anderson, perry origins of post modernity

8/6/2019 Anderson, Perry Origins of Post Modernity

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T Origins of Posmodrniy

ERRY ANDERSO-

ERO Nw Yk


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Firt published by Vero 1998 Per Anderon 1998

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Reprinted 1998,T he moral right of the author have been aerted

rsoUK 6 Meard Street, London W 1V 3HR

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ISBN 18598 222-4 (pbk)ISBN 1-8598868

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C

Foreword

1 Prodromes 3

. Crystallzaton 15

3 Capture 47

4 Atereects 78

Index 13


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Fwd

This essay started when I was asked to introduce a newcollection o writings by Fredric Jameson, he Cultural urnIn the event, it became too long or the purpose In publishingit as a text by itsel, however, I have not wanted to alter itsorm: it is best read in conjunction with the volume that inspiredit Although I have never written about a body o work that Idid not, in one way or another, admire, an element o resistancewas in the past aways an ingredient in the impulse to do soIntellectual admiration is in any case one thing, political sympathy another This short book tries do something else, which Ihave always ound dicult: to express a sense o the achievement o a thinker with whom, it might be said, I lack the saety

o sucient distance I have no assurance that I have succeededBut some larger debate around Jameson's work in general isoverdue, and this attempt may at least help to encourage it

he title o the text has a twood reerence The principaaim o the essay is to oer a more historical account o h"origins o the idea o postmodernity than is currently avail -! Vone that tries to set its dierent sources more precisely in F?spatial, political and intellectua settings, and with

reattention to tempora sequence - also topica ocus than sbecome customary Only against this background, my argumetgoes, does the peculiar stamp o Jameson's contribution emergein 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 commentsthat seek to revise an earlier attempt to sketch the premises o

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F O R E W O R D

modernism in the previous n de sicle and in pat they tryto 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 studentsin Los Angees

Vl


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Lima Madrid - London

Postmodernism' as term and idea supposes the currency ofmodernism' Contrary to conventional expectation, both wereborn in a distant periphery rather than at the centre of the

cutura system of the time: they come not from Europe or theUnited States, !AmJa We owe the coinageof modems an aesthetc men to a Nicaraguan poet,writing in a Guatemaan journa, of a literary encounter in PeruRubn Dar's initiation in 1890 of a sefconscious current thattook the name of modernismo drew on successive Frenchschools - romantc, parnassian, symbost - for a decaration of

cutura independence' from Span that set n motion an emancpation from the past of Spanish etters themseves, in thecohort of the 1890's Where in Egish the notion of modernism' scarcey entered genera usage before midcentury, iSpanish t was canonica a generation earlier. Here the bacward pioneered the terms of metropoitan advance much a(the nneteenth century, beraism' was an inventon ofSpansh risng against French occupation in the epochNapoleon, an exotc expression from Cdiz at home ony mater n the drawngrooms of Paris or London.

So too the idea of a postmodernism' rst surfaced in the

icardo Palma Obras Competas ol 2, Madrid 1950 p. 19 the ew spiritthat aimates a small but proud ad triumphat group of writers ad poets iSpaish America today: modeism.

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T H E O R I G I N S O F P O S T M O D E R N I T Y

Hispanic interword of the 190's, a generation before itsappearance in Engand or America. It was a friend of Unamuno

and Ortega, Federico de Ons, who struck off the term postmodernismo He used it to describe a conservative reux withinmodernism itsef: one which sought refuge from its formidabeyrica chaenge in a muted perfectionism of detail and ironichumour, whose most origina feature was the newly authenticexpression 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 newpitch, in a series of avantgardes that were now creating arigorousy contemporary poetry' of universal reach. De Ons'sfamous anthoogy of Spanishanguage poets, organized according to this schema, appeared in Madrid in 194, as the Left

took ofce in the Republic amid the countdown to the CiviWar Dedicated to Antonio Machado, its panorama of utramodernism' ended with Lorca and Vallejo, Borges and Neruda.

Minted by De Ons, the idea of a postmodern' stye passed intothe vocabuary of Hispanophone criticism, if rarely used bysubsequent writers with his precision;3 but it remained withoutwider echo. It was not unti some twenty years ater that theterm emerged n the Angophone world, in a very diferent

ederico de Os Antooga de a Poesa Espaoa e Hispanoamericana Madrid 19 pp. iii-iv. or De Os's view of the specicity ofHispaophoe moderism whose represetative thikers he believed to be Martad Uamuo see Sbre e Cocepto del Moderismo La Torre April-Jue195 pp. 95-10 There is a e sythetic portait of Dr himself i Antoogapp. 1-152 Durig the Civil War fridship with Uamuo restraied De Osbut his basic outlook ca be foud i his commemoratio of Machado: AtoioMachado 185-199) La Torre Jauary-Jue 19 p. 1; ad for recollectiosof 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 buteteded to the usoBrazilia as well See for a curious eample Bezerra dereitas Forma e Expresso no Romance Brasieiro - Do perodo coonia pocamd io de Jaeiro 19 where Brazilia moderism is dated fromthe Semaa de Arte Modera i Sao Paulo i 1922 uder the impact of futurismad associated essetially with the rupture of Mario de Adrade ad postmoderism held to have set i with a idigeist reactio by the thirties: pp. 19-2-


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context - as an epochal rather than aesthetic category. In therst voume of his Study of History aso pubished in 194,

Arnold Toynbee argued that the concurrence of two powerfulforces, Industrialism and Nationaism, had shaped the recenthistory of the West. Since the last quarter of the nineteenthcentury, however, they had entered into destructive contradiction with each other, as the international scale of industry burstthe bounds of nationality, yet the contagion of nationaism itselfspread downwards into ever smaller and les viabe ethnc

communities. The Great War had sprung from the conictbetween these trends, making it unmistakeaby cear that an agehad opened in which national power could no longer be sefsufcient. It was the duty of historians to nd a new horizonappropriate to the epoch, which coud only be found at thehigher eve of civiizations, beond the utworn category ofnationstates. This was the task Toynbee set himself in the sixvolumes of his Study pubished - but sti incompete - before

199.By the time he resumed publication fteen years ater, Toynbee's outook had atered. The Second Word War had vindicated 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 openedwith the FrancoPrussian War pstmodern a\ But his denition of it remained essentialy estern communities became "modern', he wrote, just as soon as they gsucceeded in producing a bourgeoisie that was both nueq1\ 2enough 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. T oynbee was esdenite about what folowed. But certainly the postmodern agewas marked by two deveopments: the rise of an industrial workingcass 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


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the West to master the secrets of modernity and turn themagainst the West Toynbee's most sustained relections on theemergence of a postmodern epoch focused on the latter. Hisexamples were Meiji Japan, Bolshevik Russia, Kemalist Turkey,and - just born - Maoist China.6

Toynbee was no particular admirer of the resultant regimesBut he was scathing of the hubristic illusions of the late imperialWest. At the close of the nineteenth century, he wrote, anunprecedently prosperous and comfortable Western middle

class was taking it as a matter of course that the end of one ageof one civilization's history was the end of History itself - atleast as far as they and their kind were concerned. They wereimagining that, for their benet, a sane, safe, satisfactoryModern Life had miraculously come to stay as a timelesspresent' Completely awry in the epoch, in the United Kingdom, Germany and the Northern United States the complacencyof a postModern Western bourgeoisie remained unshaken unilthe 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 categoryof civilization, with which e had set out to rewrite the patternof human development, had lost pertinence In one sense,Western civilization - as the nbridled primacy of technologyhad become universal, but as such promised only the mutual

rui of all. A global political authority, based on the hegemonyof one power, was the condition of any safe passage out of theCold War But in the long run, only a new universal religionwhich would necessarily be a syncretistic faith could securethe future of the planet

Shaanx Angkor Ycatan

Toynbee's empirical shortcomings, and vatic conclusions, combined to isolate his work at a time when commitment to thebattle against Communism was expected to be less nebulous.

A Study of History 8 pp. 9- A Sudy of History 9 195 p. 208 A Study of History 9 p. 21

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friend, now Polish Ambassador to the U lobbying theadministration for the new government in Warsaw. Shaken by

the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he opposedTruman's renomination as a delegate to the Democratic Convention in 1948 .

