The Tinkerer and the Bureaucrat

Michael Rancic opens his forthcoming book, A Nation of Tinkerers: A History of Electronic Music in Canada from 1945 to 1985, with a bit of mise-en-scene that really hit home for me. He talks about his grandfather’s garage at their family cabin, which was “an old wooden building, lined with workbenches and shelves of old mason jars and coffee containers that held myriad fasteners, hinges, and other odds and ends that he had collected over the years” (1). For Rancic, this provides a kind of model for “the tinkerer” that he’s going to explore over the course of the book, and this is indeed a classic kind of Canadian guy. My own grandfather was exactly like this, and I have fond childhood memories of hanging out in his workshop out at the lake and puzzling over the various disassembled outboard motors he was seemingly always working on.

Right from the outset though, this conception of the tinkerer would seem to suggest some constraints around when and where tinkering happens: Tinkering out in the shed is the domain of the old retired guy, or something done on the weekends or evenings after work. It’s cordoned off from more conventional economic activity and seems sort of willfully inefficient. In Marxist terms, you might say it produces use value without exchange value.

As a model for artistic production, this kind of “tinkering” makes a lot of intuitive sense. Not to make this too personal but I’ve done a bunch of my own little music projects, and—at least before I had kids—I spent a lot of my spare time hunched over a midi keyboard tinkering away with VSTs in Logic Pro, much in the same way I can recall my grandpa tinkering away in the garage. Still, it feels like a really narrow and private conception of labour, cut off not only from the market but also like, other people in general.

This conception of the solitary tinkerer finds a generative kind of tension with the other big throughline of Rancic’s book, which is the role of bureaucracy and state funding in the Canadian arts scene. Rancic quotes extensively from AA Bronson’s great 1983 essay “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat,” which describes the state of the arts in Canada by the mid-’80s:

Here in Canada something happened that happened nowhere else. The linear construction of the country, the reliance on media, the lack of Canadian identity, the aggressive cultural domination of American popular media, the lack of any real art market at all, the impossibility of competing internationally with New York’s hype system and the machinery of American politics pushing American art down the throats of the entire Western world, the McLuhanistic policy-making of the Canadian government in the mid-to-late Sixties, this constellation of unlikely catalysts crystallized into the post-Capital art scene we experience here in Canada today.

For Bronson, federal initiatives like the Canada Council for the Arts and their artist grants have produced an arts scene in Canada that operates more like a bureaucracy than a marketplace: Of the Association of National Non-Profit Artists Centres (ANNPAC)—a Canada Council-funded collective of 17 artist-run galleries of which Bronson was a founding member— he writes,

At times, (usually annually) ANNPAC is defined by its apparition as a series of long and pedantically democratic meetings, an endless ritual of calling and answering, proposal and revision, a bureaucratic means of reducing all to the lowest common denominator …And what better place to develop the interior kingdom of the soul, than in the humiliation of the bureaucrat, the constant death of palace coups, the submission of rational consciousness to this sleep-song drifting down the long chain of dream-palaces, this idealized vision of the “museum,” of history, in which the artist animates the quaking body of the institution with his own obsessive will?

Pretty cool. And it suggests another model of artistic production that feels decidedly outside of the market: Where making a living in the arts in a more straightforwardly market-oriented society is more readily mapped to the tension between creativity and consumption, wherein culture itself is shorn free of any kind of historical condition and reduced to the flat logic of the market (See our previous discussion of Warhol on here, for instance), Bronson offers a model of cultural production where the central tension is between individual creative freedom and a highly formalized collective negotiation.

Bronson’s characterization has a charmingly utopian neatness to it, and if you’ve spent any time hanging out with people who work in the arts here in Canada, you may be familiar with some aspects of what Bronson is describing. Many professional artists here seem to spend a lot of time thinking about and applying for grants, and the ritual of proposal and revision does seem pretty endless. The whole thing inevitably produces its own set of issues (grant writing emerges as its own perverse art form; the review process can feel alienating and opaque; interacting with bureaucracies can make you feel kind of insane, etc.) but I think the relevant point here is these are more often bureaucratic than market-based problems.

Of course, the suggestion of a “post-capital” scene—even in the sort of cheekily poetic register that Bronson is deploying in the quote above—raises some tricky questions, and I think tracing the evolving relationship between Canada’s arts scene and capitalism is actually one of the great accomplishments of Rancic’s book. Because while it’s true that Canada has fostered an arts scene that is in some ways separate from the logic of the market, it’s obviously also true that the market still exerts a tremendous amount of pressure on artists here. What I think Rancic does really successfully in his book is trace the changing nature of this pressure over time. What emerges is a story about electronic music that feels less like the slow but inevitable creep of capitalist realism described by Mark Fisher, and more like an ongoing struggle, with its own inflection points and losses, but also—crucially—an articulation of a meaningful path forward.

The Enclave

You can get a sense of the kind of tricky relationship between tinkerers and bureaucracy that Rancic is indexing through figures like Hugh Le Caine. Le Caine was a physicist who worked at the National Research Council of Canada from around 1940 through to the ‘70s. During the second world war, this meant he was researching atomic physics and helping to develop radar systems for the military. In his spare time, though, he was tinkering away on electronic instruments in his home studio, and in the ‘40s he had created what is now recognized as the first voltage controlled synthesizer, which is the foundational technology behind pretty much all analog sound synthesis.

While Le Caine developed his synthesizer on his own time, once he had a working prototype he approached the NRC and was eventually able to secure a workshop in their electronic engineering division, enabling him to tinker away on his electronic instrument projects full-time. The ostensible goal of Le Caine’s new position at the NRC was to eventually develop an instrument that could be manufactured and brought to market by a Canadian company. But Le Caine was experimenting with other stuff, as well. During his time at the NRC he composed Dripsody, an extremely cool bit of musique concrete created by manipulating a tape loop of a single drop of water to different pitches.

He also published pretty extensively: As Rancic describes, Le Caine “was prolific in disseminating his findings through scientific and engineering trade publications. These articles that Le Caine published on his work with the NRC found their way to inventors like [Robert] Moog, who then based his own inventions on those ideas. By 1964, Moog was working with voltage controlled oscillators himself, and he published his own paper on ‘voltage-controlled electronic music modules’ at the Audio Engineering Society annual meeting that year in the United States, citing Le Caine” (50).

Moog, of course, would go on to create the Moog Modular series and become one of the main guys in the history of synth music, transforming analog synthesis from a largely academic and experimental discipline into something you could hear featured on “Here Comes the Sun”. Le Caine, meanwhile, was facing budget cuts:

The NRC held a diminished role in the government following the Royal Commission on Government Organization report, instituted by the Diefenbaker government [in the early ‘60s]…The Commission introduced a technocratic, managerial framework into federal governance that took aim at the NRC and its focus on basic research over applied science—effectively pushing for practical problem-solving and more immediate results…Over the next decade, this bureaucratic overreach led to serious restructuring and dismantling of the NRC’s coordinating and granting functions, transforming it from a central science authority into a mission-oriented laboratory and industrial research organization (51).

Le Caine would spend the rest of his career at the NRC, developing prototypes and demonstrations for universities, but he never actually brought a synthesizer to market. And while he was far from a tragic figure (as Rancic rightly points out, his “true legacy…lies in the connections he made and the immeasurable impact he had on others” (58)), this is kind of a sad story. Obviously we’re skimming over a lot of detail here, and it’s worth noting the Moog himself was a big time tinkerer in his own right, but it’s hard to look at this situation and not kind of feel like Le Caine and the NRC were essentially doing R&D for Moog.

One way of explaining the seeming inevitability of the marketization of non-market innovation is to recharacterize the Canadian systems of grants and federal funding as what our old pal Fred Jameson would call a “utopian enclave,” or a “pocket of stasis within the ferment and rushing forces of social change” (Archeologies of the Future, 15). There’s a lot more depth to Jameson’s thinking here that I’m going to kind of gloss over for the purposes of this review, but the key thing is to envision the enclave as a social space partly withdrawn from the dominant order — a zone thrown up by uneven development in which a different social logic becomes briefly thinkable and livable precisely because it’s walled off from the totality around it.

As with a lot of Jamesonian concepts, the enclave is usefully dialectical: its walled-off nature both allows for and constrains the emergence of new forms of social logic. You can see all of this kind of latent in the Bronson essay quoted above, though I think it’s worth noting that what Bronson describes as “post-capital” is maybe better thought of in this context as “para-capitalist,” in the sense that it is both a kind of laboratory for exploring modes of artistic production outside of the pressures of the market (Jameson would call it “a garage space in which all kinds of machinery can be tinkered with and rebuilt” (Archeologies 14)), but it also fits pretty comfortably alongside other kinds of market-driven activities: Funds allocated to artists through bureaucratic negotiation are still going to circulate in exchange for goods and services in pretty conventionally market-driven ways.

To be clear, the publicly funded institutions that Rancic is describing can and do serve as a kind of scaffold or support for artists, but as he acknowledges, they’re also extremely fragile: The enclave that let Hugh Le Caine spend long stretches of his career tinkering on instruments with no real obligation to ship anything didn’t collapse because it lost some direct contest with Moog — it was dismantled from the inside, once the Royal Commission’s technocratic framework eventually arrived with a different mandate. The thing that made the enclave valuable and interesting— that it was walled off enough for slow, speculative, unprofitable research to happen at all — was also what made it illegible to the managerial logic that eventually came for it. As Jameson describes, “The enclave radiates baleful power, but at the same time it is a power that can be eclipsed without a trace precisely because it is confined to a limited space” (Archeologies 17). That’s sort of the two sides of our dialectic here: Pieces like Dripsody and the other state-funded works that Rancic catalogues throughout the book speak to the generative capacity of these kinds of para-capitalist enclaves. At the same time, though, the grants and publicly funded institutions of this kind don’t really challenge the centrality of the market so much as quietly service it: They soak up the risk and inefficiency capital won’t underwrite — the slow unprofitable early work of speculative tinkering— and then hand that research off to someone else to bring to market.

So the market looms pretty large over this utopian vision, and even the places where Rancic wants to zoom out and show you the full network of publicly funded research institutions feeding publicly funded performance spaces as a kind of complete and self-contained ecosystem often leave the internal and external pressures on that ecosystem unstated. He writes about how the various state-funded university research centres “shared knowledge and techniques, which in turn amplified the overall creativity and impact of the field, eventually spilling over outside the academy into public-facing electronic and electroacoustic societies, performance spaces, and the artist-run-centre movement” (87). This is a compelling image, but given where the book ends up, it feels sort of incomplete: Some of this outflow would inevitably run toward the market, which functioned less as an active participant in the exchange than as a drain — absorbing all that innovative work without any real obligation to feed back into it.

Pop Ubiquity, Utopian Noise

By the ‘70s and ‘80s, electronic music had matured to a degree that it was starting to play a major and sustained role in popular music more generally. This cuts in two directions: On one hand, you have widespread and relatively accessible electronic instruments, making it easier for anyone with the inclination to start experimenting with electronic music on their own. Rancic has great chapters on DIY and new wave that both illustrate the role of accessible electronic instruments and home recording studios in the “the defiant, creative, and often monstrous act of making oneself heard” (294), and also provide cool little catalogues of underdiscussed Canadian electronic albums. I’ve been listening to Tona Ohama’s I Fear What I Might Hear all month; it kicks ass.

On the other hand, though, this period also gave way to what Rancic calls electronic music’s moment of “pop ubiquity”, characterized by “a growing market-driven cultural homogeneity and a disconnection from the origins of electronic music, where technology, while making music more accessible, also centralized control within corporations, often at the expense of artist agency and local music scenes” (309). This feels kind of bleak, and it circles us back to the sort of naive conception of the isolated tinkerer that we opened with: The retired hobbyist out in the garage, one step removed from a market that will either happily leave them to their own devices or eventually extract any marketable elements of their work.

But I think the Jamesonian dialectic we were tracing above actually gives us some generative new ways to frame the role of the tinkerer within the increasingly homogeneous and market-driven landscape of the 1980s: Tona Ohama, for instance, tinkering away with his synths and drum machines in the basement of his family’s farmhouse in Calgary, had basically devised for himself a personal enclave, though one that registers in a slightly different key than what we saw with Le Caine and the NRC above. Like Le Caine’s workshop at the NRC, spaces like Ohama’s basement studio are walled off from the market, and allow for the kind of open-ended experimentation where cool and weird stuff can start to happen. Unlike Le Caine’s workshop, though, the basement studio is self-funded, which can itself kind of cut both ways: On the one hand, it does away with Bronson’s “pedantically democratic meetings,” and brings the entire operation under the control of the guy building it. On the other hand, though, that lack of institutional support can obviously make the DIY basement studio fragile in a different way: Now you have to Do It (viz., everything) Yourself, and this self-imposed isolation can make it easy for these kinds of projects to be ignored (or “eclipsed without a trace”) as the market simply routes around them.

But you can parse the work of the basement studio in slightly more hopeful terms: In his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali argues that the music of a particular historical moment prefigures a more general transformation of its modes of production and more general economic organization. Initially, this is presented as a framework for understanding the history of music. He writes, for example, that “if it is true that the political organization of the twentieth century is rooted in the political thought of the nineteenth, the latter is almost entirely present in embryonic form in the music of the eighteenth century” (4). [1]

More relevant for our purposes here, though, is that Attali is also building a framework for thinking about music in the then-present of the late ‘70s, where we see a new generation of artists heralding the potential emergence of a new form of production more broadly:

We are all condemned to silence—unless we create our own relation with the world and try to tie other people into the meaning we thus create. That is what composing is. Doing solely for the sake of doing, without trying artificially to recreate the old codes in order to reinsert communication into them. Inventing new codes, inventing the message at the same time as the language. Playing for one’s own pleasure, which alone can create the conditions for new communication. A concept such as this seems natural in the context of music. But it reaches far beyond that; it relates to the emergence of the free act, self-transcendence, pleasure in being instead of having… It is a foreshadowing of structural mutations, and farther down the road of the emergence of a radically new meaning for labor, as well as new relations among people and between men and commodities. (134-35)

By the ‘80s, Rancic’s tinkerer heralds exactly this kind of new relation — not so much the isolated hobbyist alone in his workshop, but a form of production that points past its own isolation toward a way of tying other people into the meaning being made. This breaking of the isolation—the communicative act for which the walled-off tinkering may be recast as a kind of rehearsal or preparation—is where we can locate the real utopian promise of electronic music that Rancic’s history narrates.

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[1] Way beyond the scope of the present writing, obviously, but Attali’s framework yields some really cool reads if you’re into this kind of thing: He talks about the transition from 14th century jongleurs (basically like roving freelance folk entertainers) to 16th century minstrels (a more rooted and professionalized set of musicians, usually tied to specific courts or households and organized into guilds), and how this transition both reflects the formalization of musical notation (the “cramped, channeled” notes of tonal music on a staff), and also prefigures a more generalized economic binding of labour to a centrally organized form of political or commercial power. Lots of fun stuff like that.

The Monad

Everybody loves that scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where DiCaprio sees himself on TV and points at the screen. It’s an instantly and instinctively relatable gesture, and this scene, in screenshot form, has quickly established itself as the quintessential “that’s me” reaction image. You could imagine that a similar thing happens when, while reading a novel, a reader encounters a character who is also described to be reading. They point at the book and go, “That’s me.” It feels too obvious to remark upon, but the act of reading within the frame of a work of fiction is always highly charged: Beyond its operation as a source of allusive commentary (think of all the moments in Murakami where characters sit around and talk about other characters from books they’ve read), there’s an inherent circularity or self-consciousness to reading about someone else reading, because that’s what you’re doing. The novelist describes the palaeolithic slouch of a character’s shoulders as they crane over a book in a doctor’s waiting room, and the reader of the novel might instinctively check their own posture.

Roughly speaking, this is the jumping off point for Jameson’s commentary on The Magic Mountain, in which we find a pairing of its protagonist Hans Castorp’s compulsive new relationship with the act of reading, and the reader’s own experience of reading The Magic Mountain itself, which produces “the special kind of addiction that must necessarily attach us…to the reading of these endless pages” (63). This basic fact—books like The Magic Mountain need to be compelling enough for readers to actually read them—is for Jameson “the fundamental motif of all modern aesthetics as such: that specification of the work of art in terms of withdrawal and contemplation” (63).

To better characterize the withdrawn and contemplative figure of the reader, Jameson turns to the notion of the monad, as initially theorized by Leibniz (as a metaphysics) and then reframed by Adorno (as a kind of metaphor for the work of art). Jameson zips through this pretty briskly but it’s worth unpacking the specific moves here, especially for those of us for whom early modern metaphysics is maybe not exactly front-of-mind.

So, for context: In the 18th century, Gottfried Leibniz wrote a pair of texts that eventually came to be known as The Monadology, in which he proposed a metaphysics based on these elementary particles he called monads. Leibniz posits that because there are compounds, there must therefore be elementary substances through which those compounds are derived. So he describes these theoretical substances called monads, whose key characteristic is that they are the basic indivisible and atomic elements of the universe, out of which everything else is built.

