for fty years ca oly eoy itself ad grow stroger ad deeer as a result. Discussio of the PreModerist Gaud was droed from the ew versio o grouds of cosistecy. 22
C RY R YSS T A L LI L IZ Z A T IO ION
Jecs elped orgaize te arcitectural sectio of te Veice Bieale mouted by Paolo Portogesi, a lamboyat pioeer of postmoder practice, etitled Te Presece of Past, wic attracted wide iteratioal attetio. By ow Jecs ad become a tireless tirele ss etusias etusiastt of te cause, ad prolic taxoomer taxoomer of its developmet. His most sigicat move was to dis tiguis, early o, late moder' from postmoder' arcitec ture. roppig te claim tat moderism ad collapsed i te early seveties, Jecs coceded tat its dyamic still survived, if i paroxysmic form, as a aestetic of tecological prowess icreasig icreasigly ly detaced detaced from from fuc fuctioal tioal pretexts - but still still imper imper vious to te pay of retrospect ad alusio tat mared postmoderism: Foster ad ogers as agaist Moore ad Graves. Tis was te arcitectural equivalet of te literature campi campioe oedd by by Hassa - ultramoderism. ultramoderism. Notig te parael, Jecs reversed te oppositio betwee e Os's terms witout quams. No matter ow productive it migt migt seem - lie lie te te crossb cros sbow ow i te rst years years of rearms rearm s suc ultramoderism was istorically a rearguard. It was postmoderism, its symbolic resources aswerig to te cotem porary eed for a ew spirituality, as oce te exuberat baroque of o f te Coutereformatio ad doe, tat represeted te advaced art of te age. By te mideigties Jecs was celebratig te Postoder as a word civilizatio of plura tolerace ad superabudat coice, tat was maig o sese' of suc outmoded outmoded polarities polarities as left left ad rig rigt twi wig, g, capitaist ad worig class'. I a society were iformatio ow mattered more ta productio, tere is o loger a artistic avatgarde', sice tere is o eemy to coquer' i t globa eectroic etwor. I te emacipated coditios today's art, rater tere are coutless idividuals i New Yor, Berli, Lodo, Mila ad oter world commuicatig ad competig wit eac oter, just as tey are He would later claim that the resose to my lectures ad articles was so forceful
ad widesread that it created PostModerism as a social ad architectural movemet: PostModernsm the New Classcsm n Art and Archtecture New Yor Yor 987, 987 , . . 29. 29 . Late Modern Moder n Archtecture New Yor 9 8, . . -3. 23
THE OIGINS OF POSTMOENITY
i n te te bani baning ng word'.20 wor d'.20 Ou O u t of tei teirr aeidoscop aeidoscopic ic creations, creations, it was to be oped, migt emerge a sared symboic order of te ind ind tat a reigion provides'2 provides'2 - te utimat utimatee agenda agenda of post post modernism. In aestetic crossdress, Toynbee's syncretistic dream ad returned. Montr Montrea eall - Paris Paris
Te arcitectura capture of te bazon of te postmodern, wic can can be dated from 1977-78, proved durabe. Te primary association of te term as ever since been wit te newest forms of buit space. But tis sift was foowed, a but immediatey, by a furter extension of its range, in an unex pected direction. Te rst piosopica wor to adopt te notion was JeanFranois Lyotard's La Condition Postmoderne wic appeared in Paris in 1979. Lyotard ad acquired te term directy from Hassan. Tree years earier, e ad addressed a conference at Miwauee on te postmodern in te performing arts orchestrated by Hassan. ecaring te staes of post modernism as a woe' were not to exibit trut within te cosure of representation but to set up perspectives witin te< return of te will Lyotard extoed Micae Snow's famous experimenta m of an empty Canadian andscape scanned by an immobie swiveing camera, and ucamp's spatia projec tions.22 His new boo was quite cose to a teme in Hassan te epistemoogica impications of recent advances in te natura sciences. Te immediate occasion of La Condition Postmoderne owever, was a commission to produce a report on te state of contemporary nowedge' for te university counci of te government of Queec, were te nationaist party of en en Levesque ad just j ust come to power. For Lyotard, te arriva of postmodernity was ined to te What s PostModernsm? PostModernsm? odo 986, pp. 44-47. What s PostModernsm? p. 43. he Ucoscios as MiseeSce i Michael Beamo ad Charles Caramello
(eds Performance n Postmodern Culture Madiso 977 p. 95. Hassa gave the eyote address at this coferece. or the itellectal cotact betwee the two at this time, see La Condton Postmoderne otes , 2, 88, ad The ostmodern Turn pp 34, 62-64.
C Y YSS T A L LI L IZ Z A T IO ION
emerg emergenc encee of o f a postind postindustri ustria a society society - teoriz teorized ed by anie Be and Aain Aain Touraine Touraine - in wic wic nowedge ad become te te main economic force of production in a ow bypassing nationa states, stat es, yet at te same time ad ost os t its traditiona traditiona egitimations. For if society was now best conceived, neiter as an organic woe nor as a duaistic ed of conict (Parsons or Marx), but as a web of inguistic inguistic communications, communications, anguage itsef itsef - te te woe socia socia bond' - was composed compos ed of a mutipicity mutipicity of different different games, wose rues were incommensurabe, and interreations agonistic. In tese conditions, science became just one anguage game among oters: it coud no onger caim te imperia priviege over oter forms of nowedge to wic it ad pretended in modern times. In fact, its tite to superiority as denotative trut over narrative styes of customary nowedge conceaed te basis of its own egitimation, wic cassicay rested on two forms form s of grand narrative itsef. Te Te rst of tese, tese, derived from te Frenc evoution, tod a tae of umanity as te eroic agent of its own iberation troug te advance of nowedge; te second, descending from German Ideaism, a tae of spirit as te progressive unfoding of trut. Suc were te great justifying myts of modernity. Te dening trait of te postmodern condition, by contrast, is te oss of credibiity of tese metanarratives. For Lyotard, tey ave been undone by te immanent deveopment of te sciences temseves: on te one and, by a puraization of types of argument, wit te proiferation of paradox and paraogism - anticipa anticipated ted witin witin piosopy by Nietzsce, Nietzsc e, Wittg Wittgenst enstein ein and Levinas; and on te oter and, by a tecnication of proof, in wic cosy apparatuses, commanded by capita or te stat ;: reduce trut' to performativity'. Science in te service of nds a new egitimation in efciency. But te genuine of postmode post modern rn science ies not in te te pursuit of te performat performat but but in te te prouction prouction of te te paraogistic paraogistic - in micropysi micropysics cs fractas, discoveries of caos, teorizing its own evoution as discontinuous, catastrop catastropic, ic, nonrectiabe and paradoxica' paradoxica ' f te dream of consensus consensus is a reic r eic of nostagia for emanci emancipat pation ion,, 2 La Condton Postmoderne Rapport sur le Savor Paris 979 p. 97. Eglish traslatio The Postmodern Condton Mieapolis 984 p 25
T HE O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D E RN I TY
narratives as suc do not disappear, but become miniaure and competiive: te little narrative remains te quintessential form of imagnaive invention24 Its social analogue, on wic The Postmodern Condition ends, is te rend owards te emporary contract in every area of uman existence: occupational, emotional, sexual, political - ties more economica, flexible, creative an te bonds of modernity. If tis form is favoured by e system, i is not enirely subjec o it We sould be appy i is modest and mixed, Lyotard concluded, because any pure alernative to e sysem would fatally come to resemble wat it sougt o oppose At te urn of e seventies, Hassans essays - essentially on literaure - ad sill to be colleced; Jencss writing was limited to arciecture In title and opic, The Postmodern Condition was e rs boo o trea posmoderniy as a general cange of uman circumsance Te vantagepoint of te pilosoper assured i a wider eco, across audiences, an any previous intervenion: it remains o tis day peraps te most widely cited wor on te subject Bu taen in isolation - as it usually is - te boo is a misleading guide to Lyoards distincive intellectual position For The Postmodern Condition writen a an ofcial commission, is conned essentially to e epistemo logical fate of te natural sciences - about wic, as Lyotard laer confessed, is nowledge was less an limied2 Wa e read into tem was a cogniive pluralism, based on te notion fres to Gallic audiences, if long staled o AngloSaxon - of differen, incommensurable languagegames Te incoerence of Witgenseins original concepion, often noted, was onl compounded by Lyoards claim at suc games were bo autarcic and agonisic, as if tere could be conict between wat as no common measure Te subsequent inuence of te boo, in is sense, was in inverse relation o its intellectual inerest, as it became te inspiration of a sreetlevel relativism 2 La Condton Postmoderne p. 98; The Postmodern Condton p. 2 I made up stories I referred to a uatity of books I'd ever read apparetly it
impressed people it's all a bit of parody . . It's simply the worst of my books they're almost all bad but that oe's the worst': Lotta Poetca Third Series o N o Jauary 198 p. 8 2- a iterview o f more geeral biographical iterest. 26
C R YS T A L L IZ A T I O N
ta often passes - in te eyes of friends and foes alie - for te allmar of postmodernism Wa e ostensibly scienic framewor of Lyotards report on nowledge left ou of view was eier te ars or politics Te curiosity of te boo lay in e fact tese were is two principal passions as a pilosoper. A militant in te farleft group Socialisme ou Barbarie for a decade (196 during wic e was an ousandingly lucid commenator on e Algerian War, Lyotard remained acive in its splioff Pouoir Ourier for anoer two years Breaing wit tis group wen e became convinced e proleariat was no longer a revolution ary subjec capable of callenging capitalism, e was active in te university fermen at Nanerre in 1968 and still reinterpre ing Marx for contemporary rebels as late as 1969. But wit te ebb of insurgency n France, Lyotards ideas sifted His rst major pilosopical wor, Discours Figure (1971, advanced a gural rendering of Freudian drives, in opposition o Lacans linguistic account of te unconscious, as te basis for a teory of art, illustrated by poems and painings By te time of Drie a partir de Marx et Freud (1 97, e ad arrived a a more drastic political energetics eason, e declared, is already in power in apital We do no want to desroy apital because it is not rational, but because it is eason and power are all one Tere was noting in apial ism, no dialectic tat will lead to its supersession, its overcoming in socialism: socialism, it is now plain to all, is identical o pitalism All critique, far from surpassing, merely consolidates i Wat alone could destroy capialism was e worldwide drift of desire among te young, away from libidinal inves ment in te system, to styles of conduc wose sole affecive intensiy and e multiplication of libidinal Te role of advanced artists - once Opojaz, Futurism or ussia; today oto, Cage or Cunningam America - was o blow up te obstacles to te unleasing of tis desire by committing te forms of establised reality to te fames Ar in tis sense lay benea all insurgent politics Aestetics as been for te poliical an I was (and reain?) not an alibi, a Drve partr de Marx et Freud Paris 1973 pp. 123 1618. 2
T H E O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D E R NI T Y
comfortabe retreat, but te faut and ssure to descend to te subsoi of te poitica scene, a vast grotto from wic its underside can be seen upsidedown or turned insideout' Wit Economie Libidinale (197) Lyotard went a step furter. No critique of Marx, by suc nas as Castoriadis or Baudriard, in te name of a pious cut of creativity or nostagic myt of symboic excange, was of any avai To unmas te desire named Marx', a compete transcription was needed of poitica into ibidina economy, tat woud not srin from te trut tat expoitation itsef was typicay ived - even by te eary industria worers - as erotic enjoyment: masocistic or ysterica deectation in te destruction of pysica eat in mines and factories, or disintegration of persona identity in anonymous sums. Capita was desired by tose it dominated, ten as now. evot against it came ony wen te peasures it yieded became untenabe', and tere was an abrupt sift to new outets But tese ad noting to do wit te traditiona sanctimonies of te Left Just as tere was no aienation invoved in popuar investment in capita, so in disinvestment tere is no ibidina dignity, nor ibidina iberty, nor ibidina fraternity' just te quest for new affective ntensities2 Te arger bacground to Lyotard's transit from a revoution ary sociaism towards a niiist edonism ay, of course, in te evoution of te Fift epubic itsef Te Gauist consensus of te eary sixties ad convinced im tat te woring cass was now essentiay integrated into capitaism Te ferment of te ate sixties gave im ope that generation rater tan cass yout across te word - migt be te arbinger of revot. Te euporic wave of consumerism tat wased over te country in te eary and midseventies ten ed to (widespread) teoriza tions of capitaism as a streamined macinery of desire By 1976 owever, te Sociaist and Communist Partis ad agreed on a Common Programme, and ooed increasingy iey to win te next egisative eections Te prospect of te PCF in government for te rst time since te onset of te Cod War sowed panic in respectabe opinion, prompting a vioent ideo 2 Drive partir de Marx et Freud p. 2 Economie Libidinale Paris 19 74, pp. 136-138.
C R YS T A L L IZ A T I O N
ogica counteroffensive Te resut was te roceting to prom inence of te Noueaux Philosophes a group of former soixantehuitard pubicists, patronized by te media and te Eyse In te vicissitudes of Lyotard's poitica trajectory, tere ad aways been one constant. Socialisme ou Barbarie was vee menty anticommunist from te rst, and watever is oter canges of mood or conviction, tis remained an ineradicabe eement in is outoo In 197 e conded to started fends in America tat is Presidentia coice was Giscard, since Mitterrand reied on Communist support. As te 1978 eections approaced, wit te danger of actua PCF participation in government, e terefore coud not but fee ambivaence towards te Noueaux Philosophes. On te one and, ter furious attacs on communism were sautary; on te oter, tey were visiby a igtweigt coterie caugt up in a compromising embrace wit ofcia power Lyotard's intervention in te pre eectora debates, te sardonic diaogue Instructions Paennes (1977), accordingy bot defended and derided tem. It was ere tat e rst formuated te idea of metanarratves tat was to gure so prominenty in The Postmodern Condition and made its rea target c{ysacear. Just one master narrative' ay at te origin of te term: Marxism Fortunatey, its ascendancy was now at ast eroded by te innumerabe itte tidings from te Guag It was true tat in te West tere existed a grand narrative of capita too; but it was preferabe to tat of te Party, since it was godess' - capitaism as no respect for any one story', for its narrative is about everytng an noting' In te same year as tis poitica manifesto, L yotard set an aestetic canon Les Transformateurs Duchamp pr te creator of te Large Glass and Gien as te critica arts te nonisomorpic, of incongruences and incommensurali ties. efending once again is account of te jouissance of te eary industria proetariat in its grinding ot, Lyotard contended: 2 Instructions Paennes Paris 1977, p. 55 yotards rst use o the terms grand arrative ad metanarrative' identies their reerent without urther ado as Marism pp. 2223.
T H E O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D E R NI NI T Y
If you describe te worers' fate excusivey in terms of aienation, expoitation and poverty, you present tem as vic tims wo only suffered passivey te wole process and wo only acquired claims for ater reparations (socialism). You miss te essential, wic isn't te growt of te forces of production at any price, nor even te deat of many worers, as Marx often says wit a cynicism adorned wit arwinism. You miss te energy tat later spread troug te arts and sciences, te jubilaton and te pain of discovering tat you can od out (ive, wor, tin, be affected) in a pace were it ad been judged senseess to do so. Indifferent to sense, ardness.' It was tis ardness, a mecanical asceticism', of wic ucamp's sexua enigmas too a reading. Te Glass is te " deay of te te nude; Gien its advance. It's too soon to see te woman aying ersef bare on te Glass and it's too late on te stage of te Gien. Te performer is a compex transformer a battery of metamorposis macines. Tere is no art, because tere are no objects. Tere are ony transformations, redistributions of energy. Te T e wo worrdd is a mutipic mu tipicity ity of apparatuses tat transform units of energy energy into into one oter. oter.'' 3 0 Te T e immediate interand interand beind The Postmodern Condiion was tus muc more intensey carged tan te document composed for te Qubecois state itsef. Te report on now edge' eft te two questions of most abiding concern to L yotard suspended. Wat were te impications of postmodernity for art and poitics? Lyotard was quicy forced to repy to te rst, were e found imsef in an awward position. Wen e e wrote The Postmodern Condition e was quite unaware of te depo ment of te term in arcitecture, peraps te ony art on wic e ad never written, wit an aestetic meaning antitetica to everyting tat e vaued. Tis ignorance coud not ast ong. By 198 e was apprised of Jencs's construction of te postmodern, and its widespread reception in Nort America. His reaction was acrid. Such postmodernism was a surrep titious restoration of a degraded reaism once patronized by Nazism and Stainism and now recyced as a cynica ececticism Transformateurs ormateurs Ducha Du champ mp Paris 1977, pp. 23, 3 9-40. -40. 30 Les Transf 30
CRYSTALLIZATION
by contemporary capital: everyting te avantgardes ad fougt against. 3 Wat tis slacening of aestetic tension promised was not just te end of experimentation, but a cancellation of te impetus of modern art as suc, wose drive ad aways come from te gap between te conceivable and te presentable, tat Kant dened as te sublime as distinct from te merely beauti fu. Wat ten coud autentic postmodern art be? Preempted by a usage e execrated, Lyotard's answer was lame. Te postmodern did not come after te modern, but was a motion of interna interna renewal witin witin it from te rst - tat current current wose wose response to te sattering of te rea was te opposite of nostagia for its unity: rater a jubilant acceptance of te freedom of invention it released. But tis was no luxuriance. Te avantgarde art Lyotard singed out for approva a year later later was Minimaism Minimaism - te te subime subime as privation. Wat buoye buoyedd te art maret, by contrast, was te itsc celebrated by Jencs: amalgamation, ornamentation, ornamentation, pastice pastice - fattering attering te te "taste "tas te of a pubic p ubic tat can ave no n o taste'. 32 If Lyotard' Lyotard'ss probem in teorizing teorizing a postmodern postmo dern art ay in te turn of aestetic trends away from te direction e ad aways campioned campioned - forcing im to decare artistic postmodernity post modernity a perennia principe, rater tan periodic category, in patent contradiction of is account of scientic postmodernity as a stage stage of cognit cognitive ive development - is difc difcut utyy in const construct ructing ing a postmodern poitics became in due course anaogous. Here te discomture came from te course of istory itsef. In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard ad announced te ecipse o a grand narratives. Te one wose deat e above al sou to certify was, of course, cassical sociaism. In subsequent e woud extend te ist of grand narratives tat were defunct: Cristian redemption, Enigtenment progress, ian sirit, omantic unity, Nazi racism, Keynesian equiibriu 3 pose
a questio: qu'estce que le postmodere?', i Le Postmoderne expliqu aux enfants Paris 1986 pp. 29-33. Eglish traslatio, Aswerig the Questio: What is Postmodeism?' appeded to The Postmodern Condition pp. 7376. 2 e sublime et l'avat l 'avatgard garde' e' (Berli (Berli lecture 1 98 9833 ) LInhumain Causeries sur le Temps Paris 1988, p. 117. 3
T H E O RI R I G NS N S O F P O S T M O D E R NI NI T Y
But te commanding referent always remained communism Wat, en, of capitalism? At te time Lyotard was writing, at te tailend of te Carter era, te West - ten enterin enteringg a severe recession recession - was in far from boisterous ideological ideological mood. Hence e could uggest wit at any rate a semblance of plausibility tat contemporary capitalism was validated by no more tan a performance principle, wic was a mere sadow of rea legitimation Wit Wit te sarp sarp cange of conjuncture conjuncture in te eigt eigties ies - te euporia of te eagan boom, and te triumpant ideoogical offensive of te igt, culminating in te collapse of te Soviet boc at te end of te decade - tis position lost all credibilit credibility y Far from grand narratives aving disappeared, it ooed as if for te rst time in istory te world was falling under te sway of te most most grandiose of all - a single, single, universa universall story story of liberty liberty and prosperity, te globa victory of te maret How was Lyotard to adjust to tis uncovenanted development? His initia reaction was to insist tat capitalism, toug it migt seem to represent a universal nality of istory, in fact destroyed any since it embodied no iger vaues tan mere factual security Capital as no need for legitimation, it prescribes noting, in te strict sense of an obligation, it does not ave to post any normative rue It is present everywere, but as necessity rater tan nality' At best peraps, it concealed a quasinorm saving time': but could tat really be regarded as a universa end?33 Tis was an uncaracteristicay wea note to strie By te end of te nineties, Lyotard ad found a stronger exit from is difcuty Capitaism, e ad started to argue muc earlier, was not to be understood primarily as a socioeconomic penom enon at all Capitalism is, more properly, a gure As a system, capitalism as as its eat source not te labour force but energy itself, pysics (te system is not isolated) As gure, capitalism derives its force from te Idea of innity It can appear in uman experience as te desire for money, te desire for power, or te desire for novelty Al tis can seem very ugly, very 33 Mmoradum sur a lgitimit' (1984) i Le Postmoderne expliqu expl iqu aux enfants enfants p. 94. 32
CRYSTALLIZATION
disquieting. But tese desires are te antropological translation of someting tat is ontologically te "instantiation of innity in te will Tis "instantiation does not tae place according to socia cass Social casses are not pertinent ontoogical categories' 34 Te substitution of istory by ontology was a waystation, owever: witin a few years, Lyotard ad moved to astropysics. Te triump of capitaism over rival systems, e now argued, was te outcome of a process of natural selection tat predated uman life tself. In te incommensurabe vastness of te cosmos, were all bodies are subject to entropy, an aboriginal cance - a contingent constellation of energy forms' - gave rise in one tiny planet to rudimentary living systems Because externa energy was limited, tese ad to compete wit eac oter, in a perpetually fortuitous pat of evolution Eventually, after milions of years, a uman species emerged capable of words and tools; ten various improbable forms of uman aggregation arose, and tey were selected according to tei ability to discover, capture and save sources of enrgy' Afte furter millennia punctuated by te neoitic and industrial revolutions, systems caled liberal democracies' proved tem selves best at tis tas, trouncing communist or islamist compet itors, and moderating ecological dangers. Noting seemed able to stop te deelopment of tis system except te ineluctable extinction of te sun But to meet tis callenge, te system was already deveoping te prosteses tat would alow it to survive after solar sources of energy were wiped out' All contempor ary scientic researc was ultimately woring towards te exodus, four bilion years ence, of a transformed ua species from the earth.
. ,
Wen rst adumbrating tis vision, Lyotard termed it a dcor'3 esort to te language of scenograpy any int of narrative - if at te cost of unwittingly suggest te stylization of te postmodern oterwise ost disied But 34 Appedice svelte a uestio postmodee' (1982), i Tombeau de lintellectuel et autres papiers Paris 984 p. 80. 35 Moralits Postmodernes Paris 1993 pp. 80-86. 36 Billet pour u ouveau dcor' (1985 i Le ostmoderne expliqu aux enfants pp. 131-134.
