Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is an essential book by Fredric Jameson chiefly because the author is a Marxist literary critic, and it seems he has another goal in addition to discussing the why and the why-not? of a fluid philosophy that seems to undermine any sense of "fixed" areas of knowledge that might otherwise give a culture a sense of itself, an identity, ethos and larger purpose that makes the past acceptable, the future brimming with a promise yet to be fulfilled, an entrenched optimism that makes the present tolerable or, at least, a condition where apathy is the preferred stance; he is intent of maintaining the authority of Marxist methods of discerning the economic superstructure of capitalism and, as well, holding on to the progressive notion that properly executed critiques and political actions based on them will further us along to Marx 's and Engle's prophecy that after the revolution, after the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established and operating for an unspecified amount of time, the State will eventually, naturally wither away , as men and women have, it's assumed, been restored to their natural state before the foul distortion of capital fouled everything up; that is, we will have become, to paraphrase a famous promise, fishers, and farmers in the morning, poets, musicians, and artists in the afternoons, scholars and philosophers at night. We will no longer have occupations, our labor, informing us who we are and destroying our potential of being much more.
This is a key book for those
struggling to comprehend the verbal murk that constituted the postmodernist
theory, which is a shame because Fredric Jameson cannot help but add his own
murk to this occasionally useful overview of a directionless philosophical
inclination. He certainly brings a lot of reading into his digressive
discussions and reveals how much the idea of postmodern strategy--Lyotard's
notion that the Grand Narrative that unified all accounts of our history,
purpose and collective sense of inevitable autonomy over the earth and those
outside our culture has been shattered, eroded or made unpersuasive in a
century that has known the horrors of two world wars and the overwhelming
emergence of new technologies and the efforts of populations outside the
margins of acceptable culture to claim their rights as humans , first and
foremost--has usurped preceding and established ideas in areas of literature,
architecture, movies, the arts, philosophy itself.
Free to be you and me, as the philosopher Marlo Thomas would have it, which is
essentially the same promise made by libertarians , a cult of free-market
zealots who believed that more of us in the culture would be more fully
realized examples of human potential if, quite literally, all trappings
of the socialist state were gotten rid of and the conditions of society were
laid to the workings of uninhibited capitalism. But here we find something interesting,
as both scenarios, the success of the socialist revolution and the replacement
of the State with a pure free market , seem modeled after the most basic tenet
of Christian theology, that the world will make sense and those who are fully
prepared with achieving the best lives they could have when the Savior returns
to earth with the keys to the kingdom of Heaven. All three involve better days
deferred; all that remains is for us is wait and distract ourselves with work,
however, packaged the labor comes to us as. Is that postmodernism?
Merely noticing the formula for competing Grand Narratives isn't especially
new, since there have been critics and theorists in the older modernist wing of
social critique who've noticed more similarities than differences in absolute
scenarios involving cures for our ills and the sources that make us sick. But
that was a matter of one idea trying to bankrupt the other. There are, to be
sure, more specific arguments of the differences between modernism and
postmodernism, all of them utilizing more opaque language than my
excruciatingly vague rant here, but it would be a safe guess to assert that
modernist still had a view of a whole universe and various sorts of slavishly
detailed theories to express the causes, conditions, and direction of that
unity, and that postmodernism, as a rule, was the kid we all know who could
take radios, clocks, computers, bikes and such things apart and have no idea
about how to put any of it back together.
The postmodern inclination undermines the metaphorical structure and linguistic
devices philosophies use to make their systems persuasive; Derrida and
Baudrillard were smart men with much influence over the Left who had their
discourses that argued that every argument contains the seeds of its own
counter-assertion. Jameson doesn't seem to want any of that and proceeds to
write as densely as the thinkers he seeks to critique, often times stalling
before coming to a major point he seemed to be traveling toward to
indulge himself with clarifications about terms being used, ideas and artifacts
that have been used as examples of opaque references . There is much the
notion of the word-drunk in this volume, the idea that Jameson is thinking out
loud and that the writing is a species of verbal stream of conscious wherein
there is the assumption, an act of faith actually, that the longer the
associative chain, the more inclusive the argument the analysis becomes and
that in this process there will come the connecting conceit that unifies what
might have been mere intellectual drift into a bravura performance. I can't
shake the idea that Jameson is stalling here and is, honestly, out of his depth
in his discussions that are not directly involved in parsing the creation and
use of narrative forms as political tools in a problematic culture. There is
value here, though, and I would suggest reading the opening essay,
"Culture", where one gets the choicest ideas and insights it has in this
volume. For the rest, it is a reminder of just how much of a trudge reading Jameson can be.