By the time he was ready to take up his epic theme, itscompass had altered. In mid48, he wrote in otes for theProposition Man is Prospectie Space is the mark of newhistory, and the measure of work now afoot is the depth of the

perception of space, both as space informs objects and as itcontains, in antithesis to time, secrets of a humanitas eased outof contemporary narrows . . . Man as object, not man as massor economic integer, is the buried seed in all formulations ofcollective action stemming from Marx. This seed, not its taticwhich merely secures it votes or coups d'etat, is the secret of thepower and claim of collectivism over men's minds. It is thegrain in the pyramid, and if it is allowed any longer to rotunrecognized, collectivism will rot as it did in nazism and as

capitalism has by a like antinomian law. (Add: the persistingailure to count what Asia will do to collectivism, the mere

quantity of her people enough to move the earth, leaving asidethe 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 KMTregime in China, and hostility to the Communist base in Yenan.After the war, two friends kept him in touch with Chinesedevelopments: Jean Riboud, a young French banker active inthe Resistance, now an associate of CartierBresson in NewYork; 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 ofthe moral collapse of Chiang Kaishek's regime, and the rise ofMao's alternative to it on the eve of the Civil War. 3 See Tom Clark Chares Oson The Aegory of a Poets Life New York 1991,pp. 893, 107-1 12, 138 . Notes or the Propositio: Ma is Prospective' boundary 1-2, all19 73 -Wr 19 7, pp. 23. obert Paye Forever China New York 1 95; China Awake New York 1 9.


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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, thewestering 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, thisnest f exrement, and deayed sh bemes

a drippin fetid massMa cnded:

ns devnsns ever

et air!

The poem, however, comprehensively persists:

he ht is in the east. Yes. nd we mst rse, at. Yetin the west, despite the apparent darkness (the whitenesswhih vers al) if y k, if y an bear, if y an,

ln enhas n as it was neessary fr hi, my idet 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 thanthose of the Europeans who conquered them, leavng to theirdescendants 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 CetralCommittee of the CCP held o 2528 December 19 at Yagjiagou i Shaai.See e Preset Situatio ad Our asks' Seected Works ol Beijig 199p. 1 Olso cited them i the rech traslatio of the speech passed to him byJea iboud.


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from Neruda's Alturas de MacchuPicchu translated a fewmonths before

Nt ne death bt many,nt amlatin bt hane, the feedbak prves,

the feedbak isthe 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 aeI hnt amn stnes

Olson's aesthetic manifesto, Proectie Verse appeared thefollowin year Its advocacy of openeld composition as adevelopment of the objectivist line of Pound and Wllamsbecame hs most inluential tatement But the reception of tgenerally failed to respect the motto he adopted from Creley -form is never more than an extension of content'6 - to Olson'spoetry itself Few poets have been treated more formally sinceIn fact, Olson's themes make up a complexio oppositorum

nlike any other A erce critic of ratonalst humanism - thatpeculiar presumpton by whch western man has nterposedhmself between what he is as a creature of nature and thoseother creation f nature whch we may, with no derogaton,call objects' - Olson could seem close to a Heideggerian sesof Being as primal integrty Yet he treated aool " domestic familars n hs verse, and was the rst poet to don Norbert Wener's cybernetics He was much

attracte:ancient cultures, Mayan or preSocratc, regardng the birth archaeology as a decisive progress in human knowledge, becauseit could help recover them But he saw the future as a collective

Projective erse' Seected Writings of Chares Oson edited by obert CreeleyNew York 19 66, p. 16 Projective erse' p. 24


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project of human selfdetermination - man a s prospective' Anaximander lay a t one end of his imagination, Rimbaud at the

other A democrat and antifascist, Oson assumed the persnaof Yeats to defend Pound from prison, and as a patriot producedperhaps the ony unmystied poem on the US Civi WarContemporary revoution came from the East, but America wassubjoined to Asia: the colours of dawn in China and of ightinto the West reected the light of a single orbit The phraseOlson used to describe himself - after the dispersion, an

archaeologist of morning' - catches most of these meaningsIt was here, then, that the elements for an afrmative conception of the postmodern were rst assembled In Olson, anaeshetic theory was inked to a prophetic history, with anagenda allying poetic innovation with political revolution in theclassic tradition of the avantgardes of prewar Europe Thecontinuity with the original Stimmung of modernism, in anelectric 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 theFBI for suspect wartime associations in the early fties BlackMountain Colege, of whic he was the last Principal, shut itsdoors in 194. In the years of reaction, his poetry became morestraggling and gnomic The referent of the postmodern lapsed

New York - Harvard - Chicago

By the end of the fties, when the term reappeared, it hadpassed into other - more or less casual hands, as a negativemarker of what was not more, than modern In 199 CWright Mills and Irving Howe - not coincdentally: theybelonged to a common miieu of the New York Left - both

emloyed it in this sense The sociologist, in more causticfashion, used the term to denote an age in which the modernideals of liberalism and socialism had all but colapsed, as

Anecdotes of the Late War which starts: the lethargic vs. violece as alterativeso each other/or los americaos ad eds: Grat didt hurry./He just had themost.//More o the latter died. Compare the wellmeaig pieties o For the UnionDead

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reason and freedom parted company in a postmodern society ofblind drift and empty conformity The critic, in milder tones,

borrowed it to describe a contemporary ction unable to sustainmodernist tension with a surrounding society whose cassdivisions had become increasingly amorphous with postwarprosperity A year later Harry Levin, drawing on Toynbee'susage, gave the idea of postmodern forms a much sharper twist,to depict an epigone literature that had renounced the strenuousintellectual standards of modernism for a relaxed middlebrow

synthesis - the sign of a new compicity between artist andbourgeois, at a suspect crossroads between culture and commerce Here lay the beginnings of an unequivocally pejorativeversion of the postmodern

In the sixties, it changed as - stil largely - adventitious signagain Halfway through the decade the critic Leslie Fieder,temperamenta antithesis of Levin, addressed a conference sponsored by the Congress of Cultural Freedom, set up by the CIAfor work on the intellectual front of the Cold War In thisunlikely setting, he celebrated the emergence of a new sensibilityamong the younger generation in America, who were dropouts from history - cultural mutants whose values of nonchalance and disconnexion, hallucinogens and civil rights, werending welcome expression in a fresh postmodern literature

19 We are at the ending of what is ca lled The Modern Age. Just as Antiquity wasfollowed 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 1959

pp. 15-1 Irvig Howe, Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction', Partisan Review, Ser1959, 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 wETcoheret publics a ll 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 iCoecte Paers ol 2 New York 191 pp. 9-00 Howe as might beepected complaied about this tet i a querulous survey The New YorkItellecuals Commentary October 198 p. 9; reprited i The Decine of theNew 20-21

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is, Fiedler later explained in Playboy wold cross classes andmix genres, repdiating te ironies and solemnities of modern

ism, not to spea of its distinctions between ig and low, in anninibited retrn to te sentimental and brlesqe By 199Fiedler's rendition of te postmodern cold be seen, in its claimsof demotic emancipation and instinctal release, as offering aprdently depoliticied eco of te stdent insrgecy of tetime, oterwise scarcely to be attribted wit indifference toistory3 A similar refraction can be detected in te sociology

of Amitai Etioni, later famos for is preacing of moralcommnity, wose boo he Actie Society - dedicated to isstdents at Colmbia and Bereley in te year of campsrebellion - presented a postmodern' period, databe from teend of te war, in wic te power of big bsiness andestablised elites was declining, and society cold for te rsttime become a democracy tat was master of itsel' einversion of te argment of he Sociological Imagination is allbt complete

Bt if te sages of Howe and Mills were reversed witdisciplinary symmetry by Fiedler and Etioni, all were stillterminological improvisatin or appenstance Since temodern - aestetic or istorical - is always in principle watmigt be called a presentabsolte, it creates a pecliar difcltyfor 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 teconcept itself, one tat cold be more or less conted on inadvance to recr werever a stray need for a marer of temporaldifference migt be felt Resort of tis ind to te term posmodern' as always been of circmstantial signicance Btteoretical development is anoter matter e notion of te

postmodern did not acqire any wider diffsion till teseventies Cross the Border Close the Gap Payboy December 1969 pp 151 23252-258; reprited i Coected Papers ol 2, pp 61-85. The Active Society New York 196 8 pp vii 5 28 .