33
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T H E O R I G I NS O F P O S T M O D E RN I TY
wen competed, e presented it as te unavowed dream te postmodern word dreams about itsef' - a postmodern fabe'. But, e insists, te fabe is reaistic because it recounts te story of a force wic maes, unmaes and remaes reaity'. Wat te fabe depicts is a conlict between two energy processes. One eads to te destruction of a systems, a bodies, iving or not, on our panet and te soar system But witin tis process of entropy, wic is ncessary and continuous, anoter process tat is contingent and discontinuous, at east for a ong time, acts in a contrary sense by increasing differentiation of its systems. Tis movemen cannot at te rst (uness it coud nd a means to refue te sun), but it can escape from catastrope by abandoning its cosmic abitat'. Te utimate motor of capitaism is tus not tirst for prot, or any uman desire: it is rater deveopment as neguentropy. eveopment is not an invention of uman beings. Human beings are an invention of deveopment'.3 Wy is tis not a - quintessentiay modern - grand narrative? Because, Lyotard maintains, it is a story witout istoricity or ope. Te fabe is postmodern because it as no naity in any orizon of emancipation'. Human beings, as witnesses of deve opment, may set teir faces against a process of wic tey are veices. But even eir critiques of deveopment, of its inequa ity, its irreguarity, its fataity, its inumanity, are expressions of deveopment and contribute to it.' Universa energetics eaves no space for patos - ostensiby. Yet Lyotard aso freey describes is story as a tragedy of energy' wic ie Oedipus Rex ends bady', yet aso ie Oedipus at Clonnus aows an utimate remission'.3 Te inteectua fragiity of tis ate construction ardy needs empasis Noting in Lyotard's origina account of meta narratives conned tem to te idea of emancipation - wic was ony one of te two modern discourses of egitimation e sougt to trace. Te postmodern fabe woud sti be a grand narrative, even were it exempt from te teme. But in fact, of course, it is not. Wat ese woud escape to te stars be tan Ue fable postmoderne i Moralits Postmodernes pp. 86-87 Ue fable postmodee' pp 9 193, 87
CRYSTALLIZATION
emancipation from te bounds of a dying eart? More pointedy sti, in te oter - intercangeabe - register of L yotard's narrative, capitaism notoriousy speas te anguage of eman cipation more continuay and condenty tan ever before. Esewere, Lyotard is forced to acnowedge tis. Indeed, e admits: Emancipation is no onger te tas of gaining and imposing iberty from te outside' - rater it is an idea tat te system itsef endeavous to actuaize in most of te areas it covers, suc as wor, taxation, maretpace, famiy, sex, race, scoo, cuture, communication'. Obstaces and resistances ony encourage it to become more open and compex, promoting spontaneous undertaings - and tat is tangibe emancipation'. If te job of te critic is sti to denounce te sortcomings of te system, suc critiques, watever form tey tae, are needed by te system for discarging te tas of emancipation more effectivey'.3 Te postmodern condition, announced as te deat of grand narrative, tus ends wit its a but immorta resurrection in te aegory of deveopment. Te ogic of tis strange dnouement is inscribed in Lyotard's poitica trajectory. From te seventies onwards, so ong as communism existed as an aternative to capitaism, te atter was a esser evi - e coud even sardoni cay ceebrate it as, by contrast, a peasurabe order. Once te Soviet boc ad disintegrated, te egemony of capita became ess paatabe. Its ideoogica triump appeared to vindicate just te nd of egitimating narrative wose obituary Lyotard ad set out to write. ater tan confronting te new reaity on a poitia pane, is soution was a metapysica subimation of it. Suitaby projected into intergaactic space, is origin energetics coud put capitaism into perspective as no more an eddy of a arger cosmic adventure. Te bittersweet tion tis ateration of scae migt offer a former miitant is Te postmodern fabe' did not spe any na reconciiatio wit capita. On te contrary, Lyotard now recovered accents of opposition ong muted in is wor: a denunciation of goba inequaity and cutura obotomy, and scorn for socia democratic reformism, recaing is revoutionary past. But te Mr, golfe systme (1990 i Moralits Postmodernes pp . 35
T H E O R I G I NS O F P O S T M O D E RN I TY
ony resistances to te system tat remained were inward: te reserve of te artist, te indeterminacy of cidood, te sience of t sou.0 Gone was te jubiation of te initia breaage of representation by te postmodern; an invincibe maaise now dened te tone of te time. Te postmodern was meancoy'.4 Frankfur - Mnich The Postmodern Condition was pubised m te autumn of
979. Exacty a year ater, Jrgen Habermas deivered is address Modernity - an Incomplete Project in Franfurt, on te occasion of is award of te Adorno prize by te city faters. Te ecture occupies a pecuiar pace in te discourse of postmodernity. Its substance touces ony to a imited degree on te postmodern; yet te effect was to igigt it as a encefort standard referent. Tis paradoxica outcome was argey, of course, due to Habermass standing in te Ango Saxon word as premier European piosoper of te age But it was aso a function of te critica stance of is intervention For te rst time since te taeoff of te idea of postmodernty in te ate seventies, it received abrasive treatment. If te emerg ence of an inteetua errain typicay requires a negative poe for its productive tension, it was Habermas wo suppied it 40 See, i particular, A l'isu' (1988) ige grae' (1991) ad time est a
terreur (1993) i Moralits Postmodernes; ad Avatpropos de l'humai' (1988) i LInhumain where yotard cofesses The ihumaity of the system ow i the process of cosolidatio, uder the ame of developmet amog others), must ot be cofused with that, iitel secret, of which the soul is hostage To believe, as oce did, that the rst kid of ihumaity ca relay the secod, give it epressio, is a error The effect of the system is rather to cosig what escapes it to oblivio' p 10. More recetly, i a Maimise', yotard reiterates the fable of develomet', but chages register here it aticipates a cotraictio' - for the process of developmet rus couter to the huma desig of emacipatio', although it claims to be at oe with it. To the questio s there ay istace withi us that asks to be emacipated from this supposed emacipatio?' - yotards aswer is the residue' bequeathed by immemorial childhood' to the gesture of witess' i the work of art Un Trait d'Union Paris 1993 p. 9 41 Moralits Postmodernes pp. 93-94. 36
I
CRYSTALLIZATION
However, a misunderstanding as traditionay been attaced to is text. Widey read as a response to Lyotards wor, because of te proximity of dates, in fact it was probaby written in ignorance of te atter. Habermas was reacting rater to te Venice Biennae exibition of 1980, te sowcase for Jencss version of postmodernism42 - just wat Lyotard, for is part, ad been unaware of wen producing is own. An ironic chassecrois of ideas stood at te origin of tese excanges. Habermas began by acnowedging tat te spirit of aestetic moderniy, wit its new sense of time as a present carged wit a eroic future, born in te epoc of Baudeaire and reacing a cimax in ada, ad visiby waned; te avantgardes ad aged. Te idea of postmodernity owed its power to tis incontestabe cange. From it, owever, neoconservative teorists ie anie Be ad drawn a perverse concusion. Te antinomian ogic of modernist cuture, tey argued, ad come to permeate te texture of capitaist society, weaening its mora bre and undermining its wor discipine wit a cut of unrestrained subjectiviy, at te very moment tat tis cuture ad ceased to be a source of creative art Te resut treatened to be a edonistic metdown of a once onourabe socia order, tat coud ony be ceced by a reviva of reigious fait in a word profaned, a return of te sacred. Tis, Habermas observed, was to bame aestetic modernism for wat was a too obviousy te commercia ogic of capitaist modernization itsef e rea aporias of cutura modernity ay esewere Te Engtenment project of modernity ad two strands One was te differentiation for te rst time of science, moraity and art - no onger fused in a reveaed reigion autonomous vauesperes, eac governed by its own norms trut, justice, beauty Te oter was te reease of te potent 4 Die Modere -
ei uvolledees Projekt', Kleine politische Schriften -, rakfurt 1981 p 444. This Germa address was sigicatly loger ad sharpe i toe tha the Eglsh versio delivered by Habermas as a James ecture i New ork the followig year, published i New German Critique Witer 1981 pp 3-15. ts opeig remarks ask the blut questio s the mode as outdated as the postmoders would have it? Or is the postmode itself, proclaimed from so may sides, merely phoy [sic] ?'. 3
T H E O R I G I NS O F P O S T M O D E R NI T Y
of tese newy iberated domains into te subjective fux of daiy ife, interacting to enric it. Tis was te programme tat ad gone astray. For instead of enterng into te common resources of everyday communication, eac spere ad tended to deveop into an esoteric speciaism, cosed to te wod of ordinary meanings. In te course of te nineteent century art became a critica encave increasingy aienated from society, even fetis izing its own distance from it. In te eary twentiet century, revoutionary avantgardes ie surreaism ad attempted to demois te resutant division between art and ife by spectacu ar acts of aestetic wi But teir gestures were futie: no emancipation fowed from destruction of forms or desubima tion of meanings - nor coud ife ave ever been transgured by te absorption of art aone. Tat required a concurrent recovery of te resources of science and moraity too, and te interpay of a tree to animate te ifeword. Te project of modernity ad yet to be reaized. But te outrigt attempt to negate it - a counse of despair - ad faied. Te autonomy of te vauesperes coud not be rescinded, on pain of regression. Te need was sti to reappropriate te expert cutures eac ad produced into te anguage of common experience. For tis, owever, tere must be barriers to protect te spontaneity of te ifeword from te incursions of maret forces and of bureaucratic administration. But, Habermas goomiy conceded, te cances for tis today are not very good. More or ess everywere in te entire Western word a cimate as deveoped tat furters currents critica of cutura modernism'.43 No ess tan tree distinct brands of conserv tism were now on offer. Te antimodernism of young' conserv atives appeaed to arcaic, dionysiac powers against a 43 To his German liseners, Habermas epline ha a coniion o a iereniae
recopling o moern clre wih everyay prais' was no s he abiliy o he lieworl o evelop insiions capable o limiing he inernal ynamics o he economic and aminisraive acionsysems b also he giing o social moern izaion along other noncapialis pahs - wenn auch ie gesellschaliche Moer nisierng in andere nichkapialisische Bahnen gelenk wren kann'. Speakng o his American aience Habemas iscreely roppe his clase, leaving only is anoyne penan Compare Die Moerne - ein nvollenees Proek', p. 462 wih Moerniy - an ncomplee Proec', p. 38
CRYSTALLIZATION
rationaization, in a tradition running from Bataie to Foucaut. Te premodernism of od' conservatives caed for a substan tive cosmoogica etics of quasiaristoteian stamp, aong ines intimated by Leo Strauss. Te postmodernism of neo conservatives' wecomed te reication of separate vaue speres into cosed domains of expertise armoured against any demands of te ifeword, wit conceptions of science cose to tose of te eary Wittgenstein, of poitics borrowed from Car Scmitt, of art ain to tose of Gottfried Benn. In Germany, a uring bend of anti and premodernism aunted te counter cuture, wie an ominous aiance of pre and postmodernism was taing sape in te poitica estabisment. Habermas's argument, compact in form, was neverteess a curious construction. His denition of modernity, uncriticay adopted from Weber, essentiay reduced it to mere forma differentiation of vauesperes - to wic e ten subjoined, as an Enigtenment aspiration, teir reconguration as inter communicating resources in te ifeword, an idea foreign to Weber and ard to detect in te Aufklrung (as distinct from Hege) itsef. Wat is cear enoug, owever, is tat te project' of modernity as e setced it is a contradictory amagam of two opposite principes: speciaization and popuarization. How was a syntesis of te two at any stage to be reaized? So dened, coud te project ever be competed? But if in tis sense it oos ess unnised tan unfeasibe, te reason ies in Habermas's socia teory as a woe. For te tensions of aestetic modernity reproduce in minia ture te strains in te structure of is account of capitaist societies t arge. On te one and, tese are governed systems' of impersona coordination, mediated by te ed mecanisms of money and power, wic cannot be any coective agency, on pain of regressive of separate institutiona orders - maret, administration, a, etc. On te oter and, te ifeword' tat is integrated y intersubjective norms, in wic communicative rater tan instrumenta action prevais, needs to be protected from coo nization' by te systems - witout, owever, encroacing on tem. Wat tis duaism rues out is any form of pop uar sovereignty, in eiter a traditiona or radica sense. Te 39
T HE O R IG I NS O F P O S T M O D E RN I TY
sefgovernmen of freey associaed producers is off e agenda. Wa is ef is e veeiy of an impossibe reconciiaion of wo unequa domains. For e Habermas of The Theory of Com municative Action e pubic spere' woud be e democraic sie of an anneaing beween e wo - ye one wose srucura decine e raced ong ago. In Modernity - an Incomplete Project ere is no menion of i. Bu i as is eco in is singe posiive exampe of wa a reappropriaion of ar in everyday exisence mig oo ie e porraya of young worers in prewar Berin discussing e Pergamon aar in Peer Weiss's Aesthetics of Resistance reminiscen of e pebeian' equiva ens of e bourgeois pubic spere evoed in e preface o is famous sudy of e aer. Bu, of course, is is no ony a cive iusraion. Te aeseic reeased is of cassica aniquiy, no moderniy; se in a ime, a a, before e avangardes ad aged. Te mal a propos ca be aen as an index of e uderying sippage in Habermas's argumen. Tere is a basic disjuncure beween e penomenon i sars by regisering - e apparen decine of aeseic modernism - and e eme i goes on o deveop - e overspeciaizaion of vauesperes. Te dynamic of science as ceary no been affeced by e aer. Wy soud ar be? Habermas aemps no answer: in fac, does no even pose e quesion. Te resu is a yawning gap beween probem and souion. Te waning of experimena viaiy ies a one end of e address, e reanimaion of e ifeword a e oer, and ere is viruay no reasoned connexion beween em. Te misconsrucion as is dispaced sympom in e fancifu axonomy wi wic i ends. Waever e criicisms o be made of e ineecua descen from Baaie o Foucau (ere are many), i canno by any srec of e imaginaion be described as conservaive'. Viceversa, owever neoconservaive e progeny of Wigensein, Scmi or Benn, no o spea of iners ie Be, o casigae em as veices of posmodern ism' is pecuiary aberran: ey ave ypicay been among is erces criics. To afx e abe o suc foes was anamoun o obnubiaing e posmodern aogeer. Tis was no o be Habermas's as word on e subjec, owever. Less noiced, bu more subsania was e ecure e 40
CRYSTALIZATION
deivered on Modern and Posmodern Arciecure' in Munic a year aer. Here Haber mas engaged wi e rea srongod of posmodern aeseic eory, dispaying an impressive now edge and passion abou is subjec. He sared by observing a e modern movemen in arciecure - e ony unifying sye since neocassicism - sprang from e spiri of e avangarde, ye ad succeeded in creaing a cassic radiion rue o e inspiraion of occidena raionaism. Today, i was under widespread aac for e monsrous urban big of so many poswar ciies. Bu is e rea face of modern arciecure reveaed in ese arociies, or are ey disorions of is rue spiri'?44 To answer is quesion, i was necessary o oo bac a e origins of e movemen. In e nineeen cenury, e indusria revouion ad posed ree unprecedened caenges o e ar of arciecure. I required e design of new inds of buidings - bo cuura (ibraries, scoos, operaouses) and economic (raiway saions, deparmen sores, wareouses, worers' ousing); i afforded new ecniques and maerias (iron, see, concree, gass); and i imposed new socia imperaives (mare pressures, adminisraive pans), in a capiais mobiizaion of a urban iving condiions'.45 Tese demands overwemed e arciec ure of e ime, wic faied o produce any coeren response o em, disinegraing insead ino ececic isoricism or grim uiiy. eacing o is faiure in e eary wenie cenury, e modern movemen overcame e syisic caos and faci ious symboism of ae Vicorian arciecure, and se ou o ransfom e oaiy of e bui environmen, from e mo monuena and expressive edices o e smaes and - pracica. In doing so, it met the rst two challenges of the nd revolution triumphantly, with extraordinary formal
_
But it was never able to master the third. Architectural modenism, virtually from the start, vastly overestimated its ability t
Moerne
n posmoerne Archiekr', collece in Die Neue Unbersicht lichkeit rankr 1985, p. 15; English ranslaion in The New Conservatism Cambrige, Mass 1989 p 8. Moerne n posmoerne Archiekr', p. 1 8. 4
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resape te urban environment: a miscalculation famously expressed in te ubris of te early, utopian Le Corbusier. After te war, tis strain of naivet rendered it elpless before te pressures of capitalist reconstruction, tat led to te desolate cityscapes for wic it later ad to soulder te blame. At te end of tis itinerary, ay te baclas of te present scene: a conservative reversion o neoistoricism (Terry), a vitalist quest for community arcitecture (Kier), and te lamboyant stage sets of postmodernism proper (Hollein or Venturi). In all, te unity of form and function tat ad driven te project of modernism was now dissolved. Tis was certainly a more telling account of te fate of aestetic modernity, in te most socially sensitive of all te arts, tan te Franfurt lecture. But te Munic address, toug muc ricer and more precise, still posed te same underlying problem. Wat ad ultimately caused te downfall in public esteem of te modern movement in arcitecture? On te surface, te answer was clear: its inability to resist or outlan te constraints of postwar money and power: te contradictions of capitalist modernization', as Habermas at one point puts it.4 But ow far was arciectural modernism - wittingly or unwit tingly - complicit wit tese imperatives? Habermas accords it some responsibility, for misunderstanding its own original dynamic. Historically, te roots of modernism lay in tree responses o cubism in te eld of pure design: ussian con structivism, e Stijl, and te circle around Le Corbusier. Experi mental form engendered practical function, rater tan te oter way round. But as te Bauaus acquired dominance, it forgot its origins and misrepresented te new arcitecture as functionalist'. In te end, tis confusion lent itself all too readily to xploitation by developers and bureaucrats, commis sioning and nancing buildings tat were functional to tem. But tis unseeing betrayal of itself, owever serious, was not te efcient cause of te impasse of modernism Tat lay in te insuperable constraints of its social environment. At rst glance, Habermas ere appeared to be indicting te rutless speculative logic of postwar capitalism, scattering brutal ofce blocs and bi., p. 42
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•
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jerrybuilt igrises across te urban landscape. If tis were so, ten a radical social reversal could be imagined, in wic te dictates of prot were swept away and te urban fabric ealed by te collective enabling of an arcitecture of selter, sociabil ity, beauty. Tis, owever, is just wat Habermas effectively rules out. For te ultimate error of modernism, e explains, was not so muc lac of viglance towards te maret, as too muc trust in te plan. Not te commands of capital, but necessities of modernity - te structural differentiation of society, rater tan te pursuit of rent or prot - condemned it to frustration. Te utopia of preconceived forms of life tat ad already inspired te designs of Owen and Fourier could not be realized, not only because of a opeless underestimation of te diversity, complexity and variability of modern societies, but also because modernized societies wi teir functional interdependencies go beyond te dimensions of living conditions tat could be gauged by te imagination of te planner'. Here, in oter words, recurs te scema traced by te Franfurt address, derived from te same paralysed dualism set up by Habermas's teory of communication action: inviolable systems and inoperative lifeworlds. But tere at least te possibility of some recovery of leeway by te latter is nominally ept open. Here, Habermas draws te consequences from is premises more implacably. It was not just modernist dreams of a umane city tat were impracticable. Te very idea of a city at all is condemned to obsolescence by te functional exigencies of impersonal coordination, tat render any attempt to recreate coerent urban meaning futile. Once, te city could be arcit turall designed and mentally represented as a abitat'. But wit industrialism te city became abstract systems wic could no longer be captured in an intelligible presence'. 4 From te beginning, proletarian ousing could never be rated into te metropolis; and as time went on, proliferat subzones of commercial or administrative activity dispersed i yet furter into an ungraspable, featureless maze. Te grapics bi. p
8 bi., p 43
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of company trademars and neon advertisements demonstrate tat differentiation must tae place by means oter tan te formal language of arcitecture'. Tere is no turning bac from tis fate. Urban aggloerations ave outgrown te od concept of te city we still eep in our earts. However, tat is neiter te failure of modern arcitecture, nor of any oter arcitec ture'.4 It is written into te logic of socia deveopment, beyond capital or labour, as a requirement of modernity itsef. Not nancial accumulation but systemic coordination, tat cannot be canceled, renders urban space indeciperable. Here te patos of Habermas's later teory, wic simu taneously reafrms te ideals of te Enligtenment and denies tem any cance of realization, nds its purest expression: wat migt be called, invertig Gramsci's formula, eudaemonism of te intelligence, defeatism of te wil. Habermas ends by expressing a guarded sympaty for vernacuar currents in arcitecture tat encourage popuar participation in design projects, as a trend werein some of te impulses of te Modern Movement defensively survive. But - just as in te wider counterculture - nostalgia for dedifferentiated forms of exist ence bestows on tese tendencies an air of antimodernism'50: teir tacit appea to a Volksgeist recalls te dire example, owever distinct in monumental intention, of Nazi arcitecture. If Habermas concedes, witout entusiasm, tat tere is a good deal of trut' in tis form of opposition, wat e does not cannot - say is tat tere is any ope in it. Tere, in te autumn of 1981 matters stood. Tirty years after a sense of it was rst aired by Oson, te postmodern ad crystallized as common referent and competing discourse. In its origins, te idea was aways brused by associations beyond te West - Cina, Mexico, Turey; even later, beind Hassan or Lyotard lay Egypt and Algeria, and te anomaly of Quebec. Space was inscribed in it from te start. Cuturay, it pointed beyond wat ad become of modernism; but in wat direction, tere was no consensus, ony a set of oppositions going bac to 49 bi, p . bi., p . 44
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e Ons; and in wat arts or sciences, only disconnected interests and crisscrossing opinions. Te coincident interven tions of Lyotard and Habermas for te rst time sealed te eld wit te stamp of pilosopical autority. But teir own contributions were eac srangely indecisive. Te original bac ground of bot tiners was Marxist, but it is striing ow ltte of it tey brougt to teir accounts of postmodernity. Neiter attempted any real istorical interpretation of te postmodern, capable of determining it in time or space. Instead, tey offered more or less loating or vacant signiers as te mar of its appearance: te delegitimation of grand narratives (dateless) for Lyotard, te colonization of te lifeworld (wen was it not coonized?) for Habermas. Paradoxically, a concept by denition tempora lacs periodic weigt in eiter. Nor is te aze tat enelops te term as social development dispelled by its usage as aestetic category Bot Lyotard and Habermas were deeply attaced to te principles of ig modernism; but far from tis commitment enabling tem to bring postmodernism into sarper focus, it seems to ave occluded it. ecoiling from unwecome evidence of wat it migt mean, Lyotard was reduced to denying tat it was oter tan an inner fold of te modernism itsef. Habermas, more willing to engage wit te arts in view, could acnowedge a passage from te modern to te postmodern, but was scarcely able to explain it. Neiter ventured any exploration of postmod ern forms to compare wit te detaied discussions of Hassan or Jencs. Te net effect was a discursive dispersion: on te one and, piosopica overview witout signicant aestetic con ten, on te oter aestetic insigt witout coerent teoretic orizon. tmatic crystalization ad occurred - te posm ern was now, as Habermas put it, on te agenda' - wh" inteectual integration. Te eld, owever, did dispay anoter ind of unity: it ws ideologically consistent. Te idea of te postmodern, as it too old in tis conjuncture, was in one way or anoter an appanage of te igt. Hassan, lauding play and indeterminacy as al mars of te postmodern, made no secret of is aversion to te sensibiity tat was teir antitesis: te iron yoe of te Left. Jencs celebrated te passing of te modern as te iberation of 45
T H E O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D ER N IT Y
consumer coice, a quietus to planning in a world were painters could trade as freely and globally as baners. For Lyotard te very parameters of te new condition were set by te discrediting of socialism as te last grand narratve ultimate version of an emancipation tat no longer eld mean ing. Habermas, resisting allegiance to te postmodern, from a position still on te Lef, neverteless conceded te idea to te igt, construing it as a gure of neoonservatism. Common to all was subscription to te principles of wat Lyotard - once te most radical - called liberal democracy, as te unsurpass able orizon of te time Tere could be noing but capitalism. Te postmodern was a sentence on alternative illusions.
46
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Suc was te situation wen Fredric Jameson gave is rst lecture on postmodernism in te fall of 98. Two wors ad establised im as te world's leading Marxist literary critic, altoug e ad aready made te terms too restrictive. Marx ism and Form (97) was an origina reconstruction, troug studies of Lucs, Bloc, Adorno, Benjamin and Sartre, of virtually te complete intellectual canon of Western Marxism between History and Class Consciousness and te Critique of Dialectical Reason from te standpoint of a contemporary aestetics true to its manysided legacy. The PrisonHouse of Language (97) offered a complementary account of te linguistic mode developed by Saussure and its projections in ussian formalism and Frenc structuralism, concluding wit te semiotics of Bartes and Greimas: an admiring but stringent survey of te merits and limits of a syncronic tadition tat se its face against te temptations of temporality. Sorcs
Jameson's own commitments as a critic were rm and Tey are peraps best captured by is Afterword to Aestheti and Politics (976), a volume collecting te classic debates ta ad ranged Lucs, Brect, Bloc, Benjamin and Adorno aainst eac oter. For Jameson, writing just as notions of postmodernism were beginning to circulate in literature depart ments, wat was at stae in tese excanges was te aestetic confict between reaism and modernism, wose navigation and 4
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renegotiation is still unavoidabe for us today'. If eac retained its trut, yet neiter could any onger be accepted as suc, te empasis of Jameson's account fe, subty but umistaeaby, on te unregarded side of te opposition. Wie noting te deciencies of Lucs's attempt to proong traditiona forms of reaism into te present, e pointed out tat Brect coud not be taen simpy as a modernist antidote, given is own ostiity to purey forma experimentation. Brect and Benjamin ad indeed ooed towards a revolutionary art capabe of appropri ating modern tecnoogy to reac popuar audiences - wie Adorno ad more speciousy contended tat te forma ogic of ig modernism itsef, in its very autonomy and abstraction, was te ony true refuge of poitics. But te postwar deveop ment of consumer capitaism ad struc away te possibility of eiter te entertainments industry mocing te opes of Brect or Benjamin, wie an estabisment cuture mummied te exempa of Adorno. Te resut was a present in wic bot aternatives of reaism and modernism seem intoerabe to us reaism because its forms revive an oder experience of a ind of ife tat is no longer wit us in te aready decayed future of consumer society; modernism because its contradictions ave in practice proved more acute tan tose of reaism'. Precisey ere, it migt be tougt, ay an opening for postmodernism as te art of te age. Wat is striing in retrospect, owever, is not so muc tat tis resou tion is avoided. It is considered and rejected. An aestetic of novety today - aready entroned as te dominant critica and forma ideoogy - must see desperatey to renew itsef by ever more rapid rotations of its own axis, modernism seeing to become postmodernism witout ceasing to be modern.' Te signs of suc invoution were te return of gurative art, as a representation of images rater tan tings in potoreais, and te reviva of intrigue in ction, wit a pastice of cassica narratives. Jameson's concusion was a calcuated deance of tis ogic, turning its terms against itsef In circumstances ie 1 Relections in Conclsion' to Ernst Bloch et al. Aesthetc and Poltcs onon
1977 p. 196 ; reprinte as Relections on the Brecht-kcs Debate', in The Ideologes ofTheo Vl , Minneapolis 19 88 p. 1 33 48
CAPTURE
these, there is some question whether the utimate renewal of modernism, the na diaectica subversion of the now automa tized conventions of an aesthetic of perpetual revolution, might not smpy be . . reaism itsef!' Since the estranging techniques of modernsm had degenerated into standardized conventions of cultural consumption, it was their habit of fragmentation' that now tsef needed to be estranged in some freshy totalizing art The debates of the interwar period thus had a paradoxical esson for the present In an unexpected dnouement, it may be Lukcs - wrong as he might have been in the 1 9 0s - who has the provisiona last word for us today' The contradictory egacy of those years leaves contemporaries with a precise but impon derabe task. It cannot of course tel u s what our conception of reasm ought to be; yet ts study makes it impossible for us not to feel the obigation to reinvent one'2 Jameson's initial gimpse of postmodernism thus tended to see it as the sign of a kind of inner deiquescence within modernism, the remedy for which ay in a new reaism, yet to be imagned. The tensions within this position found further and sti more pointed expression in the programmatic essay he ubshed on The Ideoogy of the Text' at virtuay the same tme. For this critica intervention opens with the words: A the straws in the wind seem to conrm the widespread feeing that "modern times are now over and that some fundamenta divide, some basic coupure or qualitative eap, now separates us decisiey from what used to be the new word of the eary twenteth century, of triumphant modernism'. Among the phenomena that testied to some irrevocabe distance from the immediate ast' aongside the role of computers, of of dtente, and others was postmodernism in terature art' Al such shifts, Jaeson remarked, tended to ideooges of change, usuay apoogetic in cast, where a capabe of connectng the current great transformation' to longrange destiny of our socioeconoic system' was needed3 2
Aesthetics and Politics, pp. 21 -213 ; The Ideologies of Theo Vol 2, Minnea polis 198 8, pp 1 45-147. 3 The Ideology of the Text', Salmagundi, No 3132, Fall 1975Winter 1 9 76 pp 204-205; revised version, The Ideologies of Theory, Vol 1 pp. 17-18. 49
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One suc ideology, of particular interest and inluence, was te current idea of textuality. Taing Bartes's study of Balzac's novella Sarrasine as exem plary of te new style of literary analysis - Bartes imself as a fevercart' of successive intellectual fasions - Jameson argued tat it could be read as a ind of replay of te realis modernism controversy Transformed by Bartes into an oppo sition between te legible and te scriptible, te dualty encour aged censorious judgements of realist narratives, wose moralism functioned as compensation for an inability to situate formal differences in a diacronic istory, witout ideological praise or blame Te best antidote to suc evaluations was to istoricize te binary opposition, by adding a tird term' For everyting canges, te moment we envisage a "before to realism itself' mediaeval tales, renaissance novellas, wic reveal te peculiar modernity of nineteent century forms temselves, as a unique and unrepeatable veicle of te cultural revolution needed to adapt uman beings tote new conditions of industrial existence n tis sense, realim and modernism must be seen as specic and determinate istorical expressions of te type of socioeconomic structures to wic tey corre spond, namely classical capitalism and consumer capitalism' f tis was not te place for a full Marxist account of tat sequence, it certainly is te moment to square accounts wit te ideology of modenism wic as gven its title to te present essay' 4 Te signicance of tis passage was to ie in its revson Jameson's supple and ingenious critique of Bartes neerteless left a detectable lacuna between its initial premise and suc conclusion For Te deology of te Text' ad started by registering a fundamental divide between te present and te time of modernism, now ed over' f tat intuition was rigt, ow could one of te symptoms of tis cange, te idea of textuality, be little more tan an ideology of wat preceded it? t was tis logical gap tat, wen e revised te essay for boo publication twelve years later, Jameson moved to close Here, retrospectively, can be located wit great precision te he Ideology of he ex , No 3132, pp. 234, 242
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i
tesold to be cossed fo a tu to te postmode. eletg te passa ge above, e ow wote: Te attempt to usettle ts seemgly eadcable dualsm by add a td te m , te fom of some classcal o pecaptalst aatve poved to ave oly patal success, modfyg Bates's wog cate go es but ot s fudaeta socal sceme et us eefoe attempt to dsplace ts last a de et wa y, by toducg a td tem as t wee at te ote ed of ts tempoal spectum. Te cocept of posmodernm fact copoates al te featues of te Batesa aestetc'. s was te vew tat, tatalzgly close, stll emaed ust out of eac te late sevetes Ote tets of te peod estate at te same fod Wat eabled ameso to mae te passage wt suc io at te Wtey delveg a compete teoy, vtually at a stoe a ew yeas late? Some of te souces of te cage decto wee late to be oted by ameso mself otes ema atte fo coectue Te st ad most potat lay s w tal sese of te ovety of postwa captalsm Te vey st pages of Maxism and orm stessed te sdeg of all otuty wt e past by te ew modes of ogazao of capal Te eaty wt ch te ast ctcsm of te s ad to dea was tat o a smple Eope ad Ameca, wc o oge exst Sc a wod ad moe commo wt e lfefoms of eale etes ta t does wt o ow . e ecedg of cass coct wt te metopos wle volece w as poected wtout t eomous wegt f advetsg ad meda atasy sppessg te eates of dvs ad explotato te dscoexo of pvate ad pc exstece al ts ceated a socety wtot pecedet psycologcal tems, may say tat as a sevce ecoomy ae ecefot so emoved fom te eales poducto ad wo tat abt a deam wold of atcal stmul ad televsed expe ece eve ay pevos civlizato ave te geat metapys cal peoccpatos, te fdameal qestos of beg ad of te meag of lfe, seemed so uttey emote ad ess' Th doog o(ho V p Wte he ae eghes. Mxm Fo Prceo 1, x-
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Here, rigt from te start, can be seen te origins of temes tat were to gure so largely in Jameson's later wor on postmodernism. Two inluences, by is own account elped to develop tem, enabling im to stage eac to quite new effect in te eigties. One was te publication of Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism wic ofered te rst systematic teory of te istory of capital to appear since te war, providing te basis empirical and conceptual - for understanding te present as a qualitatively new conguration in te trajectory of tis mode of production. Jameson was to express is debt to tis pat breaing wor on mny occasions. A second - lesser, toug still signicant - stimulus came from Baudrillard's writing on te role of te simulacrum in te cultural imaginary of contem porary capitalism. Tas a line of tining Jameson ad anticipated, but Baudrillard's time in San iego wen Jameson was teacing tere certainly ad an impact on im. Te difference, of course, is tat by tis date Baudrillard - originally close to te Situationists - veemently dismissed te Marxist legacy tat Mandel set outo develop. Anoter ind of catalyst can probably be traced to Jameson's departure for Yale at te end of te seventies. For tis, of course, was te university wose Art and Arcitecture building, designed by Paul udolp, doubling as dean of te scool of arcitecture, ad been singled out by Venturi as an epitome of te null brutalism into wic te Modern Movement ad declined, and were Venturi, Scully and Moore all taugt temselves. Jameson tus found imself in te vortex of arci tectural conlicts between te modern and te postmodern. n goodumouredly recording tat tis was te art tat awaene For amesons acknowledgement of these sources see Marxism and Postmodern
ism in The Cultural Turn Selected Writings on the Postmodern London-New York 1998 p. 34-35. Baudrillard presents a special case for any genealogy of the postmodern For athough his ideas certainly contributed to its crystalliation and his style can be regarded as paradigmatic of its form he himsef has never theorized postmodernism and his single extended pronouncement on it is a virulent repudiation see he Anorexic Ruins in D Kamper and C Wulf (eds) Looking Back at the End of the World New York 1989 pp 4142 his is a thinker whose temper for better or worse is incapable of assent to any notion with collective acceptation. 52
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im from dogmatic slumbers', Jameson no doubt refers to tis setting. t migt be better to say tat it released im for te visual. Up to te eigties, Jameson ad concentrated is atten tion all but exclusively on literature. Te turn to a teory of te postmodern was, at te same stroe, to be an arresting sift to te range of arts - nearly te full range - beyond it. Tis involved no drift of political moorings. n te immediate case of te built environment, e ad a signicant resource to and witin te legacy of Western Marxism in te wor of Henri Lefebvre - anoter guest in California. Jameson was peraps te rst outside France to mae good use of Lefebvre's corpus of suggestive ideas on te urban and spatial dimensions of post war capitalism; as e was later quic to register te formidable arcitectural writing of te Venetian critic Manfredo Tafuri, a Marxist of more Adornian stamp. Finally tere was peraps te direct provocation posed by Lytard imself. Wen an Englis translation of La Condition Postmoderne was at lengt ready in 198, Jameson was ased to write an introduction to it. Lyotard's assault on meta narratives migt ave been aimed specically at im. For just a year before e ad publised a major wor of literary teory, The Political Unconscious wose central argument was te most eloquent and express claim for Marxism as a grand narrative ever made. Only Marxism can give us an adequate sense of te essential mystery of te cultural past', e wrote a mystery [tat] can only be reenacted if te uman adventure is one'. Only us could suc longdead issues as a tribal tran sumance, a teological controversy, clases in te polis duels in nineteent century parliaments, come alive again. Te matters can recover teir urgency for us only if tey are r" witin te unity of a single great collective story; only owever disguised and symbolic a form, tey are seen as a single fundamental teme - for Marxism, te collect struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessit only if tey are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unnised plot'. Wen Lyotard launced is attac, no Marx ist ad ever actually presented Marxism as in essence a narrative 8 Th Political Unconscious Ithaca 19 81 , pp 19-20.