Monads are fun to think about for a range of reasons that we don’t need to list exhaustively here, but the key characteristic for Jameson—following Adorno, who we’ll get to in a second—is going to be the idea that monads are “windowless” or entirely self-contained, unable to directly interact with the world around them. For Leibniz, this is essentially a logical consequence of the metaphysical problem that monads are meant to solve: They are basic atomic elements, meaning there’s no conceptually smaller component elements either within them or outside of them, which would in turn enable any sort of mechanical interaction. Here’s Leibniz:

there is no way of explaining how a Monad can be altered in quality or internally changed by any other created thing; since it is impossible to change the place of anything in it or to conceive in it any internal motion which could be produced, directed, increased or diminished therein, although all this is possible in the case of compounds, in which there are changes among the parts. The Monads have no windows, through which anything could come in or go out. (§7, emphasis mine)

This kind of stuff plays into my very cartoonish understanding of the early modern period as essentially obsessed with contraptions: They’ve got this fully mechanical universe, the motions of which can only be explained by the local interaction of like gears and pulleys, and the way you know you’re at the atomic level is there are no more gears to turn or pulleys to pull.

The other thing to note here while we’re talking about Leibniz—it’s also going to become important in a second—is that while his monads do not directly interact with the world around them, they do need some means of knowing about it. So he’s going to grant that monads have some means of what he calls “perception,” but—again, probably as a result of the highly mechanical worldview of the early modern period—basically has to admit that he can’t really explain how it works.

Anyway, a couple centuries later Theodor Adorno takes up this notion of the monad as a metaphor for the work of art. Adorno’s own monadology is a whole complicated thing that Jameson glosses over pretty quickly, noting only that the monad “was a favourite figure of Adorno’s, who observes somewhere that whatever its validity as a solution to the technical philosophical problem for which it was devised, the idea unwittingly theorizes art itself with prescience” (63).

For Adorno, the monad is a useful metaphor for describing the work of art’s relationship to the world around it: Like the monad, the work of art is “windowless,” which in this context means that its historical context is all inherently baked in. There’s nothing that you can bring to the text that isn’t already in there. It’s a strong claim, but Adorno lays all of this out pretty explicitly. In his Aesthetic Theory, he argues that “what appears in the artwork is its own inner time; the explosion of appearance blasts open the continuity of this inner temporality. The artwork is mediated to real history by its monadological nucleus. History is the content of artworks. To analyze artworks means no less than to become conscious of the history immanently sedimented in them” (85).

Already, this feels like a conception of the work of art that would naturally privilege the analytical work of reading. I’ve written previously on here about Jameson’s preoccupation with the problems posed by the representation of historical totalities, and Adorno’s monadology is probably best understood as another particularly forceful effort to solve those problems. As Jameson describes, “the notion of the monad…has the advantage, unlike most doctrines of a world, of specifying this structure as a kind of totality, no matter how ultimately ungraspable or unknowable in its extent and finite detail” (64).

Importantly, though, Jameson is using the monad to describe not the work of art as such but rather the reader—or more precisely, the reading body. As such, he wants to operate in a slightly different affective register than Adorno, for whom the monadic, windowless artwork is fundamentally lonely and melancholic. In Aesthetic Theory, for instance, Adorno writes that “because meaning, whenever it is manifest in an artwork, remains bound up with semblance, all art is endowed with sadness; art grieves all the more, the more completely its successful unification suggests meaning, and the sadness is heightened by the feeling of ‘oh, were it only so.’” (105).

Jameson wants to give his conception of the monad a bit more affective range, and for that he’s going to go back to Leibniz:

it is now important to stress the way in which the monads, no matter how simple and how lacking in the more complex intellectual faculties, nonetheless continue to feel and to serve as the recording apparatus for a wealth of minute sensations or, as [Leibniz] calls them, perceptions: even in a swoon or “deep dreamless sleep,” “it does not follow that the simple substance has no perception at all... when there are a very great number of small perceptions with nothing to distinguish them, we are stupefied, just as it happens that if we go on turning round in the same direction several times running we become giddy...” But this dizzying aggregation of “small perceptions” is precisely what characterizes, if not writing in general, then at least the reading of [the] deliberately sensorial and symptomatological writing [of The Magic Mountain], as it minutely activates features of the reading body that serves it as a kind of ultimate template or monadic outer environment. (66)

So the monad here is a doubly useful metaphor for Jameson, as it both inscribes the novel as a self-contained index of a historical totality and, simultaneously, helps to characterize the experiential dimension of reading as an aggregation of little affective impulses.

But its this latter sense that Jameson really wants to explore here, and The Magic Mountain is filled with great little descriptions of the experience of reading, often including the basic physicality of both the books being read and the human body reading them. For instance, almost immediately after Hans Castorp has officially transitioned from visitor to patient at the International Sanatorium Berghof, he buys himself a set of textbooks on anatomy, physiology, and biology, and we get this:

The volumes were heavy, cumbersome. When reclining, Hans Castorp propped the lower edge on his chest or stomach, which hurt a little but was simply part of the bargain. His mouth hanging half-open, he would let his eyes glide down each learned page illuminated by the reddish light from his shaded lamp, though, if it had come to that, he could just as easily have read by the bright moonlight. His head would lower until his chin lay on his chest, and he would hold the pose awhile—lost in thought perhaps or musing in a dose—half-asleep, before lifting his head for the next page. While the moon followed its prescribed path across the high mountain valley, he would read, pursue his study of organized matter, of the characteristics of the protoplasm, that self-sustaining, delicate substance that hovers intriguingly between synthesis and dissolution and whose basic forms have remained the same as when it first assumed rudimentary shape. He read with burning interest about life and its sacred, yet impure mystery (270).

At this point the reader is similarly drawn to read about the sacred and impure mystery of life, as Mann draws on his seemingly inexhaustible capacity to produce compellingly weird sentences, in this case describing the human body itself, “with its mysterious symmetry of limbs, nourished by blood through a network of nerves, veins, arteries, capillaries, all oozing lymph; with its scaffold of bones, some of them tubes filled with marrow, some like blades, some like bulbs, some torqued vertebrae, but all originating in a gelatinous base that with the help of calcium salts and lime had grown firm enough to support the rest” (273), and so on, all of which operates to inscribe the reader—as in, the reader of The Magic Mountain—into exactly the same kind of monadic and windowless position as young Hans Castorp, rebuilding our conception physical embodiment from the ground up through the studious, solitary activity of reading.

Bildungsroman

For Jameson, these moments of the collapse between the reader, the text, and the protagonist constitute “a kind of absolute monadic emptiness and separation which is too unstable to last” (72), as any broader sense of narrative momentum gives way to the sentences themselves, and we’re left with a kind of Escherlike formulation of a reader reading over the shoulder of another reader within the narrative frame.

This is a pretty standard motif in Mann, incidentally. His novels, particularly the longer ones, are filled with these essay-length insertions that seem to entirely reorient their narrative space around the reader: The Kretschmar lectures on Bach and Beethoven in Doctor Faustus are presented basically in full, such that the reader is positioned right alongside the novel’s narrator and protagonist for the duration. Nothing is really “happening” during these sequences in Faustus; we are just straight up reading about Beethoven’s late style or Bach’s fugues. (Another fun little connection here is that Mann apparently wrote these lectures in consultation with one Theodor Adorno. Small world! ha ha.) But it’s not that hard to slot these lectures into the overall structure of Faustus on the level of plot: We already know that Leverkuhn is going to become a renowned composer, and so the length at which these lectures are reproduced in the text (along with the narrator’s ironic protestations that the length at which they were reproduced was “a totally unexpected mishap”(78)) can also be understood to underscore their importance to Leverkuhn’s development as a composer, such that whatever instability they generate is sort of counterbalanced by the underlying plot momentum that keeps the whole thing moving forward. As a result, even if we’re not quite locked in on the actual arguments being presented in the lectures on the level of content, we can still sort of orient ourselves in the plot, and we always kind of know why we’re reading what we’re reading.

This is not so much the case with the many extended bits of reading (or the functionally similar Naptha-Settembrini debates, which we’ll talk about more below) in The Magic Mountain, to a large extent because there’s very little else that actually “happens” in the book that is legible as plot in a more conventional sense. If anything, the entire book is premised on a kind of forestalling of forward movement: We’re first introduced to Hans Castorp as a young man on his way to visit his sickly cousin at the Berghof sanatorium in the period between the end of school and the start of his career, but everything that follows operates to push the start of his career further and further away.

But the book certainly moves! It’s a fun read! And it’s not quite the case that we’re carried along entirely by Mann’s prose through a series of otherwise plotless little episodes, “addictive” as that prose may be. But it’s an interesting little puzzle to try and think through where the novel’s forward momentum comes from, given everything we’ve already said about monadic, plot-avoidant tendencies of its protagonist.

True to form, Jameson is going to try and solve this puzzle by looking for a dialectic. Everything else aside, The Magic Mountain is more or less a bildungsroman, and so we would expect to find something like the formation of the subjective against some external objective world, even if most of what we’ve been describing thus far feels kind of like a subject trying to rebuild the objective from first principles, without interacting with the world at all.

To get us there, he’s going to go back to another classic 18th century guy: Johann Gottlieb Fichte. I’m not going to do a whole deep dive on this because we spent so much time on the Monadology stuff above, and the details here are not really that relevant, but as background, Fichte is:

1. a founding figure of German idealism, and so loomed very large for guys like Kant and Hegel, and

2. best known for the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formulation, with which, as Jameson describes, he:

wished at least to conceptualize in imagination a philosophical equivalent of the big bang, or of creation itself, a positing of how, given the empirical existence of subjects and objects, we might somehow work our way back to a primal a priori situation in which that existence could be somehow, not merely justified, but as it were replayed in all the logical necessity of its emergence (72).

So, similar to what Adorno did with Leibniz’s monad, Jameson is going to take an 18th century philosophical model and transfer it into the sphere of aesthetics. It seems like a good fit! The Fichtean problem of generating an object out of a subject maps really cleanly to this monadic Bildungsroman problem we’ve been tracing in The Magic Mountain: How does content emerge from this empty monadic reader? More practically: How to you build an entire 700 page novel out of a guy who just wants to chill out and read for a bit instead of going to work?

Following Fichte, Jameson proposes a series of dualisms presented throughout the novel, through which we can map a series of increasingly complex binary oppositions (a “thesis” and “antithesis,” so to speak), each representing a discontinuous leap (though here we’re not so much “synthesizing” the previous opposition but rather reframing it in a new context).

Here’s Jameson:

it is crucial not to freeze any of these dualisms over, but to develop a keen awareness of the way they shift and regroup: first, the pseudo-couple of the two cousins against the other nationalities, and then against Settembrini seen as demonic if not “Satanic” (a far cry from his later role as the supreme humanist and the spokesman for reason and light as well as for a relatively tame bourgeois liberalism). Then, as the figure of Clavdia emerges from the indistinct mass of the various comic nationalities, and is invested with the erotic, a new dualism comes into being which opposes her to Settembrini (or more correctly, the reverse): she is thus explicitly glossed as a Circe figure who…keeps Hans chained to the bewitched mountain, to death and illusion, and distracts him from the life tasks in the real world to which Settembrini summons him. Later on, finally, after the definitive opposition between Settembrini and Naphta has emerged, we find both sent off “back to back” by the irruption of a new character, Mynheer Peeperkorn, who treats both indifferently as specimens of the intellectual and the academic and “opposes” them as physical consumption and life appetite. (83-84)

Importantly, for Jameson, the dualisms here are being surfaced on the level of form, rather than content. As a result, they produce none of the aggregative effects or consequential sequencing of events that we might think of as the natural byproduct of a more typical plot.

But if we look at the dualisms in sequence some interesting patterns start to arise. Notably, I think, we shift from dualisms that directly incorporate Castorp himself, into dualisms where he’s been fully relegated to a position of passive observation. You can see this most clearly in the changing role of Settembrini over the course of the novel:

Initially, Settembrini is a vaguely menacing Italian guy Hans sees in the common areas in the sanatorium, broadly symbolic of the initially disorienting diversity of the Berghof’s patient cohort against which he and his cousin become reflexively aware of their own (German) identity. Settembrini (and the rest of the non-Germanic patients at the sanatorium) forms one half of a binary pairing, and Hans and his cousin form the other.

Later, Settembrini is refigured in opposition to Clavdia, a Russian woman that young Hans Castorp has a little crush on. Here, Settembrini is on one pole as a kind of mentor, pushing Hans to leave the Berghof and return to the real world, start his career etc., whereas Clavdia, on the opposing side, is figured as a reason for him to stay. This pairing is essentially mediated through Castorp—its ostensible resolution or synthesis would depend on whether he chooses to leave or stay—but he is no longer figured as one of its poles.

Next, after Clavdia’s departure, the novel’s dominant structural dualism is between Settembrini and Naptha, a Jesuit guy who lives near the sanatorium. As mentioned above, Settembrini and Naptha engage in these long, often really eloquent debates on a whole range of topics. Here again, Hans is not directly figured into the binary pairing. Instead, as Jameson describes, “the Settembrini-Naphta debates have always rightly been considered the privileged locus of dualism in this novel, and justly admired for the elegance with which the stray thoughts and remarks of idle small talk are unexpectedly teased into the most lofty themes of philosophical speculation, and become the occasions for a veritably Platonic symposium in which one impoverished set speech provokes another, each one drawing Hans’s enthusiasm and convictions (along with the reader’s) in the opposite direction” (84). Importantly, unlike the previous dualism between Settembrini and Clavdia, which was specifically about Hans and his future, the source of the dualism here isn’t really about Hans at all, and his oscillation from one pole to another is incidental, and basically a function of whichever person spoke last.

Finally, with the return of Clavdia and arrival of Mynheer Peeperkorn, the Settembrini-Naphta debates are kind of bracketed off as one pole of a whole new dualism, between what Jameson describes as intellect and “life appetite.” Peeperkorn doesn’t engage in these debates at all, but rather flattens the differences between Settembrini and Naphta down into a single dimension. Hans, in turn, is also repositioned: no longer even engaged as the audience for a series of debates, but rather the awestruck observer of a strange and inarticulate vitality that he can barely even fathom, nevermind access for himself. Mann’s description of this is so good:

it was resolved in Hans Castorp’s own mind as he lay on his balcony and admitted that those two hyperarticulate mentors, tugging at both sides of his soul, simply shrank beside Pieter Peeperkorn, until he was inclined to call them the same name that the Dutchman had called him in a fit of drunken royal banter—”little chatterboxes”—and decided it was a piece of good luck that hermetic pedagogy had also brought him into contact with such a manifest personality. (565)

Taken as a whole, Hans’ gradual shift in relation to the novel’s sequence of dualisms constitutes the foundation of an odd kind of developmental arc, whereby we can see Hans learning to process everything going on around him in increasingly impersonal terms:

the true story of [Hans Castorp’s] Bildung as a subject…The relationship to language, and this aestheticization of events and experiences, can also be observed in Hans’ “impertinence,”…that is, his sleepwalking freedom at externalizing all these inner perceptions and at describing his mental reactions to others…but this impertinence is quite different from arrogance…rather it is itself a sign of Hans’ subjective subalternity, and is authorized by his own secondary standing, by his submission to others and to the situation, or even, by his posture as a kind of apprentice (who entertains no hope of evolving into a master in his own right). Thus, what may be called a kind of aestheticizing impertinence is itself a stage towards the real development or Bildung foreseen in this Bildungsroman, which posits the Buddhist extinction of the personality, or at least its decentering, the indifference to one’s own subjectivity as such, rather than the conquest of a Self traditionally celebrated in the era of ego psychology and of the ideology of modernism(87-88)

And here again we’re confronted with the pairing of the novel’s protagonist and the novel’s reader. How can you work your way through 700 pages of slow, sensorial, vaguely plotless novel and not feel your own sense of self begin to erode a little bit? How can you read of young Hans Castorp—reclined monadically with a book, vibrating with the revelation of a strange new way to understand the world around him—and not think: isn’t that me?

Hey what’s up. Earlier this week, Vox published an article called “The tech billionaires are missing the point of their favorite sci-fi series.” The titular tech billionaires here are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerburg, and the sci-fi series is Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to write something about the Culture and its apparent influence on a certain type of tech guy, and this seems a good time to do that.

The article, by Constance Grady, is pretty brief, and it does give a nice overview of a few instances where Musk, Bezos, and Zuck have explicitly mentioned or referenced Banks’ work. Musk gives his drones fun little names, just like in the Culture. Haha. What the piece doesn’t do, in my view, is explain what it is about the Culture that is so attractive to a certain kind of tech guy. This is too bad, because the particularities of Banks’ vision of a post-scarcity utopian society, and the apparent attractiveness of that vision to guys like Musk, actually provide some interesting insight into how those guys understand their relationship to the world around them.

So what I want to do in here is talk a bit about the political climate of the late 80s and how it may have informed the politics of the Culture, and then circle back to the “tech right” and suggest a few ways in which Banks’ utopian vision might resonate with them.

To be clear I’m not trying to dunk on the Grady piece. Its broader position—billionaires are bad and the things that they like are made by people who don’t like them—is an idea with which I’m broadly sympathetic. Iain M. Banks himself was indeed a noted supporter of socialism, and the fact that a bunch of billionaire tech guys are talking about how they love his books would probably strike him as kind of grimly funny.