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Athens - Cairo - Las Vegas

e real trningpoint came wit te appearance in fall 197 atBingamton of a jornal expressly sbtitled a Journal of Postmodern Literature and Culture - te review boundary 2 elegacy of Olson ad resrfaced e eynote essay in te rstisse, by David Antin, was entitled: Modernism and PostModernism: Approacing te Present in American Poetry'Antin raed te wole canon rnning from Eliot and ateto Aden and Lowell, wit glancing re even at Pond asa 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 t}, , breakdown of an enfeebled poetic orthodoxy in the six , owed everying to tis example A year later, bounda '' ,devoted a doubleisse to 'Charles Olson:

Reminisce; The appearace of Olso ad the Black Moutai poets was the begiig of ted for te Metaphysical Moderist traditio which was by o meas a moderist" traditio but a aomaly peculiar to America ad Eglish poetry It was theresult of a collisio of strogly atimoderist ad provicial sesibilities with thehybrid modeism of Poud ad the purer moderism of ertrude Stei adWilliam Carlos Williams': boundary I No 1 p 120 Ati took Olsos greatAs the Dead Prey Upo Us as his emblem of the ew poetics.

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Essays, Reviews' - the rst fullscale appreciation sce hisdeath

It was this reception that for the rst time stabilied the ideaof the postmodern as a collective reference In the process,however, it underwent an alteration Olson's call for a projectiveliterature beyond humanism was remembered and honouredBut his political attachment to an unbidden future beyondcapitalism - the other side of Rimbaud's courage' saluted inhe Kingshers - passed out of sight Not that boundary 2 was

devoid of radical impulse Its creator, William Spanos, decidedto found the journal as a result of his shock at US collusionwith the Greek Junta, while a visiting teacher at the Universityof Athens He later explained that at that time, "Modernmeant, literally, the Modernist literature that had precipitatedthe New Criticism and the New Criticism which had denedModernism in its own autotelic terms' In Athens he sensed akind of complicity' between this established orthodoxy, in

which he had been trained, and the callous ofcialdom he waswitnessing On returning to America, he conceived boundary 2as a break with both At the height of the Vietnam War, his aimwas to get literature back into the domain of the world', at atime of the most dramatic moment of American hegemony andits collapse', and to demonstrate that postmodernism is a kindof 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 withits intention Spanos's own resistance to the Nixon Presidencywas not in doubt - he was locked up for a demonstrationagainst it But twenty years of Cold War had made the climaeunpropitious for a fusion of cultural and political vision: Olson'sunity was not retrieved Boundary 2 itself remained, in itseditor's own retrospect, essentially a literary journal, marked by

A Conversation with William Spanos' boundary Summer 1990, pp. 1-31 61 . This interview by Paul Bov - Spanos's successor as editor o the oualis a undamental document or a history o the idea o the postmodern. Aterspeaking o his arrest in protest against the bombing o Cambodia Spanosacknowledges that I didn't quite associate what I was doing as a citizen with myliterary critical perspective. I don't want to say that they were absolutely distinguished but I wasn't selconscious o the connections'.


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was Olson His place was, as it were, occupied by a fourthgure - Marshal McLuhan In this combination, the pivot was

clearly Cage: close friend of Rauschenberg and Fuller, andwarm admirer of McLuhan Cage was aso, of course, theeading aesthetician of silence; his composition 4/ famouslyexceeding the gesture of any wordess drama When Hassanconcluded his survey of the motley indices of postmodernism -running from Spaceship Earth to the Global Viage, faction andhappening, aleatory reduction and parodic extravagana, imper

manence and intermedia - and sought to synthesie them as somany anarchies of the spirit, playfully subverting the aloofverities of modernism, the composer was one of the very fewartists who could plausibly be associated with most of the bill

In subsequent essays, Hassan enlisted Foucaults notion of anepistemic break to suggest comparable shifts in science andphilosophy, in the wake of Heisenberg or Nietsche In thisvein, he argued that the underying unity of the postmodern lay

in the play of indeterminacy and immanence, whose originating genius in the arts had been Marcel Duchamp The list of hissuccessors included Ashbery, Barth, Barthelme and Pynchon inliterature; Rauschenberg, Warhol, Tinguely in the visual artsBy 1980, Hassan had annexed virtually a complete roster ofpoststructuralist motifs into an elaborate taxonomy of thedifference between postmodern and modern paradigms, and

expanded his Gotha of practitioners yet further5 But a largerproblem remained Is postmodernism, he asked, only an artistictendency or also a social phenomenon? , and if so, how are thevarious aspects of this phenomenon - psychological, philosophical, economic, political - joined or disjoined? To these questions, Hassan returned no coherent answer, though making onesignicant observation Postmodernism, as a mode of literarychange, could be distinguished from the older avantgardes(Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism etc) as well as frommodernism, he wrote Neither Olympian and detached lik he

espectively: Cltre Idetermiacy ad Immaece: Margis of the Postmoder) Age' Humanities in Society No Witer 98 pp 5-85 ad The Qestioof Postmoderism Buckne Review 980 pp. -2; reprited i The Pstmodern Turn pp. -8 ad revised as The Cocept of Postmodeism'pp 89

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latter nor Bohemian and fractious like the former, postmodernism suggests a different kind of accommodation between art

and society 6What kind? If the difference was to be expored, it woud bedifcult to avoid politics But here Hassan drew back I confessto some some distaste for ideoogical rage (the worst are nowfull of passionate intensity and ack a conviction) and for thehectoring of reigious and secuar dogmatists I admit to acertain ambivaence towards poitics, which can overcrowd our

responses to both art and life He was soon more specicabout his dislikes, atacking Marxist critics for submission othe iron yoke of ideology in their conceaed socia determinism, collectivist bias, distrust of aesthetic pleasure Preferableby far, as a phiosophy for postmodernity, was the blufftolerance and optative spirit of American pragmatism, aboveall in the expansive, celebratory shape of William James, whosepluralism offered ethica balm for current anxieties As forpolitics, the old distinctions had lost virtualy any meaningTerms like left and right, base and superstructure, productionand reproduction, materialism and idealism had become nearlyunserviceabe, except to perpetuate prejudice

Hassans construction of the postmodern, pioneering thoughmany of its perceptions were - he was the rst to stretch itacross the arts, and to note wing-marks ater widely accepted

thus had a buitin limit: the move to the socia was barred Thiswas surely one reason why he withdrew from the eld at theend of the eighties. But there was another, internal to hisaccount of the arts themselves Hassans original commitmentwas to exasperated forms of classic modernism - Ducha Beckett: just what De Ons had presciently termed utNmodernism in the thirties When he started to explore }cultural scene of the seventies, Hassan construed it

penantly through this prism The strategic role fell to vanguarstraceable back to the matrix of Black Mountain Such a

he Qestio of Postmoderism' pp. 22-2; the last setece does ot appeari the revised versio pblished i The Postmodern Turn pp 89-9 Plralism i Postmoder Perspective' (98) i The Postmodern Turn p. 88 The Postmodern Turn pp. 20-205 22 The Postmodern Tu p 22

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estimate a mc to be sai for it Bt tere as aaysanoter aspect of te vie Hassan as trying to escribe, tat

as far coser to te angi or ecorative invotion ofmoernist lan ic De Os a contraste as postmoernism'. 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 overairection 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 brigtfarrago, ectares of esprit paroy, persiage, I fet te smie onmy ips freeze'. Wen e came to rite te introction to iscoecte texts on te topic, he Postmodern urn in 197, emae it cear te tite as aso a kin of faree: Postmoernism 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 mostprominent teorization of it to sccee is on. Ironicay, itas te art to ic e gave east attention tat nay projecte

te term into te pbic omain at arge. In 197 RobertVentri an is associates Denise Scott Bron an Stevenzenor pbise te arcitectra manifesto of te ecaeLearning from Las Vegas Ventri a areay mae is nameit an eegant critiqe of te prist ortooxy of te Internationa 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 coeagesance a mc more iconocastic attak on Moernism, inte name of te vita popar imagery of te gambing srip. The Postmodern Turn p. 229. The Postmodern Turn p vii. Compexty and Contradcton n Archtecture New York 1966 Architects cao oger aord to be itimidated by the puritaicay mora aguage of orthodoModer architecture - More is ot ess: p 1 6.