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- it was more commonly understood as an analyti. But two years later, as if on demand, Jameson offered exactly wat Lyotard ad supposed. But if in tis sense he Postmodern Condition must, wen e came upon it, ave been te most direct callenge to Jameson conceivable, anoter side of Lyotard's argument was uncannily similar to is own. For te premise of bot tiners - spelt out, if anyting, even more empatically by Lyotard tan Jameson was tat narrative was a fundamental instance of te uman mind. Te provocation of Lyotard's account of postmodernity must tus to some extent also ave acted as an ambivalent foil for Jameson, quicening is own relections on te subject. Te difcult tas of introducing a wor wit wose overall stance e can ave ad so little sympaty, e acquitted wit grace and guile. Lyotard's case was certainly striing But in its concen tration on te sciences, it said little about developments in culture, and was not very fortcoming about politics, or teir ground in canges in socioeconomic life. Here was te agenda to wic Jameson would now turn. Five Moves
Te founding text wic opens The Cultural Turn Jameson's lecture to te Witney Museum of Cotemporary Arts in te fall of 198 wic became te nuceus of is essay Postmod ernism - te Cultura Logic of Late Capitaism' publised in New Left Review in te spring of 198 redrew te wole map of te postmodern at one stroe - a prodigious inaugural gesture tat as commanded te eld ever since. Five decisive moves mared tis intervention. Te rst, and mot fundamen tal, came wit its title te ancorage of postmodernism in objective altrations of te economic order of capital itself. o 9 For
Lyoard no only was narraion he uinessenial form of cusomary knowledge' before he arriva of mode science bu he lile narraive remains he uinessenial form of imaginaive invenion mos paricularly in science': La Condition Postmoderne pp. 38 and 98; The Postmodern Condition pp 9 and 60 while ameson viewed soryelling as he supreme funcion of he human mind The Political Unconscious p. 123. 10 Foreword' o The Postmodern Condition pp. xii-xv. 54
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longer mere aestetic brea or epistemological sift, postmod ernity becomes te cultural signal of a new stage in te istory of te regnant mode of production. t is striing tat tis idea, before wic Hassan ad esitated and ten turned away, was quite foreign to Lyotard and Habermas, altoug bot came from Marxist bacgrounds by no means altogeter extinct. At te Witney, te term consumer society' acted as a ind of preliminary rangender for a survey at iger resolution to come. n te subsequent version, for New Left Review te new moment of multinational capitalism' came more fully into focus. Here Jameson pointed to te tecnological explosion of modern electronics, and its role as leading edge of prot and innovation; to te organiational predominance of transnational corporations, outsourcing manufacturing operations to ceap wage locations overseas; to te immense increase in te range of international speculation; and to te rise of media conglom erates wielding unprecedented power across communications and borders alie. Tese developments ad profound conse quences for every dimension of life in advanced industrial countries - business cycles, employment patterns, class relation sips, regional fates, political axes. But in a longer view, te most fundamenta cange of all lay in te new existential orion of tese societies. Moderniation was now all but complete, obliterating te last vestiges not only of precapitalist social forms, but every intact natural interland, of space or experience, tat ad sustained or survived tem. In a universe tus abluted of nature, culture as necessariy expanded to te point were it as become virtually coextensiv wit te economy itself, not merely as te symptomatic basis some of te largest industries in te world tourism exceeding a oter brances of global empoyment - but more deeply, as every materia object and immateria becomes inseparably tractable sign and vendible commod Culture in tis sense, as te inescapable tissue of life under a capitaism, is now our second nature. Were modernism drew its purpose and energies from te persistence of wat was not yet modern, te legacy of a still preindustria past, postmodern ism signies te closure of tat distance, te saturation of every pore of te world in te serum of capital. Mared out by no 55
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star poitica caesura, no sudden storm in the historica heavens, this very modest or mid apocaypse, the merest seabreeze' represents a momentus transformation in the underying struc tures of contemporary bourgeois society. Wat ave been the consequences of this change in the object word for the experience of te subject? Jameson's d distinctive move was a exporation of te metastases of the ew conjuncture. Initiay broached as terse commentary on the deat of the subject', his deveopment of this theme soon became perhaps the most famous of a facets of his construction of te postmodern. In a series of arresting phenomenoogica descriptions, Jameson setched the Leens welt caracteristic of te time, as the spontaneous forms of the postmodern sensibiity. This was a psychic andscape, he argued, whose ground had been broen by the great turmoi of the sixties - when so many traditiona casings of identity were broen apart by the dissoution of customary constraints - but now after the poitica defeats of te seventies, purged of a radica residues. Among the traits of the new subjectivity, in fact, was the o _teQ, eit as h .!�y The charged sense of the past - as eher d of repressive traditions, or reservoir of twarted dreams; and heightened expectancy of the future - as potentia catacysm or transguration - wic had characterized modernism, was gone. At best, fading bac into a perpetua present, retrostyes and images proiferated as surrogates of the tempora. In the age of the sateite and optica bre, on the other hand, the spatia commands this imaginary as never before. The eectronic unication of the earth, instituting the simutaneity of events across the gobe as daiy spectace, has odged a vicarious geography in the recesses of every consciousness, whie the encircing networs of mutinationa capita that actuay direct the system exceed the capacities of any perception. The ascen dency of space over time in the maeup of the postmodern is thus aways offbaance the reaities to which it answers consti tutivey overpowering it inducing, Jameson suggests in a ceebrated passage, that sensation which is ony to be captured Postmodernsm, or, the Cutural Logc of Late Captalsm Drham 1991, p. iv
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by a sardonic updating of the esson of Kant: the hysterica subime'. Conventionay ysteria denotes an overpitcing of emotion, a hafconscious feigning of intensity the better to concea some inner numbness (or psychoanayticay, te other way round) For Jameson, this i s a genera condition of postmodern experi ence, mared by a waning of affect' that ensues as the bounded sef of od begins to fray. The resut is a new depthessness of the subject, no onger hed within stabe parameters, where the registers of high and ow are unequivoca. Here, by contrast, psychic ife becomes unnervingy accidented and spasmodic, mared by sudden dips of eve or urches of mood, that reca something of the fragmentation of scizoprenia. This swerving, stammering ux precudes either catexis or historicity. Signi canty, to the vaciations of ibidina investment in private ife has corresponded an erosion of generationa marers in pubic memory, as the decades since the sixties have tended to atten out into a featureess sequence subsumed under the common roster of the postmodern itsef. But if such discontinuity wea ens the sense of difference between periods at the socia eve, its effects are far from monotone at the individua eve. There, on the contrary, the typica poarities of the subject run from the eation of the commodity rus', the euphoric highs of spectator or consumer, to the dejection at the bottom of the deeper nihiistic void of our being', as prisoners of an order that resists any other contro or meaning. Having set out the forceed of postmodernity in structura changes of te capitaism, and a pervasive addering of identities under them, Jameson coud mae his tird move, on the terri of cuture itsef. Here is topica. Hi every sounding of the postmodern had been sectora. and Fieder had detected it in ierature; Hassan enarged painting and music, if more by ausion than by exporatio Jencs concentrated on architecture; Lyotard dwet on science Habermas touched on phiosophy. Jameson's wor has been o another scope - a majestic expansion of the postmodern across virtuay the whoe spectrum of the arts, and much of the Postmodernsm pp. 317.
T HE O RI G I N S O F P O S T M O D E R NI T Y
discourse flaning them. The result is an incomparably richer and more comprehensive mural of the age than any other record of this culture. Architecture, the spur to Jameson's turn beyond the modern, has always remained at the centre of his vision of what succeeded it. His rst extended analysis of a postmodern wor was the great setpiece on Portman's Bonventure hotel in Los Angeles, whose dbut is to be found below - on the evidence of citation, the most memorable single exercise in all the literature on postmodernism Jameson's later meditations have piced a deliberate path through a crowded eld of candidates for commentary: rst Gehry, then Eisenmann and Koolhaas The paramountcy of space in the categorical framewor of postmod ern understanding, as he read it, more or less ensured that architecture would have pride of place in the cultural mutation of late capitalism at large Here, Jameson has consistently argued, explosive energies of invention have been released, in a range of forms from the spare to the sumptuous, that no rival art today can match; while at the same time also guring, more graphically than any other art, different inds of subsumption to the new world economic system, or attempts to elude it not only in the practical dependence of its airports, hotels, bourses, museus, villas or ministries on estimates of prot or whims of prestige, but in the tangibility of its shapes themselves Next in the system of postmodern arts comes the Q�J· Surprising though it may seem in retrospect, lm was a conspic uous absence in earlier discussion of postmodernism Not that this silence was quite inexplicable The principal reason for it can probably be found in a famous remar of Michael Fried: the cinema is not, even at its most experimental, a modernist art' He meant in part that lm, as the most mixed of all mediums, was debarred from that drive to a purity of presence specic to each art, absolved of reference to any other, that Greenberg had held to be the royal road of the modern But the judgement could be taen in another, more widely felt sense For had not the triumph of Hollywood realism actually reversed Art
and Objecthood' Artfoum une 1967; reprinted in G. Battcock (ed) Minimal Art Berkeley an Los Angeles 1 995 p. 141 . 58
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the trajectory of modernism, Technicolor banishing the audaci ties of silent cinema to the prehistory of the industry? Such, at any rate, was the challenge that Jameson came to take up. His initial interest was caught by a lmic genre that he eventually dubbed with a suggestive oxymoron nostalgia for the present' lms like Body Het or another key Str Wrs or yet again Blue Velvet that express even more deeply than the wave of mode tro movies proper over two decades of output now, from Americn Grti to Indochine - the peculiarly postmodern loss of any sense of the past, in a hidden contami nation of the actual by the wistful, a time yearning for itself at an impotent, covert remove f such forms, surrogates or dis placements of true periodic memory, trace a corruption of the temporal, other genres can be read as responses to the arrival of the ultraspatial: above all, the conspiracy lm - Videodrome or The Prllx View interpreted as blind allegories of the unre presentable totality of global capital and its impersonal net works of power n due course, Jameson proceeded to the fuller theorization of the history of the cinema which lay in the logic of his enquiry. There were two separate cycles in the development of this art, he argued Silent lm had indeed followed a path fro realism to modernism, if one - by reason of its timing as a technical possibility - out of rhythm with the move from national to imperial capitalism that otherwise presided over this transition. But this development was cut off by sound before there could be any chace of a postmodern moment A second cycle then recapitulate the same phases at a new technological leve, Hollywood inventing a screen realism with a panoply of nar tive genres and visual conventions all its own, and the u art cinema of the postwar years producing a fresh v high modernism f the postmodern cinema that had appeared was stamped by the compulsions of nostalgia, the fortunes of the moving image in this period were by no means locked on them alone ndeed, video was more likely to emerge as the peculiarly postmodern medium - whether in the dominant forms of commercial television, in which entertain ment and advertising were now virtually fused, or in the oppositional practices of underground video nevitably, the 59
T HE O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D ER N I TY
criticism of the future would have to concern itself increasingly with these. The world of graphic design and advertising, in turn, now increasingly interpenetrated with the ne arts, as impulse t style or source of materia. n pictorial space, postmodern d�thessss had found perfected expression in the enervated sue o{arhol's wrk, with their hypnotically empty after images of the fashion page, the supermarket shelf, the television screen. Here Jamesn was to stage the most bravura of al juxtapositions between high modern and postmodern, in a cmparison of Van Gogh's peasant boots, emblems of earthly labour redeemed in a pyre of colour, and one of Warhol's sets of pumps, vitreus simulacra without tone or ground, sus pended in an icy void. The arrival of Pop Art had, in fact, long been noted by Jameson as a barmetric warning of atmospheric changes under way - presages of a wider cultural anticyclone to come. Once fully in the postmodern, however, is attention moved to practices that sought to outrange the conventions this moment had left behind, in a conceptual art breaking free of the pictrial frame altogether. n the installations of Robert Gober, reveries of unplaceable community, and Hans Haacke, battle kits f forensic insurgency, alternative kinds of imagination owing something to Emerson or Adorno - wrest utopian clearances out of the claustra pressures of the postmodern itself Such radical energies, released as the boundaries between painting and sculpture, building and andscape increasingly dissolve, belong to a wider productivity, observable in many more pliable forms. eculiar to this culture, Jameson remaks, is a privilege of the visual that arks it off frm high modern ism, in which the verbal still retained most f its ancient authority. Not that literature has been less affected by the change of period; but in Jameson's view less riginal work has been generated by it. For here, perhaps more than in any other art, the most insistent motif of the new was a - playful or portentous - parasitism on the old. n Jameson's texts, the name of this device is The source of this usage lay in Adorno's critique he tok to be the regressive eclecti cism of Stravinsky in The Philosophy of Modern Music; but 60
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Jamesn gave it a more pointed denition. Pastiche was a bank pardy', without satiric impulse, of the styles of the past. Spreading from architecture to lm, painting to rockmusic, it had become the most standardized signature of the postmodern, acrss every art. But it might be argued that ction was now the domain of pastiche par excellence. For here mimicry of the defunct, unhampered by building codes or bx ofce con straints, could shufle not only styles but also periods themselves at will - revolving and splicing articial' pasts, bending the documentary and fantastic, proiferating anachronisms, in a massive revival of what must perforce still be termed - the historical novel. Jameson spotted this form at its inceptin, in an elegiac reading of Doctorow's political ctions of a radical American past, now forgtten, where the impossibility of hold ing steady any histrica referent shadws the very eclipse the novels mourn. Alongside these changes in the arts, and smetimes indeed directly at work within the, the discourses traditionally con cerned with the cultural eld have undergone an implosion of their own. What were once the sharply separate disciplines of art history, literary criticism, sociology, political science, history started to lose their clear edges, and cross with each in hybrid, transverse enquiries that could no longer easily be allotted to one or other domain The work of Michel Fucault, Jameson noted, was a foremst example of such an unassignable oeuvre What was replacing the old divisions of the disciplines was a new discursive phenomenon, best indicated by its American shorthand: Theory'. The distinctive frm of much of this work reected the increasing textualization of its objects - what col be called a revival, immensely mre versatile, of the a practice of commentary' Leading examples of this lterary studies were the decnstructive writing of Paul and the new historicism' of Walter Benn Michael, bodies work Jameson has submitted to admiring but severe criticis, without rejecting the development itself - of whch his own work on Adorno could in many ways be regarded as a remark able example. Beynd its immediate effects, what this reorganizatin of the intellectual eld signalled was a more fundamental break. The 6
THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY
hallmark of modernity, Weber had classically argued, was structural differentiation: the autonomization of practices and values, once closely mingled in social experience, into sharply separate domains. This is the process that Habermas has always insisted cannot be cancelled, on pain of retrogression. On such premises, there could be no more ominous symptom of some cracking in the modern than the breakdown of these hardwon divisions. This was the process Fried had foreseen and feared in 1967. A decade later, it had not just spread from the arts into the humanities or social sciences, but with the arrival of the philosophical postcard and the conceptual neonsign, was eroding the line between them. What postmodernity seemed to spell was something the great theorists of modernization had ruled out: an unthinkble dedifferentiation of cultural spheres. Anchorage of postmodernism in the transformations of capi tal; probing of the alterations of the subject; extension of the span of cultural enquiry afte these, Jameson could make a logical fourth move. What were the social bases and geopolitical pattern of postmodernism? Late capitalism remained a class society, but no class within it was quite the same as before. The immediate vector of postmodern culture was certainly to be found in the stratum of newly affuent employees and pro fessionals created by the rapid growth of the service and speculative sectors of the developed capitalist societies. Above this brittle yuppie layer loomed the massive structures of multinational corpoations themselves vast servomechanisms of production and power, whose operations crisscross the global economy, and determine its representations in the collec tive imaginary. Below, as an older industrial order is churned up, traditional class formations have weakened, while seg mented identities and localized groups, typically based on ethnic or sexual differences, multiply. On a world scale in the postmodern epoch, the decisive arena no stable class structure, c comparable to that of an earlier capitalism, has yet crystallized. Those above have the coherence of privilege; those below lack unity and solidarity. A new collective labourer' has yet to emerge. These are conditions, still, of a certain vertical indenition. At the same time, the sudden horizontal enlargement of the 62
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system, with the itegratio for the rst time of virtually the whole plaet ito the world market, meas the etry of ew peoples oto the global stage, whose huma weight is apidly icreasig he authorty of the past, costatly dwndlng uder pressures of ecoomic iovatio i the First World, siks i aother way with demographic explosio i the hird World, as fresh geeratios of the livig come to outumber all the legos of the dead his expasio of the bouds of capital ievitably dilutes its stocks of iherted culture he result is a characteristic drop i level' with the postmoder he culture of moderism was iescapably elitist: produced by isolated exiles, disaffected miorities, itrasiget vaguards. A art cast i heroic mould, it was costitutively oppositioal: ot simply outig covetios of taste, but more sigicatly, defyig the solicitatios of the market he culture of postmoderism, Jameso has argued, is by cotrast far more demotic For here aother ad more sweepig sort of dedifferetiatio has bee at work he bypassig of borders betwee the e arts has usually bee a gesture i the uaccommodatig traditio of the avatgarde he dissolutio of frontiers betwee high' ad low' geres i the culture at large, celebrated by Fiedler already at the ed of the sixties, aswered to a differet logic From the start, its directio was uequivocally populist this respect the postmoder has bee marked by ew patters of both cosumptio ad productio O the oe had, for example, leadig works of ctio boosted b avish advertisig ad prizepublicity could regu larly it th bestseller lists, if ot the wide scree, i a wa earlier impossible O the other, a sigicat rage of htherO excluded groups wome, ethic ad other miorities, m • grats gaied access to the postmoder forms, broadeig '> basis of artistic output cosiderably quality, some effect was udeiable: the time of the great idividual sigatu ad masterworks of moderism was over part this reect a overdue reactio agaist orms of charisma that were ow aachroistic But it also expressed a ew relatio to the market the extet to which this was a culture of accompaimet, rather tha atagoism, to the ecoomic order herei, however, lay precisely the power of the postmoder 63
THE ORIGINS F POSTMODERNITY
Whereas in its heyday modernism had never been much more than an enclave, Jameson points out, postmodernism is now hegemonic This did not mean it exhausts the eld of cultural production. Any hegemony, as Raymond Williams insisted, was a dominant' rather than a total system, one virtually ensuring because of its selective denitions of reality - the coexistence of residual' and emergent' forms resistant to it Postmodernism was a dominant of this kind, and no more But that was vast enough. For this hegemony was no local affair. For the rst time, it was tendentially global in scope. Not as a pure common denominator of the advanced capitalist societies, however, but as the projection of the power of one of them Postmodernism may be said to be the rst specically North American global style' .4 f these were the principal coordinates of the postmodern, what was the appropriate stance towards it? Jameson's nal move was perhaps the most original of al. Hitherto, it could be said that every signicant contribution to the idea of postmod ernity had carried a strong - negative or positive - valuation of it The antithetical judgements of Levin and Fiedler, the late Hassan and Jencks, Habermas and Lyotard, offer a set pattern. From a range of distinct political standpoints, the critic could either lament the advent of the postmodern as a corruption of the modern, or celebrate it as an emancipation. Very early on soon afer his Whitney lecture - Jameson mapped out an ingenious combinatory of such oppositions in Theories of the Postmodern', reproduced in The Cultural Turn The purpose of his exercise was to point the way out of this closed, repetitive space. Jameson's own political commitments were well to the left of any of the gures charted within it. He alone had rmly identied postmodenism with a new stage of capitalism, under stood in classical Marxist terms. But mere excoriation was no more fruitful than adhesion. Another kind of purchase was needed The temptation to be avoided, above all, was moralism The complicity of postmodernism with the logic of the market and of the spectacle was unmistakeable But simple condemnation Postmodernism
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of it as a culture was sterile. Again and again to the surprise of many, on left and right alike - Jameson has insisted on the futility of moralizing about the rise of the postmodern However accurate might be the local judgements it delivered, such mor alism was an impoverished luxury' that a historical view could not afford.5 n this, Jameson was faithful to longhel convic tions. Ethical doctrines presupposed a certain social homo geneity, in which they could rewrite institutional exigencies as interpersonal norms, and thereby repress political realities in the archaic categories of good and evil, long since unmasked by Nietzsche as the sedimented traces of power relationships'. Wel before addressing himself to the postmodern, he had dened the position from which he would view it: ethics, wherever it makes its reappearance, may be taken as the sign of an intent to mystify, and in particular to replace the complex and ambivalent judgements of a more properly political and dialectical perspective with the comfortable simplications of a binary myth' .6 These remarks were aimed at a conventional moralism of the right But they applied no less to a moralism of the left, that sought to dismiss or reject postmodernism en loc Moral categories were binary codes of individual conduct; projected onto the cultural plane, they were intellectually and politically disabling. Nor were the tropes of Kulturkritik of any greater avail, with their tacit fight to the imaginary of one or other idyllic past, from whose balcony a fallen present could be reproved e enterprise on which Jameson had embarked - he stressed tht it required many hands was something else A genuine critique of postmodernism could not be an ideolog refusal of it Rather the dialecticask was to work our completely through it, that our understanding of the time w emerge transformed on the side A totalizing compeensio( the new unlimited capitalism a theory adequate o the glo scale of its connexions and disjuctions remained the unr nouncable Marxist project. t precluded manichean responss Postmodernism . Fables of Aggression Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist Berkeley and Los Angeles 1979, p. 65
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to the postmodern. To critics on the left inclined to suspect him of accommodation, Jameson replied with equanimity. The col lective agency necessary to confront this disorder was still missing; but a condition of its emergence was the ability to grasp it from within, as a system Otcomes
With these parameters in place, a coherent account of postmod ernity had arrived. Henceforward, one great vision commands the eld, setting the terms of theoretical opposition in the most striking imaginable way t is a normal fate of strategic concepts to be subject to unexpected political capture and reversal, in the course of discursive struggle over their meaning. Characteristi cally, in this century, the outcome have been dtournements to the Right - civilization', say, once a proud banner of progres sive Enlightenment thought, becoming a stigma of decadence at the hands of German conservatism; civil society', a term of critique for classical Marxism, no a cynosure in the idiom of contemporary liberalism n the dominion over the term post modernism won by Jameson, we witness the opposite achieve ment: a concept hose visionary origins were al but completely effaced in usages complicit with the established order, wrested away by a prodigious display of theoretical intelligence and energy for the cause of a revoutionary eft This has been a discursive victory gaied against all the poitical odds, in a period of neoliberal hegemony when every famiiar landmark of the eft appeaed to sink beneath the waves of a tida reaction t was won, undoubtedly, because the cognitive map ping o the contemporary word it offered caught so unforgett ably at once lyrically and caustically - the imaginative structures and ived experience of the time, and their boundary conditions. How shoud we situate this achievement? Two answers suggest themselves The rst relates to the deveopment of Jameson's own thought. Here there is a notable paradox The vocabuary of the postmodern came, as noted above, relatively late to Jameson, after signs of initia reservation But its prob lematic was there very early, and unfods through successive 6