But her piece is a useful jumping off point for my purposes here because, in its insistence that “nearly every aspect of the Culture seems to be diametrically opposed to the worldview of the tech right,” it’s forced to give a fairly cramped and superficial account of Banks’ utopian vision and also a sort of odd interpretation of how the tech right actually views the world.

Because while it is nominally true, as Grady writes, that in the Culture, “there is no money…therefore, there can’t be any billionaires,” I’d posit to you that Banks’ vision of a techno-utopian anarchistic society governed by artificial intelligence, where people can live forever and are free to indulge all of their weirdest and most hedonistic personal desires, can actually provide a fairly insightful framework for understanding the priorities and interests of right-wing tech guys here on earth in 2025.

Liberalism, Utopia, and The End of History

The Culture is a series of nine novels plus one short story collection written by Iain M. Banks and published by Orbit Books between 1987 and 2012. Each novel is its own self-contained narrative, and while there are a handful of characters that show up in multiple books, the main throughline of the series a whole is the Culture itself, a post-scarcity society that is managed by artificial super intelligences known as Minds. The Culture is made up of a distributed network of massive habitats known as Orbitals, and then a bunch of ships of various sizes. The largest type of these ships, known as General Systems Vehicles or GSVs, can house billions of people each, just to give a sense of scale. Every orbital and ship has its own Mind, and each Mind manages the various ship systems, plus attends to the needs of its inhabitants, the humanoid citizens of the Culture who are free to just kind of do whatever.

This freedom is really crucial to the whole project of the Culture. We might characterize the Culture as a sort of technologically-enabled liberal utopia. Crucially, though, it’s a utopia that’s been delivered through technological advancement rather than class struggle. This is really important to keep in mind, because by the late ‘80s, when the first Culture novels were published, some people had already begun to suspect that conventional politics was kind of out of gas anyway.

This newsletter has explored this period pretty extensively through the lens of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, in which we find Jameson working through the collapse of the utopian impulse under the cultural logic of late capitalism, but the other more obvious touchpoint for this kind of thing is Francis Fukuyama’s essay, “The End of History?”, in which he posits that historical progress, or the Hegelian series of ideological struggles that moved societies from one period to the next, had reached its final stage in the Western liberal democracies of the late 20th century, and it would just be a matter of time before the rest of the world reached the same “conclusion.” A better world is not possible! This is as good as it gets!

What Banks is able to do in the Culture series is transpose this same basic logic—history has a conclusion and we’ve reached it—onto a futuristic society that, thanks to a bunch of technological advances, could be more plausibly seen as a kind of end state for civilizational development. This serves as a major animating factor for the Culture’s various interventions into other civilizations, which, as Grady notes, is usually what drives the plot for each individual book in the series. This tendency toward intervention, it should also be noted, sits at odds with the Culture’s foundational commitment to liberalism. In her book Bodies of Tomorrow, Sherryl Vint sums all of this up really nicely:

the most problematic aspect of the Culture is its belief that its moral perspective is so enlightened as to entitle it to interfere in the domestic affairs of other civilizations in order to ‘encourage’ these civilizations to move toward an ethic that more closely matches that of the Culture…the struggle to reconcile this perspective with the liberal humanist belief in individual freedom, a struggle that is also part of the ‘real world’ history of liberalism and its connections to colonialism and the suppression of other cultures, dominates these works (85)

Escape from Politics

So this tension between liberalism and interventionism expresses itself throughout the Culture series a bunch of interesting ways, both in terms of how the Culture interacts with other civilizations as well as its own internal structure. To pick an example from the Vox piece, for instance, Grady writes that “in the Culture, should someone commit an action that most people agreed was unacceptable, everyone responds with social shaming rather than the rule of law: They stop inviting the person in question to parties. In other words, like a group of proper leftists, they deal with misbehaviour by social cancellation.”

What she’s not mentioning here is that beyond social pressures, criminals in the Culture are also assigned what’s called a “slap-drone,” or a little drone that follows them around and stops them from committing further crimes, in some cases by force. The authority that informs these assignments is instructive, because it provides a neat little justification for one way in which the tension between liberalism and interventionism can be resolved: In Surface Detail, an avatar for one of the Culture’s Minds describes the authority by which they could impose a slap-drone on someone: “ultimately my right to impose a slap-drone on you comes down to the principle that it is what any set of morally responsible conscious entities, machine or human, would choose to do were they in possession of the same set of facts as I am” (155). It’s an attractively neutral bit of reasoning: I’m a super intelligent computer, and my actions are reflective of a certain responsibility imposed by my awareness of this situation. The correct course of action just sort of falls out of the basic facts: It’s fundamentally impersonal and apolitical.

This basic line of thinking strikes me as fairly similar to a lot of the AI enthusiasm coming from the Tech Right. Musk himself has already tweeted about the possibility of his own LLM, Grok, rendering “extremely compelling legal verdicts” after he finishes “adding all court cases to the training set.”

Along these same lines, I’d argue Banks’ whole techno-utopian vision provides a kind of model for something that’s been a longstanding project for the Tech Right. Here’s an excerpt from an extremely sinister essay that Peter Thiel wrote in 2009:

In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”…The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.

Compare that to Banks’ own description of the formation of The Culture, from an essay he wrote in 1995:

The Culture is a group-civilisation formed from seven or eight humanoid species, space-living elements of which established a loose federation approximately nine thousand years ago. The ships and habitats which formed the original alliance required each others' support to pursue and maintain their independence from the political power structures - principally those of mature nation-states and autonomous commercial concerns - they had evolved from.

A loose federation with the shared goal of maintaining independence from the power structures of mature nation-states. Familiar, right?

My sense is that this is exactly what the Tech Right sees in the Culture series: a vision of the future in which a post-scarcity utopian society just kind of spontaneously emerges through the force of technological development alone, where history has still ended and existing political institutions can continue to atrophy while a few clever tech guys sneak out the side door and head toward the stars in a cool spaceship with a funny name.

To put all of this in more comfortable Jamesonian terms, here’s a nice quote from Archaeologies of the Future:

The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break…The formal flaw - how to articulate the Utopian break in such a way that it is transformed into a practical-political transition - now becomes a rhetorical and political strength - in that it forces us precisely to concentrate on the break itself: a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right. This is very far from a liberal capitulation to the necessity of capitalism, however; it is quite the opposite, a rattling of the bars and an intense spiritual concentration and preparation for another stage which has not yet arrived. (232-233)

Say what you will about the Tech Right, they do appear to believe that an alternative to the present political arrangement is possible. They have “thought the break,” in their own weird libertarian way, and we’re currently witnessing the results. Is the Left ready to do the same?

Okay thanks for reading. Next time we’ll go back to talking about A Singular Modernity.

Part 1: The Four Maxims of Modernity

1

Last time we set up the basic project for this book, which is an analysis of the word “modernity”. And so like any good etymological study we’re going to start with a little bit of historical context. Modernity: Where does it come from? Jameson traces it back to the fifth century AD, where we get two kind of different uses of modernus in Latin. It’s deployed by Pope Gelasius I basically just to designate “the present” or “now”, as in me and my contemporaries are “modern” in comparison to some earlier set of guys, and Jameson notes that for Galasius there’s “no particular privilege (save for the chronological one) for the present” (17).

The second usage, which is for our purposes more interesting, comes from Cassiodorus, a Roman scholar who was part of a Visigoth administration in the 5th century just after those guys had conquered Rome, and so his use of the term “modernus” has a bit more of an obvious political project behind it. For Cassiodorus, modernus “signifies a fundamental dividing line between the henceforth classical culture and a present whose historic task lies in reinventing that culture. It is this break that is crucial in the endowment of the term ‘modern’ with the specific meaning it has continued to bear down to our own time” (17). So “modernus” here is not only signalling that something is new, but also that it is new in a way that forces a recognition of difference with some aspect of the past. Not to jump too far ahead here but you may already get the sense that we’re creeping up on a notion of “periodization.”

But before we dig into “periodization” more explicitly, Jameson wants to talk a bit more about the “anomalous dynamics” (18) of a word like modernus, which, much like “modernity,” has this kind of double linguistic functionality built into it. So naively, following Cassiodorus, we might use it to identify a kind of break with an older period (i.e., like pre-sack rome vs. gothic rome) but already from the perspective of the present feels kind of weird to say, like, “modern gothic rome” or whatever, because obviously for us, that period is not modern at all. So there’s this kind of linguistic slipperiness to “modernity” that suggests we might want to just handle it similarly to a word like “new,” or this whole set of what linguists call “shifters”, or “those empty vehicles of ‘deixis’ or reference to the context of enunciation, whose meaning and content vary from speaker to speaker throughout time” (19).

So problem solved, right? Maybe “modernity” is just this wholly relativistic term that signals a kind of historical break between its utterer and some previous historical chapter. Of course, we know that modernity doesn’t only signify this kind of historical break in shifting relativistic terms. It also signifies a fairly precise moment of history, a “period” if you will, that was comprised of specific thinkers, informed by specific historical conditions, punctuated by specific events, and so on. And in this sense, it is not relative at all, but in fact sort of definitionally fixed.

So we’re going to need another model for understanding all of this. Jameson turns to HR Jauss, citing a book by Jauss I couldn’t find a translation of, but his essay “Modernity and Literary Tradition” in Critical Inquiry lays out the basic contours of the argument that Jameson seems to be leaning on here if you’re interested in following up on this, and I’ll cite some relevant bits of that essay below.

In any case, Jauss has this neat distinction he draws between what he calls “cyclical” and “typological” versions of the modern. Put briefly, “cyclical” modernity designates something like the shifting conception outlined above, where what counts as “modern” kind of moves around to reflect the context in which the term is used, with particular attention to the break with some previous period. As Jauss writes, “edging ever forwards, the temporal boundary of [modernity] expands to encompass a larger period of time and then leaves this period behind, transforming it into a self-contained epoch” (334). In this sense, there’s a kind of historicizing operation built right into the term, where it wants to kind of break things down into eras or periods, establish boundaries and so on.

Typological modernity, on the other hand, has more to do with identifying and articulating the character of these historical periods, primarily through comparison with other historical periods. In this sense it situates a given historical period not so much in a chronological order (where one period breaks off from another) but rather based on a typology. Here’s a nice image from Jauss:

With the typological experience of history there originates a famous image…first employed by Bernard de Chartres and later interpreted in antiquity’s favor: the [moderns] as dwarves sitting on the shoulders of giants. The trope bespeaks admiration for [antiquity], to be sure, yet in the admiration one can also hear the consciousness of a typological intensification of the old in the new: the present can see farther than the past! (336)

So this is a different kind of operation that has more to do with what we might think of as a second order awareness of history as such, and a capacity to identify common characteristics across periods, placing some discrete period of modernity “on the shoulders” of some previous “classical” era upon which it is building. To put this in like, more comfortably literary terms, what we’re beginning to approach here is the capacity to recognize allegory or metaphor, though we don’t really need to be thinking in those terms just yet.

Now, you might look at the two conceptions of modernity laid out by Jauss and say, well, these are kind of mutually exclusive. Either we’re attending to the chronological breakages between historical periods, or we’re sort of isolating out one period and finding some ancient moment for it to stand on the shoulders of.

So of course Jameson is going to say that this is actually one thing viewed two ways: “When we look at the opposition [of cyclical and typological modernity] more closely, its two poles seem to vanish into one another; and the cyclical proves to be fully as typological, in this sense, as the typological is cyclical” (21)

Okay! Well then how about you reformulate it for us in another, less evident way:

The distinction is therefore to be reformulated in another, less evident way: In reality, it involves a kind of Gestalt alternation between two forms of perception of the same object, the same moment in historical time. Is seems to me that the first perceptual organization (the one identified as ‘cyclical’) is better described as an awareness of history invested in the feeling of a radical break; the ‘typological’ form consists rather in the attention to a whole period, and the sense that our (’modern’) period is somehow analogous to this or that period in the past. A shift of attention must be registered in passing from one perspective to the other, however complementary they may seem to be: to feel our own moment as a whole new period in its own right is not exactly the same as focusing on the dramatic way in which its originality is set off against an immediate past. (21)

This, to me, does not feel hugely different to the stuff I quoted from Jauss, and to be honest this wouldn’t be the first time in this newsletter where we’ve encountered Jameson essentially borrowing a nice bit of thinking from someone else only to add his own baroque “reformulation” that isn’t actually all that immediately clarifying. Not to get too far ahead of ourselves here, but you may already see in these two operations something like the tendency toward “grand narrative” that we’ve already talked about previously as a defining characteristic of Modernism. To add my own possibly non-clarifying reformulation here, we can also see in these cyclical and typological modernities a kind of analog for two great Jamesonian terms, “metonymy and metaphor,” which are going to become really important to us as we push deeper into the Poetics of Social Forms. But I can hear my kid waking up which means I should probably end here for now.

We’ll do section 2 of part 1 next week, thanks for reading!

hey all. if you’ll indulge me a bit I wanted to start this one with a quick note about the future of this newsletter. I basically have two ideas here:

The Poetics of Social Forms

We’re doing it folks. Real Jamesonheads out there will know that Postmodernism was actually just one instalment of a pretty ambitious six volume project known as the Poetics of Social Forms. The longterm plan for this newsletter is to cover the rest of the volumes in order of publication, with the hope that the long anticipated first volume (currently, and in my view perfectly, titled Parts of Speech), will probably be published posthumously eventually. Though even if it’s not ever published, there’s a ton of stuff to cover here, so I think this will serve as a pretty good structuring mechanism for the newsletter for the foreseeable future. I’ve read I think three of the four published parts of PoSF (technically that’s four separate books, as A Singular Modernity and The Modernist Papers collectively constitute vol. IV) but not nearly as closely as I’ve now read Postmodernism, and I know I haven’t read the book on science fiction, so I’m looking forward to digging into all of them and trying to map out this whole big set of texts. We’ll start with A Singular Modernity, the preface of which I’ve written about below, hopefully to build a little momentum for next week. Ha ha!

Assorted Musings on Fiction and Maybe Some Other Stuff As Well

While the Poetics of Social Forms is going to be the big overarching project, I’m also hereby announcing my intention to occasionally do some writing about other books I like on here. This is going to be less systematic than the Jameson coverage, but I am lately catching myself having Occasional Opinions About Novels again and this newsletter seems like a reasonable outlet for some of that.

More broadly I’m just writing all of this to say that I’m going to treat this thing less like a Substack-shaped repository for a fairly niche and singularly focused writing exercise and more like an actual substack. So more regular posts, and aside from Jameson reading guides you might also occasionally get my views on like, some of the weird old sci-fi I’ve been getting into lately or whatever. I’ll do my best to index everything so you can follow along with the reading guides in the right order on your own time if that’s what you’re doing with these.

Okay, enough housekeeping, let’s talk a bit about A Singular Modernity.

Preface: Regressions of the Current Age

So in the big final chunk of Postmodernism, one of the goals for Jameson was establishing the terms for a “future confrontation” between modernism and postmodernism. This confrontation will look different as it plays out in different domains, but as I talked about in my commentary at the time, he seemed most interested in staging this a confrontation between Marxism, with its grandly modernist narrative of historical progression, and what we can kind of characterize as a poststructuralist theoretical turn away from grand narratives, and toward a kind of boutique identity-driven set of “local” concerns that is both unwilling and unable to situate itself within a broader historical context. I’m obviously being a bit unfair to both sides here but that’s the basic schematic.

He anticipates that, because one of the key characteristics of postmodernism is a denial of history, or broadly like “time”, this conflict is going to have to play out spatially, though a compelling though I think somewhat difficult to practice mode that he describes as “cognitive mapping.” What he doesn’t exactly anticipate at the time, though, is that there is another kind of stupider way in which the conflict may be staged: namely, people will just start talking about modernism again, but mean something entirely different.

That is basically the situation that Jameson finds himself contending with here in the preface to A Singular Modernity, published a couple decades after the publication of Postmodernism, and which “constitutes the theoretical section of the antepenultimate volume of The Poetics of Social Forms.” (I’m using the pagination from the verso edition published in 2012 btw). Let’s fucking GO dude.

so what’s happening here. Jameson describes it like this:

what we have here is…the reminting of the modern, its repackaging, its production in great quantities for renewed sales in the intellectual marketplace, from the biggest names in sociology to garden-variety discussions in all the social sciences (and in some of the arts as well). (7)

But why modernism? Jameson points to a couple reasons:

1. Postmodernity is too hard to think about: “Postmodernity came to seem a relatively disreputable idea in the established disciplines when some of its naster consequences—a retheorization of late capitalism, feminism, coming to terms with so-called ‘relativism’ and the constructedness of social reality—became more evident” (7). We got a bit of a taste of this in Postmodernism whenever Jameson would have a go at the ‘new social movements’ with their ‘local’ politics etc. I pointed out at the time how his treatment of these groups was fairly superficial, and even if you’re broadly sympathetic to the idea that like, theorizations of “identity” type stuff can be leveraged in cynical ways that reaffirm existing power structures, etc. etc., it’s easy enough to imagine why academic institutions as a whole would be maybe not so enthusiastic about exploring that too much.