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Hee, tey gued, ws t o be found spectcu enew of teistoic ssocition of citectue wit pinting, gpics nd

scuptue - n exubent pimcy of symbo ove spce - ttModenism d to its cost foeswon It ws time to etun toRuskin's dictum tt citectue ws te decotion ofconstuction

Deiveed wit n i of csu ening, te idbck messgeof Learning from Las Vegas ested on pemises tt woud vedumbfounded Ruskin e commeci stip cenges te

citect to tke positive, noncipontesoude view',Ventui nd is coegues wote Ls Vegs's vues e notquestioned ee e moity of commeci dvetising, gmbing inteests, nd te competitive instinct is not t issue' . 3Fom nysis of te joyous iot of signs in te deset sky didnot necessiy pecude soci judgement, but it did ue outone stndpoint Otodox Moden citectue is pogessive,if not evoutiony, utopin nd puistic: it is disstised witexisting conditions' But te citect's pincip concen ougtnot to be wit ougt to be but wit wt is' nd ow to epimpove it' .4 Beind te modest neutity of tis gend -wete society ws igt o wong ws not fo us t ttmoment to gue' y disming opposition ontsting tepnned monotony of modenist megstuctues wit te vigound 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)' esimpicity of te pentesis sys eveyting Hee, spet outwit beguiing cndou, ws te new etionsip between tnd society Hssn sumised but fied to dene

Ventui's pogmme, expessy designed to supesede t


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fortune was Carles Jencs, te rst edition of wose Languageof Postmodern Architecture appeared in 1977. Muc morepolemical in is obsequy for modernism - allegedly consignedto obivion in 197, wit te te demolition of a igrise in teMidWest - Jencs was at rst also more critical tan Venturiof American capitaism, and of te collusion between te twoin te principa types of postwar building commission. But,wile arguing te need for a broader semiotic range tanVenturi ad allowed, to include iconic as wel as symbolic

forms, is prescriptions were essentially based on te ideas ofLearning from Las Vegas inclusive variety, popular legibility,contextual sympaty. espite is title, Jencs was initiallyesitant about calling tese values postmodern', since te termwas - e confessed - evasive, fasionabe and worst of allnegative'. His preferred arcitecture would be better describeas radica eclecticism', even traditionalesque', and its onlyaccomplised exemplar to date was Antonio Gaud

itin a year Jencs ad canged is min, fuly adoptingte dea of te postmodern and now teorizing its ececticism asa stye of doublecoding' tat is, an arcitecture empoying aybrid of modern and istoricist syntax, and appealing bot toeducated taste and popular sensibility. It was tis liberatinmxture of new and old, ig and low, wic dened postmodernism as a movement, and assured it te future In 19

The Language of ostodern Archtecture New Yor 977, . 7. Promted iart by the wor of the Marist critic Malcolm MacEwa a colleague of Edwardhomso o The New Reasoner at this stage Jecs offered a eriodizatio omodes of architectural roductio - miicaitalist; welfare state catalist;moooly aitalist or the ew allervasive domiace of the commercialdeveloer. Several moder rchitects i a deserate attemt to cheer themselvesu 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 NewYor 978, . 6-8: Modeism sufers from elitism. PostModerism is tryig toget over that elitism by reachig out towards the veracular towards traditioad the commercial slag of the street architecture which has bee o aeforced diet for fty years ca oly eoy itself ad grow stroger ad deeer as aresult. Discussio of the PreModerist Gaud was droed from the ew versioo grouds of cosistecy.

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Jecs elped orgaize te arcitectural sectio of te VeiceBieale mouted by Paolo Portogesi, a lamboyat pioeer of

postmoder practice, etitled Te Presece of Past, wicattracted wide iteratioal attetio. By ow Jecs adbecome a tireless etusiast of te cause, ad prolic taxoomerof its developmet. His most sigicat move was to distiguis, early o, late moder' from postmoder' arcitecture. roppig te claim tat moderism ad collapsed i teearly seveties, Jecs coceded tat its dyamic still survived,

if i paroxysmic form, as a aestetic of tecological prowessicreasigly detaced from fuctioal pretexts - but still impervious to te pay of retrospect ad alusio tat maredpostmoderism: Foster ad ogers as agaist Moore adGraves. Tis was te arcitectural equivalet of te literaturecampioed by Hassa - ultramoderism.

Notig te parael, Jecs reversed te oppositio betweee Os's terms witout quams. No matter ow productive it

migt seem - lie te crossbow i te rst years of rearms -suc ultramoderism was istorically a rearguard. It waspostmoderism, its symbolic resources aswerig to te cotemporary eed for a ew spirituality, as oce te exuberatbaroque of te Coutereformatio ad doe, tat represetedte advaced art of te age. By te mideigties Jecs wascelebratig te Postoder as a word civilizatio of plura

tolerace ad superabudat coice, tat was maig osese' of suc outmoded polarities as left ad rigtwig,capitaist ad worig class'. I a society were iformatioow mattered more ta productio, tere is o loger aartistic avatgarde', sice tere is o eemy to coquer' i tgloba eectroic etwor. I te emacipated coditiostoday's art, rater tere are coutless idividuals i TokNew Yor, Berli, Lodo, Mila ad oter world cdcommuicatig ad competig wit eac oter, just as tey are

He would later claim that the resose to my lectures ad articles was so forcefulad widesread that it created PostModerism as a social ad architecturalmovemet: PostModernsm the New Casscsm n Art and Archtecture NewYor 987, . 29. Late Modern ArchtectureNew Yor 9 8, . -3.

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in te baning word'.20 Out of teir aeidoscopic creations, itwas to be oped, migt emerge a sared symboic order of te

ind tat a reigion provides'2 - te utimate agenda of postmodernism. In aestetic crossdress, Toynbee's syncretisticdream ad returned.

Montreal - Paris

Te arcitectura capture of te bazon of te postmodern,

wic can be dated from 1977-78, proved durabe. Te primaryassociation of te term as ever since been wit te newestforms of buit space. But tis sift was foowed, a butimmediatey, by a furter extension of its range, in an unexpected direction. Te rst piosopica wor to adopt tenotion was JeanFranois Lyotard's La Condition Postmodernewic appeared in Paris in 1979. Lyotard ad acquired te termdirecty from Hassan. Tree years earier, e ad addressed aconference at Miwauee on te postmodern in te performingarts orchestrated by Hassan. ecaring te staes of postmodernism as a woe' were not to exibit trut within tecosure of representation but to set up perspectives witin te

CAPTURE

im from dogmatic slumbers', Jameson no doubt refers to tissetting. t migt be better to say tat it released im for te

visual. Up to te eigties, Jameson ad concentrated is attention all but exclusively on literature. Te turn to a teory of tepostmodern was, at te same stroe, to be an arresting sift tote range of arts - nearly te full range - beyond it. Tisinvolved no drift of political moorings. n te immediate case ofte built environment, e ad a signicant resource to andwitin te legacy of Western Marxism in te wor of HenriLefebvre - anoter guest in California. Jameson was perapste rst outside France to mae good use of Lefebvre's corpusof suggestive ideas on te urban and spatial dimensions of postwar capitalism; as e was later quic to register te formidablearcitectural writing of te Venetian critic Manfredo Tafuri, aMarxist of more Adornian stamp.

Finally tere was peraps te direct provocation posed byLytard imself. Wen an Englis translation of La Condition

Postmoderne was at lengt ready in 198, Jameson was asedto write an introduction to it. Lyotard's assault on metanarratives migt ave been aimed specically at im. For just ayear before e ad publised a major wor of literary teory,The Political Unconscious wose central argument was temost eloquent and express claim for Marxism as a grandnarrative ever made. Only Marxism can give us an adequatesense of te essential mystery of te cultural past', e wrote amystery [tat] can only be reenacted if te uman adventure isone'. Only us could suc longdead issues as a tribal transumance, a teological controversy, clases in te polis duelsin nineteent century parliaments, come alive again. Tematters 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 collectstruggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessitonly if tey are grasped as vital episodes in a single vastunnised plot'. Wen Lyotard launced is attac, no Marxist ad ever actually presented Marxism as in essence a narrative

8 Th Poitica Unconscious Ithaca 19 81 , pp 19-20.


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- it was more commonly understood as an analyti. But twoyears later, as if on demand, Jameson offered exactly wat

Lyotard ad supposed.But if in tis sense he Postmodern Condition must, wen ecame upon it, ave been te most direct callenge to Jamesonconceivable, anoter side of Lyotard's argument was uncannilysimilar 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 umanmind. Te provocation of Lyotard's account of postmodernitymust tus to some extent also ave acted as an ambivalent foilfor Jameson, quicening is own relections on te subject. Tedifcult tas of introducing a wor wit wose overall stancee can ave ad so little sympaty, e acquitted wit grace andguile. Lyotard's case was certainly striing But in its concentration on te sciences, it said little about developments inculture, and was not very fortcoming about politics, or teir

ground in canges in socioeconomic life. Here was te agendato wic Jameson would now turn.