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works with astonishing continuity. n his rst monograph, Sartre The Origins of a Style (1961) written in his mid twenties, he was already writing of a society without a visible future, a society dazzled by the massive permanence of its own institutions in which no change seems possible and the idea of progress is dead' Ten years later, in Marxism and Form comparing the enchanted bricabrac of surrealism with the commodities of a postindustrial capitalism products utterly without depth', whose plastic content is totally incapable of serving as a conductor of psychic energy' he asked whether we are not here in the presence of a cultural transformation of signal proportions, a historical break of an unexpectedly abso lute kind?'. Marxism and Form ended by observing that a new kind of modernism, articulated by Sontag and Hassan, had surfaced, which no longer as an older modernism had reckoned with the instinctive hostility of a middecass public of which it stood as a negation', but was rather popular; maybe not in small midWestern towns, but in the dominant world of fashion and the mass media'. The lms of Warhol, the novels of Burroughs, the pays of Beckett were of this kind and no critique can have any binding force which does not submit to the fascination of all these things as stylzatos of reality' A not dissimilar note is strck in The PrisonHouse of Language where the deeper justication' of the use of linguistic models in formalism and structuralism lay not so much in their scientic validity, as n the character of contemporary societies, which offer the spctace of a world of forms from which nature s such has been eliminated, a word saturated with messages information, whose intricate commodity network may be s, as the very prototype of a system of signs'. There was thu profound consonance between linguistics as a method and systematized and disembodied nightmare which is our cu today'2 Sartre - The Orgns of a Style ew York 1984 (second edition p. 8. 8 Marxsm and Form p. 105. Marxsm and Form pp. 413-414. The PrsonHouse of Language rinceton 1972, pp. xviii-ix. 6
T H E O R G I N S O F P O S T M O D E RN I T Y
Passages like these sound like so many orchestral tuneups for the symphony to come. But if they anticipate so directly leitmotifs of Jameson's presentation of the postmodern, there was perhaps another indirect presage of what lay ahead. From the start Jameson seems to have sensed a kind of petrication of the modern as a set of aesthetic forms, that drew his interest to authors who sidelined or manhandled them. The two novelists to whom he has devoted freestanding studis are JeanPaul Sartre and Wyndham Lewis. One reason for his attraction to them is certainly that both were highly political writers, at opposite ends of the spectrum: iconoclastic Left and radical Right. Another, which he himself has stessed, is what Jameson calls the linguistic optimism' they shared - the condence that anything could be expressed in words, provided they were untoward enough.2 But equally important, and not unrelated, was the angle at which they stood to the mainstream of modernism - Lewis isolated by his mechanistic expressionism, Sartre by his reversions to the trappings of melodrama. nvol untarily in the one case (Lewis's subsequent neglect preserving, as in a timecapsule, a freshness and virulence' of stylization gone dead in the embalming of his great contemporaries), and voluntarily in the other (Sartre's deliberate waiver of the conse crated forms and passivereceptive vocations' of the high mod erns),22 these were writers who in their own fashion had aready bumped against the limits of modernism. There was a time when Jameson thought some novel species of reaism might emerge beyond them. But the space for a salt mrtale into the postmodern was already being cleared. Viewed iographically, Jameson's movement toward a theory of postmodernism thus seems virtually inscribed in his trajectory from the start as if with the uncanny coherence of an origina choice' in the Sartrean sense. But there is anothr way of looking at the same outcome. Jameson's writing on the postmodern belongs to a specic intellectual line. n te years after the First World War, when the great wave of revolutionary unrest in Centra Europe had receded, and the Soviet state was Sartre p. 204; Fables of Aggression p 86 Fables of Aggression p. 3; Sartre p. 219. 68
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already bureaucratized and isolated, there developed in Europe a distinctive theoretical tradition that eventually acquired the nae of Western Marxism. Born of political defeat - the crushing of proletarian insurgencies in Germany, Austria, Hun gary and taly which its rst great thinkers Lukcs, Korsch and Gramsci had lived through - this Marxism was separated from the classical corpus of historical materialism by a sharp caesura. n the absence of a popular revolutionary practice, political strategy for the overthrow of capital waned, and once the great depression had passed into the Second World War, economic analysis of its transformations tended to lapse too. n compensation, Western Marxism found its centre of gravity in philosophy, where a series of outstanding second generation thinkers - Adorno, Horkheimer, Sartre, Lefebvre, Marcuse - constructed a remarkable eld of critica theory, not in isolation from surrounding currents of nonMarxist thought, but typicaly in creative tension with them. This was a tradition deeply concerned with questions of method - the epistemology of a critical understandig of society - on which classical Marxism had left few pointers. But its philosophica scope was not merely procedural: it had one centra focus of substantive concern, which formed the common horizon of this line as a whole. Western Marxism was above all a set of theoretical investigations of the cuture of developed capitalism. The pri macy of philosophy in the tradition gave these enquiries a particular cast: not exclusively, but decisivey, they remained true to the oncerns of aesthetics. Whatever else it incuded, culture signed, rst and foremost, the system of the arts Lukcs, Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre, Dela Volpe formed the rue here; Gramsci or Lefebvre, with a more anthropologica of culture, the exception.23 For all its common features as a tradition, Western was in many ways reatively unaware of itself. On the whole, s leading thinkers were scarcely apprised of each other across linguistic boundaries within Europe. The rst work to afford an 3
have discussed he genera ackground and characer of hs radiion in Considerations on Weste Marxism London 1 <6 for he laer rai see
pp. 75 -7 8
69
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overvew of ts repertore dd not arrve tll the early seventes, from Amerca: and t was none other than arxism and Form. Here, as n no prevous text, the unty and dversty of Western Marxsm were put on eegant dspay f Jameson's book concentrated on Adorno and Benjamn, Boch and Marcuse, ukcs and Sartre, leavng efebvre and Gramsc - each noted - asde, n ths t kept to the promse of ts ttle The domnant strand of ths descent was aesthetc For the rst tme, one mght say, Western Marxsm was tacty faced wth ts trth. What dd such totalzaton, however, sgnfy for the future of ths tradton? There were many, ncludng myself, who reckoned that the condtons whch had produced t were now past, and other knds of Marxsm - closer to classca models - were lkely to repace t Ths estmate was based on the renewed radcal ferment n Western Europe of the late sxtes and eary seventes, and on the vsble return of ntellectua energes towards questons of poltcal economy and strategy that had domnated the oder agenda of hstorca materasm The French upheaval of May 98 coud be seen as a revolvng beacon of ths change, lashng out the sgnal that Western Marxsm was now over taken, passng to the rank of an honourable egacy A shrewder judgement saw the May Revolt n a somewhat dfferent ght, not as the end but the cmax of ths tradton Peter Wollen's Raiding the Iceox s the only work whose power bears comparson wth Jameson's as a route map of twentethcentury culture A centra epsode n ts narratve s the story of the Stuatonst nternatona, the last of the hstorc avantgardes whose dssouton n 97 brought to an end an epoch that began n Pars wth the Futurst Manfesto of 909 But Stuatonsm, nurtured on ukcs, efebvre and Breton, was not ony ths n theoretcally gntng the exploson of May 98 Wolen remarks, we can equally see t as the summaton of Western Marxsm' Ths was a more plausble readng But ts upshot was nevertheess qute smlar The lessons of West Raiding the IceBox Reections on Twentieth Century Culture
p. 124
odo 1993,
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ern Marxsm, as of the casscal avantgardes, needed to be lea rnt and valued, but ther tme was up - a perod has ended' 25 t s ths verdct Jameson's work has so perfecty beled Hs theorzaton of postmodernsm, startng n the early eghtes, takes ts pace among the great nteectual monuments of Western Marxsm ndeed, one coud say that here ths tradton reached ts culmnaton Arsng once agan from an experence of potcal defeat - the quellng of the turmo of the sxtes and developng n crtca contact wth new styles of thought structuralst, deconstructve, neohstorcst far from Marxsm, Jameson's work on the postmodern has answered to h same basc coordnates as the classc texts of the past But if n that sense t s the contnuaton of a seres, t s also a recaptulaton of the set at a second eve For here dfferent nstruments and themes from the repertore of Western Marxsm are blended n a formdable synthess From ukcs, Jameson took hs commt ment to perodzaton and fascnaton wth narratve; from Bloch, a respect for the hopes and dreams hdden n a tarnshed objectword; from Sartre, an exceptonal luency wth the textures of mmedate experence; from efebvre, the curosty about urban space; from Marcuse, pursut of the tral of hgh tech consumpton; from Althusser, a postve concepton of deoogy, as a necessary soca magnary; from Adorno, the ambton to represent the totaty of hs object as nothng ess than a metaphorcal composton'26 Sch elements do not le nertly together n forced comb naton The are moblzed n an orgnal enterprse whch seems effortlessly o absorb them Two features endow ths work wh ts peclar unty The rst s Jameson's prose tsef He o remarked that of the thnkers of Western Marxsm, dorno the supreme stylst of them all' Bt there are tmes we reader mght wonder whether the descrpton does not or at any rate more consstently, apply to hmsef H_ope hs rst book wth the words: t has aways seemed to me tha a modern style s somethng n tself ntellgble, above an bi. See Marxism and Form p. 7 Marxism and Form p xiii.
T H E O R I G I NS O F P O S T M O D E R NI T Y
beyond the imited meaning of the book written in it, and beyond even those precise meanings which the individua se tences that make i up are intended to convey.'2 Future studies of Jameson's own writing coud take this as a motto. For the moment, it is enough to note two features of a stye of compeing spendour. The spacious rhythms of a compex, yet suppe syntax - wenigh Jamesian in its forms of address enact the absorption of so many variegated sources in the theory itsef; whie the sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity, exhiar ating gura eaps with a highwire clat a of their own, stand as embems of the bod diagona moves, coser to a poetic than anaytic inteigence, with which this work unexpectedy cross connects disparate signs of the tota phenomenon in view. We are deaing with a great writer. At the same time, Jameson's work on the postmodern unies the sources on which it draws in a deeper substantive sense. The Western Marxist tradition was attracted to the aesthetic as invountary consoation for impasses of the poitica and econ omic. The resut was a remarkabe range of reections on different aspects of the cuture of modern capitaism. But these were never integrated into a consistent theory of its economic deveopment, typicay remaining at a somewhat detached and speciaized ange to the broader movement of society: taxabe even with a certain ideaism, fro the standpoint of a more cassica Marxism. Jameson's account of postmodernism, by contrast, deveops for the rst time a theory of the cutura ogic' of capita that simutaneousy offers a portrait of the transformations of this socia form as a whoe. This is a much more comprehensive vision. Here, in the passage from the sectora to the genera, the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most compete consummation. The conditions of this widening were historica. The view that the ate sixties marked a critica break in the andscape of the eft was not atogether wrong. nteectuay, as the very tite of his andmark essay and book indicates, Jameson's turn to a theory of the postmodern was enabed by Mande's Late Capitalism an economic study that situated isef in a cassica Sartre p. vi. 2
CAPTURE
tradition distinct from any shade of Western Marxism. Empiri cay, economic ife itsef had anyway become so pervaded by the symboic systems of information and persuasion that the notion of an independent sphere of more or ess acutura production increasingy ost meaning. Henceforward, any major theory of cuture was bound to encompass more of the civiiza tion of capita than ever before The traditiona object of Western Marxism was enormousy magnied. So Jameson's resumption of its heritage coud yied a much more centra and poitica description description of the conditions of contemporary contemporary ife than the precedents it drew on. on . Crucia to the effect of Jameson's account here is its sense of epochaity' This way of reading the signs of the time owes much to Lukcs. But Lukcs's principa exercises in epocha anaysis, The Soul and Forms and The Theory of the Novel remain aesthetic or metaphysica. When he moved to the poitica, in his remarkabe short study Lenin ukcs dened the epoch that had opened with the catastrophe of the Great War as one stamped above a by the actuaity of revoution'. When events disappointed this expectation, no further descrip tion coud foow. t was then Gramsci, the thinker within Western Marxism from whom Jameson has taken east, who tried to capture the nature of the consoidation or counter revoutions of capita between the wars. His notes on Fordism represent, in fact, the ony rea precedent in this tradition for Jameson's enterprise. t is no accident that they gave rise to so much discussion after the Second Word War, or varios attempts to sketch the features of a postFordism' in the seventies and eighties But, powerfu and origina (at times highy idiosyncra they were, were, Gramsci's ideas about about Fordism Fordism - embraci embracing ng production, rigorous workdiscipine and high the US, puritanism for ower orders and ibertinage for strata, sectarian reigion in ibera America and corporat organization organization in in fascist fascist tay tay - neverthee nevertheess ss remained aconic aconic and and unsystematic. n a sense, their epochaity' too misred. n many respects ahead of the time, behind it in a few, these jottings proved to be mainy suggestive after the event. Jameson's account of the postmodern contains no comparabe insights 3
T H E O R I G I NS N S O F P O S T M O D E RN R N I TY TY
nto the abour process or producton, reyng as t does on a sefstandng economc terature of ts own But t s, of course, enormousy more deveoped and detaed as the denton of an epoch, and supported by contemporary experence Yet much of the crtca crtc a charge of ths theory aso comes from ts tenson tenso n wth the very cmate of tme t depcts For, as we read n the rst sentence of ostmodernism t s safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern postmoder n as an attempt attempt to thnk the present hstorcay n an age that has forgotten how to thnk hstorcay n the rst pace' f, n a these ways, Jameson's work appears ke a grandose nae of Western Marxsm, n another way t has sgncanty exceeded ths tradton Nurtured n Europe, the work of ts major thnkers never moved far beyond t as an nteectua force Lukcs was known n apan before the war, and n exe the Frankfurt Schoo dscovered the nted States Later, Sartr was read by Fanon and Athusser studed n Latn Amerca Bu essentaly ths was a Marxsm whose radus of nuence remaned mted to the orgna core of the advanced captast word: Western not ony n ts orgns and themes, but aso ts mpact Jameson's theory of the postmodern has broken ths pattern ts nta formuatons were focused prncpay on North Amerca But as hs work on the queston deveoped, ts mpcat mpcatons ons wdened: wdened: postm postmode odernsm rnsm,, he concud concuded, ed, was not addtonay, but ntrn ntrnsca scay y the cutura cutura ether of a goba system that overrued a geographca dvsons ts ogc com peed pe ed a major maj or turn n Jameson's James on's own ow n ed of enqury enqury p to the eve of the eghtes, Jameson's crtca practce was excusvey terary and ts objects emnenty Western Proust, Hemngway, Bazac, Dckens, Echendorff, Faubert, Conrad such were the gures n the foreground of hs attenton Wth the eghtes, thee s a sharp change Vsua forms start to compete wth wr wrtt tten en,, and rapdy come come to predomn predomnate ate a shft evdent n ostmodernism tsef Smutaneousy there s a strkng movement otwards, to cutures and regons beyond the West n ths perod, Jameson was to reect on Sosek and Karatan n Japan; L Xun and Lao She n Chna; Sembne n Postmodernism p. ix. 4
CAPTURE
Seneg Senega a and a nd S S as o r Barne Barnett in i n Cuba; Edward Edward Yang Yang of Taiwa Taiwann C ultural al Turn Turn and Kidak Tahimik of the Phiippines3 n The Cultur discussions can be found of the ms of Pau Leduc, Mexican director of a sient movie set in Venezuea, and Soueymane Ciss from Mai s there any contemporary critic with an even distanty comparabe range? The sense of such interventions has been to encourage a geo poitica aesthetic' adequate to the enargement of the cutura universe in postmodern conditions This has been no engage ment from afar Jameson rst set out his ideas on postmodern ism comprehensivey in a ecture course in Beijing in 198, and pubished a coection on the subject in China some years before he produced one in America His account of Postmodernism and the Market' was tested out in Seou We owe the major text on Transformations of the mage' to an address in Caracas Setting Settingss ike i ke these were not a matter matt er of chance chanc e Jameson's Jameso n's theory of postmodernity has won a growing audience in countries once of the Third or Second Word because it speaks of a cutura imaginary famiiar to them, part of the web of their own experience A Marxism so naturay at home in the great metropoitan centres of the South and the East is no onger restrictivey Western With this breakout from the Occident, the idea of the postmodern has come fu circe back to its origina inspiration, as a time when the dominance of the West woud cease Oson's visionary condence was not mispaced; virtuayy be read as a brevet for Jameson's Jameson's The King Kingshers shers coud virtua achievement But if that was possibe, it is aso because Jameson shared something with Oson that distinguishes him fo the intell tua ine fom which he descends n one cucia Jameson's wok depats fom the whoe teno of See
respectivey Soseki and Westen Modernism bounda Fall 1 pp. 123-11; In the Mirror o Alternate Modeities South Atlantic Quarterl Spring 1993 pp. 295-310; ird Word Liteature in the Era o Multinational Capitalism Social Text Fall 1986 pp. 6588; Literary Innovation and Modes o roduction Modern Chinese Literature Septemer 198 pp 67-72; On Literary and Cultural ImportSustitution in the hird World: the Case o the estimonio' Margins Spring 1991 pp. 11-3; The Geopolitical Aesthetic London 1992 pp. 11-157 186213 5
T H E O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D ER N I TY
Marxism. That was a tradition whose major monuments were in one way or another, secretly or openly, all affected by a deep historical pessimism 3 Their most original and powerful themes - Lukcs's destruction of reason, Gramsci's war of position, Benjamin's angel of catastrophe, Adorno's damaged subject, Sartre's violence of scarcity, Althusser's ubiquity of illusion spoke not of an alleviated future, but of an implacable present. Tones varied within a common range, from the stoic to the melancholy, the wintry to the apocalyptic. Jameson's writing is of a different timbre. Although his topic has certainly not been one of comfort to the Left, his treatment of it has never been acrimonious or despondent On the contrary, the magic of Jameson's style is to conjure into being what might be thought impossible - a lucid enchantment of the world. ts themes are as grave as any in the tradition But a spray of wonder and peasure - the chances of happiness in a stiling time - is never far from the swell of even the most ominous reection To move, to instruct, to deight'. f few other subversive thinkers have come so close to the aims of art, the reasons are no doubt in part contingent. Jameson can evoke bodily experience as memorably as Sartre, but the feelingtone is habitually the opposite - nearer elation than disgust The pleasures of the intellect and of the imagination are no less vividly rendered than those of the senses. The glow with which Jameson can endow objects, concepts, ctions is the same32 The biographical sources of this warmth are one thing. ts philosophical premises are another. Behind this consent to the world lies the deeply Hegelian cast of Jameson's Marxism, noted by many critics/3 which has equipped him to confron For his aspec see Considerations on Western Marxism pp 8892 Perhaps he nes example is his essay on Godard's Passion in The Geopolitical Aesthetic London 1992, pp 158185 he conras wih Adoos reamen of he obecword even a is mos elouen is eling Compare on a very similar opic he passage in Minima Moraia (p. 40 - isef of grea beauy - on he casemen window or genle ach and he samming of car or frigidaire doors wih ameson's reverie on he eviaions of he Californian garage in Signatures of the Visible pp 107-108 See noably Michael Sprinker he Place of heory' New Le Review No 18 7, May-une 19 91 pp 139-142 6
CAPTURE
the adversities of the epoch, and work through its confusions, with an intrepid equanimity all his own. Categories such as optimism or pessimism have no place in Hegel's thought. Jameson's work cannot be described as optimistic, in the sense in which we can say of the Western Marxist tradition that it was pessimist ts politics have always been realist History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable imits to individual as well as collective praxis' - above all in the determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history' to date3 But utopian longings are not easily repressed, and can be rekindled in the least predictable of guises. t is this note too - the subterranean persistence of the will to change that has given Jameson's work its force of attaction beyond the precincts of a jaded West
The Political Unconscious p.
Af-ffc
The capture of the postmodern by Jameson has set the terms of subsequent debate. t is no surprise that the most sgnicant interventions since his entry into the ed have likewise been Marxist in origin. The three leading contributions can be read as attempts to suppement or correct, each in ts own way, Jameson's orignal account. Alex Callinicos's Against Postmod ernism (989) advances a coser analysis of the potical back ground to the postmodern. Davd Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity ( 990) offers a much fuler theory of ts econ omc presuppositons. Tery Eageton's Illusions of Post modernism (99) tackles the impact of its ideologica dffuson. A these works pose problems of demarcaton. How s the postmodern to be best periodied? To what nteectua cong uraton does it correspond? What is the appropriate response to t? Timing
The centra question hre s the rst the ssue of perodiaton Jameson's eariest crtic on the Left had ponted out a loose joint n hs construction. f postmodernism was the cultura ogic of ate capitaism, should they not coincde fairly closey in time? Yet Mandel's Late Capitalism on whch Jameson based hs concepton of a new stage n captaist deveopment, See Mike Davis rban Renaissance and he Spiri o osodernis New Left Review No 5 May-ne 85 pp. 06 - 3 . 8
AFTEREFFECTS
dated its general arrival from 94 - while Jameson put the emergence of the postmodern in the early seventies. Even if it could be argued that the full realiation of Mandel's model did not come overnight, such a gap remained troubling. Callinicos and Harvey, writing at virtually the same time, drew opposite conclusions. Harvey, whose earlier work The Limits of Capital had outlined the most systematic and orignal Marxist theory of economic crises, argued that the advent of postmodernity, righty located towards the beginning of the seventies, in fact relected a contemporaneous break with the postwar model of capitalist development. With the recession of 197 Fordism undermined by increased international competition, faing cor porate prots and accelerating ination - had plunged into a longdeayed crisis of overaccumulation. n response, a new regime of exible accumulation' had emerged, as capital increased its room for manoeuvre across the board. The new period saw greater exibility of labour markets (temporary contracts; immigrant and domestic sweating), man ufacturng processes (outsourcing of plants; justintime produc tion), commodity outputs (batch consignments), and above al of deregulate nancial operations, in a singe world market for money and credit. t was this restless, speculative system that was the existentia basis of the vaious orms of postmodern cuture, whose reality and novelty were not to be doubted - a sensibility closely reated to the demateriaization of money, the ephemeraity of fashion, the glut of simulation in the new economies. None of this amounted to any fundamenta change in the mode of production as such - let aone to a longterm souton of the pressures of overaccumulation, which had not undergone the necessary purge of a massive of capital. Nor, ndeed, coud exible accumulation described as universally dominant; more typically, it in mixed atterns with older Fordist forms, and even the from one to the other were by no means always irreversb. What had critically altered, however, was the position an autonomy of nancia markets within capitalism, outanking The Condition of Postmodernity Oxord 0 pp. 2-7. he even keel o hs work is very ipressive. 9
T HE O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D E R NI T Y
nationa governments which spelt systemic instabiity of an unprecedented kind. Calinicos, on the other hand, reversed this line of argument. Whie it was true that goba capita was now more integrated than ever before, and possessed new degrees of mobiity, this in no way added up to a break' in the history of capitalism. For nationa states retained substantial powers of reguaion, as the ironic success of Reagan's miitary keynesianism in reating the word economy in the eighties had shown. As for the other features of exible accumulation', they were mostly exagger ated or mythical the abour force was less segmented, batch production less widespread, the service sector less signicant than theories of postFordism suggested - just as Fordism itself was an overblown notion, projecting a homogeneous domi nance of standardized mass production that had never existed, save in a limited number of consumer durable industries. Similary, postmodernism as a distinct set of artistic practices let alone a cultural dominant - was largely a gment. Virtually every aesthetic device or feature attributed to postmodernism bricolage of tradition, play with the popular, relexivity, hybrid ity, pastiche, gurality, decentring of the subject - coud be found in modernism. No critical break was discernible here either. What coud be observed was something different: namely a gradual degradation of modernism itself, as t had become increasingly commodied and integrated into the circuits of postwar capital. The sources of this decline, however, were to be traced in the rst instance, not so much to larger economic changes, or any immanent aesthetic logic, as more directly to the politica history of the time. Historically, modernism had reached its apogee with the custer of revoutionary avant gardes between the wars constructivism in Russia, expression ism and neue Sachlichkeit in Germany, surrealism in France. t was the victory of Stalin and Hitler that nished off these movements. Anaogously, postmodernism - aesthetically litte more than a minor twist in the downward spira of modernism, though ideoogically of much greater signicance - shoud be seen as a product of the political defeat of the radical generation of the late sixties. Revolutionary hopes disappointed, this cohort
AFTEREFFECTS
had found compensation in a cynical hedonis that found avish outet in the overconsumption boom of the eighties. This conjuncture - the prosperity of the Western new middle cass combined with the poitical disilusionment of many of its most articulate members - provides the context for the proiferating tak of postmodernism. '3 Such contrasted diagnoses, reached from common starting points, pose the pobem of situating the postmodern with some accuracy acutely. n a sketch of the origins of modernism in the European Belle Epoque once suggested that it was best understood as the outcome of a ed of force trianguated by three coordinates: an economy and society sti ony semi industrial, in which the ruing order remained to a signicant extent agrarian or aristocratic; a technology of dramatic inven tions, whose impact was sti fresh or incipient; and an open political horizon, in which revoutionary upheavals of one kind or another against the prevailing order were widey expected or feared. n the space so bounded, a wide variety of artistic innovations coud explode - symbolism, imagism, expression ism, cubism, futurism, constructivism: some quarrying classica memory or patrician styles, others drawn to a poetics of the new machinery, yet others red by visions of social upheava; but none at peace with the market as the organizing principle of a modern culture - in that sense, virtually without exception antibourgeois. The First World War, destroying the ancien rgimes in Russia, AustroHungary and Germany, and weakening landowners elsewhere, modied but did not overturn this setting. Europen upper classes and their train de vie went on much as befo; advanced forms of industrial organization and mass tion - Gramsci's idea of Fordism remained largey o the US; revolution and counterrevolution battled from Vistula to the Ebro. n such conditions, avantgarde movems and forms of great vigour continued to emerge - Opojaz i Against Postmodernism Cambridge 1 989, 16 8. Moderniy and Revolion, New Left Review No 144, March-Aril 1984; rerined, wih a osscri 1985, in A Zone of Engagement London 1992
. 2555.