2. the marketplace of ideas: More fundamentally, though, modernism is back because the notion of grand narrative, forward momentum, progress, etc, are all politically useful ideas, or at least more compelling than the Fukayama-style End of History type thinking that had become popular in the 90s. Turns out telling people that this is as good as it’s ever going to get is not a particularly compelling political vision. People don’t want to hear it. Interestingly, though, this new sort of generic revival of the concept of modernity seems to have been able to abstract away any sort of positive content for its grand narrative of progress. It just represents like, some intangible notion of progress as such:

it is difficult to image how one can shape an attractive political programme if you believe in the ‘end of history’ and have excluded the dimension of the future and of radical change (let alone of ‘progress’) from your political thinking… The revival of the concept of modernity is an attempt to solve that problem…What is encouraged is the illusion that the West has something no one else possesses—but which they ought to desire for themselves. That mysterious something can then be baptized ‘modernity’ and described at great length by those who are called upon to sell the product in question. (8)

On a popular level, we might see this as a kind of anticipation of like, the Obama campaign in 2008, which was just sort of generically about “Hope and Change”. The idea of forward momentum is attractive, even if what we’re moving toward is vaguely defined. But if that is what is now meant by “modernity,” then it puts what we can sort of provisionally term “older modernisms” in a weird spot. As Jameson describes,

The adversaries of the free market, such as the socialists, can only be classed in the negative or privative categories of the unmodern, the traditionalist, or even, ultimately, since they clearly resist progress and modernity, of the hardliners…What is generally meant in the polemics against socialism and Marxism (if not even against all forms of a left-centre liberalism) is that those positions are old-fashioned because they are still committed to the basic paradigm of modernism. (10)

Marxists are un-modern because they’re still committed to the basic paradigm of modernism. Conversely, the new modernity is literally postmodern, in the sense that it is preceded by these old fashion modernisms. Ah!

So we’ve already got a huge mess on our hands. Thankfully our old pal FJ is here to set things straight for us. Here’s how he sets up the project for this book:

Let’s say, to cut it short, that this will be a formal analysis of the uses of the word ‘modernity’ that explicitly rejects any presupposition that there is a correct use of the word to be discovered, conceptualized, and proposed. It is a path that will lead us on to a related concept in the aesthetic sphere, modernism, where analogous ambiguities can and will be found. But modernism in its turn will lead us on, unexpectedly, into is own immediate history and fortunes, so that this essay will conclude, not on any emergent postmodern note, as might have been expected, but rather with that specifically historical period concept I want to call late modernism. This project is therefore one of the ideological analysis, not so much of a concept, as of a word. (13)

So it’s a nice concise history of the word “modernity” plus a fun new periodization to think about. Late modernism. Sounds great. I’m all in. next time we’ll start with part 1. Thanks for reading!

I’m returning to this project again in October of 2024, a week or so after the passing of Fredric Jameson. I don’t think my status as the preeminent Postmodernism summary guy on substack necessarily qualifies me to eulogize the man who wrote it, so I won’t attempt that here. I will just say Jameson loomed extremely large for me when I was in grad school, and I still find his work hugely rewarding to read and think about today. I can’t think of another writer who can pack more genuine insight into a single sentence, or who can make the study of literature feel more vital than Fredric Jameson. I liked Terry Eagleton’s piece for the LRB on Jameson and his new book a lot, and it was genuinely very moving to see people sharing memories of him on twitter. Someone said that he saw Jameson using a computer once and he would move the mouse around with two hands like he was using a ouija board, which is really good to think about. He really was the best to ever do it.

X. The Production of Theoretical Discourse

In the long chapter on theory, one of the takeaways Jameson offered is that post-structuralist theorists like the new historicists operated under the assumption that it was impossible to do theoretical work that “transcended” its particular historical moment. And so while there are a bunch of fun things you can do with the various ephemera of a particular period, it was all kind of trapped in that period, and you cant really extrapolate outward in any meaningful sense. Another way to phrase that, and how Jameson phrases it here in his secondary elaborations, is that post-structuralism is all about the impossibility of saying saying anything absolute. as a result, linguistic expression is reduced to “a function of commentary, that is, of a permanently second-degree relationship to sentences that have already been formed.” (393)

As discussed in that earlier chapter, this is a trap for postmodern theory guys, for whom “the mission of theoretical discourse thus becomes a kind of search-and-destroy operation in which linguistic misconceptions are remorselessly identified and stigmatized, in the hopes that a theoretical discourse negative and critical enough will not itself become the target of such linguistic demystification in its turn. The hope is, of course, vain” (392-93).

If you’ve spent a little time in graduate seminars you’re probably somewhat familiar with how this disposition toward theory looks and feels on a practical level. Every theoretical position or framing of a certain problem is always to the exclusion of something else, and no matter how careful or defensively you frame something, you’re always open to criticism from some other angle.

Jameson describes this situation in terms of “ideolects” and group adherence:

Where I used to ‘believe’ in a certain vision of the world, political philosophy, philosophical system, or religion as such, today I speak a specific ideolect or ideological code—the badge of group adherence, viewed from a different and more sociological perspective—which presents many of the features of an officially ‘foreign’ language (393)

You say climate change is “a struggle in the planetary factory” and I say “ah, but can indigenous land defenders be reduced to mere labourers in that factory” and everybody either nods or groans at my shit depending on their ideological, or uh, “ideolectical” affinity. It’s a classic Annoying Seminar Guy move. The reason why its annoying, in Jamesonian terms, is because you now find yourself having to contend with two different ideolects (in this case eco-marxism vs like postcolonial eco crit), neither of which can be fully reducible to the other.

It’s worth noting that this for Jameson a fundamentally linguistic problem, where two different discursive modes are clashing with each other. But its also tied up with identity in some tricky ways. If I’m framing my little argument in a way that implicitly excludes a postcolonial perspective, I’m leaving myself open to the (possibly bad faith but also possibly not) accusation of excluding colonized peoples, silencing them, rendering them unmournable, asserting some kind of epistemic privilege over them, etc. etc.:

If a code attempts to assert its nonoptionality—that is to say, its privileged authority as an articulation of something like a truth—it will be seen not merely as usurpatory and repressive but (since codes are now identified with groups, as the badge of their adherence and the content of their expression) as the illicit attempt of one group to lord it over all the others (397).

Still, Jameson offers a couple of generative ways of “doing theory” within what we might think of as an irreducible discursive landscape:

Under these circumstances, several new kinds of operations are possible. I can transcode; that is to say, I can set about measuring what is sayable and ‘thinkable’ in each of these codes or idiolects and compare that to the conceptual possibilities of its competitors; this is in my opinion, the most productive and responsible activity for students and theoretical or philosophical critics to pursue today. (394)

Some surprisingly practical advice here. And he’s right! This is a really good and generative way of doing theory, and you can get a lot of milage out of this approach. Simply take up a particular ideolect or discursive framework and evaluate what it can or can’t be made to say. Jameson has done this a lot throughout this book, and has continued to do a similar thing in the writing he’s published since. He’s built a real reputation out of being the guy who can take a whole discursive framework and say “here’s what it can and can’t do.” It’s what makes him great! It’s also kind of what makes him annoying to many people, I think. And we’ve seen examples of that throughout this project as well. He’ll take up some set of theorists (like the new historicists or the “new political movements”), pluck a few quotes, and say, here’s what they’re doing, and here’s where its limits are. As I mentioned before, this kind of thing sometimes operates on a level of abstraction that can feel a little bit dismissive of the work on its own terms. But if you’re a grad student and you’re looking for a way to frame out your dissertation, then a good faith engagement with some popular ideolect and its possible limitations is a reasonable place to start.

In any case, Jameson also notes that another operation available to contemporary theorists is “what I will call the production of theoretical discourse par excellence, the activity of generating news codes, it being understood that in a situation in which new ways of thinking and new philosophical systems are by definition excluded, this activity is utterly nontraditional and demands the inventions of new skills altogether.” (394)

So what does generating new codes look like under these conditions? Hard to say. Jameson admits that “the present remarks are only prolegomena and notes” toward some more robust theorization of what a meaningfully new discourse would look like. He gestures toward the work of Bruno Latour, who “has combined a semiotic code with a map of social and power relations to ‘transcode’ the scientific fact and the scientific discovery itself. Nothing, indeed, prevents the enlargement of the chain of equations to further codes”(395).

In fact Latour would go on to enlarge the chain to an insane amount of codes in his Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, which is this wildly ambitious project in which he aims to do the same thing he did with science studies to basically every other domain of knowledge. It’s a really fun book if you’re into this kind of thing, but I don’t know if it succeeds in quite the way Jameson is anticipating it might.

XI: How to Map a Totality

Anyway. Jameson’s insistence on the nonoptionality of Marxism is here returned to as another way to think about the present moment’s resistance to “totalizing” theorizations more generally. He writes, “It has not escaped anyone’s attention that my approach to postmodernism is a ‘totalizing’ one. The interesting question today is then not why I adopt this perspective, but why so many people are scandalized (or have learned to be scandalized) by it.” (400)

This has been kind of the central thread of this whole long final essay, and it does appear to be the grounds on which this confrontation that he’s anticipating between modernism (read: good old totalizing and historically-situated marxism) and the postmodern (with its inability to meaningfully recognize class and history) will be hashed out. Previously in this essay, he’d staged this tension in terms of a kind of utopian anxiety (wherein the postmodern subject intuitively shrinks away from confronting whatever lies beyond the grinding but familiar rhythms of life under late capitalism) as well as a vaguely psychedelic demographic anxiety (wherein wrapping one’s mind around the sheer volume of people that iteratively make up any meaningful accounting of “history” would be too much to bear).

But this confrontation can be staged in a third way as well, which has more to do with the how different historical moments seem more inclined to “totalizing” thinking than others. He writes, “The hubris of the present and of the living can be avoided by posing the issue in a somewhat different way: namely, why it is that ‘concepts of totality’ have seemed necessary and unavoidable at certain historical moment and, on the contrary, noxious and unthinkable at others” (402).

Smartly, Jameson sort of sidesteps the messy epistemic question about the limits of consciousness as such, and reframes the whole thing as a representative or discursive problem. So: the thinkability of a given historical moment from within becomes, somewhat more manageably, the meaningful representation of a historical totality in the context of a historical novel, which brings him back around to our old pal Sir Walter Scott (as interpreted by our other pal Lukacs.)

Scott, like Faulkner later on, inherited a social and historical raw material, a popular memory, in which the fiercest revolutions and civil and religious wars inscribed the coexistence of modes of production in vivid narrative form. The conditions of thinking a new reality and articulating a new paradigm for it therefore seemed to demand a peculiar conjuncture and a certain strategic distance from that new reality, which tends to overwhelm those immersed in it. (405)

This is all a kind of roundabout way for Jameson to offer a kind of justification for why, even though he’s going to insist that “Postmodernism” is properly understood as a “mode of production” rather than a kind of cultural phenomenon, he’s spent the bulk of his big book on Postmodernism looking at video art and books and other cultural artifacts.

This little turn initially feels like an odd little digression in so far as anyone who has read through the preceding hundred pages of these secondary elaborations, never mind the whole 300ish pages of book leading up to them, is probably more or less on board with the project here, but nonetheless Jameson is essentially defending the practice of literary or cultural analysis as such as a meaningful activity for understanding a particular historical moment.

Because I think there is a kind of ungenerous read of Jameson that would run something like this: His posturing about the non-optionality of marxism is just kind of typical theory guy rhetoric, but what he’s really doing is using the conceptual toolbox developed by marxist scholars as a heuristic for talking about the books and movies he likes, and sometimes that yields some interesting insights, because he’s a smart guy, but all of this stuff is happening within a broader sphere of like, “cultural commentary”, which even Jameson himself would insist is downstream from Politics as such.

But Jameson is going to insist that no, serious literary scholarship more broadly plays a functional role in rendering visible the contours of a particular historical moment (i.e., “mapping a totality”). Of course all of this is complicated by the fact that this act of mapping is very tricky indeed:

What is essential is that the culture ideology in question articulate the world in the most useful way functionally, or in ways that can be functionally reappropriated… There can surely be no model or formula give in advance for these historical transactions; just as surely, however, we have not yet worked this out for what we now call postmodernism. (407)

We have not yet worked this out. But he’s got some interesting ideas about where we might look. And if you’ve been following along with this project, it will perhaps not surprise you to learn that Jameson anticipates the map of the postmodern will be a spatial one. This is an argument he’s touched on in various ways already throughout this book, but the way he rehearses it here is really concise and illustrative, so let’s run through it to wrap things up.

The three stages of capitalism (classical, imperial, and late) have each generated their own unique type of space, which “are all the result of discontinuous expansion of quantum leaps in the enlargement of capital, int he latter’s penetration and colonization of hitherto uncommodified areas. A certain unifying and totalizing force is presupposed here—not the Hegelian Absolute Spirit, not the party, nor Stalin, but simply capital itself; and it is at least certain that the notion of capital stands or falls with the notion of some unified logic of this social system itself” (410).

The first of these spaces, which corresponds to the classical or market stage of capitalism, is a kind of grid, wherein the patchy and heterogeneous world of precapitalism becomes standardized, quantifiable, geometric, etc. Jameson points to Faucault’s Discipline and Punish as a useful short-hand for this kind of space, though obviously for Marxists the organizing principle of this kind of space is like, labor and production rather than Foucault’s slightly more mystified notion of “power”.

The notable thing here is that in this classic market stage of capitalism, the basic logic is still fundamentally localized. It’s the most basic version of capitalism, wherein your individual experience still largely overlaps with the entirety of the economic activity that structures that experience. Exchange value has replaced use value, but the market is a fully mappable physical space that you probably literally go to, and you can still more or less trace the production of the stuff you buy.

This stops being the case as we move into the second stage, Lenin’s “stage of imperialism,” wherein the economic structure expands far beyond individual experience. Here’s Jameson:

At this point the phenomenological experience of the individual subject—traditionally, the supreme raw material of the work of art—becomes limited to a tiny corner of the social world, a fixed-camera view of a certain section of London or the countryside or whatever. But the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong: it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual’s subjective life. Yet those structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable for most people. (411)

Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, in particular his essay on Jane Austen, have become kind of the standard touchpoint for describing this particular phenomenon, and Jameson himself will return to the issue of globalization and its impact on representation throughout his career—some of that writing has been collected in that Inventions of a Presentcollection from earlier this year. But his interest here in particular is about how this growing divide between individual experience and an increasingly complex economic reality results in the emergence of some idiosyncratic new strategies for mapping consciousness:

What we begin to see is the sense that each consciousness is a closed world, so that a representation of the social totality now must take the (impossible) form of a coexistence of those sealed subjective worlds and their peculiar interaction, which is in reality a passage of ships in the night, a centrifugal movement of lines and planes that can never intersect. The literary value that emerges from this new formal practice is called ‘irony’; and its philosophical ideology often takes the form of a vulgar appropriation of Einstein’s theory of relativity. (412)

He names Conrad and Pessoa as practitioners of this new kind of closed off and relativistic expression of consciousness, but you could also probably think of Kafka here: The big ironic punchline in The Metamorphosis tracks a collision between these previously sealed off subjective worlds, suggesting a social space iteratively constructed through a tense network of partial apprehensions. In general, though, there’s a really load-bearing assumption revealed here about the “experience of the individual subject” as the traditional “supreme raw material of the work of art.” You’ll see Jameson further unpack this idea and its implications for like the historical development of the novel in Antinomies of Realism, but the idea that Art as such is fundamentally a vehicle for the expression of individual experience struck me very powerfully on this read through of this essay, in part because I think it is really crucial for understanding how Jameson wants to position literature and cultural production relative to politics: They’re down stream and symptomatic, but also something more than that.

Finally, late capitalism takes this same network and kind of compresses it down:

The new space that thereby emerges involves the suppression of distance…and the relentless saturation of any remaining voids and empty spaces, to the point where the postmodern body…is now exposed to a perceptual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed (413)

This is potentially very uncomfortable, especially if you’re someone who has grown accustomed to sheltering layers and intervening mediations. But it’s also good, or at least potentially good, because in cracking open the “sealed subjective worlds” of the previous stage, things are suddenly moving again. There are new characters within frame, new pressures being exerted and rendered visible. For Jameson, this is an opportunity for the resurgence of a new kind of class consciousness. Here’s how he ends the essay:

“Cognitive mapping” was in reality nothing but a code word for “class consciousness” — only it proposed the need for class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind…The rhetorical strategy of the preceding pages has involved an experiment, namely, the attempt to see whether by systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and historicizing something that is resolutely ahistorical, one couldn’t outflank it and force a historical way at least of thinking about that. “We have to name the system”: this high point of the sixties finds an unexpected revival in the postmodern debate. (418)

So that’s Postmodernism! What a ride. Thanks for reading!

VII: Demographies of the Postmodern

Last time, Jameson set up a confrontation between Marxists and the “new political movements”— a somewhat nebulous discursive formation that we might understand to mean “cynically identity-focused liberalism.” Taken as a whole, the rise of these new identity-focused political movements has “forced” people to recognize a much more diverse range of political subjects.