Five Moves

Te founding text wic opens The Cultural Turn Jameson'slecture to te Witney Museum of Cotemporary Arts in tefall of 198 wic became te nuceus of is essay Postmodernism - te Cultura Logic of Late Capitaism' publised inNew Left Review in te spring of 198 redrew te wole mapof te postmodern at one stroe - a prodigious inauguralgesture tat as commanded te eld ever since. Five decisivemoves mared tis intervention. Te rst, and mot fundamental, came wit its title te ancorage of postmodernism inobjective altrations of te economic order of capital itself. o

9 For Lyoard no only was narraion he uinessenial form of cusomaryknowledge' before he arriva of mode science bu he lile narraive remainshe uinessenial form of imaginaive invenion mos paricularly in science': LaCondition Postmoderne pp. 38 and 98; The Postmodern Condition pp 9 and 60while ameson viewed soryelling as he supreme funcion of he human mindThe Poitica Unconscious p. 123.10 Foreword' o The Postmodern Condition pp. xii-xv.

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longer mere aestetic brea or epistemological sift, postmodernity 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, wasquite foreign to Lyotard and Habermas, altoug bot camefrom Marxist bacgrounds by no means altogeter extinct.

At te Witney, te term consumer society' acted as a indof preliminary rangender for a survey at iger resolution tocome. n te subsequent version, for New Left Review te newmoment of multinational capitalism' came more fully intofocus. Here Jameson pointed to te tecnological explosion ofmodern electronics, and its role as leading edge of prot andinnovation; to te organiational predominance of transnationalcorporations, outsourcing manufacturing operations to ceapwage locations overseas; to te immense increase in te rangeof international speculation; and to te rise of media conglomerates wielding unprecedented power across communications

and borders alie. Tese developments ad profound consequences for every dimension of life in advanced industrialcountries - business cycles, employment patterns, class relationsips, regional fates, political axes. But in a longer view, temost fundamenta cange of all lay in te new existentialorion of tese societies. Moderniation was now all butcomplete, obliterating te last vestiges not only of precapitalistsocial forms, but every intact natural interland, of space orexperience, tat ad sustained or survived tem.In a universe tus abluted of nature, culture as necessariyexpanded to te point were it as become virtually coextensivwit te economy itself, not merely as te symptomatic basissome of te largest industries in te world tourismexceeding a oter brances of global empoyment - butmore deeply, as every materia object and immateria

becomes inseparably tractable sign and vendible commodCulture in tis sense, as te inescapable tissue of life under acapitaism, is now our second nature. Were modernism drewits purpose and energies from te persistence of wat was notyet modern, te legacy of a still preindustria past, postmodernism signies te closure of tat distance, te saturation of everypore of te world in te serum of capital. Mared out by no

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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 structures of contemporary bourgeois society.Wat ave been the consequences of this change in the object

word for the experience of te subject? Jameson's ddistinctive move was a exporation of te metastases of theps ew conjuncture. Initiay broached as tersecommentary on the deat of the subject', his deveopment ofthis theme soon became perhaps the most famous of a facetsof his construction of te postmodern. In a series of arrestingphenomenoogica descriptions, Jameson setched the Leenswelt caracteristic of te time, as the spontaneous forms of thepostmodern sensibiity. This was a psychic andscape, he argued,whose ground had been broen by the great turmoi of thesixties - when so many traditiona casings of identity werebroen apart by the dissoution of customary constraints - but

now after the poitica defeats of te seventies, purged of aradica residues. Among the traits of the new subjectivity, infact, was the o _teQ, eit as h9 .!y The charged sense of the past - as eher dof repressive traditions, or reservoir of twarted dreams; andheightened expectancy of the future - as potentia catacysm ortransguration - wic had characterized modernism, wasgone. At best, fading bac into a perpetua present, retrostyesand 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. Theeectronic unication of the earth, instituting the simutaneity ofevents across the gobe as daiy spectace, has odged a vicariousgeography in the recesses of every consciousness, whie theencircing networs of mutinationa capita that actuay direct

the system exceed the capacities of any perception. The ascendency of space over time in the maeup of the postmodern isthus aways offbaance the reaities to which it answers constitutivey overpowering it inducing, Jameson suggests in aceebrated passage, that sensation which is ony to be captured

Postmodernsm, or, the Cutura Logc of Late Captasm Drham 1991, p. iv


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by a sardonic updating of the esson of Kant: the hystericasubime'.

Conventionay ysteria denotes an overpitcing of emotion,a hafconscious feigning of intensity the better to concea someinner numbness (or psychoanayticay, te other way round)For Jameson, this i s a genera condition of postmodern experience, mared by a waning of affect' that ensues as the boundedsef of od begins to fray. The resut is a new depthessness ofthe subject, no onger hed within stabe parameters, where theregisters 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 recasomething of the fragmentation of scizoprenia. This swerving,stammering ux precudes either catexis or historicity. Signicanty, to the vaciations of ibidina investment in private ifehas corresponded an erosion of generationa marers in pubicmemory, as the decades since the sixties have tended to atten

out into a featureess sequence subsumed under the commonroster of the postmodern itsef. But if such discontinuity weaens 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 fromthe eation of the commodity rus', the euphoric highs ofspectator or consumer, to the dejection at the bottom of thedeeper nihiistic void of our being', as prisoners of an order thatresists any other contro or meaning.

Having set out the forceed of postmodernity in structurachanges of te capitaism, and a pervasive addering of identitiesunder them, Jameson coud mae his tird move, on the terriof cuture itsef. Here is innovias topica. Hievery sounding of the postmodern had been sectora. and Fieder had detected it in ierature; Hassan enarged Tpainting and music, if more by ausion than by exporatioJencs concentrated on architecture; Lyotard dwet on scienceHabermas touched on phiosophy. Jameson's wor has been oanother scope - a majestic expansion of the postmodern acrossvirtuay the whoe spectrum of the arts, and much of the

Postmodernsm pp. 317.


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discourse flaning them. The result is an incomparably richerand 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 whatsucceeded it. His rst extended analysis of a postmodern worwas the great setpiece on Portman's Bonventure hotel in LosAngeles, whose dbut is to be found below - on the evidence ofcitation, the most memorable single exercise in all the literature

on postmodernism Jameson's later meditations have piced adeliberate path through a crowded eld of candidates forcommentary: rst Gehry, then Eisenmann and Koolhaas Theparamountcy of space in the categorical framewor of postmodern understanding, as he read it, more or less ensured thatarchitecture would have pride of place in the cultural mutationof late capitalism at large Here, Jameson has consistentlyargued, explosive energies of invention have been released, in a

range of forms from the spare to the sumptuous, that no rivalart today can match; while at the same time also guring, moregraphically than any other art, different inds of subsumptionto the new world economic system, or attempts to elude it notonly in the practical dependence of its airports, hotels, bourses,museus, villas or ministries on estimates of prot or whims ofprestige, but in the tangibility of its shapes themselves

Next in the system of postmodern arts comes theQJ

Surprising though it may seem in retrospect, lm was a conspicuous absence in earlier discussion of postmodernism Not thatthis silence was quite inexplicable The principal reason for itcan probably be found in a famous remar of Michael Fried:the cinema is not, even at its most experimental, a modernistart' He meant in part that lm, as the most mixed of allmediums, was debarred from that drive to a purity of presence

specic to each art, absolved of reference to any other, thatGreenberg had held to be the royal road of the modern But thejudgement could be taen in another, more widely felt senseFor had not the triumph of Hollywood realism actually reversed

Art and Objecthood' Artfoum une 1967; reprinted in G. Battcock (ed)Minima Art Berkeley an Los Angeles 1 995 p. 141 .