8
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Russia, Bauhaus in Germany, surrealism in France The caesura came with the Second World War, whose outcome smashed the old agrarian elites and their way of life across most of the Continent, installed stable capitalist democracy and standard ized consumerdurables in the West, and gutted the ideals of revolution in the East. With all the forces that had historically spurred it gone, the ln of modernism gave out. t had lived from the nonsynchronous - what was past or future in the present - and died wth the arrival of the purely contempora neous: the monotone steadystate of the postwar Atlantic order. Henceforward, art that still would be radical was routinely destined for commercial integration or institutional cooption Much could be said of this rapid outline, by way of expansion or criticism, today. t invites more geographical nuance. What determined the gradient of technological enthusiasm in the early forms of modernism? Why was Britain seemingly so barren of innovative movements - or was it altogether? Can surrealism be regarded as simply the last in the series of major avantgardes between the wars, or did it also congure something new? Answers to questions like these would have to look more closely at the national specicities of the different cultures of the tim. Schematically, for example, one could envisage a spectrum of ideal attitudes to the new mechanical marvels of the early twentieth century, varying inversely with the extent of their implantation: the two most industrially backward powers of the continent, taly and Russia, generating the most fervently tech t aantgardes, in their respective futurisms; while Germany, combining advanced industry in the West with the retrograde landscape of the East, was split between expressionist loathing and Bauhaus wooing of Metropolis; France, on the other hand, with its pattern of modesty prosperous petty production i town and country, permitted a quirkier synthesis in surrealism, entranced precisely by the interlacing of new and old. As for Britain, the failure of its ickering modernist impulses to endure was surely related to the absence of any major insurgent strand in the labour movement. But it was no doubt also a function of early industrialization, and the gradual development of an overwhelmingly urbanized but already
AFTEREFFECTS
traditionbound economy, whose slowness ated as a buffer against the shock of a new machineage that galvanized avant gardes elsewhere. But the more important limits of the account retraced above are to be found at the end rather than beginning of the story. The cutoff point proposed for modernism after 194 was certainly too abrupt. Peter Wollen's history amply demonstrates that. The legacy of the prewar avantgardes could not be extinguished overnight, since it necessarily still stood as internal model and memory, no matter how unfavourable the external circumstances for reproducing it. n America, abstract expressionism offered a poignant illustration of the new situ ation Formally an exemplary modernist gesture, the most radical collective break with gurality to date, the New York school went from garret to apotheosis at - comparatively speaking - lightning speed, marking something quite new in the history of painting. This was an avantgarde that became an orthodoxy in its own short lifespan, capitalized as symbolic investment by big money and promulgated as ideological value by the state. Yet the Cold War trumpeting of this art by the USA had a peculiar irony. Connexions with surrealism were vital in abstract expressionism, and the politics of its leading painters could hardly have been further from their use as a moral afche for the Free World: Rothko was an anarchist, Motherwell a socialist, and Pollock - in the private opinion of Greenberg, his greatest public champion - nothing less than a goddam talinist from start to nish'. 5 n Erope, where the annexationist logic of the postwar rt market was ess overpowering, and signicant forces of resis ance to the old War system persisted in the West, with the insurgent aims of the interwar avant gardes much stronger Surrealism could still trigger successive conceived more or less i its image, as Wllen shows detailed econstruction of the movement from OBRA lettrisme to the Situationist nternational Here, the her ee T. Clark In Defense of Absrac Expressionism October No 6 mmer 4 p 45 6 Raiding the Icebox pp 35-50
T H E O R I GI N S O F P O S T M O D E RN I T Y
ambton of te storc avantgarde - te transguraton of art and poltcs alke - sprang to lfe once more. But even before te clmax of 196 e unon ad come loose. Te artstc wngs of Stuatonsm were essentay a product of te perp ery: Denmark, Holland, Begum, Pedmont, were te gallery system was weak. Te poltcal ead was centred n France, were revolutonary mltancy and e art market were bot muc stronger, creatng a eld of suspcon wtn te nter natona of wc te artsts pad te prce, n expulson or departure; condemnng te S n turn to te azards, and transence, of any overpoltczaton. Anoter great adventure of tese years lasted longer. n some ways strangely parallel n trajectory, Godard's cnema moved towards steadly more rad cal forms - of narratve ellpse, torson between sound and mage, ddactc capton - n te same perod, trowng off a seres of nearmasterpeces, before culmnatng n a convulsve, unsustanable bd for a revolutonary ascess n te aftermat of 196. Later, Godard's wtdrawal to Swtzerland mgt be compared to Jorn's refuges n Lgura or Denmark: a dfferent knd of productvty, once agan of te margn. Te quarter century after te end of osttes tus seems n retrospect an nterregnum, n wc modernst energes were not subject to sudden cancellaton, but stll glowed ntermttenty ere and tere, were condtons alowed, wtn an nosptable general clmate t was not untl te turn of te seventes tat te ground for an altogeter new conguraton was prepared. f we want to x te emergence of a postmodernsm more accurately, one way of dong so s to look at wat ad replaced te prncpal determnants of modernsm Jameson's work, n fact, contan ponters to most of te reevant canges, wc wt te slgtest of rearrangements afford te more precse focus requred Post modernsm can be vewed as a cutura ed tranguated, n ts turn, by tree new storcal coordnates Te rst of tese les n te fate of te rulng order tself By te end of te Second World War te power of arstocratc tradton ad receved ts quetus across contnental Europe. But for anoter generaton, ts tradtonal ater - rval and partner - perssted We can st speak of te bourgeose as a class, n tat meanng of te term n wc Max Weber could remark wt prde tat e belonged
AFTEREFFECTS
,
to t. Tat s to say, a socal force wt ts own sense of collectve dentty, caracterstc moral codes and cultura habitus. f we wanted a sngle vsual clp of ts world, t was a scene were men stll wore ats. Te Unted States ad ts verson n te old money of te Eastern establsment. Scumpeter always argued tat captalsm, as an ntrnscally amora economc system drven by te pursut of prot, dssol vent of all barrers to market calcuaton, depended crtcally on precaptalst - n essence noblary - values and manners to od t togeter as socal and poltca order. But ts arstocratc undergrdng', as e put t, was typcally renforced by a secondary structure of support, n bourgeos mleux condent of te moral dgnty of ter own calng: subjectvey closer to portrats by Mann tan Flaubert n te epoc of te Marsal Pan and te geness of te European Communty, ts word ved on n te poltcal realm, substanta gures lke Adenauer, De Gasper Monnet emboded ts persstence - ter poltcal relatonsp to Curcll or De Gaulle, grandees from a segneur al past, as f an aftermage of an orgnal compact tat socally was no longer vald But, as t turned out, te two braces n te older structure were more nterdependent tan tey once ad seemed. For wtn te span of anoter twenty years, te bourgeose too - n any strct sense, as a cass possessed of selfconscousness and morae - was all but extnct. Here and tere, pockets of a tradtonal bourgeos setng can stll be found n provnca ctes of Europe, and peraps n certan regons of Nort Amerca, typcaly preserved by regous pety: famly networks n te eneto or Basqe ands, conservatve notables n t Bordeas, parts of te German Mittelstand and on But' and large, te bourgeose as Baudelare or Marx, Rmbaud, Grosz or Brect - or even Sartre or O'Hara t, a tng of te past. pace of tat sold ampteatre an aquarum of oatng, evanescent forms - te projectors an managers, audtors and jantors, admnstrators and speculatos of contemporary captal: functons of a monetary unverse tat knows no socal xtes or stable denttes Not tat ntergeneratonal mobty as greatly ncreased, f at all, n te rcer socetes of te postwar word. Tese reman
T H E O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D ER N I T Y
as objectively stratied as ever. But the cultural and psychologi cal markers of position have become steadily more eroded among those who enjoy wealth or power. Agnelli or Wallenberg now evoke a distant past, in a time whose typical masks are Milken or Gates. From the seventies onwards, the leading personnel of the major states was moulting too - Nixon, Tanaka, Craxi were among the new plumes. More widely, in the public sphere democratization of manners and disinhibition of mores advanced together. For long, sociologists had debated the embourgeoisement of the workingclass in the West - never a very happy term fo the processes at issue. By the nineties, however, the more striking phenomenon was a general encan aillement of the possessing classes - as it were: starlet princesses and sleazeball presidents, beds for rent in the ofcial residence and bribes for killer ads, disneycation of protocols and taran tinization of practices, the avid corteges of the nocturnal underpass or the gubernatorial troop. n scenes like these lies much of the social bacdrop of the postmodern. For what this landscape means is that two conditions of modernism have vanished utterly. There is no longer any vestige of an academicist establishment against which an advanced art could pit itself. Historically, the conventions of academic art were always closely tied, not only to the selfrepresentations of titled or upper classes, but also to the sensibility and pretensions of traditional middle classes below them. With the passing of the bourgeois world, this aesthetic foil is missing. The title and site of the most deliberately lurid bratpack show in Britain says everything: Sensation care of the Royal Academy. Similarly, modernism tapped violent energies of revolt against the ofcia morality of the time - standards of repression and hypocrisy notoriously stigmatized, with reason, as specically bourgeois. The jettisoning of any real pretence of upholding these stan dards, widely visible from the eighties onwards, could not but affect the situation of oppositional art: once bourgeois morality in the traditional sense is over, it is as if an amplier is suddenly cut off. Modernism, om its earliest origins in Baudelaire or Flaubert onwards, virtualy dened itself as antibourgeois'. Postmodernism is what occurs when, without any victory, that adversary is gone.
AFTEREFFECTS
A second condition can be traced to the evolution of tech noogy. Modernism was owered by the excitement of the great cluster of new inventions that transformed urban life in the early years of the century: the liner, the radio, the cinema, the skyscraper, the automobile, the aeroplane, and by the abstract conception of dynamic machinofacture behind them. These provided the images and settings for much of the most original art of the period, and gave all of it an encompassing sense of rapid change. The interwar period rened and extended the key technologies of the modernist takeoff with the arrival of the ying boat, the roadster, sound and colour on screen, the autogyro, but did not add signicantly to their list. Gamour and speed became, even more than before, the dominant notes in the perceptual register. t was the exerience of the Second World War that abruptly changed this whole Gestalt Scientic progress now for the rst time assumed unmistakeably menac ing shapes, as constant technical improvement unleashed ever more powerful instruments of destruction and death, terminat ing in demonstrative nuclear exposions. Another and innitely vaster kind of machinery, far beyond the range of daily experi ence, yet casting a baleful shadow over it, had arrived. After these glimpses of apocalypse, the postwar boom
changed the countenance of the mechanica in more closeat
hand and thoroughgoing ways. War production, above all if not only - in America, had converted technological innovation into a permanent principle of industrial output, mobilizing research budgets and design teams for miitary competition.
Wit peacetime reconstruction and the ong postwar boom, mass production of standardized goods integrated the sa dynamic. The result was an industrial version of paraboa of the spiritua: as the ow of the new became n very continuity a stream of the same, the charisma of ec was transformed into routine, and ost its magnetic powers art. n part too this banalization reected the absence, amidst a ceaseess plethora of improvements, of any decisive cluster of inventions comparable to those of the era before the First Word War. For a whole period the excitement of the modern tacitly dwinded, without much alteration of its original visual eld. The deveopment that changed everything was television. 87
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This was the rst technological advance of wordhistorica moment in the postwar epoch. With it, a qualitative jump in the power of mass communications had arrived. Radio had already proved, in the interwar and wartime years, a far more potent instrument of social capture than print: not merely by reason of its lesser demands on educational qualication, or greater immediacy of reception, but above al because of its temporal reach. Roundthecock broadcasting created poten tialy permanent listeners audiences whose waking and hearing hours could at the limit be one. This effect was only possible, of course, because of the dissociation of the ear from the eye, which meant that so many activities - eating, working, travel ing, reaxing coud be performed with the radio in the background. The capcity of television to command the atten tion of its audiences' is immeasurably greater, because they are not simpy such: the eye is caught before the ear is cocked. What the new medium brought was a combination of undreamtof power: the continuous availability of radio with an equivaent of the perceptual monopoy of print, which excludes other forms of attention by the reader. The saturation of the imaginary is of another order. First marketed in the fties, television did not acquire major saience till the early sixties. But so long as its screen was only blackandwhite, the medium whatever its other advantages retained a mark of inferiority, as if it were technicaly stil a laggard stepchild of the cinema. The true moment of its ascendancy did not come until the arriva of colour teevision, which rst became general in the West in the early seventies, triggering a crisis in the lm industry whose boxofce effecs are stil with us. f there is any single technoogical watershed of the postmodern, it ies here. f we compare the setting it has created to the opening of the century, the difference can be put quite simpy Once, in jubilation or alarm, modernism was seized by images of machinery; now, postmodernism was sway to a machinery of images. n themselves, the teevision set or the computer termina, with which it will eventually merge, are peculiarly blank objects nul zones of the domestic or bureau cratic interior that are not just inapt as conductors of psychic energy', but tend to neutralize it Jameson has put this with
AFTEREFFECTS
characteristic force: These new machines can be distinguished fom the older futurist ions in two related ways they are al sources of reproduction rather than "production and they are no onger sculptural solids in space. The housing of a computer scarcely embodies or manifests its pecuiar energies in the same way that a wing shape or santed smokestack do' . On the other hand, imageresistant themselves, the machines pour out a torrent of images, with whose volume no art can compete. The decisive technica environment of the postmodern is constituted by this Niagara of visua gabble'. Since the seventies, the spread of secondorder devices and positionings in so much aesthetic practice is comprehensible ony in terms of this primary reality. But the latter, of course, is not simpy a wave of images, but aso - and above all of messages. Marinetti or Tatlin could erect an ideoogy out of the mechani cal, but most of the machines themselves said little. The new apparatuses, by contrast, are perpetual emotion machines, transmitting discourses that are alltowall ideology, in the strong sense of the term. The intellectua atmosphere of post modernism, as doxa rather than art, draws many of its impulses from the pressure of this sphere. For the postmodern is this too: an index of critical change in the reationship between advanced technology and the popular imaginary. A third coordinate of the new situation lay, of course, in the political changes of the time. The onset of the Cold War, after 197 had frozen strategic boundaries and chiled all insurgent hopes in Europe. n America, the labour movement was neu tered and the left hounded. Postwar stabiization was foowed by the fastest period of international growth in the history capitalism. The Atlantic order of the fties, proclaiming the of ideology, seemed to consign the poitical world of twenties and thirties to a remote past. The wind of in which the avantgardes had once skimmed, was gone. cally, it was in this period, when most of the great experiments seemed over, that the notion of modernism' acquired currenc Signatures of the Visible New ork 12 p. 61 likewise Postmodernism
pp. 3637 he phrase is Rober Hghess Nothing ifNot Critical New ork 10 p. 14
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as a comprehensive term, to demarcate a canon of cassical works to which contemporary critics now looked back. Yet the outwrd appearance of a complete closure of political horizons in the West was still, for a whole period, deceptive. n continental Europe, mass Communist parties in France and taly and undergrounds i Spain, Portugal and Greece - remained unreconciled to the existing order; no matter how moderate their tactics, their very existence acting as a mnemonic device, as it were, holding the place in the pages of history' for the revival of more radical aspirations. n the USSR, the passing of Stalin unleashed processes of reform that seemed in the era of Khrushchev to be moving towards a less repressive and more internationaist Soviet model - one committed to assisting rather than frustrating insurgent movements abroad. n the Third World, decolonization was shaking loose aj or bastions of imperial rule, in a series of revolutionary upheavals - ndochina, Egypt, Algeria, Cuba, Angola - that brought independence to much wider areas. n China, the established bureaucracy became the target of a movement orchestrated by Mao, invoking the ideals of the Paris Commune. Such was the setting, with its mixture of realities and illusions, for the sudden kindling of explosive revoutionary energies among educated youth of the advanced capitaist countries not merely in France, Germany or taly, but equally in the United States or Japan - in the sixties. The wave of student revolt was rapidly, if more seectively, followed by labour unrest - most famously, the general strike of May-June 196 in France, the Hot Autumn of taly in 1969 and its protracted seques, the miners' strikes of 1977 in Britain. n this great tu bulence, echoes from the European past (Fourier, Blanqui, Luxemburg not to speak of Marx himself), the Third World present (Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Cabral) and the Communist future (the cultural revolution' envisaged by Lenin or Mao) crisscrossed to create a poitical ferment not seen since the twenties. n these years too, vital struts of the traditiona moral order, regulating the relations between generations and sexes, started to give way. Noone has retraced the parabola of Marxism and Form p 273.
AFTEREFFECTS
better than Jameson, in his essay Periodizing the that time Sixties' 0 Quite naturally, it saw lively avantgarde lames spurt up aga. But this conjuncture proved to be a cmacterc Wthn another few years, all the signs were reversed as, one by one, the political dreams of the sixties were snuffed out. The May Revolt in France was absorbed virtually without trace in the political doldrums of the seventies. The Czechoslovak Spring the boldest of all Communist reform experiments - was crushed by the armies of the Wasaw Pact. n Latin America, guerrillas inspired or led by Cuba were stamped out. n China, the Cultural Revolution sowed terror rather than liberation. n the Soviet Union, the long Brezhnevite decline set in. To the West, here and there labour unrest persisted; but by the second half of the decade the tide of militancy had ebbed. Callinicos and Eagleton are right to stress immediate sources of postmodernism in the experience of defeat. But these setbacks were only a preamble to more decisive checkmates ahead. n the eighties, a victorious Right passed over to the offensive. n the AngloSaxon world the Reagan and Thatcher regimes, after attening the labour movement, rolled back regulation and redistribution. Spreading from Britain to the Continent, privatization of the public sector, cuts in social expenditure and high evels of unemployment created a new norm of neoiberal development, eventually implemented by parties of the Left no less than the Right. By the end of the decade, the postwar mission of socialdemocracy in Western Europe - a welfare state based on full employment and universal provision - had bee largely abandoned by the Socialist nternational. n East Europe and the Soviet Union, Communism - unable to economically abroad or democratize politically at home - obliterated altogether n the Third World, states born national liberation movements were everywhere trapped in ne forms of international subordination, unable to escape t constraints of gobal nancia markets and their institutions o supervson. The universal triumph of capital signies more than just a The Ideologies o Theo Vol 2 pp 178208 9
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defeat for all those forces once arrayed against it, athough it is aso that. ts deeper sense ies in the canceation of poiti ca aternatives. Modernity comes to an end, as Jameson observes, when it oses any antonym. The possibiity of other
socia orders was an essentia horizon of modernism. Once that vanishes, something ike postmodernism is in pace. This is the unspoken moment of truth in Lyotard's original construction.
How, then, should the conjuncture of the postmodern be
summed up ? A capsue comparison with modernism might run:
postmod�rnism
from
ho} an
But, of course, these coordinates were themseves only
of a arger change that supervened with the
seventies. Capitaism as a whole entered a new historical phase, with the sudden fadeout of the postwar boom. The underying cause of the ong downswing, with its much sower rates of growth and higher rates of inequality, was the intensication of international competition, relentlessly forcing down rates of prot and so the springs of investment, in a gobal economy no longer divisibe into reatively shetered national spaces. This was the hard meaning of the arriva of the mutinational capitalism fagged by Jameson. The response of the system to the crisis yieded the conguration of the eighties: the batter ing down of labour in core regions, outsourcing of pants to cheap wage ocations in the periphery, displacement of invest ment into services and communications, expansion of military expenditure, and vertiginous rise in the relative weight of nancial speculation at the expense of innovative productio. n these ingredients of the Reagan recovery, al the deteriorated elements of the postmodern came together: unbrided nouveau riche display, teleprompt statecraft, bollweevil consensus. t was the euphoria of this conjuncture that generated, with punctual timing, the rst real iumination of postmodernism. The economic turningpoint of the Reagan Presidency came on 1 August 9 when the American stockmarket took off - the start of the feverish bullrun that ended the Carter recesson. Three months later, Jameson rose to address the Whitney. 92
AFTEREFFECTS
Polarities
If such may have been the conditions of the postmodern, what can be said of its contours? Historicaly modernism was essen tially a post facto category, unifying after the event a wide variety of experimenta forms and movements, whose own names for themseves knew nothing of it. By contrast, postmod ernism was much coser to an ex ante notion, a conception germinated in advance of the artistic practices it came to depict. Not that it has ever been signicantly adopted by practitioners themselves, any more than was modernism in its (retrospective) heyday. But there is stil a major difference in the respective weight of the terms. The time of the modern was that of the unrepeatable genius - the high modernism' of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Eliot; or the intransigent vanguard - the collective movements of Symboism, Futurism, Expressionism, Construc tivism, Surrealism. This was a word of sharp demarcations, whose frontiers were staked out by the instrument of the manifesto: decarations of aesthetic identity peculiar not ony to the avantgardes, but also in more oblique and subimated stye characteristic of writers like Proust or Eliot, that separated the elective ground of the artist from the terrains vagues beyond. This pattern is missing in the postmodern. Since the seventies, the very idea of an avantgarde, or of individua genius, has fallen under suspicion. Combative, collective movements of innovation have become steadiy fewer, and the badge of a novel, selfconscious ism' ever rarer. For the universe of the postmodern is not one of delimitation, but intermixture celebrating the crossover, the hybrid, the potpourri. I climate, the manifesto becomes outdated, a relic of an purism at variance with the spirit of the age. In the any system of selfdesignations internal to the ed of practices themseves, however, the external unier of postm ernism has acquired a contemporary saience modernism its never had, as a comprehensive rubric for them all. The ga between name and time has cosed. This is not to say that there was no discrepancy at all. The history of the idea of the postmodern, as we have seen, starts well before the arrival of anything that would readily be
T H E O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D E R NI T Y
identied as a form of the postmodern today. Nor does the order of its theorization correspond to the order of its phenom enal appearance. The origins of the notion of postmodernism were literary, and its projection to fame as a style was architec tural. But long before there were novels or buildings that answered to standard descriptions of the postmodern, virtualy al its traits had surfaced in painting. Since the Belle Epoque, this had usualy been the most sensitive seismograph of wider cultural changes. For painting is set apart among the arts by a distinctive combination of features, that amount to a special statute. On the one hand, in the scale of resources required as a practice, its costs of poduction are far the lowest (even sculp tors use more expensie materials) - a mere minimum of paint and canvas, within reach of the most indigent producer. By comparison, the capital sums needed for architecure or lm are enormous, while writing or composing normally demands quite sizeable outays to reach pubication or performance. Another way of putting this is simpy to note that the painter is in principle the only fuly independent producer, who as a rule needs no further intermediation to reaize a work of art. On the other hand - and in dramatic contrast - the market for paintings involves potentially the highest rates of return on initial investmen of any of the arts. Since the Second World War, the galery system and auction room have steadiy esca lated values, towards astronomic gures in the top range. Wha is pecuiar about the art market, of course, and explains these dizzying prices, is its speculative character. Here works can be bought and sold as pre commodities in a futures market, for prot to come. The two opposite sides of the situation of painting are, of course, interrelated. A picture is cheap to produce, because it invoves no techniques of reproduction - no crane or steel, no camera or studio, no orchestra, no printing press. But precisely for that reason, as what is nonreproducibe - that is unique - it can become incommensurately valuabe. This paradox is joined by another within the practice of painting itself. In no other art is the barrier to forma innovation so low. The constraints of verba intelligibility, let alone the aws of engineering, are far more rigid than the habits of the eye. Even music, dependent on speciaized skils of the ear, is less free, as
AFTEREFFECTS
the innitely smaler audience for modernist experiment in the medi u of sound makes lear. It is thus no accident that painting started to break with the conventions of representation well before any other art, even poetry, and has witnessed far the largest number of formal revolutions since. In front of the canvas, the painter enjoys an individual freedom without precise counterpart. Yet, far from being the pursuit par excellence of solitaries, painting has been objectively the most collaborative of modern arts. In no other do the terms school' and movement' - in the strong sense of mutual earning and common purpose - recur so frequenty and actively. Originay, training in the academy or studio was no doubt critica for this. But perhaps too, at some deeper evel, the very liberty of painting, in its unnerving space of invention, has needed the compensation of a distinctive sociabiity. At al events, painters have typicaly consorted with each other as writers or musicians have rarely done, and in their interaction have furnished much the clearest series of stylistic breaks in the general history of modernism. These features marked painting out in advance as likey to be the privieged site for a transition to the postmodern. The last major schoo of the modern, abstract expressionism, had been the rst to hit a zenith of current success. But what the market gave, it took away. As Greenberg noted: In the spring of 196 there came the sudden colapse, marketwise and publicitywise, of Abstract Expressionism as a coective manifestation' - a dbce touched off by the ong stockmarket decine of the winter and spring of 196 which had nothing to do with art intrinsicaly'. Six months later, New York saw the trium Pop Art in the fal. Originally, the new stye had strong l a radical past. Rauschenberg had taught under Abers Olson at Back Mountain, and enjoyed close ties with and Cage; Johns was initialy hailed as a neoDada. Fascinatn with the machinemade daily environment was a return to one o the odest avantgarde interests. But by the sixties, this aready appeared as an impulse with a difference. Few rea machines Clemen Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism Vol 4 Chicago 1993
pp. 215 79.
T H E O I G I N S O F P O S T M O D E N I T Y
gured in this painting, though the exceptions - Rosenquist's sleek nacelle of death - are suggestive. he characteristic icons of Pop Art were no longer mechanical ojects themselves, ut their commercial facsimiles. his art of cartoonstrips, rand names, pinups, glazed anners and lurred idols supplied, as David Antin remarked of Warhol in 66 a series of images of images' . Citing the phrase two years later, Leo Steinerg was perhaps the rst to du this painting postmodernist. With the later Warhol, indeed, a full postmodern has unques tionaly arrived: nonchalant crossing of forms - graphics, painting, photography, lm, journalism, popular music; calcu lated emrace of the market; heliotropic ending towards media and power. Here the curve deplored y Hassan, from a disci pline of silence to a adinage of the deadpan, was virtually traced within a single style - even so, not without all suversive effect. But if Pop Art offers one paraola of the postmodern, as it moved towards an aesthetic of lirtation, the movements that succeeded it took a more uncopromising orientation. Mini malism, launched in 666 deed any easy appeal to the eye, not y a mixing of forms ut y undermining the distinc tions etween them: nitially, with the production of ojects that were neither painting nor sculpture (Judd), then with the migration of sculpture towards landscape or architecture (Smithson, Morris). Here a characteristic modernist attack on perceptual conventions was radicalized in two directions, as spatial constructs were rendered temporal experiences, and institutional displays frustrated y siteinding. Conceptualism, following hard on the heels of Minimalism its rst articulations came around 67 went further, disman tling the artistic oject itself y interrogation of the codes constituting it as such. Coinciding with the height of the anti war movement and the wave of uran uprisings in America at the end of the sixties, conceptualism was much more political in intention, moilizing text against image for resistance not only he conseence o a series o regressions rom some iniia image o he rea
word Warho he Siver enemen' Artnews Smmer 1966 p. 58 Seinberg discssed his passage in Other Criteria New ork 1 972, p. 91, where he characeried he aprpose picre pane o Raschenberg as he basis o a pos Modernis paining.
AFTEEFFECTS
I �i I
to traditional ideologies of the aesthetic in the narrow sense, ut also to the contemporary culture of the spectacle at large. t was also far more international - America enjoying a rief priority, ut no hegemony, as variants of conceptual art arose independently all over the world, from Japan or Australia to Eastern Europe or Latin America.3 n this sense, conceptualism could e considered the rst gloal avantgarde: the moment at which the recurtains of modern euroamerican - art parted, to reveal the stage of the postmodern. But conceptualism was this in another sense too. he formalist canvas was not just displaced y unclassiale ojects, eluding the system of the ne arts. Painting itself was deposed as the acme of the visual, and volatilized into other forms. Ahead lay the emergence of instal lation art. he pictorial is still suspended in the aftershock of this upheaval. he reak etween the modern and postmodern thus not only came earlier in painting or sculpture than in any other medium, ut was more drastic - a radical disturance of the nature of the arts themselves. t is thus no surprise that it was precisely this area that gave rise to the most vaulting theories of the destiny of the aesthetic. n 9 the German art historia Hans Belting pulished Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? a year later, the American philosopher Arthur Danto his essay he Death of Art' he close con vergence of their themes has found further expression in Belting's enlarged second edition of his work, Eine Revision nach zehn ]ahren ( 99 ) which drops the questionmark in the rst edition, and Danto's After the End of Art ( 997) .