This is a new form of social and political awareness that he notes may be limited to First World elites, which is “all the more reason to factor it into the description of the postmodern, where it emerges—somewhat more crudely (or materialistically) as I began to put it—in the form of sheer demography itself. There are more people now, and that ‘fact’ has implications that transcend mere spatial discomfort and the prospect of the intermittent shortage of luxury goods.” (357-58)

By demography, he means thinking about the human population in aggregate. Historically, discussions of population as such have been dominated by Malthusians and the right.

Briefly, for context: Thomas Malthus was the guy in the early 19th century who was like, “more food means more people, and more people means a lower standard of living for everybody,” and is essentially the progenitor of a lot of the concern over overpopulation, especially as an explanation for poverty. “Poor people are poor because there are too many of them” etc. etc.

As you might expect, Marx and Engles both wrote a lot about Malthus and his ideas about population. Here’s a nice bit from Engles, from a letter to Oskar Lange:

Too little is produced, that is the cause of the whole thing. But why is too little produced? Not because the limits of production…are exhausted. No, but because the limits of production are determined not by the number of hungry bellies but by the number of purses able to buy and to pay. Bourgeois society does not and cannot wish to produce any more. The moneyless bellies, the labour which cannot be utilized for profit and therefore cannot buy, is left to the death-rate. (Marx and Engels on Malthus 82)

Just for fun here’s a quote from vol. 1 of Capital, which is less substantive but just some classic Marx shit talk: “If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose ‘Essay on Population’ appeared in 1798, I remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, etc., and does not contain a single sentence thought out by himself.” Get his ass dude.

Anyway these guys did not like Malthus. And the conventional Marxist move here is to say well no, poor people are poor as a result of capitalism, and over time Marxists have tended to essentially counterpose class relations for demography and population. Wally Seccombe wrote a really good essay about this for NLR in the 1980s, arguing that the Left has ceded too much ground on population and demography to the right, and maybe its time to develop a meaningful materialist perspective on demography.

So Jameson is going to take that seriously. He asks: what does it look like look like to take a materialist perspective on demography, especially in the context of the postmodern era, where “according to some reports…the quantities of human beings now alive today on earth…is rapidly approaching the total number of hominids who have already lived and died no the planet since the beginning of the species” (360). Incidentally, this little factoid is not true, and by some estimates the earth would need to have about 10 times its current population for this claim to be anywhere near plausible. So Jameson’s materialist demography is off to a pretty rough start.

But consider the implications if it was true. Here’s Jameson:

If this is so, then the relationship of the postmodern to historical consciousness now takes on a very different appearance, and there is some justification, and a plausible argument to be made, for consigning the past to oblivion as we seem to be doing; now that we, the living, have the preponderance, the authority of the dead—hitherto based on sheer numbers—diminishes at a dizzying rate. (360)

So he’s maybe having a bit of fun here, and it honestly doesn’t matter too much that this is just kind of riffing based on a false demographic factoid, because as we’ve talked about repeatedly throughout this newsletter, a fundamental characteristic of Postmodernism is that us postmodern subjects have no meaningful concept of history, so we’re effectively behaving as though the past really doesn’t matter that much.

More generatively, this leads him into some nice stuff on existentialism and Sartre, ”the philosopher of small-group politics”(362), who gives us a nice way of thinking about the lived experience of the postmodern, ahistorical subject, for whom planet-scale concepts like population and the global proletariat are “somehow real but untrue, thinkable but unrepresentable, and thus doubtful and unverifiable for an existence philosophy that above all wants to avoid being cheated or shortchanged in its life experience” (363).

How do you describe the experiential texture of being tied up in a global class struggle? It’s a tough problem! I’ll note parenthetically that the degree to which it is “thinkable but unrepresentable” is something Jameson will grapple with in several future books, and it produces some really cool writing. This is a big part of Antinomies of Realism, as well as his Detections of Totality (his little book on Raymond Chandler) and Allegory and Ideology. In all of these books, he seems more willing to grant that their representability is not an irresolvable problem but actually more of a skill issue. Here’s a quote to that effect from Allegory and Ideology:

“These new posthuman environments are unknowable only in the sense that they are so far unrepresentable; and political questions about their expansion or modification are inseparable from those—perhaps more artistic—omens of their representability” (36 emphasis mine)

This is another way of describing why art still matters, even though it is somewhere downstream from the actual machinations of politics. It can render these “posthuman environments” legible.

VIII: Spatial Historiographies

Anyway this whole shaky swerve into demography is mostly a means of bringing things back around to spatiality, which “is here registered…as the consequence of some prior specialization—a kind of intensified classification or compartmentalization which I am tempted to describe as a division of labor of the mind and its modes of scanning and mapping the realm.” (370).

In the year or so since I last revisited this book, Jameson’s position on spatiality has been the thing I’ve puzzled over the most. On the one hand, I think I get why he’s so invested in space. His definition of postmodernism is really focused the collapse of time as a meaningful category. As we’ve discussed throughout this newsletter, postmodernism collapses history into a set of disjointed historic signifiers, signs, icons, etc. And so the concept of “space” seems like a natural alternative. But it’s never been totally clear to me how one is meant to “think spatially” or whatever. The stuff about Frank Gehry and “the architectural thought” posed by his house was interesting but also maybe a bit too literal. Like a house is an actual space that you can walk around in, and so in some sense it does “spatialize” whatever ideas motivate its construction. But Jameson seems to want to use “spatiality” to mean something broader. For instance, postmodernism introduces a new mode of pseudo-historical thinking that he calls “spatial historiography”. Here’s Jameson:

“The occasional flash of historical understanding that may strike the ‘current situation’ will..happen by the well-nigh postmodern (and spatial) mode of the recombination of separate columns in the newspaper: and it is this spatial operation that we continue to call (using an older temporal language) historical thinking or analysis.” (374)

Then he hits us with an example of the ‘current situation’ of 1989 that feels grimly (though I guess also illustratively) contemporary:

The [Exxon Valdez] Alaska oil spill thus sits cheek by jowl with the latest Israeli bombing or search-and-destroy mission in southern Lebanon, or follows closely on its heels in the segmentation of television news. The two events activate altogether different and unrelated mental zones of reference and associative fields…No introspective examination of our personal history, but no inspection of the various objective histories either (filed under Exxon, Alaska, Israel, Lebanon), would in itself be enough to disclose the dialectical interrelatedness of all these things, whose legendary Ur-episode can be found in the Suez war, which determined the building of larger and larger oil tankers to circumnavigate the Cape of Good Hope, on the one hand, with its sequel, on the other, in 1967, a sequel that fixed the political geography of the Middle East in violence and misery for more than a generation. (374)

The specific instances here might not be as ready to mind to contemporary readers, but I do think the particular style of news engagement he’s describing here is a familiar one. You read about two news events that are happening simultaneously, and they’re reported on as discrete phenomena. You can then triangulate an additional event or set of events that connects the relationship between the two. This connection won’t be enough to fully exhaust either event (or “disclose” their “dialectical interrelatedness”) but it will be enough to feel like you have some kind of context for what you’re reading.

Jameson wants to describe this as a kind of spatial puzzle-solving:

What I want to argue is that the tracing of such common ‘origins’—henceforth evidently indispensable for what we normally think of as concrete historical understanding—is no longer exactly a temporal or a genealogical operation in the sense of older logics of historicity or causality. The ‘solution’ to a juxtaposition—Alaska, Lebanon—this is not yet even a puzzle until it is solved—Nasser and Suez!—no longer opens up a historiographic deep space or perspectival temporality…[It] lights up like a nodal circuit in a slot machine (and thus foreshadows a computer-game historiography of the future even more alarming).(374)

We’re all Charlie Kelly in the mailroom, stringing together discrete events and calling it “history”. Jameson doesn’t explicitly say this here, but it seems like this becomes a spatial problem largely as a function of scale: The sheer volume of things we’re now aware of as they’re occurring makes the operation of just keeping track of those events feel more spatial than temporally linear, even though the temporal sequencing plays a role in how events tend to unfold (i.e., this happens so then that happens). The task of mapping things out spatially takes the place of slotting things into a meaningfully linear historical trajectory.

Another important thing to note here is that this mapping activity is also fundamentally irreducible. We don’t have a “master narrative” that can be used as a heuristic to carve off “lesser” discourses from more important ones. Climate change, the opioid crisis, the housing market, covid, etc., etc., etc. All important issues that may interact and overlap in generative ways, but none of which are fully reducible to or explained by the others:

None of these voices can be said to contradict the others; not ‘discourses’ but only propositions do that, and the identity of identity and nonidentity does not seem very satisfactory for this one, for which ‘coexistence’ is too reassuring a term as well, implying some ultimate change of intergalactic collision in which matter and antimatter might finally meet and shake hands…As an ideology that is also a reality, the ‘postmodern’ cannot be disproved insofar as its fundamental feature is the radical separation of all the levels and voices whose recombination in their totality could alone disprove it. (376)

IX: Decadence, Fundamentalism, and Hightech

So as we’ve been describing, postmodernism is an age of conflicting irresolvable discourses and free floating historical signifiers stripped of their historical contexts, in which artistic and cultural production is always a kind of pastiche. It’s also culturally kind of listless: without a meaningful concept of history, us postmodern subjects are just kind of goofing around, tinkering with various “local” political projects but mostly hanging out. In this sense, postmodernism might seem to have a lot in common with 19th century decadence, with its cynicism, self-indulgence, and ennui.

But not so fast!

One would have thought that the world of headphones and Andy Warhol…would have all the qualifications to pass for ripely decadent in the eyes of of any sensible Martian observer; but it is corny to say so, and one of the other tactical achievements of the postmodern discursive system lies in the relegation of the laudator temporis acti to the storeroom of no longer very plausible or believable literary characters. To be sure, where the former norm has become just another ‘life-style,’ the category of the eccentric loses its reason for being (377)

A different way to parse this might be that the moderns had “eccentrics” or laudatores temporis acti (literally “those who praise the past”), but postmodernism just has different types of guys. So what changed? Jameson is going to unpack this one with a neat reading of Marx on capitalism.

So typically Marxists view capitalism as a stage of socio-historical development, and a lot of the current project here has taken that for granted. Postmodernism has been positioned as “the cultural logic of late capitalism”, and we’ve spent a lot of time here both implicitly and explicitly talking about what postmodernism can tell us about capitalism as a stage: what kind of society it generates, how people experience art and relate to each other, etc etc etc. But Jameson notes that this isn’t the only way that we can think about capitalism:

A careful reading of the Manifesto, however, suggests a somewhat different way of thinking about Marx’s view of capitalism as a stage, for it can be grasped as a kind of enormous black box or ‘vanishing mediator,’ one extraordinarily complex and temporally distended and developed laboratory, through which precapitalist peoples must pass in order to be reprogrammed and retrained, transformed and developed, on their way to socialism. (380)

From this perspective, capitalism is a means to an end, or a kind of transitory period through which a society needs to pass in order to develop the means to create socialism. As a result, this whole extensive project of characterizing the nature of postmodernism can be recontextualized as a sort of prefiguration of the coming socialist utopia. As Jameson describes, “it obligates us to reconsider the features attributed to postmodernism in a functional way, as new and intensified forms of a structural tendency Marx famously described in terms of separation and disjunction, reduction, disaggregation, divestment, and the like” (380). Kind of a neat trick.

Of course, this recontextualization feels very modernist: it reasserts a kind of grand narrative, and it situates the capitalist subject within a larger historical trajectory. It also reaffirms something about capitalism itself as a substantial point of departure from the period that came before it.

And here it’s useful to recall our earlier discussion of Kafka and this whole thing about postmodernism being a more “complete” stage of modernism, where “every­thing has reached the same hour on the great clock of development” (310). Jameson now returns to this idea as a way of retroactively understanding “decadence”:

Decadence is clearly something that both resists modernity and comes after it, as a future destiny in which all the promises of the modern go slack and unravel…‘Decadence’ is thus in some way the very premonition of the postmodern itself, but under conditions that make it impossible to predict that aftermath with any sociological or cultural accuracy, thereby diverting the vague sense of a future into more fantastic forms, all borrowed from the misfits and eccentrics, the perverts and the Others, or aliens, of the present (modern) system.” (382)

This in turn gives us another really interesting way to think about the differences between the moderns and postmoderns:

Late capitalism is in that sense a misnomer, insofar as ‘late’ now yields none of the fin-de-siecle or late-Roman overtones we associate with it, nor are its subjects fantasized as being faint and listless with too much experience and history, too much joissance and too many rare and occult intellectual and scientific operations. We have all those things, indeed, but we jog afterward to refresh our constitution, while by the same token computers relieve us of the terrible obligation to distend the memory like a swollen bladder retaining all these encyclopedia references. (383)

We jog afterward to refresh our constitution! How can you not love this guy.

okay let’s leave it here for this week. Next week we’ll do our final instalment. i can’t believe it. we’re almost there. Thanks for reading!

I. Prolegomena to Future Confrontations Between the Modern and the Postmodern

Jameson opens this one with a bit of conceptual housekeeping, trying to distinguish between taste (or “opinion”) and analysis: “’Taste’, in the loosest media sense of personal preferences, would seem to correspond to what used to be nobly and philosophically designated as ‘aesthetic judgement’… ‘Analysis’ I take to be that peculiar and rigorous conjuncture of formal and historical analysis that constitutes the specific task of literary and cultural study” (298).

Jameson obviously sees himself as someone who is primarily engaging in the latter, but he does use this section to lay out some of his own aesthetic judgements about expressions of postmodernism in various mediums: He likes the architecture and photography, but he doesn’t like the novels, or at least the serious literary postmodern novels, which he says are “excelled by [their] narrative counterparts in film and video” (298).

He argues that none of these aesthetic judgements have had any impact on his analysis, so I guess it’s just a coincidence that his aesthetic judgements are exactly what you’d expect them to be based on the proceeding 300 pages of analysis. Anyway it’s kind of funny to see him “indulge in a personal note” trying to distinguish what he’s doing from the more vulgar world of taste and opinion only to reveal that the postmodern stuff he likes just happens to be perfectly aligned with his central claims about the nature of postmodernism.

II. Notes Toward a Theory of the Modern

Anyway enough prolegomena lets get into the confrontation:

He outlines a bunch of problems with identifying modernism as such. Modernism is an uneven process, and some places “modernize” before others. He tries to identify a central theme to which modernism is generally a response or reaction, starting with “industrial progress, rationalization”, but (following Perry Anderson) identifies “rather their hostility to the market itself” (305), which is clarifying because of postmodernism’s implicit embrace of the market. Recall the nice bit of thinking about markets being anti-narrative; everything is equidistant from everything else, meaning its difficult to generate plot or any kind of narrative tension.

He offers a neat read on Kafka and The Trial, the main takeaway of which is that postmodernism’s ahistoricity is a kind of completion of the project of modernism, which can be retroactively understood as an inconsistent process of modernization: The Trial’s Joseph k is an anonymous modern office guy but all the real fun stuff in the story is the old timey judicial bureaucracy with which he is forced to interface. This uneven distribution is something we don’t encounter anymore, because everything has been flattened out; there are no archaic systems, only archaic “signs” or “logos” or whatever: “Ours is a more homo­geneously modernized condition; we no longer are encumbered with the embarrassment of non-simultaneities and non-synchronicities. Every­thing has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or rationalization (at least from the perspective of the "West"). This is the sense in which we can affirm, either that modernism is characterized by a situation of incomplete modernization, or that postmodernism is more modern than modernism itself.” (310). This is a neat read, but I don’t really think this holds up to scrutiny. It’s maybe reflective of how pervasive “end of history” style thinking was in the 90s, but its also sort of consistent with the other kinds of homogeneities that Jameson has attributed to postmodernism up to this point. But it rings particularly false because the quotidian unevenness of modernity is something we still experience constantly: I’m still “encumbered” by “non-simultaneities” every time a government agency asks me to print and physically mail a form. It’s why people still read Kafka, can describe certain encounters as “kafkaesque”, etc.

III. Cultural Reification and the ‘Relief’ of the Postmodern

Still, one of the nice (?) consequences of postmodernism as a cultural logic is that it really does get things moving again, in all kinds of new and potentially interesting ways. We’re no longer weighed down by stuff like historical context and canon, so you can pretty much just go nuts out there, finding novel combinations of newly loosened cultural artifacts. Jameson characterizes this as a kind of relief:

“If modernism thought of itself as a prodi­gious revolution in cultural production…postmodernism thinks of itself as a renewal of production as such after a long period of ossi­fication and dwelling among dead monuments.” (314).

The way in which everything from Instagram posts to full feature length movies are now “content,” and anyone who is involved in any sort of cultural production is encouraged to see themselves as a “content creator” is kind of a grim evolution on this basic trend. Presciently, Jameson notes that price of all of this relief is “the prelimi­nary destruction of modernist formal values (now considered "elitist"), along with a range of crucial related categories such as the work or the subject” (317). So no big deal!

IV. Groups and Representation

Another way to parse the distinction in the previous section is that modernism was elitist and postmodernism is populist, such that postmodernism might seem like it “dismantles many of the barriers to cultural consumption that seemed implicit in modern­ism. What is misleading about this impression is, of course, the illusion of symmetry, since, during its own life span, modernism was not hege­monic and far from being a cultural dominant… when modernism (like the contemporary socialisms) finally did come to power, it had already outlived itself, and what resulted from this posthumous victory was called postmodernism instead.” (318)

Of course, gestures to popularity are always tricky, especially when the population in question includes women and “the international Third World”, who “frequently repudiate the very concept of a postmodernism as the universalizing cover story for what is essentially a much narrower class-cultural operation serving white and male-dominated elites in the advanced countries” (318). Which is true, he says.