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the trajectory of modernism, Technicolor banishing the audacities 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 heeventually dubbed with a suggestive oxymoron nostalgia forthe present' lms like Body Het or another key Str Wrsor yet again Blue Velvet that express even more deeply than thewave of mode tro movies proper over two decades of outputnow, from Americn Grti to Indochine - the peculiarly

postmodern loss of any sense of the past, in a hidden contamination of the actual by the wistful, a time yearning for itself atan impotent, covert remove f such forms, surrogates or displacements of true periodic memory, trace a corruption of thetemporal, other genres can be read as responses to the arrival ofthe ultraspatial: above all, the conspiracy lm - Videodrome orThe Prllx View interpreted as blind allegories of the unrepresentable totality of global capital and its impersonal net

works of powern due course, Jameson proceeded to the fuller theorizationof 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 realismto modernism, if one - by reason of its timing as a technicalpossibility - 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 couldbe any chace of a postmodern moment A second cycle thenrecapitulate the same phases at a new technological leve,Hollywood inventing a screen realism with a panoply of nartive genres and visual conventions all its own, and the uart cinema of the postwar years producing a fresh vhigh modernism f the postmodern cinema that had

appeared was stamped by the compulsions of nostalgia, thefortunes of the moving image in this period were by no meanslocked on them alone ndeed, video was more likely to emergeas the peculiarly postmodern medium - whether in thedominant forms of commercial television, in which entertainment and advertising were now virtually fused, or in theoppositional practices of underground video nevitably, the

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criticism of the future would have to concern itself increasinglywith these.

The world of graphic design and advertising, in turn, nowincreasingly interpenetrated with the ne arts, as impulse tstyle or source of materia. n pictorial space, postmoderndthessss had found perfected expression in the enervatedsue o{arhol's wrk, with their hypnotically empty afterimages of the fashion page, the supermarket shelf, the televisionscreen. Here Jamesn was to stage the most bravura of aljuxtapositions between high modern and postmodern, in acmparison of Van Gogh's peasant boots, emblems of earthlylabour redeemed in a pyre of colour, and one of Warhol's setsof pumps, vitreus simulacra without tone or ground, suspended in an icy void. The arrival of Pop Art had, in fact, longbeen noted by Jameson as a barmetric warning of atmosphericchanges under way - presages of a wider cultural anticycloneto come. Once fully in the postmodern, however, is attention

moved to practices that sought to outrange the conventions thismoment had left behind, in a conceptual art breaking free of thepictrial frame altogether. n the installations of Robert Gober,reveries of unplaceable community, and Hans Haacke, battlekits f forensic insurgency, alternative kinds of imagination -owing something to Emerson or Adorno - wrest utopianclearances out of the claustra pressures of the postmodernitself

Such radical energies, released as the boundaries betweenpainting and sculpture, building and andscape increasinglydissolve, belong to a wider productivity, observable in manymore pliable forms. eculiar to this culture, Jameson remaks,is a privilege of the visual that arks it off frm high modernism, in which the verbal still retained most f its ancientauthority. Not that literature has been less affected by the

change of period; but in Jameson's view less riginal work hasbeen generated by it. For here, perhaps more than in any otherart, the most insistent motif of the new was a - playful orportentous - parasitism on the old . n Jameson's texts, the nameof this device is . The source of this usage lay inAdorno's critique f wh he tok to be the regressive eclecticism of Stravinsky in The Philosophy of Modern Music; but

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hallmark of modernity, Weber had classically argued, wasstructural differentiation: the autonomization of practices and

values, once closely mingled in social experience, into sharplyseparate domains. This is the process that Habermas has alwaysinsisted cannot be cancelled, on pain of retrogression. On suchpremises, there could be no more ominous symptom of somecracking in the modern than the breakdown of these hardwondivisions. This was the process Fried had foreseen and feared in1967. A decade later, it had not just spread from the arts intothe humanities or social sciences, but with the arrival of thephilosophical postcard and the conceptual neonsign, waseroding the line between them. What postmodernity seemed tospell was something the great theorists of modernization hadruled out: an unthinkble dedifferentiation of cultural spheres.

Anchorage of postmodernism in the transformations of capital; probing of the alterations of the subject; extension of thespan of cultural enquiry afte these, Jameson could make a

logical fourth move. What were the social bases and geopoliticalpattern of postmodernism? Late capitalism remained a classsociety, but no class within it was quite the same as before. Theimmediate vector of postmodern culture was certainly to befound in the stratum of newly affuent employees and professionals created by the rapid growth of the service andspeculative sectors of the developed capitalist societies. Abovethis brittle yuppie layer loomed the massive structures ofmultinational corpoations themselves vast servomechanismsof production and power, whose operations crisscross theglobal economy, and determine its representations in the collective imaginary. Below, as an older industrial order is churnedup, traditional class formations have weakened, while segmented identities and localized groups, typically based on ethnicor sexual differences, multiply. On a world scale in the

postmodern epoch, the decisive arena no stable class structure, ccomparable to that of an earlier capitalism, has yet crystallized.Those above have the coherence of privilege; those below lackunity and solidarity. A new collective labourer' has yet toemerge. These are conditions, still, of a certain verticalindenition.

At the same time, the sudden horizontal enlargement of the

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system, with the itegratio for the rst time of virtually thewhole plaet ito the world market, meas the etry of ew

peoples oto the global stage, whose huma weight is apidlyicreasig he authorty of the past, costatly dwndlnguder pressures of ecoomic iovatio i the First World,siks i aother way with demographic explosio i the hirdWorld, as fresh geeratios of the livig come to outumber allthe legos of the dead his expasio of the bouds of capitalievitably dilutes its stocks of iherted culture he result is acharacteristic drop i level' with the postmoder he cultureof moderism was iescapably elitist: produced by isolatedexiles, disaffected miorities, itrasiget vaguards. A artcast i heroic mould, it was costitutively oppositioal: otsimply outig covetios of taste, but more sigicatly,defyig the solicitatios of the market

he culture of postmoderism, Jameso has argued, is bycotrast far more demotic For here aother ad more sweepig

sort of dedifferetiatio has bee at work he bypassig ofborders betwee the e arts has usually bee a gesture i theuaccommodatig traditio of the avatgarde he dissolutioof frontiers betwee high' ad low' geres i the culture atlarge, celebrated by Fiedler already at the ed of the sixties,aswered to a differet logic From the start, its directio wasuequivocally populist this respect the postmoder has beemarked by ew patters of both cosumptio ad productioO the oe had, for example, leadig works of ctio boosted b avish advertisig ad prizepublicity could regularly it th bestseller lists, if ot the wide scree, i a waearlier impossible O the other, a sigicat rage of htherOexcluded groups wome, ethic ad other miorities, m 'I- ;grats gaied access to the postmoder forms, broadeig '>basis of artistic output cosiderably quality, some lvlTjeffect was udeiable: the time of the great idividual sigatuad masterworks of moderism was over part this reecta overdue reactio agaist orms of charisma that were owaachroistic 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

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Whereas in its heyday modernism had never been much morethan an enclave, Jameson points out, postmodernism is now

hegemonic This did not mean it exhausts the eld of culturalproduction. Any hegemony, as Raymond Williams insisted, wasa dominant' rather than a total system, one virtually ensuring because of its selective denitions of reality - the coexistence ofresidual' and emergent' forms resistant to it Postmodernismwas a dominant of this kind, and no more But that was vastenough. For this hegemony was no local affair. For the rsttime, it was tendentially global in scope. Not as a pure commondenominator of the advanced capitalist societies, however, butas the projection of the power of one of them Postmodernismmay be said to be the rst specically North American globalstyle' . 4

f these were the principal coordinates of the postmodern,what was the appropriate stance towards it? Jameson's nalmove was perhaps the most original of al. Hitherto, it could be

said that every signicant contribution to the idea of postmodernity had carried a strong - negative or positive - valuation ofit The antithetical judgements of Levin and Fiedler, the lateHassan and Jencks, Habermas and Lyotard, offer a set pattern.From a range of distinct political standpoints, the critic couldeither lament the advent of the postmodern as a corruption ofthe modern, or celebrate it as an emancipation. Very early on

soon afer his Whitney lecture - Jameson mapped out aningenious combinatory of such oppositions in Theories of thePostmodern', reproduced in The Cultural Turn The purpose ofhis exercise was to point the way out of this closed, repetitivespace. Jameson's own political commitments were well to theleft of any of the gures charted within it. He alone had rmlyidentied postmodenism with a new stage of capitalism, understood in classical Marxist terms. But mere excoriation was no

more fruitful than adhesion. Another kind of purchase wasneededThe temptation to be avoided, above all, was moralism The

complicity of postmodernism with the logic of the market andof the spectacle was unmistakeable But simple condemnation