Belting's original thesis took the form of a doule attack
he bes accon o he origins and eecs o he movemen is eer Goba Concepaism (orhcoming. For a criie o is psho see Bchohs aernaive version Concepa Ar 1962-196 9 rom he Aesheics Adminisraion o he Criie o Insiions October No 55 Winer 199 pp. 105-143 which axes concepaism wih a prging o image and ski memory and vision ha paradoxicay conribed o a reinsaemen o he very specar regime i sogh o void. his argmen is ar rom over. Danos ex ormed he ead essay in he symposim edied by Bery Lang The Death of Art New ork 1 984 pp. 535 he remainder composed o responses o i 9
HE O R I G I N S O F P O S M O E R N I Y
the regutive ide notions of rt' tht hd informed pro fession rt history since Hege, but whose origins went bck to sri; nd on vntgrde conceptions of continuous pro gress' in modern rt. hese two discourses, he gued, hd wys been disjoined, since rt historins with the rrest of exceptions - hd never hd much to sy bout the rt of their time, whie the vntgrdes tended to reject the rt of the pst en loc nywy. But both were historic mystictions here ws neither unitry essence no n unfoding ogic in rt, which not ony ssumed widey diverse forms, but fued rdicy different functions, in the vious societies nd epochs of humn history In the West, the dominnce of ese pinting dted ony from the Renissnce, nd ws now over Amid the disintegrtion of its trdition genes, it ws now egitimte t sk whether Western rt hd not reched the kind of exhustion in which the cssic rtforms of Est Asi were often on their home ground fet to hve come to n end. At events, it ws cer tht no coherent history of rt' - tht is, its Western vrints, since univers history hd neve been on offer - ws ny onger possibe, ony discrete enquiries into prticur episodes of the pst; nd tht there coud be no such thing s constnt work of rt' s singur phenomenon, susceptibe of universy vid ct of interprettion In due course, Beting proceeded to vouminous iustrtion of his rgument in Bild und Kult ( 990) study of devotion representtions from te Antiquity to the end of the Midde Ages, trcing history of the imge before the er of rt' When he cme to review his cse in the midnineties, Beting no onger hd ny doubt tht rt history s once understood ws nished His ttention now turned to the fte of rt itsef Once, rt ws understood s n imge of reity, of which rt history funished the frme In the contempory epoch, how ever, rt hd escped its frme. dition denitions coud no onger encose it s new forms nd prctices proiferted, not merey tking mss medi s their mteris, but often deivered by the eectronic medi themseves or even by fshion, s styistic rivs of wht remined of the eau arts he visu prctices of this postmodern scene hd to be expored in the
AFEREFFECS
sme ethnogrphic spiit s premodern icons, without commit ment to ny science of the beutifu ppernce. In the nine teenth centuy Hege hd decred the end of t, nd t the sme stroke founded new discourse of rt history. ody, for Beting, we observe the end of ine t history, s rt tkes eve of its denitions. he resut is the opposite of cosure: n unprecedented nd wecome openness mrks the time. Dnto rives t the sme frmtion, by sighty - beit piqunty diffeent route Here the end of t' is more phiosophicy nnounced, s the copse of mster nrrtives tht ent the disprte works of the pst cumutive mening But such invoction of Lyotrd by no mens signies simirity of deduction. he nrrtive whose deth Dnto wishes to ceebrte is Greenberg's ccount of the dynmic of modern pinting, moving by successive purges beyond gur tion, depth, impsto to sheer tness nd coour. Its funer ws Pop Art, which in one vrint or nothe unexpectedy restored virtuy everything Greenberg hd deced spent For Dnto, Pop Art mrked the entry of pinting into posthistoric' iberty, in which nything visibe coud become work of rt moment of which Wrho's Brio Box coud stnd s the epiphny For Pop Art ws not simpy sutry dortion of the commonpce', fter the eitist metphysics of bstrct expressionism (with its suspect inks to surreism) It ws so demonstrtion - here the connexion with Duchmp ws essenti - tht the esthetic is not in fct n essenti or dening property of rt' Since there ws no onger ny prescrip tive mode of rt, cndy br coud be s cceptbe work o rt, if so proposed, s ny other his condition of perfect rtistic freedom', in which thng is permitted', did not, however, contrdict Hege's thetic but on the contrry reized it For the end of rt in the coming to wreness of the true phiosophic ntue rt' - tht is, rt psses over into phiosophy (s Hege sid it After the End of Art rnceon 1997, pp. 11, 185 A candy bar ha s a work of ar need no be some especaly good candy bar. I js has o be a candy bar prodced wh he nenon ha be ar. One can sll ea snce s edbly s conssen wh s beng ar
T H E O R I I NS O F P O S T M O D E RN I TY
must) at the moment at which only an intellectual decision can determine what is or is not art. This is an endstate which Danto explicitly associates with that other Hegelian prospect, the end of history as such, as reworked by Kojve. f the latter has not necessarily yet been reached, the former gives us a hppy prevision of it. How wonderful it would be to believe that the pluralistic art world of the historical present is a harbinger of political things to come!' Belting's construction - this is its principal contrast with Dan to's - dispatches rather than appeals to Hegel. Yet it strikes a very similar note, at precisely this point, where the theme of a posthistorical condition transmit ted by Henri De Man to Gehlen, from the alternative source of Cournot, recurs at the same junction: The Posthistoire of artists, want to argue, started earlier and has unfolded more creatively than the Posthistoire of historical thinkers' . The intellectual fragility of these interlocking arguments is evident enough. The equation of premodern icons with post modern simulacra, as art before and after art, involves an obvious paralogism - since in the rst case objects are endowed retrospectively with aesthetic status, while in the second they are expressly denied it. What qualies, then, the latter as art at all? For Danto, the answer is essentially the at of the artist The difference between the commodity in the supermarket and its reproduction in the museum lies in Warhol's debonair gesture itself. t would be difcult to imagine a philosophy of art that was, in substance, less Hegelian. The real inspiration here is closer to Fichte: the ego positing whatever world it wills. This paroxysm of subjective idealism is foreign to Belting, who proceeds with a more cautious anthropological step. But common o both theorists is a eldspecic predilection. The postmodern is construed and admired essentially through its most brazenly ostensive forms: the emblematic artists are Warhol or Greenaway But the break can also be written in a very different way For Aer the End of Art pp. 2, 303 , 37 Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte Eine Revision nach zehn Jahre Mnich
995, p. 2 I have discssed he inellecal origins o he idea o Posthistoire in he nds o Hisory, A Zone of Engagement pp 279375 00
AFTEREFFECTS
al Foster, the most cogent theoist of a neoavantgarde' indebted to its historic predecessors, but not necessarily inferior to them - indeed perhaps capable of realizing aims they missed it is not the gurative wit of Pop Art but the austere abstractions of Minimalism that marked the moment of rupture: a paradigm shift towards postmodernist practices that continue to be elaborated today'. For if the original avantgardes had concentrated their re on the conventions of art, they had paid relatively little attention to its institutions. In exposing these, the neoavantgardes had - as it were, after the event consummated their project. This was the task undertaken by the cohort of artists whose work represented the most effective passage from minimalism to conceptualism: Buren, Brood thaers, Asher, Haacke. The postmodern had never completely superseded the modern, he two being always in some sense deferred', as so many pregured futures and reclaimed pasts But it had inaugurated a ange of new ways to practice culture and politics' Y The notion of the postmodern, Foster insists, whatever later misuses were made of it, was not one the left should surrender Such accounts appear virtually antithetical, not only in aes thetic but political accet. Yet the commonalities behind the con tasting noms of each ae also plain Paodically, one could say: without Duchamp, no Rauschenberg or Johns - without Johns, no Warhol or Judd - without Ruscha or Judd, no Kosuth
or Lewitt - without Flavin or Duchamp (nally outanked ), no Buren. Even the la st white hope of modernist abstraction, Frank Stella, once set up to be bulwark against everything sliding towards the postmodern , played a not inconsiderable part in its '" arrival However the transformati on of the visual is . �·• here, connexions and oppositions are interwined. This is still too recent for detached reconstruction, that would all its contradictions their due But a mere ad h oc nominalis s clearly insufcient too The shifts in painting suggest a wid pattern Some provisional way of conceptualizing what seems
to be a constitutive tension within postmodernism is needed. Te Return of the Real p. 36 The Return ofthe Real p. 206
THE ORIGINS OF PO STMODERNITY
At the very origin of the term, as we have seen, there as a bifurcation When De Ons rst coined postmodernismo he contrasted it with ultramodernismo as two opposite reactions to Hispanic modernsm, succeeding each other within a brief space of time Fifty years later postmodernism has become a genera term, whose primary connotations remain cose to those indicated by De Ons, but which also visibly exceeds them towards the other poe of his construction To capture this complexity, another pair of prexes - internal to postmodern ism - is needed Perhaps the most appropriate coud be bor rowed from a revolutionary past. In a famous speech, on the 9th Nivse of the Year II, Robespierre distinguished between citrarevolutionary' and utrarevolutionary' forces in France that is, moderates who wished to draw the Republic back from the resolute measures necessary to save it (Danton), and extre mists who sought to precipitate it forward into excesses that woud just as surey lose it (Hbert) Here, purged of loca polemic, is the dyad that more nicely conveys the poarity within the postmodern The citra' can be taken as all those tendencies which, breaking with high modernism, have tended to reinstate the ornamental and more readily available; while the ultra' can be read as all those which have gone beyond modernis in radicalizing its negations of immediate intelligibiity or sensuous gratication If the contrast between the pop and the minimal conceptual in the postmodern gallery is archetypal, the same tension can be traced throughout the other arts Architecture is a particularly marked case in point, where the postmodern stretches from the forid histrionics of Graves or Moore at one end to the deconstructive severities of Eisenmann or Liebeskind at the other: citramodernism and ultramodernism to monu mental scale But it would equaly be possible to map - say contemporary poetry in similar fashion David Perkins's stan dard history, in effect, tacitly does so by distributing postmod ern genres geographically, as between Britain and America See F.A. Alard,
La Socit des ]acobins Recueil de documents Vol V aris
1895, pp. 601-604. No hisorian dobs ha Danon and Hber also belonged o he Revolion. 02
AFTEREFFECTS
modernism extng into Larkin or Hughes on one side of the Atlantic, and Ashbery or Pereman on the other. Enthusiasts for the atter, of course, wod excude the citra from postmodern poetry just as viceversa Jencks woud excude the utra from postmodern architecture One of the most striking features of Jameson's critica writing is his effortless negotiation of both poes Portman and Gehry, Warho and Haacke, Doctorow and Simon, Lynch and Sokurov Does a forma divider of this kind correspond to any socia demarcationline? onfronting the cuture of capita, modern ism could appea to two aternative valuewords, both hostile to the commercia ogic of the market and the bourgeois cult of the family, if from opposite standpoints he traditional aristo cratic order offered one set of ideas against which to measure the dictates of prot and prudery - a sprezzatura above vugar calcuation or narrow inhibition he emergent labour move ment embodied quite another, no less antagonistic to the reign of fetish and commodity, but seeking its basis in exploitation, and its solution in an egalitarian future rather than hierarchical past hese two critiques sustained the space of aesthetic experiment Artists in dispute with established conventions had the chance of metonymc afliation with one class or the other, as moral styles or notional publics Sometimes they were attracted to both, as famously were critics like Ruskin here were also other optios the new urban pettybourgeoisie amiably popular, rather than gloweringly proletarian - was an important referent or the impressionists, or for Joyce But the two principal zones of actual or imaginary investment were upper atmosphere of titled leisure and the lower deeps manua labour Strindberg, Diaghilev, Proust, George, mannstha, D'Annunzio, Eliot, Rilke can stand for the rst Compare David erkins, A History of Modern Poetry Modernism and Ae
Cambridge, Mass., 1987, pp. 331353, wih al Hoover (ed) Postmodern Ameri can Poetry New ork 1994, pp. xxv-xxxix Were one o exend is scope beyon he ars philosophy oers an obvios eld or mch he same conras - Rory a one end, Derrida a he oher. For his daliy, see in pariclar Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism London 1989, pp. 55-57 . 03
T H E O R I I N S O F P O S T M O D ER N I T Y
Ensor, Rodchenko, Brecht, Platonov, Prvert, Tatlin, Lger, for the second. Evidenty enough, this divarication did not correspond to any particuar pattern of aesthetic merit. But, equay painy, it did indicate two opposite sets of poitical sympathies, that delimited the range of styles adopted on either side. There were, of course, signicant exceptions here, like Mallarm or Cine, where the hermetic and demotic exchanged ideologica signs But the general rule holds good that the eld of modernism was traversed by two social lines of attraction, with formal conse quences How far can anything comparable be said of postmod ernism? The departure of aristocracy, the evanescence of the bourgeoisie, the erosion of workingclass condence and iden tity, have altered the supports and targets of artistic practice in fundamental ways. It is not that alternative addressees have simply disappeared New poles of oppositional identication have emerged in the postmodern period: gender, race, ecoogy, sexual orientation, regional or continental diversity. But these have to date constitutd a weaker set of antagonisms. Warhol can be takn as a case in point. In a sympathetic and ingenious reading, Wllen situates his theatricaization of everyday life' as a continuation of the historic avantgarde project of lifting the barriers between art and life, taken into the underground, where its politica charge passed to gay liberation But there is insufcient contradiction between this legacy and Warhol's later fascination with Reaganism - the phase of society portraits and cabe T'.3 Subversive instincts were ultimately overpowered by something much arger. Wlen's authoritative rewriting of the overall trajectory of modernism stresses that at its origins lay a circulation between low and high culture, periphery and core, whose original outcome was much more disordery and exuberant than the functionalist aesthetic ater clamped down onto it, in the name of a stream lined industria modernity, enamoured of Americanis and Raiding the Icebox pp. 1 81 6 1 208 Fo anoher aracive reading of he early
Warhol daing a decline from 1966 see homas Crow Modern Art in the Common Culture New Haven 1996 pp. 4965: a volme ha conains perhaps he bes aesheically inclsive ye hisorically renchan skech of he original dialecic of modernism and mass clre in he visal ars 04
AFTEREFFECTS
Fordism. But, he argues, there always persisted a heterodox undercurrent of difference, excess, hybridity and olysemy' occasionay visible even in such zealots of purity as Loos or Le Corbusier - which, with the crisis of Fordism, resurfaced in the decorative play of postmodern forms.2 At rst glance, this looks ike a story with an upbeat ending. Yet there are sufcient ndications of new forms of corporate power esewhere in Wen's account to suggest a more ambigu ous verdict. What is true, however, is that the institutiona and technologica complex to emerge out of the crisis of Fordism does not acquire the same proportionate weight as the Fordist conguration itself, in his reconstruction. The lesser detail allows a looser conclusion. The risk here is an understatement of the change in the situation of the arts since the seventies, where the forces at work in the revival of the ornamental and the hybrid have obviously not just been released from below. Another way of putting this would be to ask how far the appeaing title of Raiding the Icebox is fully contemporary. Warhol's downhome phrase belongs to just that nostalgic elegy' for teenage years ived in a Golden Age of Americanism which, Wen remarks, dened Po Art as a whole. What coud be more fties than the refrigerator? Between such casual, haptic riing among the preserves of the past and our postmod ern present lies an eectronic barrier Today, scanning the picturebank, surng the net, digitalizing the image, would be more actual operations - all of them, necessariy, mediated by the oligopolies of the spectacle. It is that transformation, the ubiquity of the spectace as the organizing principle of the culture industry in conditions, which above all now divides the artistic eld. seam between the forml and the social typically lies her citramodern can virtually be dened as that which appeals to the spectacuar; the ultramodern as that which sees to elude or refuse it. There is no way o separating the return the decorative from the pressure of this environment. Low' and high' acquire a different sense here: denoting no longer the distinction between popular and eite, but rather between the Raiding the cebox p. 206.
T HE O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D E R N IT Y
market and those who command it. Not that, any more than in the modern, there is any simpe correspondence between the reation of a work to the demarcationline and its achievement. Aesthetic quaity continues, as always, to be distinct from artistic position. But what can be said, with compete certainty, is that in the postmodern the citra inevitably predominates over the utra. For the market creates its own suppy on a scale massively beyond any practices that woud resist it. The spec tace is by denition what mesmerizes the social maximum. It is this endemic imbaance within the postmodern that surfaces in the afterthoughts of even its most serious and generous commentators. The ast chapter of The Return of the Real has the melancholic title: Whatever happened to postmod ernism?' - that is, the practices and theories its author had championed, now perceived as already otsam, stranded on the banks of time by the onward stream of the media.25 Wllen, viewing the Academy show of 1997 found instaation art increasingy standardized in its hour of victory, and the spark of innovation unexpectedy passing back to painting, in doubt ful combat with its new environment - or the tension fet in the art world between the legacy of a lost Modernism and the ascendant culture of the spectacle, the transformed and trium pha forces of eveything which Clement Greenberg dismissed as kitsch. The new world order is in the ascendant and the art The Return of the Real pp. 205-206 I migh be haarded ha Fosers remarks
relec a more general disappoinmen o October he joal where hey rs appeared whose key role in proposing radical versions o posmode possibiliies in he visal ars aer he pahbreaking essays o Rosalind Krass Doglas Crimp and Craig Owens o 19791980 has ye o be properly docmened. he collecive volme edied by Foser in 1983 The AntiAesthetic which inclded amesons Whiney address is represenaive o his momen For he change o one by he lae eighies compare e.g. Paricia Mainardis scahing Posmode Hisory a he Mse dOrsay October No 41 Smmer 1987 pp. 31-52. his is he raecory ha can already be ond in Hassan or Lyoard. Cira sandpoins do no enconer he same diclies - alhogh on occasion perhaps hey shold. For an amsing example o imperrbable suivisme applading s wha was originally decried see Rober Venri and Denise Sco Browns complacen ale o he way he decoraed shed was wiped o by he dck in heir deser resor Las Vegas er is Classic Age in Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture A View from the Drafting Room Cambridge Mass 1996. 06
AFTEREFFECTS
word cannot possiby insulate itsef from it'. In this predica ment, contemporary art is pued in two directions: a desire to reassess the Modernist tradition, to reincorporate eements of it as corrective to the new Postmodern visua cuture', and a drive to throw onesef headlong into the new seductive word of ceebrity, commercialism and sensation'.2 These paths, he concudes, are incompatibe. In the nature of things, there is itte doubt which is likely to bear the heavier trafc. nections
oes Jameson's writing on postmodernism suggest any compar abe evoution of emphasis? Similar notes are certainy struck in his study of Adorno, that can be read not only in the key of its title Late Marxism but aso as a retrieva, in the spirit of Woen's remark, of a dialectica egacy of late modernism. Jameson is expicit on this point: Adorno's modernism pre cludes assimiation to the aleatory free pay of postmodern textuaity, which is to say that a certain notion of truth is still at stake in these verbal or formal matters', and his exampe persists even at its most provocative. Dialectic of Enlighten ment' pitiess examination of Hoywood, whatever its other shortcomings, reminds us that perhaps today, when the triumph of the more utopian theories of mass culture seems compete and virtually hegemonic, we need the corrective of some new theory of manipulation, and of a propery postmod ern commodication' In current conditions, what were once idiosyncratic limitations have become essentia antidotes. Adorno was a doubtful ally when there were stil powerful oppositional political currents from which his and cantankerous quietism could distract the committed Now that for the moment those currents are themselves cent, his bile is a joyous counterpoison and a corrosive solve to the surface of "what s '.2 Here is the political voice of he same requirement. hachers Ariss' London Review of Books 30 Ocober 1997 p. 9. Late Marxism Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic London 1990 pp. 11, 143 Late Marxism p. 249. 07
T H E O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D E R N IT Y
Jameson's book on Adorno is virtualy contemporary with
Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Since then, can we detect any inection in his tracking of the postmodern? In the ast part of the The Seeds of Time (1994) confessing a certain exasperation with myself and others' for overstating the ungovernabe richness' of the architectural forms of the postmodern, Jameson proposed instead a structural analysis of its constraints. The resut is a combinatory of positions, deimited by four signs - totality, innovation, partial ity, repication - which forms a cosed system. Such closure does not determine the responses of the architect to its set of possibilities, but does deate the puraist rhetoric of postmod ernism. Stil, it is striking that here Jameson professes admir ation for all the practitioners or theorists - Koolhaas, Eisenmann, Graves, Ando, Moore, Rossi, Frampton distrib uted round his semiotic square, no matter how mutually inimi cal. Consistent with this ecumenicism, although the social is often powerfully evoked in the course of the account, it affords no discrimination between positions, which are differentiated by formal criteria alone. A paradoxical consequence is to nd the embelishments of Moore or Graves aigned with the savage abhorrence of them by Frampton in the same aesthetic quadrant - which the analysis has then to decant into a subsidiary combinatory in order to separate out. Frampton, for one, might regard this way of looking at the architectural battleeld as insufciently critical.0 It is true that architecture occupies a peculiar position within the arts, which may hep to explain Jameson's apparent reti cence here. No other aesthetic practice has such immedia social impact, and - logically enough - none has therefore generated so many ambitious projects of social engineering. But since at the same time the cost and consequences of a major buiding complex are greater than those of any other medium, the actual exercise of free choice of structures or sites - by the architect is typicay smaler than anywhere else: overwhelm ingly, clients corporate or bureaucratic cal the shots. The very The Seeds ofTime New ok 99 p xv. ° Compare his Modern Architecture A Critical History London 992 pp 306-3
AFTEREFFECTS
rst sentence of Koohaas's enormous programmatic reverie, X reads: Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence' .3 If a certain substantive impo tence were the common baseine, then fantasies of omnipotece coud only nd outet in forms. It remains to be seen how far reasoning of this kind lies behind Jameson's approach. It is noticeable, however, that the combinatory - announced as only a sketch - has since been folowed by interventions of more stringent cast, that start to pose the questions it left aside. An urbane review of Koolhaas's summum bends warmth of persona admiration for the gure with a forbidding projection of the future he extols - the disposable city, whose nearest anticipation is Singapore: an ebulient iconoclasm ideaizing a virtualy penitentiary setting, as the perverse destination of a vanguard without a mission' .3 Subsequently, Jameson has insisted on the the agonizing issue of responsibiities and priorities' in contemporary architecture, and the need for a critique of its ideology of forms - where the facades of Boll or Graves belong to the order of the simula crum, and a wealth of inventiveness dissolves into frivolity or sterility'.33 In the na text of The Cultural Turn it is the speculative structure of globalized nance itself - the reign of ctitious capital, in Marx's terms - that nds architectural shape in the phantom surfaces and disembodied volumes of many a postmodern highrise.
r
In other areas, the inlection looks sharper. Nowhere more so than in the stunning ong essay on Transformat ions of the Image' at the centre of The Cultural Turn. Here Jameson registers a wholesae return within the postmodern of the once theoretically proscribed by it: a reinstatement of : return of the subject, rehabiitation of political science, rene' >
debates about modernity, and - above all - a res ; aesthetics. In so far as postmodernism in a larger sense, as the ogic of capitalism triumphant on a world scale, has banishe
O, Rem Koolhaas Brce Ma SMXXL Roerdam 995 p. xix. XXL Rem Koolhaass Grea Big Bildingsroman Village Voice Literary Sup plement May 996 Space Wars London Review ofBooks 4 April 996 09
T H E O R I G I S O F P O S T M O D E RN I T
the specte of evolution, this ecent twist epesents in Jame son's eading what we might call a estoation within the estoation'. The paticula object of his citique is the evival of a ponounced aeshetic of beauty in the cinema. Examples he discusses ange fom Jaman o Kieslowski at one level, though diectos like Coeau o Slas at anothe, to cuent Holly wood action pictues; not to speak of the thematics of at and eligion associated with the new output of the beautiful. His conclusion is daconian: whee once beauty could be a subve sive potest against he maket and its utilityfunctions, today the univesal commodication of the image has absobed it as a teacheous patina of the established ode. The image is the commodity today, and that is why it is vain to expect a negation of the logic of commodity poduction fom it; that is why, nally, all beauty today is meeticious'.3 The feocity of this dictum has no equivalent in Jameson's witing on achitectue, which even at its most eseved is much moe lenient on claims to visual splendou. What might explain the diffeence? Pehaps we should think of the contasting position of the two ats - cinema and achitectue - in popula cultue. The st was vitually fom inception its centepiece, while the second has neve eally acquied much of a foothold. Thee was no lmic countepat of functionalism In this moe aeed eld, a tun towads the decoative would be less tainted by immediate association with a longstanding aesthetic of entetainment than in the most comeon of all the commecial ats In Tansfomations of the Image', Jameson takes his illustations of the aesthetic of beauty fom makedly expei mental, calculatedly middlebow and staightfowadly popu la lms alike But if it is difcult to view Latino Bar o Yeelen in the same way as Blue The Godfather the pessue fo thei assimilation comes fom the categoy of the last This can be seen fom the focus of Jameson's oiginal attack on lmic beauty - the inauthentic cult of the glossy image' in boxofce nostalgia pis, whose shee beauty can seem obscene' as some ultimate packaging of Natue in cellophane of a type that an elegant shop might well wish to cay in its windows' It is See Te Cultural Turn 135.