But! “But it is no less true that the ‘micropolitics’ that corresponds to the emergence of this whole range of small-group, nonclass political practices is a profoundly postmodern phenomenon, or else the word has no meaning whatsoever.” (318-19)

Well well well. A leftist white guy is about to give his opinions about the political projects of women and people of colour. Everyone gather round!

The emergence of the ‘new social movements’ is an extraordinary historical phenomenon that is mystified by the explanation so many postmodernist ideologues feel themselves able to propose; namely, that the new small groups arise in the void left by the disappearance of social classes and in the rubble of the political movements organized around those. How classes could be expected to disappear, save in the unique special-case scenario of socialism, has never been clear to me…the alternative view, that the small groups are, in fact, the substitute for a disappearing working class, makes the new micro­politics available for the more obscene celebrations of contemporary capitalist pluralism and democracy: the system congratulating itself for producing ever greater quantities of structurally unemployable subjects. (319-20)

Cautiously nodding. He says he’s going to circle back for a more meaningful engagement with some of these “new social movements,” but what he wants to do first is zoom out quite a bit and try to situate them relative to the dominant cultural logic, or capitalism itself. What it boils down to is essentially a question of agency: Are the “new political movements” genuine threats to an existing late capitalist order (i.e., marginalized people exerting their own capacity for resistance), or are they products of the late capitalist system itself (i.e., more consumers looking to be catered to by the market)? This, or some version of this, has become a kind of stock argument that a certain set of leftists used to hash out on Twitter every so often, and it’s neat to watch Jameson think his way through it here before concluding that this amounts to yet another instance of a familiar dilemma between volunteerism and determinism, or, in a slightly different way, mind and body. Which, look. I don’t know. If you squint at it the right way you can sort of see what he’s saying, but this also feels like a classic instance of Jameson jumping way up into the most abstract version of a theoretical position (or in this case, a huge number of different theoretical positions he sums up as “the new political movements”) before even beginning to address any of the theorists he’s talking about on their own terms. It feels a little dismissive!

More broadly, the move here is to sort of downgrade these “new political movements” to “what we can metaphysically call a kind of ‘local politics’” (330), or political projects that are less concerned with political revolution than they are with a kind of incremental adjustment of the current system in certain ways. So where an older form of politics generated a sense of solidity from and understanding that their core aim was to “coordinate local and global struggles” (330), these newer movements (with their narrower “localized” focus) can more easily “drift apart into a disembodied and easily bureaucratized abstract struggle for and around the state, on the one hand, and properly interminable serious of neighbourhood issues on the other.” (330).

Again, leaving aside the obvious lack of engagement with the actual political movements he’s deriding here, if you’ve followed the project this far you’ll probably appreciate how this basic argumentative structure closely mirrors that of the earlier long chapter on New Historicism, where the lack of meaningful historical situation leaves the whole operation feeling kind of hollow. There’s a bunch of activity but none of it can gain purchase because it’s hermetically sealed within its own little set of “local” issues. And just as new historicism and poststructuralist literary criticism more generally leaves us unsatisfied, so too does a political project without meaningfully “global” aspirations. He sums all of this up pretty nicely to end the section:

What is sometimes charac­terized as a nostalgia for class politics of some older type is generally more likely to be simply a "nostalgia" for politics tout court: given the way in which periods of intense politicization and subsequent periods of depoliticization and withdrawal are modelled on the great economic rhythms of the boom and bust of the business cycle, to describe this feeling as "nostalgia" is about as adequate as to characterize the body's hunger, before dinner, as a “nostalgia for food”. (331)

V: The Anxiety of Utopia

So where does all of this aversion to Real Politics come from? Why have we retreated from the struggles of class politics to the “local” identitarian politics of these “new political movements”?

Some people (not Jameson) argue that the utopian project represented by socialism “will somehow be a place of renunciation, of the simplification of life…a place, finally, of the return to a simple ‘organic’ village forms of ‘rural idiocy’ from which everything interestingly complex about ‘Western civilization’ has been amputated.” (335)

As Jameson argues, though, the real anxiety here are not so much that Utopia will be boring. That’s also not quite the right way to frame the issue. The anxiety is that a commitment to the utopian project forces a society to see itself from an uncomfortably historicized vantage. He gets a bit psychedelic with it:

“What ultimate anxieties such a [utopian] society involves are materialist and biological, the deconcealment of human history as a dizzying sequence of dying generations and as a generalized demographic scandal for the mind…But the foundational texts for that realm are neither Thomas More nor Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor,” but probably something closer to Kafka’s “Josephina the Mouse-Singer” or perhaps the classics of Buddhism.” (340). We’ll return to the demography stuff in the next instalment.

VI: The Ideology of Difference

Let’s maybe recap a little bit: The confrontation between modernism and postmodernism that Jameson is posing here is beginning to look more like a confrontation between Marxism (which is portrayed here as a modernist utopian project) and the set of “new political movements” that we would now just call “identity politics” (which are portrayed here—perhaps somewhat reductively— as postmodern, anti-utopian, and “local” in their aspirations).

So to frame this confrontation, he starts with a long quote with Linda Hutcheon, who was the other major theorist of postmodernity in the late 80s and 90s. This would take a whole other newsletter to unpack in a comprehensive manner but the relevant thing about Hutcheon for our purposes is she views postmodernism as a much more generative space for politics than Jameson, thanks largely to the same heterodox political groups that Jameson is working to dismiss.

Here’s Hutcheon:

Whatever narratives or systems that once allowed us to think we could unproblematically and universally define public agreement have now been questioned by the acknowledgement of differences…In its most extreme formulation, the result is that consensus becomes the illusion of consensus, whether it be defined in terms of minority (educated, sensitive, elitist) or mass (commercial, popular, conventional) culture, for both are manifestations of late capitalist, bourgeois, informational, post industrial society, a society in which social reality is structured by discourses (in the plural)—or so postmodernism endeavours to teach. (340).

For Hutcheon, postmodernism’s utility is in its polyvocality. Where modernism offers a singular grand narrative, the wider range of discourses that constitute postmodernity force us to acknowledge that political and cultural consensus emerges through a process of privileging and erasure.

What Jameson wants to highlight here is that for Hutcheon (and champions of postmodernism more generally), the enemy is consensus, which, as he notes “now designates representative democracy, with its ballots and public opinion polls, and it is now this that, already objectively in crisis, finds itself politically challenged by the new social movements, none of which find the appeal to majority will and consensus particularly legitimate any longer” (341).

So alright. The point made in the Hutcheon quote is basically correct for reasons that feel like fairly well-worn territory by 2024: “consensus” is a heavily mediated and manufactured phenomenon, and it seems a little naive for Jameson to act like groups that previously had very little say in the establishment of that consensus are wrong or misguided in being distrustful of a system like representative democracy.

His broader point here, though, is more about a distinction between the narrower political aims of individual groups looking for recognition within an existing structure, and the much broader political project of class struggle. Here’s Jameson:

“Classes are few; they come into being by slow transformations in the mode of production…Groups, on the other hand, seem to offer the gratifications of psychic identity (from nationalism to neoethnicity)…The political horror of consensus—mistaken for a dread of ‘totalization’—is then simply the justified reluctance of groups that have conquered a certain pride in their own identity to be dictated to by what turn our to be simply other groups, since now everything in our social reality is a badge of group membership and connotes a specific bunch of people…with the signal exception of the media and the market, which, alone among what ought to be institutions, are somehow universal” (347).

So in place of organized class struggle you get a messy patchwork of indentitarian groups, each gaining a kind of therapeutic gratification from the mere recognition of their status as part of a group. The vehicle for that recognition is the market, which is where our cultural obsession with Representation in Media comes from: The market simply catering to these various groups’ desire to see themselves reflected in their media consumption options. And it should go without saying that for Jameson none of this ever gets anywhere near having a meaningful political impact, because cultural production is downstream from politics.

Look: This does fairly accurately describe a particular kind of identity-focused liberalism, I think, but it’s also a little frustrating that he doesn’t really name names here. It’s a bit of a cop out that he’s willing to get into the weeds on like Jonathan Demme and David Lynch but won’t talk about like the Combahee River Collective or whatever. That kind of direct engagement would have been interesting in its own right, but it also would have helped introduce a bit of nuance into his conception of these “new political movements,” which here seem to represent only the most cynical deployment of the concept of identity. Still! Cynical deployments of identity remain a pretty pervasive issue, and it is remarkable the degree to which his framing of (modernist) class struggle vs. (postmodern) liberal identitarianism remains broadly the correct way to see these issues today.

Okay this is already running a bit long so this seems like a reasonable place to end. I’ve already drafted most of the next instalment so hopefully I’ll post it like next week. I’m locking in. Thanks for reading.

Hey gang. Just slinking back into your inbox with another instalment of my little Jameson newsletter. This is actually the final chapter of Postmodernism, though there are still like 100 pages worth of “secondary elaborations” that I’ll get to eventually as well, though I’m not going to make any promises about when. But before we get rolling here I did just want to say hello and thank you to everyone who has subscribed to this thing. I finished my PhD this summer and since my job is only just barely “alt-ac” it’s cool to have an outlet for casually bullshitting about literary criticism, and I probably would not be doing this at all if people did not seem interested. So thanks for subscribing, thanks for reaching out, thanks for telling your friends. It really does mean a lot. Okay let’s get into it.

Chapter 9: Nostalgia for the Present

The 1950s vs “The fifties”

So Jameson starts this one with a little discussion of Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, a novel published in 1959 that opens on a small American town that, in retrospect, neatly captures certain cultural stereotypes about “the fifties” in America. Eisenhower on tv, game show, poodle skirt, sputnik, milk man, etc etc. Jameson calls it “a world of neighbours and PTAs” (279). He notes that these are all stereotypes, but they are also authentic in some sense: There really were poodle skirts and milk men at some point. But these things are, in the terminology of this project, now “icons” of a particular aesthetic that we think of as “the fifties” and in turn associate with a specific historical period.

More interestingly, these icons impose a way of thinking about the fifties that we can read as the kind of spacial allegory that Jameson has been toying with throughout the book. The fifties’ preoccupation with the small town, the neighborhood, or the kind of closed-off (often racially homogenous) community, “also functioned as an allegorical expression for the situation of Eisenhower America in the outside world as a whole— contented with itself, secure in the sense of its radical difference from other populations and cultures, insulated from the vicissitudes and from the flaws in human nature so palpably acted out in their violent and alien histories” (281).

So there is a kind of distinction to be drawn here between “the 1950s” as a particular historical period in which people actually lived and thought about stuff, and “the fifties” as a kind of floating set of aesthetic symbols of the sort that we’ve been dealing with throughout this book. But the question is, then, did people in the 1950s experience that period as an aesthetic as well? Because as Jameson notes, the set of aesthetic symbols that constitute our conception of “the fifties” are largely generated by people from the historical period itself. Here’s Jameson:

to shift from the realities of the 1950s to the representation of that rather different thing, the ‘fifties,’…obligates us in addition to underscore the cultural sources of all the attributes with which we have endowed the period, many of which seem very precisely to derive from its own television programs; in other words, its own representation of itself. (281)

Of course, this isn’t to suggest that the cultural output of the 1950s can be interpreted as the sum total of what the 1950s were like. In fact, for Jameson it’s at least plausible that “the deeper realities of the period…have little to do with either our cultural stereotypes of years thus labeled and defined in terms of generational decades.” And by “deeper realities” he means something like the global power dynamics and economic conditions that are somewhere upstream from cultural production.

This plausibility gives way to an even larger claim about the relationship between between actual historical periods and their representations. And the stakes are quite high indeed. Here’s Jameson again:

There is however an even more radical possibility; namely, that period concepts finally correspond to no realities whatsoever, and that whether they are formulated in terms of generational logic, or by the names of reigning monarchs, or according to some other category of typological and classificatory system, the collective reality of the multitudinous lives encompassed by such terms is nonthinkable…and can never be described, characterized, labeled, or conceptualized. This is, I suppose, what once could call the Nietzschean position, for which there are no such things as ‘periods,’ nor have there ever been. In that case, of course, there is no such thing as ‘history’ either, which was probably the basic philosophical point such arguments sought to make in the first place.

Let’s see how ol’ Freddie Jameson wriggles his way out of this jam.

Science fiction and historicity

Okay so let’s go back to Time Out of Joint for a second. The twist of the book, and crucially the thing that makes it sci-fi, is that the little 1950s town is revealed to be not an actual 1950s town at all, but rather a fake town constructed by people in 1997 (which for Dick would have been several decades into the future), as part of a ruse to trick some guy into doing something, or whatever. The plot is some Ricky Morty nonsense and does not matter for our purposes. What Jameson is interested in is the way in which Dick uses the future dystopia (a hallmark of sci-fi) as a means of rendering “the present” as a construct that has a kind of historical situatedness.

The future itself—Dick’s 1997— is not…centrally significant as a representation or an anticipation; it is the narrative means to a very different end, namely the brutal transformation of a realistic representation of the present, of Eisenhower America and the 1950s small town, into a memory and a reconstruction. (285)

So for Dick, the point is not so much to represent or anticipate the future as such, but rather to use it as a means of rearticulating the present in a way that functions “historically”: The 1950s (this actual historical period in which the novel was written) becomes “the fifties.” The little Potemkin village of the novel (which the reader first incorrectly identifies as “the present”) is revealed to be a thing constructed from the vantage of an imagined future.

It’s in this sense, for Jameson, that sci-fi offers something like a counterpoint to the sort of historicizing operation that used to be a function of the historical novel.

To put it a little crudely, the “historical novel,” as theorized by Lukacs and typified by someone like Sir Walter Scott or Tolstoy, made the present thinkable as a part of “history” by situating it in relation to a (largely imagined) past. The historical novel provides a kind of scaffolding against which people could see themselves, their lives, their concerns, as part of the dialectical progression of of history.

Or at least it used to. As much of this book has been working to explain, one of the defining characteristics of postmodernism as such is that we’re no longer able to experience history in this way. “The past” is reduced to a set of aesthetic signifiers or icons that bear no relationship to any kind of “grand narrative” by which we could orient ourselves in “the present.”

But for Jameson, this is where sci-fi steps in as a kind of counterbalance:

if the historical novel ‘corresponded’ to the emergence of historicity…science fiction equally corresponds to the waning or blockage of that historicity, and, particularly in our own time (the postmodern era), to its crisis and paralysis, its enfeeblement and repression. (284)

In this account, Time Out of Joint makes the present thinkable through a kind of reversal of the move made by the historical novel: The present is revealed to be the reconstructed past of an imagined future, allowing the reader to grasp it as a kind of historical entity, with particular characteristics (poodle skirt, milk man) and preoccupations (the calming and vaguely regressive geopolitical isolation represented by the small town).

Of course, not all sci-fi does this, nor is it entirely clear whether contemporary sci-fi is even still capable of this kind of historicizing work. As Jameson notes, “perhaps…we can no longer imagine the future at all, under any form—Utopian or catastrophic. Under those circumstances, where a formerly futurological science fiction (such as so-called cyberpunk today) turns into mere ‘realism’ and an outright representation of the present, the possibility that Dick offered us—an experience of our present as past and as history—is slowly excluded” (286).

But contemporary sci-fi, and contemporary art more generally, does maintain a kind of interest in history and a particular sort of historical thinking that Jameson characterizes as “an omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for dead styles and fashions” (286), and which “includes at least the will and intent to return upon our present circumstances in order to think of them—as the nineties, say—and to draw the appropriate marketing and forecasting conclusions” (286-87).

Postmodern nostalgia

So we’ve found ourselves faced with a familiar conundrum. We want to historicize, but the nature of postmodernity makes it hard to know how to do that. Not to give away too much of the game here but if you’ve been following along with this newsletter you can probably already figure out where this chapter is headed. Phil Dick is good because he historicizes. But postmodernity has made it difficult to do what he did back in the 1950s. Instead, what we’re left with is art that depicts “a collective unconscious in the process of trying to identify its own present at the same that that [it illuminates] the failure of this attempt, which seems to reduce itself to the recombination of various stereotypes of the past” (296).

To that end, the rest of this chapter is actually taken up by a neat little pair of readings of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which both offer their own version of this self-conscious failure to achieve historicity. I’m not going rehearse either of those readings here, other than to say that they are fun and plausible if you squint at them a bit but mostly just kind of exhausting. Like for instance here is a chart that he gives you mapping the “semic organization” of Something Wild.

Which, you know, sure.

Here’s how Jameson wraps things up:

Dick used science fiction to see his present as (past) history;…The two 1986 movies [Something Wild and Blue Velvet], while scarcely pioneering a wholly new form (or mode of historicity), nonetheless seem, in their allegorical complexity, to mark the end of that and the now open space for something else (296).

So the knot at the core of postmodernism remains intact and continues to yield some fun opportunities for Jameson to flex his seemingly limitless capacity for weird and exhausting interpretations of books and movies. Not a bad deal!