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of it as a culture was sterile. Again and again to the surpriseof many, on left and right alike - Jameson has insisted on the

futility of moralizing about the rise of the postmodern Howeveraccurate might be the local judgements it delivered, such moralism was an impoverished luxury' that a historical view couldnot afford.5 n this, Jameson was faithful to longhel convictions. Ethical doctrines presupposed a certain social homogeneity, in which they could rewrite institutional exigencies asinterpersonal norms, and thereby repress political realities inthe archaic categories of good and evil, long since unmaskedby Nietzsche as the sedimented traces of power relationships'.Wel before addressing himself to the postmodern, he haddened the position from which he would view it: ethics,wherever it makes its reappearance, may be taken as the sign ofan intent to mystify, and in particular to replace the complexand ambivalent judgements of a more properly political anddialectical perspective with the comfortable simplications of a

binary myth' . 6These remarks were aimed at a conventional moralism of theright But they applied no less to a moralism of the left, thatsought to dismiss or reject postmodernism en loc Moralcategories were binary codes of individual conduct; projectedonto the cultural plane, they were intellectually and politicallydisabling. Nor were the tropes of Kulturkritik of any greateravail, with their tacit fight to the imaginary of one or otheridyllic past, from whose balcony a fallen present could bereproved e enterprise on which Jameson had embarked - hestressed tht it required many hands was something else Agenuine critique of postmodernism could not be an ideologrefusal of it Rather the dialecticask was to work our ycompletely 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 gloscale of its connexions and disjuctions remained the unrnouncable Marxist project. t precluded manichean responss

Postmodernism . Fabes of Aggression Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist Berkeley andLos Angeles 1979, p.

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to the postmodern. To critics on the left inclined to suspect himof accommodation, Jameson replied with equanimity. The col

lective agency necessary to confront this disorder was stillmissing; but a condition of its emergence was the ability tograsp it from within, as a system

Otcomes

With these parameters in place, a coherent account of postmodernity had arrived. Henceforward, one great vision commandsthe eld, setting the terms of theoretical opposition in the moststriking imaginable way t is a normal fate of strategic conceptsto be subject to unexpected political capture and reversal, in thecourse of discursive struggle over their meaning. Characteristically, in this century, the outcome have been dtournements tothe Right - civilization' , say, once a proud banner of progressive Enlightenment thought, becoming a stigma of decadence at

the hands of German conservatism; civil society', a term ofcritique for classical Marxism, no a cynosure in the idiom ofcontemporary liberalism n the dominion over the term postmodernism won by Jameson, we witness the opposite achievement: a concept hose visionary origins were al but completelyeffaced in usages complicit with the established order, wrestedaway by a prodigious display of theoretical intelligence andenergy for the cause of a revoutionary eft This has been adiscursive victory gaied against all the poitical odds, in aperiod of neoliberal hegemony when every famiiar landmarkof the eft appeaed to sink beneath the waves of a tidareaction t was won, undoubtedly, because the cognitive mapping o the contemporary word it offered caught so unforgettably at once lyrically and caustically - the imaginativestructures and ived experience of the time, and their boundary

conditions.How shoud we situate this achievement? Two answerssuggest themselves The rst relates to the deveopment ofJameson's own thought. Here there is a notable paradox Thevocabuary of the postmodern came, as noted above, relativelylate to Jameson, after signs of initia reservation But its problematic was there very early, and unfods through successive

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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 visiblefuture, a society dazzled by the massive permanence of its owninstitutions in which no change seems possible and the idea ofprogress is dead' Ten years later, in Marxism and Formcomparing the enchanted bricabrac of surrealism with thecommodities of a postindustrial capitalism products utterlywithout depth', whose plastic content is totally incapable of

serving as a conductor of psychic energy' he asked whetherwe are not here in the presence of a cultural transformation ofsignal proportions, a historical break of an unexpectedly absolute kind?'.

Marxism and Form ended by observing that a new kind ofmodernism, articulated by Sontag and Hassan, had surfaced,which no longer as an older modernism had reckoned withthe instinctive hostility of a middecass public of which it

stood as a negation', but was rather popular; maybe not insmall midWestern towns, but in the dominant world of fashionand the mass media'. The lms of Warhol, the novels ofBurroughs, the pays of Beckett were of this kind and nocritique can have any binding force which does not submit tothe fascination of all these things as stylzatos of reality' Anot dissimilar note is strck in The PrisonHouse of Language

where the deeper justication' of the use of linguistic models informalism and structuralism lay not so much in their scienticvalidity, as n the character of contemporary societies, whichoffer the spctace of a world of forms from which nature ssuch has been eliminated, a word saturated with messagesinformation, 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 cutoday'2

Sartre - The Orgns of a Stye 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.

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already bureaucratized and isolated, there developed in Europea distinctive theoretical tradition that eventually acquired the

nae of Western Marxism. Born of political defeat - thecrushing of proletarian insurgencies in Germany, Austria, Hungary and taly which its rst great thinkers Lukcs, Korsch andGramsci had lived through - this Marxism was separated fromthe classical corpus of historical materialism by a sharp caesura.n the absence of a popular revolutionary practice, politicalstrategy for the overthrow of capital waned, and once the greatdepression had passed into the Second World War, economicanalysis of its transformations tended to lapse too.

n compensation, Western Marxism found its centre ofgravity in philosophy, where a series of outstanding secondgeneration thinkers - Adorno, Horkheimer, Sartre, Lefebvre,Marcuse - constructed a remarkable eld of critica theory, notin 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 epistemologyof a critical understandig of society - on which classicalMarxism had left few pointers. But its philosophica scope wasnot merely procedural: it had one centra focus of substantiveconcern, which formed the common horizon of this line as awhole. Western Marxism was above all a set of theoreticalinvestigations of the cuture of developed capitalism. The primacy of philosophy in the tradition gave these enquiries aparticular cast: not exclusively, but decisivey, they remainedtrue to the oncerns of aesthetics. Whatever else it incuded,culture signed, rst and foremost, the system of the artsLukcs, Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre, Dela Volpe formed the ruehere; Gramsci or Lefebvre, with a more anthropologica eJ:/of culture, the exception.23

For all its common features as a tradition, Western


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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 WesternMarxsm were put on eegant dspay f Jameson's bookconcentrated 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 domnantstrand of ths descent was aesthetc For the rst tme, one mghtsay, Western Marxsm was tacty faced wth ts trth. What

dd such totalzaton, however, sgnfy for the future of thstradton? There were many, ncludng myself, who reckonedthat the condtons whch had produced t were now past, andother knds of Marxsm - closer to classca models - were lkelyto repace t

Ths estmate was based on the renewed radcal ferment nWestern Europe of the late sxtes and eary seventes, and onthe vsble return of ntellectua energes towards questons ofpoltcal economy and strategy that had domnated the oderagenda of hstorca materasm The French upheaval of May98 coud be seen as a revolvng beacon of ths change,lashng out the sgnal that Western Marxsm was now overtaken, passng to the rank of an honourable egacy A shrewderjudgement 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 bearscomparson wth Jameson's as a route map of twentethcenturyculture A centra epsode n ts narratve s the story of theStuatonst nternatona, the last of the hstorc avantgardeswhose dssouton n 97 brought to an end an epoch thatbegan n Pars wth the Futurst Manfesto of 909 ButStuatonsm, nurtured on ukcs, efebvre and Breton, was

not ony ths n theoretcally gntng the exploson of May98 Wolen remarks, we can equally see t as the summatonof Western Marxsm' Ths was a more plausble readng Butts upshot was nevertheess qute smlar The lessons of West

Raiding the IceBox Reections on Twentieth Century Cuture odo 1993,p. 124


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beyond the imited meaning of the book written in it, andbeyond even those precise meanings which the individua se

tences that make i up are intended to convey.'2 Future studiesof Jameson's own writing coud take this as a motto. For themoment, it is enough to note two features of a stye ofcompeing spendour. The spacious rhythms of a compex, yetsuppe syntax - wenigh Jamesian in its forms of address -enact the absorption of so many variegated sources in the theoryitsef; whie the sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity, exhiarating gura eaps with a highwire clat a of their own, standas embems of the bod diagona moves, coser to a poetic thananaytic inteigence, with which this work unexpectedy crossconnects disparate signs of the tota phenomenon in view. Weare deaing with a great writer.