AFTEREFFECTS
notable that on that occasion, at the souce of his objections, Jameson specied thei opposite: those histoical moments and situations in which the conquest of beauty has been a wenching political act: the hallucinatoy intensity of smeaed colou in the gimy numbness of outine, the bittesweet taste of the eotic in a wold of butalized and exhausted bodies'. 3 If those possibilities have so dwindled today, the eason lies in the immense distance between the situation of modenism and that of the postmodens o ouselves' ceated by the genealized mutation of the image into spectacle - fo today what chaacte of izes postmodenity in the cultual aea is the of all eveything outside of commecial cultue, its cultue, high and low', into a single system.3 his cultual tansfomation, in which the maket becomes allinclusive, is accompanied by a social metamophosis. Jameson's account of this change is, initially at least, moe favouable. Pointing to geate levels of liteacy and abundance of infomation, less hieachical mannes and moe univesal dependency on wage labou, he uses a Bechtian tem to captue the esultant levelling pocess: not democatization, which would imply a political soveeignty constitutivey missing, but plebeianization' - a development which, wit all its limits, the left can only wel come.3 But, as is often the way in Jameson, the dialectical depths of a concept disclose themselves only gadually Subsequent election on this alteation thus stikes a some what diffeent note In ,plebeianization eveals anothe aspect - not so much a closing of class distance, as a cancellation of social diffeence tout court: that is, the eosion o suppession of any categoy of the othe in the collective ay What once could be epesented altenatively by high o the undewold, the native o the foeigne, now fades fantasmagoia of intechangeable tatus and aleatoy in which no position i the social scale eve ievocably xe and the alien can only be pojected outwads into the eplica or extra-terrestrial. What corresponds to this fguration is not
Signatures of te Visible 85. See Te Cultual urn 135. Postmodernism 306. 111
THE ORIIN OF POSTMODERNITY
any greater objective equality - which has, on the contrary, everywhere receded in the postmodern West - but rather the dissolution of civil society as a space of privacy and autonomy, into a jagged noman'sland of anonymous marauding and dereg ulated violence: the world of William Gibson or Bladerunner38 Although not without its grim satisfactions, such plebeianization perforce denotes not greater popular enlightenment, but new forms of inebriation and delusion. Here is the natural soil of the luxuriant crescence of commodied imagery which ameson analyses so powerfully elsewhere. The notion of plebeianization comes from Brecht. But to register these ambiguities is also to recall a limit before which, we might say, his thought faltered. There was one massive reality Brecht's art never succeeded in rendering: the telltale sign of his uncertainty before it is the trivialization of Arturo Ui For the Third Reich was also, undeniably, a form of plebeianization - perhaps the most drastic yet known, one which did not reect but pursued the eradication of every trace of the other. To note this is not to conjure up renewed dangers of fascism, a lazy exercise o right and left alike today. But it is to remind us of an alternative legacy from that time, the example of Gramsci, who in his years in prison confronted the political strength and popular support of fascism without the smalest selfdeception. It is in his notebooks that perhaps the most suggestive analogy for the social transformation of the postmod ern can be found. As an Italian, Gramsci was compelled to compare the Renais sance and the Reformation - the reawakening of classical culture and supreme ourishing of the arts his own country had known, and the rationalization of theology and formidable regeneration of religion it had missed. Intellectually and aesthet icaly, of course, the Renaissance could be judged far in advnce of the Reformation that followed it, which - viewed narrowy in many ways saw a regression to a crude philistinism and biblical obscurantism But the Reformation was in that sense a conservative reaction that brought a historical progress. For the Renaissance had been essentially an elite affair, conned to The Seeds of Time pp 152-159
AFTEREFFECTS
privileged minotes even among the educated, whereas the Reformation was a mass upheaval that transformed the outlook of half the common people of Europe. But in the sequence from one to the other lay the condition of the Enlightenment.3 For the extraordinary sophistication of Renaissance culture, con ned to those above, had to be coarsened and simplied if its breakout from the mediaeval world was to be transmitted as a rational impulse to those below. The reform of religion was that necessary adulteration, the passage of intellectual advance through the ordeal of popularization, to a broader and so eventually stronger and freer social foundation The empirical qualications required by Gramsci's account need not concern us here. What is pertinent is the gure of the process he described. For is not something very close to this the relation of Modernism to Postmodernism, viewed historically? The passage from the one to the other, as cultural systems, appears marked by just such a combination of diffusion and dilution. Plebeianization' in this sense does mean a vast broad ening of the social basis of modern culture; but by the same token also a great thinning of its critical substance, to yield the at postmodern potion. Quality has once again been exchanged for quantity, in a process which can be looked at altrnatively as a welcome emancipation from cass connement or as a dire contraction of inventive energies. Certainly, e phenomenon of cultural coarsening, wose ambiguities caught Gramsci's atten tion, is on global display. Mass tourism, the greatest of a industries of the spectacle, can stand as its monument, in its awe some mixture of release and despoilment. But here the analog poses its question. In the time of the Reformation, the vehicl descent into popular life was religion: it was the proes churches that assured the passage of postmediaeva clr a more democratic and secular world. Today, the vehicle is market. Are banks and corporations plausible candidates the same historical role? It is enough to pursue the comparison a litte to see its imits. Gramsci ook mch o his argmen rom Croce, b rned i more sharply in avor o he Reormaion. For his principal relecions, see Quaderni del Carcere rin 1 977, Vol II pp. 1 1 29-11 30, 293-129; Vol III, pp 1 858-1 862. 3
THE ORIGNS OF POSTMODERNIY
The Reformation was in may ways a socia owering of cutura heights previousy attained: the ikes of Machiavei or Miche angeo, Montaigne or Shakespeare, were not to be reproduced again But it was aso, of course, a poitica movement of convusive energy, uneashing wars and civi wars, migrations and revoutions, across the better part of Europe. The Protestant dynamic was ideoogica; driven by a set of beiefs ercey attached to indiidua conscience, resistant to traditiona authority, devoted to the itera, hostie to the iconic - an outook that produced its own radica thikers, at rst theoogi ca, and then more openy and directy poita: the decension from Meanchthon or Cavin to Winstaney or Locke Here, for Gramsci, was the progressive roe of the Reformation that paved the way to the epoch of the Enightenment and the French Revoution. It was an insurgency against the premodern ideo ogica order of the universa church. The cuture of the postmodern is the inverse. Athough great poitica changes have swept over the word in the past quarter century, these have ony rarey been the hardfought outcome of mass poitica strugges. Libera democracy has spread by force of economic exampe, or pressure - Marx's artiery of commodities' - not by mora upheava or socia moiization; and as it has done so, its substance has tended to dwinde, both in its homeands and its new territories, as faing rates of voter participation and mounting popuar apathy set in. The Zeitgeist is not stirred: it is the hour of democratic fataism. How coud it be otherwise, when socia inequaity increases pari passu with poitica egaity, and civic impotenc hand in hand with nove suffrage? What moves is ony e market - but this at ever acceerating speed, churning hbits, styes, communities, popu ations in its wake. No prsined enightenment ies at the end of this journey. A pebeian beginning acks automatic connexion with a phiosophica ending. The movement of reigious reform began with the breakng of images; the arriva of the postmod ern has instaed the rue of images a neer before. The icon once shattered by the dissenter's bo is now enshrined in pexigass as universa ex voto The cuture of the specta@ generated, of course, its own ideoogy. This is the doxa of postmodernism that descends from 4
AFTEREFFEC
the moment of Lyotard. Inteectuay, it is not of much interest: an undemanding medey of notions, whose upshot is itte more than a sackawed conventionaism. But since the circuation of ideas in the socia body does not typicay depend on their coherence, but their congruence with materia interests, the inuence of this ideoogy remains considerabe by no means conned to campus ife aone, but pervasive in popuar cuture at arge It is to this compex that Terry Eageton has devoted a scintiating critique in The llusions of Postmodernism At the outset, Eageton distinguishes ceary between the postmodern understood as a deveopment in the arts, and as a system of ides re�us and expains that his concern is excusivey with the atter. He then considers one after another of the standard tropes of an antiessentiaist, antifoundationaist rhetoric rejections of any idea of human nature; conceptions of history as random process; equations of cass with race or gender; renunciations of totaity or identity; specuations of an undeter mined subject - and, with deicate precision, dismantes each. There has rarey been so effective and comprehensive a dissec tion of what might be caed, sardonicaly adapting Gramsci to Johnson, the common nonsense of the age. But Eageton's purpose is not just a sottisier He woud aso situate the ideoogy of postmodernism historicay. Advanced capitaism, he argues, requires two contradictory systems of justication a metaphysic of abiding impersona verities - the discourse of sovereignty and aw, contract and obigation - in the poitica order, and a casuistic of individua preferences fr the perpetuay shifting fashions and gratications of tion in the economic order. Postmodernism gives expression to this duaism, since whie its dismissa of the subject in favour of the erratic swarmings of desire coud the amora hedonis of the market, its denia of any vaues or objective truths undermines the prevaing tions of the state. What explains such ambivalence? Here Eg� ton's account hesitates. His study begins with the most sustan reading of postmodernism as the product of poitica defea on the eft ventured to date - a denitive repuse' .40 But this is
The Illusions ofPostmodernism Oxord 1997, p. 1 . 5
T H E O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D E R N IT Y
presented as playfu parable rather than actual reconstruction. For with characteristic sympathy, Eagleton suggests that post modernism cannot be reduced to this: it was aso the eerence of humiliated minorities onto the theoretical stage, and veri table revolution' in thought about power, desire, identity and the body, without whose inspiration no radical politics is hencefor ward thinkable. The ideological ambivalence of the postmodern thus might be linked to a historical contrast: schematically - defeat of organ ized labour and student rebellion concluding in economic accommodation to the market, rise of the insulted and injured leading to political questioning of morality and the state. Some such parallelism is certainly latent in Eagleton's account But if it is never quite spelt out, the reason lies in an equivocation at its outset. On the ace of it, there would appear to be little common measure between the two background developments assigned to postmodernism: the one driven home in a frontal chapter that sets the scene for the whole book, the other - as it were - allusive compensation for it in a couple of paragraphs. Political reality would suggest that such a ratio was good sense. But it sits uneasily with the notion of ambivalence, which implies a parity of effect. Perhaps aware of the difculty, Eagleton momentarily retracts with one hand what he advances with the other. The fable of political defeat concludes with the most bizarre possibility of all', as he asks: What if this defeat never really happened in the rst place? What if it were less a matter of the left rising up and being forced back, than of a steady disintegration, a gradual failure of nerve, a creeing paralysis?'. Were hat the case, then balance between cause and effect woud be restored. But, tempted though he is by this comforting fancy, Eagleton is too lucid to insist on it. His book ends as it begins, regretfully, on a more minatory note': not equipoise, but illusion is the bottomline of the postmodern.2 The discursive complex that is the object of Eagleton's critique is, as he notes, a phenomenon that may be treated apart from the artistic forms of postmodernism - ideology as distinct 41 The usions of Postmodernism 24. 42 Compare The usions ofPostmodernism 19, 134 6
AFTEREFFECTS
rom culture, in a traditional acceptance o these terms. But, o course, in a wider sense the two cannot be so cleanly separated How, then, should their relationship be conceived? he doxa o the postmodern is dened, as Eagleton in eect shows, by a primary anity with the ctechis o� What we are looking at, consequentlyce te rpart o the citra' - as the dominant strand in postmodern culture - in the ideological eld. It is striking how little concerned ameson has been with it But i we ask ourselves where the antithetical moment o ultra' theory is to be ound, the answer is not ar to seek. It has oten been observed that the postmodern arts have been short o the maniestoes that punctuated the history o the modern. his can be overstated, as h examples o Kosuth or Koolhaas noted above indicate. But i aesthetic programmes can certainly still be ound - albeit now more oten individual than collective, what has undoubtedly been missing is any revolution ary vision o the kind articulated by the historic avantgardes. Situationism, which oresaw so many aspects o the postmod ern, has had no sequels within it. he theoretical instance the avantgarde orm represented has not, however, disappeared. Rather, its unction has migrated. For what else is Jameson's totalization o postmodernism itse? In the epoch o modernism, revolutionary art generated its ow n descriptios o the time or intimations o the uture, while or the most part its practices were viewed sceptically, or at best selectively, by political or philosophical thinkers o the et. rotsky's coolness to uturism, Lukcs's resistance to Brechtia Verfremdung Adorno's aversion to surrealism, were characte istic o that conjuncture. In the period o postmodernism, has been a reversal o roles. Radical strands in the reclaiming or developing legacies o the avantgardes, been lacking. But no doubt in part because o the coexistence o the citramodern, o which there was o equivalent, this ultramodernist' culture has not produced condent account o the age, or sense o its general directio. hat has been the achievement o Jameson's theory o the postmodern. Here, viewed comparatively, is where the critical ambition and revolutionary lan o the classical avantgarde have passed. In this register, Jameson's work can be read as a 7
T HE O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D E R N I TY
single conti nuous equivalent of all the passionate meteorologies of the past. The totaliz er is now external; but that displacement belongs to the mome nt of history that the theory itself explains not embat-
tled, but complacent beyond precedent. R esistance can only start by staring down this order as it is.
Scope
The classical avantgades emained Westen, even i the hete odo cuents o modenism, o which they omed one steam, epeatedly sought inspiation in the Oiental, the Aican, the AmeicanIndian. The scope o Jameson's wok eceeds this occidental bounday. But it can be asked whethe, in doing so, it nevetheless still pojects an unduly homogeneous cultual univese at lage, modelled on the Noth Ameican system at its coe. Modenism', wites Pete Wllen, is not being succeeded by a totalizing Westen postmodenism but by a hybid new aesthetic in which new oms o communication and display will be constantly cononted by new venacula oms o invention and epession', beyond the stiingly Euocentic discouse' o the atteday moden and postmoden alike.3 The same kind o objection acquies moe doctinal om in the copus o postcolonial theoy'. This body o citicism has deveoped since the mideighties, lagely in diect eaction to the inuence o ideas o postmodenism in the metopolitan counties, and in paticula to Jameson's own constuction o the eld. The gavamen o the chage against his theoy is that it ignoes o suppesses pactices in the peiphey that not only cannot be accommodated within the categoies o the postmod en, but actively eject them. Fo these citics, postcolonial cultue is inheently moe oppositional, and a moe political than the postmodenism o the cente. Challenging the ove weening petensions o the metopolis, it typicaly has no hesitation in appealing to its own adical oms o epesenta tion o ealism, poscibed by postmoden conventions. The 4 Raiding the Icebox pp. 205 20 9.
AFTEREFFECTS
champions of the postcolonial wish once and or all to name and disclaim postmodernsm as neoimperialist'. For the con cept of postmoderniy has been constructed in terms which more or less intentionally wipe out the possibility of post colonial identity' that is, the need of the victims of Western imperialism to achieve a sense of themselves uncontaminated by universalist or Eurocentric concepts and images'. For this, what they require are not the pernicious categories of a totaliz ing Western Marxism, but the discrete genealogies of, say, Michel Foucault. Postcolonial theory has already attracted a series of powerful rejoinders, which it would be otiose to repeat here.5 The notion of the postcolonial' itself, as typically used in this literature, is so elastic that it loses virtually any critical edge. Temporally, its advocates insist, postcolonial history is not conned to the period since independence of states that were once colonies rather, it designates their entire experience since the moment of colonization itself. Spatially, it is not restricted to lands con quered by the West, but extends to those settled y it, so that by a perverse logic even the United States, the summit of neo imperialism itself, becomes a postcolonial society in quest of its breachless identity. This ination of the concept, tending to deprive it of any operational signicance, no doubt owes much to its geopolitical origins - which lie not where might be expected, in Asia or Africa, but in the former White ominions: New Zealand, Australia, Canada; and perhaps something to its 4 Simon Dring, Posmodernism or Poscolonialism?,
Landfall Vol 39 No 1985 pp. 369 Posmodernism or Poscolonialism Today, Textual Practice Vol ; _
No 1, 1987, p. 33 These wo exs rom New Zealand, each o which Jameson o ask, conain he earlies and cleares saemen o key hemes _ lierare. For remarks on an nerlying realis scrip in lal Sephen Semon: Modernisms as Pos, an Adam and Helen Trin eds, the Last Post New ork 1991 pp. 1-1 1, a conribion rom Canada. See, in pariclar, Ari Dirlik, The Poscolonial Ara: Third World Criicism in he Age o Global Capialism, Critical Enquiry Winer 1994 pp. 328-356 and Aijaz Ahmad, The Poliics o ierary Poscolonialiy, Race and Class Amn 1995, pp. 1-20. 46 See Bill Ashcro, Gareh Grihs, Helen Trin, The Empire Writes Back Theory and Practice in Colonial Literatures ondon 1989 p. 2: he ahors wrie rom Asralia 9
THE OIGINS OF POSTMOENITY
intellectual sources too - the banalizaton of power in oucault's overstretchng of the concept comes to mind. At all events, a conception of the postcolonal as aqueous as this can scarcely affect ts target. A more reasonable construal of the term takes ts prex n less cavalier fashion, to denote a historical period where decol onization has indeed occurred, but neoimperal domination persists no longer drectly based on military force, but on forms of ideological consent that call for new kinds of political and cultural resstance This version of the dea of postcolo alsm clearly reects more of the reality of the contemporary world, even if the second sign n the term still msses part of its target, snce such major states as China - the specc object of this renterpretation - or Iran were never colonzed, and most of Latn America ceased to be so nearly two centuries ago. But n ts insistence on the strength of market penetration of popular cultures outside the core zone of advanced capitalsm, it goes far to meet - rather than contest - Jameson's description of the impact of postmodernism; indeed, at the level of detail, expressly conrms it. So, too, the vitality of mutant forms of realsm n the arts of the periphery - where, say, employment of magcal motfs can be seen as a typical resort to weapons of the weak' - and their unsettlng effect, to whch postcolonial critics legitmately point, does not contradict the conguration of the centre. There after all postmodernsm, especially on ts ctra slope, always ncluded certan realist appeals, and has had no dfculty n incorporating supernatural twists to them. A more substantial objecton to Jameson's case for a global dominance of the postmodern comes not from claims for the postcolonal, but rather smpy from the lack of full capitalist modernizaton tself in so many areas of what was once the Thrd World In condtons where the minimum condtions of modernty - lteracy, industry, mobilty - are still basicay absent or only patchily present, how can postmodernity have any meaning? It s a long way from iamond ust Shoes to the 4 See
Shaobo Xie Rehning he Problem o Poscolonialism' New Literary History Vol 28 No 1 Winer 1977 sse on Clral Sdies China and The Wes' 9 20
AFTEEFFECTS
Taklamakan or Irrawaddy Jameson's argument, however, does not depend on any contention - obvously absurd - that contemporary capitalism has created a homogeneous set of social crcumstances round the world. Uneven development is nherent n the system, whose abrupt new expansion' has equally unevenly' eclipsed older forms of inequality and multi plied new ones we as yet understand less well' . The real question is whether this unevenness s too great to sustain any common cultural logic. Postmodernism emerged as a cultural domnant in unprece dently rich capitalist societies with very hgh average levels of consumption Jameson's rst reconnassance linked t drectly to these, and he has since inssted further on its speccally American origins. Would t not therefore be reasonable to think that where levels of consumption were far lower, and the stage of ndustrial development much less advanced, a conguraton closer to modernism - as it once lourished in the West - would be more likely to preva Ths was a hypothesis to whch I, at any rate, was drawn. In these conditons, might one not expect to nd a pronounced dualism of hgh and low forms, compar able to the European divide between avantgarde and mass culture, possibly wth a stll wder gulf between the two? The Indian cnema would appear to offer a case in pont: the contrast between Satyajit Ray's lms and the avalanche of songand dance genres from the Bombay studos lookng as stark as any in the developed world. But ths, of course, is an example from a hghly protected natonal market n the sxties. Today, global communicatons systems ensure an incomparably greater degree of cultural penetraton of the former Second and Thrd Worls by the irst. In these conditons, the inluence of psm forms becomes nescapable - in the architecture of ctes Shangha or Kuala Lumpur, the art shows of Caracas or novels and lms from Moscow to Buenos Aires. Inluence, however, s not necessarily domnance. The pres ence of sgnicant groups of artsts, or clusters of buldings, whose references are clearly postmodern does not ensure any 48 Late Marxism 249. 4 Moderny and Revolion, A Zone of Engagement 0 54 2
T HE O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D E R N IT Y
local hegemony. n the terms Jameson himself uses, after Raymond Williams, the postmodern could well be only emer gent' - rather than the modern being residual' This, certainly, is the view of such a levelheaded critic as Jonathan Arac, surveying these issues in the country where hey are more hotly debated than perhaps anywhere else today, the People's Repub lic of China. 50 With nearly a billion people still on the land, the conclusion is difcult to contest. t would be open to Jameson to reply that the global hegemony of the postmodern is just that - a net predominace at wrld level, which does not exclude a subordinate role at the ational level, in any gien case. How ever that may be, there is another consideration which must be weighed in the scales. Postmodern culture is not just a set of aesthetic forms, it is also a technological package. Television, which was so decisive in the passage to a new epoch, has no modernist past. t became the most powerful medium of all in the postmodern period itsf. But that power is far greater more absolutely disortionate to the impact of all others combined - in th/ormer Third World than it is in the First itself. This paradox must give pause to any overquick dismissal of the idea that the damned of the earth too have entered the kingdom of the spectacle. t is unlikely to remain solated. For just ahead lies the impact of the new technologies of simulation - or prestidigitation - whose arrival is quite recent even in the rich cultures. We now have a strangely august diorama of these, in Julian Stallabrass's remarkable Gargantua. Here, quite unex pectedly, Jameson's call for a sequel to Adorno and Horkhei mer's Culture ndustry', to address subsequent forms of manipulation, has been fullled. No work since that famous analysis has so closely matched its ambition, or represented such a tting succession; although here the countervailing infuence of Benjamin tilts an Adornian project away from the declaratively systematic towards a more pointilliste phenomenal plane. Stallabrass surveys digital photography, cyberspace exchange and computer games as well as a more familiar Posmodernism and Posmoderniy in China an Agenda or niry', New Literary History Winer 997, p. 44. 22
AFTEREFFECTS
landscape of automobiles, malls, grafti, detritus, television itself - as pregurations of a future mass culture that threatens to supersede the spectacle itself, as known hitherto, by effacing the boundaries between the perceived and the enacted altogether. With this development, the new techniques conjure the possibility of a selfsealed universe of simulation capable of veiling - and so insulating - the order of capital more completely than ever. A quiet gravity of tone, and precision of detail, characterize this unseasonable argument. But its logic is in one signicant respect at variance with its framework Stallabrass will have little truck with any talk of the postmodern, and holds to a radical separation of rich and poor zones of the world - which, he suggests, it is one of the crucial functions of mass culture to mask.5 But a more plausible deduction points the other way. The technologies he explores are in both timing and effect preeminently postmodern, if the term has any meaning at all; and they will surely not, as he sometimes seem to assume, remain conned to the First World. Computer games already have a thriving market in the Third. Here too, as with television, the arrival of novel kinds of connexion and simulation will tend to unify rather than divide the urban centres of the coming century, even across vast differences in average incomes. So long as the system of capital prevails, each new advance in the industry of images increases the radius of he postmodern. n that sense, it can be argued, its global dominance is virtually foreordained. Jameson's own demonstration proceeds at another level: for him, as always, the proof of the pudding is in the cultural practices themselves. The salience of a postmodern that is longer occidental can be judged from exemplary works of periphery. The modernist format of Gide's Counterfeiters its moral resolution, serve as benchmarks for their contemporary transformaion in Edward Yang's Terrorizer its relation to the new wave lms in Taiwan that form, Jameson's view, a linked cycle more satisfying for the viewer than any national cinema know (save perhaps the French Gargantua Manufactured Mass Culture ondon 997 pp 67 0- 7577 24 23023.
T H E O R I G I S O F P O S T M O D E R I TY
poductions of the s and s)'. In not dissimla fashion, Becht's conception of Umfunktionierung becomes itself unpe dictably etooled in the dignied hilaity' of Kidlat Tahimik's Perfumed Nightmare whee the standad oppositions of cul tual nationalism - Fist and Thid Wods, old and new - ae batteed out of shape into amshackle composites, as ingeni ously seviceable as the Filipino jeepney itself. It would be had to think of sympathies less Euocentic than these, o moe conguent with Wollen's concens. In fact, the Zaiois paintes o Nigeian musicians with whom Raiding th Icebox concludes, ceative devises of a paatouist at' insep aable fom the effects of postmoden tave, teach the same lesson: that the choice between an authentic nationalism and a homogenizing modenity wil become moe and moe out moded'.53 The nal emphasis in both citics is the same: symptoms of steility and povincialism in the metopolis, notations of imaginative enewal in the peiphey. The postmod en may also signify this. It is because in late capitalism and in its wold system even the cente is maginalized', wites Jame son, that expessions of the maginaly uneven and unevenly developed ssuing fom a ecent expeience of capitaism ae often mo intense and poweful', and above all moe deeply symptomatic and meaningful than anything the enfeebled cente sti nds itsef able to say'. 5 Poitics
Uneven development: symptomatic meaning. These ae tems of at which bing us to a nal cux in Jameson's wok At the The Geopolitical Aesthetic Cinema and Space in the World System ondon 1992 pp 120 211 Raiding the Icebox pp 197 202204 The Geopolitical Aesthetic p 155 ameson's commens on he vaciy o high
meropolian orms in orh America and more widely in he Firs World have been consisenly on occasion i migh be arged even ndly sharp ee as examples his inerview in Le Curve o 12 1988; Americans Abroad: xogamy and eers in ae Capialism' in even Bell e al eds Critical Theory Cultural Politics and Latin American Narrative ore Dame 1991; inrodcion o South Atlantic Quarterly special isse on posmodernism in ain America mmer 1993 124
AFTEREFFECTS
head of his st majo book, Marxism and Form thee eads an epigaph fom Mallam: Il nexiste douvert a a recherche mentale que deux voies, en tout, o bifurque notre besoin, a savoir, lesthtique dune part et aussi lconomie politique5 Reiteating it once again in Postmodernism as the vey emblem
· of his entepise, Jameson glossed the dictum as a peception shaed by both disciplines of the immense dual movement of a plane of fom and a plane of substance'5 the hidden concod of Hjelmslev and Max The sense in which Jameson's oeuve can be seen as a culmination of the Westen Maxist tadition has been indicated above. The long suit of that tadition was always aesthetic, and Jameson has played an extaodinay hand with it. But undeying the aesthetic enquies of this line of thinkes, of couse, thee was always a set of economic categoies deived fom Capital that infomed thei focus and diection. The wok of a Lukcs o Adono is unthinkable without this constant, immanent efeence. At the same time, the tadition itself poduced no signicant development in the eld of plitical economy as Max - o Luxembug o Hilfed ing - undestood it. Hee it elied on an intellectual legacy it did not extend. An altenative classical tadition, that did seek to pusue Maxist economic analysis into the ea of the Geat epession, was genealy ignoed. By the end of the Second Wold Wa, this line itsef had lapsed. Thus when, twenty yeas late - at the height of the postwa boom - Jameson was stating to wite, the divoce between the aesthetic and economic dimensions of a cultue of the left was at is widest. His own wok took up the geat aesthetic taditi But when the economic tadition evived at the stat of seventies, as wold capitaism began its slide into a long wave, it is stiking how actively and ceativey he it. The decisive ole of Enest andel's Late stimulating his tun towads a theoy of postmodenism · aleady been noted. This was no stay inuence. In The Cult Magie, Oeuvres Paris 195 p. 399. ameson renders his as: Only wo pahs sand open o menal research: esheics, and also poliical economy' (Postmodern ism p. 27) which omis he crcial where or need divides'. Postmodernism p. 265. 25
THE ORIINS OF POSTMODERNITY
Jameson has notaby deveoped his account o the post modern through an original appropriation o Giovanni Arrighi's Long Twentieth Century whose synthesis o Marx and Braude oers the most ambitious interpretation o the overal history o capitalism attempted to date. Here the dynamic o nance capita on the pane o substance' releases a movement o ragmentation on the pane o orm', traceable a the way rom the lmic preview to postmodern collages o the commonpace In each case, the economic reerent unctions not as an external support, but as an interna element o the aesthetic construction itse. The nal text in the same voume, The Brick and the Baloon', hints at a way avid Harvey's Limit to Capital coud pay a not dissimilar role. 5 Mallarm's two paths are thus rejoined. But i the objective is a continuation o Marx's project into a postmodern world, are the aesthetic and economic the exclusive lines o march? Where does this eave the political? Its trace is not orgotten in the motivating dictum. Malarm speaks, ater al, not o econ omics, but o poitica economy. This canonical term, however, is less unequivoca than it seems. Originally designating the cassical systems o Smith, Ricardo and Malthus, it was precisey the object o Marx's critique; but when the neoclassica theories o Walras, Jevons and Menger became estabished as orthodoxy, with the marginaist revoution, Marx himse was assimilated to the predecessors with whom he had broken, as so many ossils o the prehistory o the discipline - the critique o political economy becoming no more than its dogmatic ast chapter. In reaction, ater Marxists would oten claim the tradition as indeed their own, in opposition to the ormalism o pure' economics codied by the heirs o the neoclassical thinkers But as such, it remained a residual category poitical' only in so ar as it exceeded the calculus o the market, towards a social reerence otherwise et indeterminate This weak sense was never sucient to dene Marx's particuar egacy. But i the poetic adage leaves no independent space or the poitica, this gures prominenty esewhere, in the title o Turn