Okay! That’s all folks. Next time we’ll start in on the big concluding section.

Chapter 8: Postmodernism and the Market

Marx and Proudhon

Jameson opens this one with a nice bit of conceptual housekeeping about "markets." For Jameson, it's not really possible to talk about the market as a kind of abstract ideology or concept without talking about actual markets, and vice versa, because the actual operation of markets is the thing that generates the ideological or conceptual dimension of the market as such. Here's Jameson:

the ideology of the market is unfortunately not some supplementary ideational or representational luxury or embellishment that can be removed from the economic problem and then sent over to some cultural or superstructural morgue, to be dissected by specialists over there. It is somehow generated by the thing itself, as its objectively necessary afterimage; somehow, both dimensions must be registered together, in their identity as well as their difference (260)

This position is being pulled directly from our old pal Marx, who makes this argument in the Grundrisse in response to the Proudhonists, who "thought they would get rid of all the problems of money by abolishing money, without seeing that it is the very contradiction of the exchange system that is objectified and expressed in money proper and would continue to objectify and express itself in any of its simpler substitutes, like work-time coupons" (260).

Here's Marx:

the money system...is indeed the system of freedom and equality, and what disturbs [the Proudhonists] in the more recent development of the system are the disturbances immanent to the system, i.e., the very realization of equality and freedom, which turn out to be inequality and unfreedom. It is an aspiration as pious as it is stupid to wish that exchange value would not develop into capital, or that labour which produces exchange value would not develop into wage labour (Quoted in Jameson 262).

For Marx, the Proundhonists' big mistake is their belief that freedom and equality are the aspirational features of some Utopian image of the market that can be realized through gradual and incremental adjustment. A good contemporary analog for this kind of thing is probably something like the "democratic socialists" down in the states, or the NDP here in Canada, where the belief seems to be that markets are a kind of foundational element of societies as such, but they can be made to operate more fairly (i.e., closer to their "ideal" expression) through things like regulation etc.

This is a mistake, both practically and conceptually, because it assumes that there is some kind of "ideal" operation of market that is separate from the way that actual markets operate, when in fact it is the actual operation of markets that generates their ideological content. There is no idealized version: the market is what it is, and the kinds of unfreedom and inequality it generates, as well as the unrealizable ideals of freedom and equality that it promises, are its defining features.

Freedom and equality and the market

So the crucial thing to note here is that "freedom and equality" are in fact fundamental features of the market (or "money system") being described in the quote above. It's just that they're fundamentally unreachable. You can't actually have them, but by holding them up as an ideal, you are reifying the centrality of the market. Sorry! As Jameson describes, "everybody wants [freedom and equality]; but they cannot be realized. The only thing that can happen to them is for the system that generates them to disappear, thereby abolishing the 'ideals' along with the reality itself" (262-63).

Ultimately, it's a kind of rhetorical problem for the left, where guys like the Proudhonists, or today's various social democrats, have essentially tricked themselves into trying to combat the market system on its own terms. This problem has existed forever, but it's become particularly dire under late capitalism, where the logic and actual operation of markets have become so central to our lives that they (and their attendant ideals) seem sort of natural and inevitable. That's a big problem! Here's Jameson:

the rhetoric of the market has been a fundamental and central component of [the ideological struggle between Marxism and late capitalism], this struggle for the legitimation or delegitimation of left discourse..."The market is in human nature" is the proposition that cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged; in my opinion, it is the most crucial terrain of ideological struggle in our time (263-64).

So that's kind of the project here. We all know that the freedom and equality enabled by the market are fundamentally good and aspirational qualities of any modern society. But what this chapter presupposes is: maybe they aren't?

Becker

As an example of how the logic of the market has become naturalized, Jameson turns to Gary Becker, who argues, in his book The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, that you can describe literally all of human behaviour through economics: "the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behaviour" (Becker 14). Okay!

This approach yields some kind of weird-sounding formulations of quotidian aspects of "human behaviour" that are nonetheless sort of accurate, albeit in a very narrow way. For instance, here's Becker describing families and "the household":

Similar to the typical firm analyzed in standard production theory, the household invests in captial assets (savings), capital equipment (durable goods), and capital embodied in its "labour force" (human capital of family members)...As an organizational entity, the household, like the firm, engages in production using this labour and production (Becker in Jameson 267)

Which, sure! Why not. What's weird about this is not so much that it's wrong (it isn't, exactly), but just kind of thin and flat. If you want to describe the various intangible benefits of having a family as a kind of "production," then I guess your kids and wife are sort of the labour force behind that production. But it's weird to do that! And it flattens out the complexities of intrafamily dynamics into a sort of math problem. And Becker wants to describe every aspect of human behavior like this!

For Jameson, this naturalization of economic logic suggests the same kind of denial of transcendence and plot that he's been characterizing as central features of the postmodern: "Such representation would reveal a world peculiarly without transcendence and without perspective (death is here, for example, just another matter of utility maximization), and indeed without plot in any traditional sense, since all choices would be equidistant and on the same level." (269).

Markets and human nature

The point here is that the market as such is useful as an explanatory mechanism because its totalizing structure, paired with its underlying flat plotlessness, is nicely aligned with the cultural logic of late capitalism itself. The panic-inducing lack of historical consciousness that is the hallmark of postmodernism as a cultural logic can be counterbalanced by the reassuringly atemporal logic of the market. It can help people orient themselves by way of a bunch of depersonalized transactions. Here's Jameson:

Market ideology assures us that human beings make a mess of it when they try to control their destinies ('socialism is impossible') and that we are fortunate in possessing an interpersonal mechanism — the market— which can substitute for human hubris and planning and replace human decisions altogether. We only need to keep it clean and well oiled, and it now— like the monarch so many centuries ago— will see to us and keep us in line (273).

That governments exist primarily as a means of facilitating the smooth operation of markets is now a pretty familiar idea. Philip Mirowski's great book from a few years ago about neoliberalism and the '08 financial crisis makes this case pretty exhaustively. What's more interesting to Jameson, though, and where this chapter ends, is the extent to which this naturalization of the market kind of boxes out the potential for other, more substantial and useful projects.

Planning

Jameson ends the chapter with an appeal to this kind of “great collective project” and the utility central planning:

What is wanted is a great collective project in which an active majority of the population participates, as something belonging to it and constructed by its own energies. The setting of social priorities— also known in the socialist literature as planning— would have to be part of such a collective project. It should be clear, however, that virtually by definition the market cannot be a project at all (278).

Ultimately, this is what's at stake for Jameson. The depersonalized, economic logic of the market serves as an unsatisfyingly totalizing framework for negotiating our relationship to other people.

The point here is that the market and this weirdly transactional economic logic promise us not only freedom and equality, but also a kind of clarity in the face of postmodern life. But just as it is unable to ever fully deliver on that promise of freedom and equality, the simplicity with which it reduces the whole messy world of human relations to a set of optimizable transactions leaves us with very little that is recognizably human. In more comfortable literary terms, there is no plot, no narrative, everything is just flattened out into this weird and blocky math.

The potential for any kind of alternative to emerge in the future lies in the outright rejection of the market as both an ideological formation and actual mediator of human relations. Not only does its economic logic warp our understanding of human behaviour and relationships into weirdly transactional terms, it also undermines the potential for other kinds of relationships to emerge.

Chapter 7: Immanence and Nominalism in Postmodern Theoretical Discourse

Chapter 7 Part 2. Deconstruction as Nominalism

Quick Recap

In the last part, we talked about new historicism and this kind of generalized trend in theory away from actual historicization: For Jameson, new historicism is not so much a discipline as it is a scholarly aesthetic, characterized by a montage of primary sources and curiosities from a particular historical moment and a refusal to connect those sources to any broader argument.

For new historicists, history is a series of discrete moments with no connection to each other, and so the only connection we have to any moment in the past is the textual artifacts it leaves behind. This, for Jameson, is antithetical to the project of "critical theory," which is really built on extrapolating out from these textual artifacts into some kind of broader claim about something that is not so narrowly trapped in its own historical moment. He characterizes this tension as "immanence vs trancendence."

The point I tried to make at the end of the last letter was that while we don't really see people actively identifying as "new historicists" so explicitly, the aesthetic that Jameson is critiquing here is still extremely prevalent: People love to string together little curiosities and go "look at this, this is crazy." And sometimes it is crazy! But it's generally not that satisfying as scholarship.

And that's because new historicism is really best understood as a symptom of that classic theoretical turn we know and love as "poststructuralism," which, as Jameson notes, is a school of thought wherein "all enemies are on the left, [and] the principle target always turns out to be this or that form of historical thinking" (217). By now, a lot of that stuff has just been metabolized by English departments such that it’s just a sort of default mode for doing scholarship.

Homeric Laughter

So Jameson opens the back half of this chapter with a kind of fun analogy for "theory," playing on this tension between immanence and trancendence we talked about in the previous section. He asks readers to "imagine the first sophisticated hominid philosophers, already skeptics of an advanced sort, complaining among themselves about the awkwardness of the rocks their fellows use to beat and break and pound. These clumsy objects, they feel, do not even reach approximation with their concept, the 'instrument' or 'tool'; they are of a piece with the level and quality of social life of the hominid population itself" (218).

For Jameson, these early hominid philosophers may have developed some kind of advanced conception of what these rudimentary tools ought to be (i.e., the platonic ideal of a hammer or whatever), but they just as easily could have concluded that the achievement of genuine "instrumentality" was always going to be impossible for humans, because ultimately we're just these dumb little guys.

The point is that creating something (be it a hammer or a computer or a novel theoretical framework) is always going to be a little clumsy and stupid looking, always going to to fall short of "human intention," but it's equally stupid to dismiss or otherwise condemn those actions just because they look stupid and clumsy.

What's being set up here has to do with the difficulty and clumsiness of thinking new ideas, which is sort of a theme of this chapter. But for now I wanted to run through all of this because it gives us a truly fascinating glimpse into the kind of thing that the Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies thinks is funny:

intention is always deeply comical: we do not need the banana skin and the interruption of an intended action for the human act...always to strike us as ontologically inadequate (homeric laughter). For that, it is enough for the intention itself to be separated out from the act and to hover alongside it as a now no longer quite internal standard of judgement: at that point the very project of a human being to walk— even without slipping— is a matter of some hilarity (219).

Rousseau, Derrida, de Man

Jameson then turns to Paul de Man's work on Rousseau as an example of how novel theoretical insights are both sort of heroic but also clumsy and awkward.

Just briefly, sorry: The main thing you need to know about Rousseau for this letter is that he was a renaissance guy who wrote an essay called "Essay on the Origin of Languages" in which, among other things, he makes the point that language is the first social institution and therefore must have arisen from "natural" causes.

De Man's work on Rousseau is being positioned in contrast to our old pal Derrida's discussion of Rousseau in Of Grammatoloy, which, as Jameson notes, is less interested in "the fictionality of the 'experience' of the past that Rousseau's account seems to presuppose but on the internal contradictions of his formulation" (226). Enumerating these contradictions would be a project for a whole other (equally excruciating) newsletter, but the main one is basically: how is it possible for a bunch of people that "possess" language to imagine what it would be like to not have language. For Derrida, the prelinguistic past of humanity is literally unthinkable to us as language-possessing humans, because for us, conceptualizing anything requires language on some fundamental level.

That contradiction, then, becomes the underlying maneuver for discrediting or— to use the contemporary and more annoyingly vague term— “troubling” our access to anything besides the present. As Jameson summarizes, "this particular focus strikes at all imagination of radical change or difference and poses the question of how a being informed by one system in the present could possibly have any appreciation of a condition radically different, since by definition the thesis of difference and change means just that, that the past is inaccessible and unimaginable" (226). This assumption of inaccessibility is the thing that underwrites the new historicist investment in immanence discussed in the previous section, but I’m sure if you’ve done any grad school at all you’ve encountered this kind of move all over the place.

So this all seems really tricky, and it's basically why talking to anyone who is really into Derrida is so exhausting. But here comes our new buddy Paul de Man, who is also a poststructuralist, but who has a decidedly different way of framing this problem of how we can use language to have access to anything.

Metaphor

So how does language work? Well for de Man (in his interpretation of Rousseau) it's all about metaphor. Here's Jameson on de Man on Rousseau:

metaphor is for de Man something like the source and origin, the deeper cause, of the literal and referential illusions themselves: "Metaphor overlooks the fictional, textual element in the nature of the entity it connotes. It assumes a world in which intra- and extra-textual events, literal and figural forms of language, can be distinguished, a world in which the literal and the figural are properties that can be isolated and, consequently, exchanged and substituted for each other" (Allegories of Reading 152). "This is an error," he adds, "although it can be said that no language would be possible without this error" (227).

Let's maybe unpack the chain of who's saying what, exactly, here: for Rousseau, the emergence of language is driven by early hominid's ability to draw comparisons and other types of relationships between things. This tree is taller than that tree, this guy is taller than that guy, this tree is taller than that guy, things of this nature.

For de Man, the ability to compare things is less about the things themselves, but rather through the abstraction required to make the comparison: Comparing things to each other is effectively the production of a whole relationship out of effectively nowhere. Which, crucially, de Man will identify a metaphorical operation: Whether you're saying "All the world's a stage" or "this tree is like that tree," the underlying operation here is to take entities that are ontologically unrelated and forge a kind of relationship between them through language: The world, a stage, this tree, that tree.

For Jameson, this is the key to de Man's whole thing: "this identification of the emergence of abstraction as a metaphorical operation is...a strategic act which enables de Man's unique 'rhetorical' system to come into being"(229).

de Man's Nominalism

So crucially, for de Man, the basic metaphoric nature of language is a kind of error, because to use language is to (in his view, mistakenly) assume a kind of equivalence between ontologically distinct entities: love is not actually a rose, this tree is not that tree, etc.

If you're a theory guy, you may have already clocked the underlying ontological position here as nominalism, which similarly conceptualizes the world as a bunch of discrete objects that we then organize into broad universal categories for the sake of epistemic clarity. For Jameson, positioning de Man as a nominalist allows for his work to be more easily positioned within "the very logic of contemporary thought and culture, from which he otherwise stood aloof, unique, and unclassifiable" (250).

For Jameson, de Man's commitment to the "error" of metaphor that serves as the basis of language is best understood as an effort to smuggle a bunch of anachronistic "literary" things back into the project of deconstruction, which is otherwise pretty hostile to aesthetics or privileging something like "the literary" over other forms of "text." Here's Jameson:

It is certain that de Man's form of deconstruction can be seen as a last-minute rescue operation and a salvaging of the aesthetic—even a defence and valourization of literary study and a privileging of specifically literary language— at the moment in which it seemed about to disappear without a trace (251).

The stakes here are pretty clear: For Jameson, de Man was the deconstructionist who on some basic level understood the damage that deconstruction was going to do to the study of literature. His anachronistic turn to metaphor can be read as an effort to recuperate some kind of space for good old fashion literary devices in an academic climate that was increasingly interested in more or less abandoning "literature" in favour of "texts." As Jameson, de Man's work is "prophetic of the 1980s [due to] the judgement of bankruptcy it pronounces on the elaborate celebration of liberation, the body, desire, and the senses which was one of the principal 'gains' and battlefields of the 1960s" (255).

So this is kind of the point: For Jameson, de Man is the awkwardly heroic figure of deconstructionist criticism. He understood that deconstruction was going to radically change how English departments operate, and he was struggling to find some way to carve out a bit of space for something like the properly “literary” to operate. He isn’t successful, ultimately, but his struggle offers some genuinely compelling insights that might orient future scholarship beyond its current boundaries.

Paul de Man: Just Following Orders

Okay so that is basically where the serious part of the theory chapter ends. But Jameson caps the chapter with a sort of meandering defence of Paul de Man against the "now notorious 'revelations'" (256) that de Man worked as a "cultural journalist" during the first years of the German occupation of Belgium back in the 40s. Uh Oh!

So it turns out back in the 40s Paul de Man published some anti-semitic cultural commentary. There was a sort of fun essay in the New Yorker several years ago that outlines this whole saga, but the gist of it is that the absolute best case scenario seems to be that de Man was not personally anti-Semitic but still cynically and voluntarily collaborated with the Nazis for personal gain—not good!

So we're 250 pages in to this book and Jameson seems to have decided he can just sort of say whatever. For instance here’s he is talking about his “sneaking admiration” for Heidegger's much more overt commitment to National Socialism:

I know I will be misunderstood if I add that I have some sneaking admiration for Heidegger's attempt at political commitment, and find the attempt itself morally and aesthetically preferable to apolitical liberalism (provided its ideals remain unrealized) (257)

uh what's up?

But de Man and Jameson were buddies. So maybe Jameson has some special insight to bring to the table here:

Nothing of this has any relevance to Paul de Man, for whom the thing dramatically called "collaboration" was simply a job, in a Europe henceforth and for the foreseeable future united and German, and who as long as I knew him personally was simply a good liberal (257).

It was just a job! He thought the Nazis were going to win! Plus we were friends! Fucking hell man.