At the same time, Jameson's work on the postmodern uniesthe sources on which it draws in a deeper substantive sense. TheWestern Marxist tradition was attracted to the aesthetic as

invountary consoation for impasses of the poitica and economic. The resut was a remarkabe range of reections ondifferent aspects of the cuture of modern capitaism. But thesewere never integrated into a consistent theory of its economicdeveopment, typicay remaining at a somewhat detached andspeciaized ange to the broader movement of society: taxabeeven with a certain ideaism, fro the standpoint of a morecassica Marxism. Jameson's account of postmodernism, bycontrast, deveops for the rst time a theory of the cuturaogic' of capita that simutaneousy offers a portrait of thetransformations of this socia form as a whoe. This is a muchmore comprehensive vision. Here, in the passage from thesectora to the genera, the vocation of Western Marxism hasreached its most compete consummation.

The conditions of this widening were historica. The view

that the ate sixties marked a critica break in the andscape ofthe eft was not atogether wrong. nteectuay, as the verytite of his andmark essay and book indicates, Jameson's turnto a theory of the postmodern was enabed by Mande's LateCapitalism an economic study that situated isef in a cassica

Sartre p. vi.

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tradition distinct from any shade of Western Marxism. Empiricay, economic ife itsef had anyway become so pervaded by

the symboic systems of information and persuasion that thenotion of an independent sphere of more or ess acuturaproduction increasingy ost meaning. Henceforward, any majortheory of cuture was bound to encompass more of the civiization of capita than ever before The traditiona object ofWestern Marxism was enormousy magnied. So Jameson'sresumption of its heritage coud yied a much more centra andpoitica description of the conditions of contemporary ife thanthe precedents it drew on.

Crucia to the effect of Jameson's account here is its sense ofepochaity' This way of reading the signs of the time owesmuch to Lukcs. But Lukcs's principa exercises in epochaanaysis, The Soul and Forms and The Theory of the Novelremain aesthetic or metaphysica. When he moved to thepoitica, in his remarkabe short study Lenin ukcs dened

the epoch that had opened with the catastrophe of the GreatWar as one stamped above a by the actuaity of revoution'.When events disappointed this expectation, no further description coud foow. t was then Gramsci, the thinker withinWestern Marxism from whom Jameson has taken east, whotried to capture the nature of the consoidation or counterrevoutions of capita between the wars. His notes on Fordismrepresent, in fact, the ony rea precedent in this tradition forJameson's enterprise. t is no accident that they gave rise to somuch discussion after the Second Word War, or variosattempts to sketch the features of a postFordism' in theseventies and eighties

But, powerfu and origina (at times highy idiosyncrathey were, Gramsci's ideas about Fordism - embracingproduction, rigorous workdiscipine and high

the US, puritanism for ower orders and ibertinage for strata, sectarian reigion in ibera America and corporatorganization in fascist tay - nevertheess remained aconic andunsystematic. n a sense, their epochaity' too misred. n manyrespects ahead of the time, behind it in a few, these jottingsproved to be mainy suggestive after the event. Jameson'saccount of the postmodern contains no comparabe insights

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nto the abour process or producton, reyng as t does on asefstandng economc terature of ts own But t s, of course,

enormousy more deveoped and detaed as the denton of anepoch, and supported by contemporary experence Yet muchof the crtca charge of ths theory aso comes from ts tensonwth the very cmate of tme t depcts For, as we read n therst sentence of ostmodernism t s safest to grasp the conceptof the postmodern as an attempt to thnk the present hstorcayn an age that has forgotten how to thnk hstorcay n the rstpace'

f, n a these ways, Jameson's work appears ke a grandosenae of Western Marxsm, n another way t has sgncantyexceeded ths tradton Nurtured n Europe, the work of tsmajor thnkers never moved far beyond t as an nteectuaforce Lukcs was known n apan before the war, and n exethe Frankfurt Schoo dscovered the nted States Later, Sartrwas read by Fanon and Athusser studed n Latn Amerca Bu

essentaly ths was a Marxsm whose radus of nuenceremaned mted to the orgna core of the advanced captastword: Western not ony n ts orgns and themes, but aso tsmpact Jameson's theory of the postmodern has broken thspattern ts nta formuatons were focused prncpay onNorth Amerca But as hs work on the queston deveoped, tsmpcatons wdened: postmodernsm, he concuded, was not

addtonay, but ntrnscay the cutura ether of a gobasystem that overrued a geographca dvsons ts ogc compeed a major turn n Jameson's own ed of enqury

p to the eve of the eghtes, Jameson's crtca practce wasexcusvey terary and ts objects emnenty Western Proust,Hemngway, Bazac, Dckens, Echendorff, Faubert, Conrad such were the gures n the foreground of hs attenton Wththe eghtes, thee s a sharp change Vsua forms start to

compete wth wrtten, and rapdy come to predomnate ashft evdent n ostmodernism tsef Smutaneousy there s astrkng movement otwards, to cutures and regons beyondthe West n ths perod, Jameson was to reect on Sosek andKaratan n Japan; L Xun and Lao She n Chna; Sembne n

Postmodernism p. ix.

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Senega and Sas o r Barnet in Cuba; Edward Yang of Taiwanand Kidak Tahimik of the Phiippines3 n The Cultural Turn

discussions can be found of the ms of Pau Leduc, Mexicandirector of a sient movie set in Venezuea, and SoueymaneCiss from Mai s there any contemporary critic with an evendistanty comparabe range?

The sense of such interventions has been to encourage a geopoitica aesthetic' adequate to the enargement of the cuturauniverse in postmodern conditions This has been no engage

ment from afar Jameson rst set out his ideas on postmodernism comprehensivey in a ecture course in Beijing in 198, andpubished a coection on the subject in China some years beforehe produced one in America His account of Postmodernismand the Market' was tested out in Seou We owe the major texton Transformations of the mage' to an address in CaracasSettings ike these were not a matter of chance Jameson's theoryof postmodernity has won a growing audience in countries once

of the Third or Second Word because it speaks of a cuturaimaginary famiiar to them, part of the web of their ownexperience A Marxism so naturay at home in the greatmetropoitan centres of the South and the East is no ongerrestrictivey Western With this breakout from the Occident,the idea of the postmodern has come fu circe back to itsorigina inspiration, as a time when the dominance of the West

woud cease Oson's visionary condence was not mispaced;The Kingshers coud virtuay be read as a brevet for Jameson'sachievement

But if that was possibe, it is aso because Jameson sharedsomething with Oson that distinguishes him fo the intelltua ine fom which he descends n one cucia resyJameson's wok depats fom the whoe teno of

See respectivey Soseki and Westen Modernism bounda Fall 1pp. 123-11; In the Mirror o Alternate Modeities South Atantic QuarterSpring 1993 pp. 295-310; ird Word Liteature in the Era o MultinationalCapitalism Socia Text Fall 1986 pp. 6588; Literary Innovation and Modes oroduction Modern Chinese Literature Septemer 198 pp 67-72; On Literaryand Cultural ImportSustitution in the hird World: the Case o the estimonio'Margins Spring 1991 pp. 11-3; The Geopoitica Aesthetic London 1992pp. 1 1-157 186213

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Marxism. That was a tradition whose major monuments werein 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 themelancholy, the wintry to the apocalyptic. Jameson's writing isof a different timbre. Although his topic has certainly not beenone of comfort to the Left, his treatment of it has never beenacrimonious or despondent On the contrary, the magic ofJameson

anderson, perry origins of post modernity

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