7 The Cultural Turn 136-144 . 1 84-1 85 .
AFTEREFFECTS
Jameson's most systematic theoretica work in the ed of iterature itsef. The Political Unconciou opens with the words This book will argue the priority of the politica interpretation of iterary texts. It conceives of the political perspective not as some supplementary method, not as an optiona auxiiary to other interpretive methods current today the psychoanaytic or the mythcritica, the styistic, the ethical, the structural - but as the absoute horion of a reading, and a interpretation'. Jameson notes that this position will seem extreme. But its meaning is spelt out a few pages ater, with the declaration: There is thing that is not socia and historical indeed, everything is "in the ast instance political'.5 This is the comprehensive sense of the term that gives its force to the book's title. Within the interpretive strategy to which it pro ceeds, however, there is another and esser space of the poitical, understood in a more restrictive sense In this mode Jameson argues that there are three concentric frameworks which mark out the sense of the social ground of a text, through the notions, rst of political history, in the narrow sense of punctua event and chronicelike happenings in time; then of society, in the now already less diachronic and timebound sense of a constitu tive tension and strugge between social casses; and, ultimately, of history now conceived in its vastest sense of the sequence of modes of production and the succession and destiny of the various human social formations, from prehistoric life to what ever far future history has in store for us'. 59 Here there is a clear hierarchy, running from the fundamenta to the supercial: economic socia � poitica. In the latter, history is reduced' the verb indicates what is ikey to follo to the diachronic agitation of the yeartoyear, the annals of the rise and fal of political regimes and social and the passionate immediacy of struggles between individuas' 6 What this recalls, perhaps more than anythin else, is Braudel's description of lhitoire vnementielle in hs famous tier of historical times - that evanescent foam of episodes The Political Unconscious 17 20 The Political Unconscious 75. The Political Unconscious 76-77 27
THE ORIGIN OF POSTMODERNITY
and incidents which he compared to the surf on the waves from Africa, breaking immemorially on the shores of Bahia under the faint light of the stars The formal similarities between the two tripartite schemas, adjusting for the geographica rather than economic emphasis of lhistoire immobile are evident enough. What they seem to share is a reserve towards the political conceived in a strong sense - that is, as an independent domain of action, pregnant with its own consequences. In Braudel's case, this reticence is coherent with the whole structue and programme of his work. In the case of a Marxist, it might be doubted whether this could be so. Jameson, however, has offered reasons why it might be. In the most calculatedly shocking of his texts, he suggests a natural kinship between one of the most extreme versions of neoiberaism - the universal modelling of human behaviour as utilitymaximization by the Chicago economist Gary Becker - and socialism, in so far as both do away with the need for any political thought. The traditiona complaint about Marxism that it lacks any autono mous political reection', he writes, tends to strike one as a strength rather than a weakness'. For Marxism is not a politica philosophy, and whie there certainy is a Marxist practice of poitics, Marxist political thinking, when it is not practica in that way, has exclusively to do with the economic organization of society and how peope cooperate to organize production'. The neoliberal beief that in capitalism only the market matters is thus a close cousin of the Marxist view that what counts for socialism is planning: neither have any time for poitical disquis itions in their own right. We have much in common with the neoliberals, in fact virtually everything - save the essentials!' Behind the buoyant provocation of these lines lies a conviction of principe - it is no accident Mallarm's formula reappears just here But they also correspond to a sense of immediate Postmodernism p 265. For amesons flles meiaion on Mallarms icm an is effecs for concep ions of poliics see his inerview in he Cairene ornal A/i On Conemporary Marxis heory' No 10 1990 pp 12-129 afer a corse agh in Egyp. shol be sai ha Mallarm himself is no o be rece o he ichoomy of Magie Dring he MacMahon crisis of 1876-77 when he consiion of he hir Repblic hng in he balance he pblishe an aricle in La Rpublique des 28
AFTEREFFECTS
priotes. Returning to his tripartite scheme at the end of The Geopolitical Aesthetic Jameson remarks of Tahimik's lm that what is instructive about it is the way in which here the economic dimension has come to take precedence over a political one which is not left ot or repressed, but which is for the moment assigned a subodinate position and roe'. For this is a general esson of the time. In the present conjuncture, of post modernity, our most urgent task will be tireessly to denounce the economic forms that have come for the moment to reign supreme and unchaenged' a reication and commodication Lettres eclaring ha nohing less han he sovereigny of he people' was a sake ner he rbric o inee La Politique For he ex see P.S Hambly n aricle obli e Sphane Mallarm Revue dHistoire Littraire de a France anary-Febrary 198 9 pp. 828 I was in his inensely evenfl - conex ha he isse he amos ringing saemen he paricipaion of a hihero ignore people in he poliical life of France is a social fac ha will honor he whole of he close o he nineeenh cenry. A parallel is fon in arisic maers he way being prepare by an evolion which he pblic wih rare prescience bbe from is rs appearance inransigen which in poliical langage means raical an emocraic in he Impressionss an Eoar�ane' Sepember 1876). wo ecaes laer i was he Panama crisis of 1893 ha se he sage for Mallarm's re o poliical commenary wih he ex ha became Or he rs of Grans Fais Divers collece in Divagations of which Magie was he secon in ime from he same year. Boh breahe an inomiable aversion o he feishism of nance he alchemy of speclaion Fume le milliard hors le temps dy faire main basse ou le
manque dblouissement voire dintert accuse qulire un dieu nest pas pour le conner lombre des cofes de fer et des poches La pierre nulle qui rve !or dite philosophale mais elle annonce dans a nance le futur crdit prcdant le capital ou le rduisant lhumilit de monnaie - see Oeuvres pp. 398 00. [A
billion is smoke beyon he ime o ge yor hans on i or he lack f beazzlemen even of ineres inicaes ha a go is no elece o be he shaow of iron coffers an pockes he sone is nll which reams of , calle philosophical b i annonces in nance a fre crei preceing c an recing i o he hmiliy cash!] opical hoghs inee ha col hea amesons penlimae essay in The Cultural Turn When Mallarm came o wrie his series of aricles Variaions sr n Se in Revue Blanche ring 1895 Dreyfs ha been senence an he poliical clos of he Aair were gahering. By now his isillsion wih he Oppornis parliamenary regimes of he ime was complee ]aunes effondrements de banques aux squames
de pus et le candide camelot apportant a rue une rforme qui lui late en a main ce rpertoire dfaut le pitinement de Chambres o le ventcoulis se distrait des crises ministrielles compose hors de leur drame propre qui les humains 29
T HE O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D ER N IT Y
that have become so universalized as to seem wellnigh natural and organic entities'.6 Even the politics of national liberation itself can only be inscribed in this larger battle Jameson's theoretical programme - we might call it, in honour of its epigraph a materiaist symbolism - has thus been formidably consistent. Its coherence can be veried a contrario by the one signicant absence in its appropriation of the Western Marxist repertoire. For that tradition was not without a supremely political moment. Antonio Gramsci is the one great name substantially missing from the rollcall of Marxism and Form In part, that is no doubt due to the sideong position of Italy in Jameson's imposing usufruct of the resources of Euro pean culture as a whole, where France, Germany and Engand are the lands of reference But it is also that Gramsci's work, sont aveugles, le spectacle qotidien see Oeuvres p. 414. [Yellow collapses o
banks wih scales o ps and he candid hawker bringing o he sree a reorm ha brss in his hand, his reperory - or ailing ha, he salling o Assemblies where was o air disrac hemselves wih Miniserial crises composes, beyond heir own drama o which hmans are blind, he daily specacle.] The ex rom which his passage comes, La Cour por saliner les paris, is he mos revealing o Mallarms inervenions o ha year a remarkable example o he sion o arisocraic and prolearian mois in he avangarde clre o he ime. To gage he impor o Mallarms aricles in La Revue Blanche i is necessary o remember heir onex. They appeared in he same isses o he ornal, no s wih drawings by Tolose, alloon or Bnnard, b side by side wih ladaory aricles on Baknin, Herzen, rodhon and Marx a celebraory review by Charles Andler on he pblicaion o he Third Volme o Capital; no o speak o an elevenpar serializaion o he memoirs o he enrag General Rossignol Hberise commander in he sppression o he Vende, honored wih a heroic represenaion by Villard See La Revue Banche 1895 V, pp. 175178 289-299 391395 450454; X, pp. 5163 ec.; and or he rs noe on Dreys, aacking his ingenios orrers on Devils sland, see V, p. 408 A carel sdy o Mallarms poliical developmen has ye o be wrien. The belaed pblicaion o a sbsanial secion o Sarres proeced work on he poe, daing rom 1952 sggess wha we have missed: see ngagemen de Mallarm, Obliques No 1819 1979 now available as Mallarm La Lucidit et sa Face d'Ombre Paris, 1986 The disappearance o he ll manscip ms be acconed a maor loss. The ragmen ha srvives makes i clear ha his wold in all probabiliy have been Sarres re biographical chef doeuvre: richer in deail and sharper in ocs han his sbseen accon o Flaber. 63 The Geopoliical Aesthetic p. 212. 30
AFTEREFFECTS
the product of a Communist leader in prison, relecting on the defeat of one revolution nd the ways to possible victory of another, does not t the bifurcation of the aesthetic and economic It was eminenty political, as a theory of the state and civil society, and a strategy for their qualitative transfor mation. This body of thought is bypassed in Jameson's extra ordinary resumption of Western Marxism. Who can say that his intuition was wrong? The grandeur of the Sardinian is stranded today, amid the impasse of the intellectual tradition he represented, pain for all to see. The current of history has passed elsewhere. If the egacies of Frankfurt or Paris or Budapest remain more available, it is aso because they were less political - that is, subject to the contin gencies and reversals' pecuiar to lhistoire vnementielle as Jameson has seen it. The purication of Western Marxism to the aesthetic and economic has, as things stand, been vindicated The theory of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism is its dazzling issue Yet at the same time, precisely here the forclusion of the political poses a paradox Jameson construes the postmodern as that stage in capitalist development when culture becomes in effect coextensive with the economy What is the appropriate stance, then, of the critic within this culture? Jameson's answer rests on a threefold distinction There is taste, or opinion, that is a set of ubjective preferences - in hs o interest - for particular works of art study of the historica Ten there is anaysis, or the forms' Finay s c� of possibiity of which involves no aesthetic judgements in the tra but rather seeks to interrogate the quality o social life by way of the text or individual work of art, hazard an assessment of the politica effects of cutura or movements with less utilitarianism and a greater for the dynamics of everyday life than he imprimaturs an indexes of earlier traditions' 5 Jameson, while avowing some personal enthusiasms as a consumer of contemporary culture, sets no special store by bid. Postmodernism p. 298
.
T HE O R I G I NS O F P O S T M O D E RN I TY
them. The task of historical and formal analysis, on the other hand, has been the major part of his work as a theorist and critic - most systematically articulated in The Poliical Uncon scious. What then of evaluation? If we look at Posmodernism what we nd are unforgettable etchings of the quality of life in this historical form, with its internal quotient of misery and the determinate potentiality of bodily and spiritual transguration it also affords, or conquers' .66 But of calibration of the political effects of cultural movemnts', there is signicantly less. The New Social Movements do gure, as a now standard opos in Jameson's survey of the postmodern, where they are viewed with sympathy, but also a wary caution against inated claims made on their behalf. But their invocation is without detail or differentiation, perhaps because they are not in the rst instance - as their name implies - cultural movements srico sensu at all. A more apposite case is offered by the antiinstitutional conceptualism represented by artists like Haacke, whose strat egy of undermining the image by way of the image itself' is captured graphically, if briey. 6 But this is a relatively isolated reference, that only tends to underline the fact that there are not many others. But is not this, it might be asked, a fair reection of the actual paucity of oppositional - or indeed many positional - cultural movements in the postmodern? Certainly, the eclipse of organ ized avantgardes, and the decline of class politics that consti tutes its wider historical background, are powerfully registered by Jameson in these same pages. But they seem insufcient in themselves - for neither are absolutes - to explain the distance between promise and delivery. Here some deeper difculty may be at work. Jameson's marriage of aesthetics and economics yields a wondrous totalization of postmodern culture as a whoe, whose operation of cognitive mapping' acts and this is its intention - as a placeholder of dialectical resistance to it. But its point of leverage necessarily remains in that sense outside the system. Inside it, Jameson was more concerned to monitor than to adjudicate. At this level, he has consistently warned of Postmodernism p. 302 Postmodernism p. 09 32
AFTEREFFECTS
I_
the dangers of too easy denunciation of specic forms or trends, as pitfalls of a sterile moralism. That did not mean, in the other direction, any concessions to populism, for which Jameson has never had much inclination. There, his rebuke to cultural studies can be taken as a general motto: The standardization of consumption is like a sound barrier which confronts the euphoria of populism as a fact of life and a physical law at the upper reaches of the system'.6 Still, it remains true that Posmodernism contains no sus tained attack on any specic body of work or movement within the culture it depicts, in the conventional sense of the term. In part, this is no doubt a question of psychic economy - this sort of thing has anyway never much attracted Jameson's energies; from each according to their temperament. But that there is also a theoretical issue at stake can be seen, perhaps, from a signicant tension - very unusual in this writer - in Jameson's handling of a theme of central importance to his thought: namely, Qian longing. The oscillation, pointed out by Peter tt t t o t t o o his most aring an istinctive themes - that utopian impulses are inherently at work in the reied products of mass commer cial culture too, since these cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly utopian as well they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated' - a bribe that will consist in some guration, no matter how distorted or buried, of a redeemed collective order. This function Jameson terms their transcendent potential - that dimension of even the most degraded type of mass cultur' which remains negative and critical of the social order which, as a product and a commodity, it springs' ?0 The 3 which illustrate the argument are Jaws and The Godfaher On the other hand, representations of utopia proper in hig culture - from More to Platonov to LeGuin - are invariaby held to demonstrate that this is just what we cannot imagine. 68 On Cral Sdies, Social Text No 3 1 993 p 51. 69 Pape a coneence on posmodernism held a Changsha, Hnan, in Jne 1997.
Signatures ofthe Visible p. 29
33
T H E O R I G I N O F P O S T M O D E R N IT Y
Utopia's deepest subject' turns out to be precisely or inability to conceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to project the Other of what is, a failure that, as with reworks dissoving back into the night sky, must once again leave us alone with this history'. This impotence, Jameson insists, is constitutiona. What mass cuture can intimate, uo pian ction cannot embody. Is there a common ·measure between Independence Day and Chevengur or is this an aporia? The most reevant point, perhaps, ies esewhere. No poitical criterion is given for discriminating between different gurations of utopian longing, either in commercial disguise or in prophetic imagination But how can such forms be separated from their substance - the shape of a politica dream? Can judgements between them be avoided? Here, posed in its most acute form, is the more general problem raised by the positioning of the postmodern between aesthetics and economics. For missing in this bifurcation is a sense of culture as a batteeld, that divides its protagonists That is the plane of politics, understood as a space in its own right. We do not have to yield to sectarian temptations within Marxism, or overheated conceptions of an avantgarde, to realize this. Such an under standing goes back to Kant, for whom philosophy itsef was constituted as a Kampfplatz - a notion in the air of the German Enlightenment, whose military theorization came a generation later in Clausewitz. It was a major thinker of the Right who gave consequent expression to this emphasis in the ed of politics Schmitt's denition of the political as inseparable from a division between friend and foe is, of course, not exhaustive But that it captures an ineliminable dimension of all politics is scarcely to be doubted; and it is that sense of the poitical which bears on the culture of the post modern. To reca this is not to summon any intrusion. The aesthetic and the political are certainly not to be equated or confused. But if they can be mediated, it is because they share one thing in common Both are inherently committed to critical judgement: discrimination between works of art, forms of state. Abstention from criticism, in either, is subscription. Postmodernism, like modernism, is a 7 The Ideologies of Theory 2 p 34
AFTEREFFECTS
ed of tensions. Division is a n inescapable condition of engage ment with it. Just this can be seen from Jameson's texts since Postmodern ism as the inlexion of his writing on the postmodern has become steadily sharper. For what they trace is in effect an invoution. Postmodernism Jameson now suggests can already be periodized. After its rst creative release in the seventies that thunderous unblocking of energies' of whose relief he originay wrote2 - there has folowed a perceptible regression in the most recent period delineated in the essays on the End of Art' and Transformations of the Image' in The Cultural Turn. On the one hand the postmodern release from the bonds of the modern Sublime dwelling among dead monuments') originaly an emancipation has tended to degenerate into a new cult of the Beautifu that represents a colonization of reaity generally by spatial and isual forms' that is aso a commodi cation of that same intensively coonized reality on a world scae' .3 With this degraded aestheticism art appears to sink back once again into a cuinary condition. At the same time the intellectua liberation wrought with the coming of Theory as a breakdown of barriers between ossied disciplines and the emergence of more ambitious and unexpected styles of thought has undergone a regression too. For the atest phase has seen a reinstatement of all the outdated autarchies that the dediffer entiating impuses of postmodernism sought to sweep away starting with ethics and aesthetics themselves. Such recidivism for Jameson is not irreversible: the postmod ern spirit could take other turns But if we ask ourseves what the cultural slide he criticizes might correspond to the answer is chronologically clear When Jameson rst started about postmodernism in the early eighties the regimes Reagan and Thatcher were already setting the pace in the W' the USSR was the last throes of Brezhnevism and iberation a fading memory in most of the Third World. But t wordwide triumph of capitalism was stil to come Even as h nished Postmodernism at the threshold of the nineties th 7 Postmodernism p. 313.
S The Cultural Turn p 35
T H E O R I I NS F P O S T M O D E RN I T Y
Soviet state sti nominaly existed It is the complete extinction of the Communist aternative, its virtual deletion from the historica record, followed by the relentless advance of neo liberaism through the Third Word, eliminating one vestige of economic autonomy after another - a process now roling through the last bastions of Eas Asia itsef - that forms the background to Jameson's now more uncompromising tone The ideoogical themes of the end of history, the hating of time at the bourne of libera capitaism, become the object of a detota izing irony in the magnicent Antinomies of Postmodernity' (1994) with its redesign of Kantian categories for our contem porary enightenment; and then more directly again inEnd of Art - End of History?' itself (1996) which cooly switches the line of ojve and Fukuyama to an unscheduled terminus Other texts sound the state of the debt' to Marx A major work on Brecht wil be with us soon. 5 These statements are political interventions at ful tilt In the past, Jameson's writing was sometimes taxed with being insuf ciently engaged with the real world of material conlicts - class struggles or nationa risings - and so held unpolitical' That was always a misreading of this unwaveringly committed thinker Here, we have noted a theoretica reserve towards the eventful' that could lead to historical totaization without punctual divisions in the cultural arena - traceable, certainly, to a disinclination to yield autonomy to the politica, but the opposite of its abnegation: rather its absorption into the very shape of the totality itsef This has shifted, towards greater triage But considerations like these refer inwards, to the prob lems of cultura theory as such In the arger reationship of this body of wrting to the outward world, Jameson's voice has been without equal in the clarity and eloquence of its resistance to the direction of the time When the Left was more numerous and condent, his theoretical work kept a certain distance from immediate events As the Left has become increasingly isolated and beleaguered, and ess capable of imagining any alternative See The Cultural Turn pp. 5072 and 7392 5 See Marxs Prloined eer, New Left Review
No 209, JanaryFebrary 19 95 ; and Brecht and Method orhcoming, ondonNew York 1998 36
AFTEREFFECTS
to the exstg social order, Jameson has spoken ever more directy to the poitical character of the age, breaking the spe of the system: with what viene enevene is ght what st n gestre ustie rings what wrngs dmesti rights invve what staks this siene
3
Idx
Adenauer, Konrad 85 Adorno, Theodor 4 7, 6 0, 69-70, 7, 76, 07, 08 , 7, 22, 25 Ahmad, A jaz 9 Albers, Josef 95 Althusser, Lous 7, 74, 76 Anaxmander 2 Andler, Charles 30 Ando Tadao 08 Andrade, Maro de 4 Antn, Dad 5, 96 Apollnare, Gullaume Arac, Jonathan 22 Arrgh, Goann 26 Ashbery, John 8 , 03 Ashcroft, Bll 9 Asher, Mchael 0 Auden, Wystan 5 Aulard, Fran
Becker, Gary 28 Beckett, Samuel 7, 9 , 67 Bell, Danel 25, 3 7, 40 Beltng, Hans 97-99 Benamou, Mchael 24 Benjamn, Walter 47, 48, 6970, 76, 22 Benn, Gottfred 39, 40 Berque, Jacques 7 Blanqu, Auguste 90 Bloch, Ernst 47, 70, 7 Boll, Rcardo 08 Bnnard, Perre 3 0 Borges, Jorge Lus 4 Bo, Paul 6 Braude!, Fernand 27-28 Brecht, Bertolt 48, 85, 04, -2, 7 Breton, Andr 70 Brezhne, Leond 9, 35 Broodthaers, Marcel 0 Brown, Dense Scott 20, 06 Buchloh, Benjamn 97 Buren, Danel 0 Burroughs, Wllam 67 Butterwck, George 9 Cabral, Amlcar 90 Cage, John 7-8 , 27, 95 39
INDEX Callncos, Alex 8-80, 9 Caln, Jean 4 Caramello, Charles 24 Carter, Jmmy 92 Castorads, Cornelus 28 Clne, LousFerdnand 04 Chang Ka shek 8 Churchll, Wnston 85 Css, Souleymane 5 Clark, T ] 8 3 Clausewtz, Karl on 3 4 Conrad, Joseph 4 Coeau, Alan 0 Cournot, Auguste 00 Crax, Bettn 86 Creeley, Robert , Crmp, Douglas 06 Croce, Benedetto 3 Crow, Thomas 04 Cunnngham, Merce 2 D'Annunzo, Gabrele 03 Danto, Arthur 9, 99-00 Danton, Georges 02 Dar, Rubn 3 Das, Mke 8 De Gasper, Alcde 85 De Gaulle, Charles 8 5 D e Man, Henr 00 De Man, Paul 6 Della Volpe, Galano 69 Derrda, Jacques 03 Daghle, Serge 03 Dckens, Charles 4 Drlk, Arf 9 Doctorow, E L 6, 03 Dreyfus, Alfred 29-30 Duchamp, Marcel 8, 9, 24, 30, 95, 99, 0 Durng, Smon 9 Eagleton, Terry 8, 9 , 5- Echendorff, Josef on 4
Esenhower, Dwght Esenmann, Peter 58 , 02, 08 Elot, Thomas Stearns 9, 5, 93, 03 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 60 Ensor, James 04 Etzon, Amta 4 o r 7 4 teo Gotteb eder ele 4 7, 4 ttg eter Flaubert, Gustae 4, 85, 8 Flan, Dan 0 Foster, Hal 0, 06 Foster, Norman 23 Foucault, Mchel 8, 39, 40, 6, 9, 20 Fourer, Charles 43, 90 Frampton, Kenneth 08 Fretas, Bezerra de 4 Fred, Mchael 58, 62 Fuller, Buckmnster Gates, Bll 86 Gaud, Antono 22 Gehlen, Arnold 00 Gehry, Frank 58 George, Stefan 03 Gbson, Wllam 2 Gde, Andr 23 Gscard dEstang, Valery 29 Gober, Robert 60 Godard, JeanLuc 6, 84 Gramsc, Antono 44, 69, 0, 3, 8 , 2- 4, 5, 30- 3 Graes, Mchael 23, 02, 08, 09 Greenaway, Peter 00 Greenberg, Clement 58, 83 , 95, 99, 06 Gremas, Algrdas 40
INDEX Grfths, Gareth 9 Grosz, Georg 85 Gueara, Ernesto 90
Jzsef, Attla 5 Joyce, James 93, 03 Judd, Donald 96, 0
Haacke, Hans 60 , 0, 03, 32 Habermas, Jrgen 36-46, 55, 5, 64 Harey, Dad 8-9, 26 Hassan, Ihab -20, 23, 26, 45, 55, 5, 64, 6, 96, 06 Hbert, Jacques Ren 02 Hegel, Georg Wlhelm 6-, 98, 99-00 Hedegger, Martn , Hemngway, Eest 4 Herzen, Alexander 3 0 Hlferdng, Rudolf 25 Htler, Adolf 80 Hjelmsle, Lous 25 Ho Ch Mnh 90 Hofmannsthal, Hugo on 03 Hollen, Hans 42 Hooer, Paul 03 Horkhemer, Max 69 Howe, Irng 2, 3, 4 Hughes, Robert 89 Hughes, Ted 03
Kafka, Franz , 93 Kant, Immanuel 3 , 34 Karatan, Kjn 4 Khlebnko, Velemr 5 Khrushche, Nkta 90 Ker, Leon 42 Keslowsk, Krzysztof 0 Koje, Alexander 00 Koolhaas, Rem 58 , 0 8, 09, Korsch, Karl 69 Kosuth, Joseph 0 , Krauss, Rosalnd 06
Ibsen, Hendrk 85 zenour, Steen 20 James, Wllam 9 Jameson, Fredrc , 4-, 8, 84, 88-89, 9, 92, 0-0, - 8 , 20-37 Jarman, Derek 0 Jencks, Charles 22-24, 26, 30-3 , 3, 45-6, 5, 64, 03 Jeons, Wllam 26 Johns, Jasper 95, 0 Johnson, Samuel 5 Jorn, Asger 84
L Revue Blnce
29-30
Lacan, Jacques 2 Lang, Beryl 9 Lange, Oskar -8 Lao She 4 Larkn, Phlp 03 Le Corbuser (CharlesEdouard Jeanneret) 42, 05 Le Gun, Ursula 33 Leduc, Paul , 5 Lefebre, Henr 53, 69-0, Lger, Fernand 04 Lenn, Vladmr 90 Leesque, Ren 24 Len, Harry 3, 5, 64 Lnas, Emmanuel 25 Lews, Wyndham 68 Lewtt, Sol 0 Lebesknd, Danel 02 Locke, John 4 Los, Adolf 05 orca, Federco Garca 4, 5 Lowell, Robert 5 Lu Xun 4 4
INDEX Lukcs, Georg 47, 4 8 , 49, 69-7, 73, 74, 76, 7, 25 Luxemburg, Rosa 90, 25 Lynch, Dad 03 Lyotard, JeanFranos 24-36, 44-45, 46, 53-55, 57, 64, 92, 06 MacEwan, Macom 22 Machado, Antono 4 Machae, Ncco 4 McLuhan, Marsha 8 MacMahon, Mare Edm 2 8 Manard, atrca 06 Maarm, Stphane 04, 25-26, 28-3 Mathus, Thomas 2 6 Mande, Eest 52, 72-73, 78, 25-26 Mann, Thomas 85 Mao Zedong 8-0, 90 Marcuse, Herbert 69-70, 7 Marnett, Fppo Tommaso 5 , 89 Marx, Kar 8, 25, 27-28, 45, 47, 85, 4, 25, 26 Meanchthon, Php 4 Mee, Herman 7 Menger, Kar 26 Mchae, Water Benn 6 Mcheangeo (Buonarrot) 4 Mes an der Rohe, Ludwg 20 Mken, Mchae 86 Ms, C Wrght 2 Monnet, Jean 85 Montagne, Mche de 4 Moore, Chares 23, 52, 02, 08 More, Thomas 33 Morrs, Robert 96 Motherwe, Robert 83 Nahas, Mustafa 7 Nehru, Jawahara 8
Neruda, Pabo 4, , 5 New Left Revew 54 Netzsche, Fredrch 25, 65 Nxon, Rchard 6 , 86
Otbe
06 OHara, John 85 Oson, Chares 7-2, 5-7, 8 , 44, 75, 95, 37 Os, Federco de 4, 9-20, 23, 02 Ortega y Gasset, Jos 4 Owen, Robert 42 Owens, Crag 06 Parsons, Tacott 25 Payne, Robert 8, 9 Pereman, Bob 03 Perkns, Dad 02 Pesner, Nchoas 2 Patono, Andre 04, 3 3 Pound, Ezra 7, , 2 rert, Jacques 04 Proudhon, Perre Joseph 30 Proust, Marce 74, 93 , 0 3 Pynchon, Thomas 8 Rauschenberg, Robert 7-8, 95, 0 Ray, Satyajt 2 Reagan, Ronad 32, 80, 9, 92-93, 04, 35 Rboud, Jean 8 Rcardo, Dad 26 Rke, Raner Mara 03 Rmbaud, Arthur 2, 6, 85 Robesperre, Maxmen 02 Rodchenko, Aexander 04 Rogers, Rchard 23 Rooseet, Frankn Deano 7 Rorty, Rchard 03 Rosenqust, James 96 42