Okay. Glad to be back, see you guys next week

Chapter 7: Immanence and Nominalism in Postmodern Theoretical Discourse

Part 1: Immanence and the New Historicism

New Historicism

So okay we have finally arrived at what Jameson teased in his introduction as the "lengthy and disproportionate" (xvi) chapter on theory, and it's a bit of a tricky one, as it's both deep in the weeds of a fairly narrow meta-theoretical debate from the early 90s, but also drops some really solid and clarifying insights about how theory and criticism operate under postmodernism more generally.

So I think this week I'm just going to break down Jameson's take on New Historicism, which is the main thrust of this chapter's first half. There's also a pretty cool reading of Walter Benn Michaels' The Gold Standard that I'm going to skip over for now, but I might circle back to it in a few weeks when we get to the chapter on economics.

In a nut's shell: New Historicism names a critical tendency that emerged as part of the broader “poststructural turn,” which aimed to position the literary text as inextricable from the historical context in which it was created.

It's main guy is probably Stephen Greenblatt, whose book Renaissance Self-Fashioning is usually pointed to as like the urtext of the New Historicist movement. I'm honestly not super familiar with Greenblatt, but he does have a pretty fun essay called "Invisible Bullets" that reads Shakespeare's history plays against renaissance police reports, Machiavelli, and early North American colonialism.

It's a neat piece of scholarship, but it's less interested in the typical "theoretical" project of building an argument than it is in what Jameson describes as a "montage of historical attractions" (190).

This "montage" approach to literary analysis is the basic move of New Historicism more generally: a scholar will assemble a literary work alongside a bunch of other "texts” (in the broadly expanded poststructuralist sense of the term) from a particular historical moment, to basically say “here’s what this historical moment was like.”

The underlying assumption here is that history itself is a bunch of discrete and disjointed moments with no fundamental relationship to what came before or what will come after, and whose “meaning” can only be inferred by the literary artifacts it leaves behind.

To really drive this home, here's some excerpts of a nice little critique of the New Historicist movement by D.G. Myers in which he boils it down to its basic contentions:

1. Literature is historical, which means (in this exhibition) that a literary work is not primarily the record of one mind’s attempt to solve certain formal problems and the need to find something to say; it is a social and cultural construct shaped by more than one consciousness. The proper way to understand it, therefore, is through the culture and society that produced it.

2. Literature, then, is not a distinct category of human activity. It must be assimilated to history, which means a particular vision of history.

3. Like works of literature, man himself is a social construct, the sloppy composition of social and political forces—there is no such thing as a human nature that transcends history. Renaissance man belongs inescapably and irretrievably to the Renaissance. There is no continuity between him and us; history is a series of "ruptures" between ages and men.

4. As a consequence, the historian/ critic is trapped in his own "historicity." No one can rise above his own social formations, his own ideological upbringing, in order to understand the past on its terms. A modern reader can never experience a text as its contemporaries experienced it.

Immanence and Transcendence

The relevance of this particular style of cultural criticism to the broader discussion of Postmodernism should probably be obvious: For Jameson, New Historicism's rejection of even the possibility of transgressing one's own historical situation amounts to an acceptance of the cultural logic of late capitalism: Its "montage of historical attractions" is basically the English department's version of that annoying AlienNATION video we talked about in the chapter on TV. It just kind of washes over you without really suggesting any kind of broader argument or structure.

Jameson usefully describes this approach to scholarly work as an investment in "immanence" over "transcendence." This sort of follows from what Myers identifies above as the New Historicist's claims about the fundamental rupture between historical moments: if the literatures and texts of any given historical moment are inescapably tethered to their moment, then they can only be deployed as a means of talking about the immanent, immediate features of that moment.

What this focus on immanence forecloses on is transcendence, or the building of generalizable claims, categories, and structures out of those immediate particulars. This, of course, has huge implications for the practice of "theory." Here's Jameson: "It follows, to take only the most dramatic examples of such denial of the transcendent, the social classes do not exist, or that, in literary history, concepts like 'modernism' are crude substitutes for that very different and qualitatively discriminate experience of reading an individual text" (185). If everything needs to be beheld in its irreducible particularity, then there's not really room for anything else, any of the "externalities" from which you might have previously been able to build a more robust theoretical structure.

Empty Hands

So that's obviously a huge problem for the kind of work that gets described as New Historicist. But as Jameson points out, even naming these guys as a coherent "movement" or "school of thought" or whatever would be helping ourselves to a notion of a transcendental category that their own basic contentions would seem to disallow.

As Jameson points out, this is an unavoidable dilemma of any effort to identify an irreducibly individual thing: "a crucial component of my particular situation as a unique individual is always the general category to which I am condemned by other people which I must therefore comes to terms with (Sartre said, assume) in any way I like— shame, pride, avoidance behaviour— but which I cannot expect to have removed just because I'm somebody special" (185).

Moreover, once you reject the idea of the generalized category, what you’re left with is basically just a really annoying style, or what Jameson usefully calls a "writing practice":

Elegance here consists in constructing bridge passages between the various concrete analyses, transitions or modulations inventive enough to preclude the posing of theoretical or interpretive questions...Whence, in the most successful of such artifacts, that sense of breathlessness, of admiration for the brilliance of the performance, but yet bewilderment, at the conclusion of the essay, which which one seems to emerge with empty hands— without ideas and interpretations to carry away with us (188).

Get their ass dude!

What's really important to drive home here is the extent to which this notion of the transcendental, or the generalizable ideas and structures of thought that can be carried away from the particular, is really what "theory" has historically been all about. "Doing theory" in the broadest sense is about deploying the particular as a means toward the general or transcendental.

If you disallow yourself access to that transcendental, or write it off as an externality, you're effectively kneecapping your own capacity to derive anything from your own work besides a kind of reflexive cataloguing of the immediate features of whatever particular thing you're talking about.

You're also, incidentally, severely hampering your ability to defend yourself against guys like Jameson, who is obviously deeply invested in theory and the interplay of immanence and transcendence, and it’s why he's able to spend an entire chapter both immanently and transcendentally kicking the shit out of the New Historicists.

More broadly, though, if you've spent enough time in grad school you've definitely encountered exactly this New Historical approach to scholarship, if perhaps by some other name. Someone who is just going to show you a bunch of discrete, historically bounded curiosities all loosely organized by a kind of general thematic, and go, "look, all of these things were going on at the same time. They're related." And all you can do is nod your head and go, "wow. I hadn't seen these things arranged quite like that before."

As a style of scholarship, it can be extremely, seductively compelling, in the way any good montage can be compelling. But you have to ask yourself: What is this actually doing? What actual argument is being developed here? What am I meant to be taking away from this series historical curiosities?

Okay that’s all for now, see you next week.

Ballard

So up until now, we've been talking a lot about the particular problems that the postmodern poses to ideas like "history" and "ideology." We've seen what Jameson has characterized as a kind of "historical deafness" represented by Warhol's floating shoes and Nam June Paik's unwatchable T.V. arrangements. These are works that are on some level meant to be disorienting and contextless in the way postmodernism is disorienting and contextless.

But what we haven't yet really talked about is that all of this weird disorientation and contextlessness is also tremendously sad. Here Jameson turns to J.G. Ballard's "Voices of Time," a story that (like a lot of Ballard's work) is really interested in entropy and decay, as well as this new "spatialized" conception of time: The story is built in part around this extraterrestrial signal that is understood to be a kind of countdown to the end of the universe. The temporal dimension of this signal is rendered in explicitly spatialized terms: "Every particle in your body, every grain of sand, every galaxy carries the same signature."

For Jameson, this pairing of entropy and the "spatialization of the temporal" can be read as an expression of this loss of the utopian project of modernism: "what is mourned is the memory of deep memory; what is enacted is a nostalgia for nostalgia, for the grand older extinction questions of origin and telos, of deep time and the Freudian Unconscious...forms whose Absolutes are no longer audible to us, illegible hieroglyphs of the demiurgic within the technical world" (156).

So not only does the postmodern register a transformation of capitalism's underlying cultural logic, but it also registers this kind of mourning process for modernism, which, for all of its problematically universalizing tendencies (which have been critiqued ad nauseam over the course of the poststructural turn), was also aspirational and utopian to a degree that seems sort of impossible to imagine now. What makes stuff like Warhol's soup labels etc all sort of vaguely depressing is that they register the loss of this "utopian impulse," or ability to coherently imagine some kind of future.

As you might expect, this is no good. But it does set up an interesting project for this chapter. Jameson "wants to insist very strongly on the necessity of the reinvention of the Utopian vision in any contemporary politics: This lesson...is part of the legacy of the sixties which must never be abandoned in any reevaluation of that period and our relationship to it" (159).

Politics

Okay: so Jameson's suggestion that we need to somehow reinvent the utopian vision in the postmodern moment again raises the question for us of how exactly postmodern "art" can interface with "politics" more generally. Thus far prospects have looked pretty bleak. As suggested by the discussion of Warhol way back in chapter 1, Postmodernism's characteristic tendency toward imagery without substance really foreshortens its political efficacy. Warhol can show you the shoes, the coke bottles, the soup labels, and you go, "right yeah, commodity fetishism or whatever." But there's no real bite to it. It's only gesturing in the direction of something that feels like criticism.

But this is where Jameson's careful positioning of Postmodernism as a cultural "dominant" starts to pay off. Because "domination" implies a little space for "oppositional culture." Here:

the totalizing account of the postmodern always included a space for various forms of oppositional culture: those of marginal groups, those of radically distinct residual or emerrgent cultural languages, their existence being already predicated by the necessarily uneven development of late capitalism, whose First World produces a Third World within itself by its own inner dynamic. In this sense postmodernism is "merely" a cultural dominant (159).

This is a push-and-pull that has become only more pronounced and obvious. Marginalized people resist the dominant cultural logic, and the dominant cultural logic in turn works to subdue and incorporate their resistance. It's a tension we're probably all extremely familiar with; It sucks!

Utopia

In the context of this chapter, though, Jameson is interested in a sort of narrower angle on the intersection of art and politics: the political potentialities organized around identifying the "utopian impulses" of Postmodern society.

Typically, though, Jameson has a kind of weird way of trying to get there: where the utopianism of the 1960s served to produce "a vital range of micropolitical movements (neighbourhood, race, ethnic, gender, and ecological) whose common denominator is the resurgent problematic of Nature in a variety of (often anticapitalist) forms" (160), Jameson argues that each of these utopian visions can also be approached spatially: They form a range of Utopias in which "the transformation of social relations and political institutes is projected onto the vision of place and landscape, including the human body" (160).

Which, sure. This seems trivially true on its face, even if we don't generally think about it in these terms: Utopian visions of society do generally at least imply a reorganization of space. And while spatialization never really seemed like the central goal or project of any of the 60s utopian projects, I guess they weren't exactly not about space.

Robert Gober

Okay so what. Well here Jameson turns to Robert Gober's "Untitled Installation" pictured above. The Gober installation is essentially a bunch of other, older pieces, arranged in a room: Gober’s own untitled wooden door and doorframe (1986-88), a painting called Lake Tahoe, California (1867) by Albert Bierstadt, a handwritten joke from 1988 by Richard Prince, and a piece called Moss Bed, Queen (1986–88) by Meg Webster that Jameson just refers to as a "mound".

Here's the joke if you're interested. It's pretty good:

Anyway. This piece is similar to some of the stuff by Paik that we've been talking about already, where the point of the installation has more to do with the arrangement of elements than any individual part of it: You don't watch any one of the Paik T.V.s, and to just walk through the Gober installation and look at the joke, then the painting, then the moss thing as if it were just a room in an exhibit would be to sort of miss the point.

Well so what is the point: Well Jameson says that he is "tempted to suggest that [Gober's work is] a form of conceptual art [that] constructs, not an already existing concept... but rather the idea of a concept that does not yet exist" (162-63).

Sounds vague! Note that this is sort of different from the "material thought" stuff from the fourth chapter's discussion of Frank Gehry's house. Here, the irreducible spatialization of Gober's installation is not an "answer" to a specific problem, it is rather an effort to produce something like the conditions under which some new kind of thinking can emerge.

As Jameson describes, the installation is "meant to stress, over against the deconstructive operation, the production of a new kind of mental entity, but at the same time to exclude the assimilation of that entity into any kind of positive representation, and in particular to sketch for an 'affirmative' architecture" (165).

Crucially, this "new mental entity" is produced somewhere in the tension between the irreducibly heterogeneous and social nature of its various constituent elements, and the singular authorship of its spatialization. The most basic parameters of the work itself, its authorship and dimensions etc, become difficult to conceptualize at all once you start to think about it. Jameson describes this problem really well:

all of these distinct artistic materials, which emit their own discordant formal and material voices, also here summon up the ghostly, but social, presence of real human collaborators, who raise again the issues of the individual intention, along with the nonsolution of "signatures"... Meanwhile, the door off its hinges continues to urge us to put all this back together, all the while inscribing itself as disjoined, as we gradually get it through our heads that producing a concept is uncomfortably different from merely having one, or even thinking one through.

He's right, it is difficult. And that difficulty is the point: In the same way that utopianism is a sort of orientational precondition for the formation of a new type of politics or political organization, so too might the "production of a new kind of mental entity" examined here offer the precondition for the emergence of a new kind of politics that resists assimilation— and through which we might map an escape from the dominating logic of late capitalism.

allegory

So okay. The seemingly irresolvable spatial problem posed by the Gober piece, in which we are effectively being asked to generate a whole new conception of what constitutes a "work," signifies, for Jameson, either the re-emergence or re-invention of allegory and allegorical interpretation, which, as he notes, "any future historians of our own cultural and theoretical moment are bound to consider significant and symptomatic" (167).

Since the publication of this book, Jameson has written extensively (and, in my view, really compellingly) on allegory, most recently in 2019's Allegory and Ideology, but the most salient insight for our purposes here has to do with the distinction he draws between the allegorical and the Symbol. As he writes, "the displacement of modernism by postmodernism can also be measured and detected in the crisis of the older aesthetic absolute of the Symbol, as its formal and linguistic values secured their hegemony in the long period from romanticism to New Criticism and the canonization of 'modernist' works in the university system in the late 1950s" (167).

To put it a little crudely, the idea is that the totalizing logic that governed "modernist" literary interpretation enabled these really tight relationships between literary "symbols" and what they're meant to symbolize. I remember having profs in my undergrad that had these really rigid understandings of like, what the lighthouse in To The Lighthouse "meant," as if the various elements of any novel had this really clean 1:1 correspondence with some fixed meaning outside of the text.

Allegory, by contrast, takes for granted that no such clean and definitive signification is possible. As Jameson argues, the allegorical "can be minimally formulated as the question posed to thinking by the awareness of incommensurable distances within its object of thought, and as the various new interpretive answers devised to encompass phenomena about which we are at least minimally agreed that no single thought or theory encompasses any of them" (168).

We've seen this already, in the shifting, unfixable "meaning" of the AlienNATION videotext, the Nam June Paik stuff, and again here with Gober, where we find "a constant movement from one item to another in which each term, as it confronts one of the other three, finds its value and its meaning subtly or not so subtly modified" (168). These works are allegorical, in the sense that they take for granted the fact that the present cultural moment is irreducible to a singular interpretive logic.

And this, for Jameson, signals the quiet emergence of a new kind of clandestine political organization pulled together by this new utopian impulse:

in our time, where claims of the officially political seem extraordinarily enfeebled and where the taking of older kinds of political positions seems to inspire widespread embarrassment, it should also be noted that one finds everywhere today— not least among artists and writers— something like an unacknowledged "party of Utopia": an underground party whose numbers are difficult to determine, whose program remains unannounced and perhaps even unformulated, whose existence is unknown to the citizenry at large and to the authorities, but whose members seem to recognize one another by means of secret Masonic signals. One even has the feeling that some of the present exhibitors may be among its adherents" (180).

[Giving you the secret spatialized utopianism nod] See you next week.

Chapter 5: Reading and the division of Labour

Conducting Bodies

This chapter is structured around a discussion of the novelist Claude Simon and the nouveau roman (or "The New Novel"). Nouveau roman is one of those literary movements that I'm only sort of vaguely aware of, but generally it's talked about in terms of its unique preoccupation with space and (usually women's) bodies. Here's I guess a fairly representative little chunk from Simon's Conducting Bodies, a novel that Jameson returns to throughout this chapter.

She is a young woman with blond hair pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck, dressed in a blouse with the ends tied in a knot below her breasts, her hips, buttocks, and thighs imprisoned in a pair of tightfitting Bermuda shorts in an apple-green and lemon-yellow flower print. A leather bag dangles from a long strap slung over her shoulder. Between the knotted blouse-ends and the waistband of the Bermuda shorts a patch of bare skin is visible, tanned a tawny gold. Situated beneath the diaphragm and weighing between 1500 and 2000 grams, the liver is approximately 28 centimeters wide, 16 centimeters thick, and 8 centimeters high. It occupies all of the right hypochondrium, and extends a short distance over into the left hypochondrium. It is reddish brown in color; its consistency is firm but friable. It is marked with the imprint of contiguous organs. The hepatic artery (carrying oxygenated blood) and the portal vein (carrying blood from the digestive tract and nutritive elements which the liver chemically converts) feed into the pedicle located on its lower surface, from which the hepatic veins arise, carrying off bile to the choledoch and then to the intestine. The tall silhouettes of the skyscrapers are all of a uniform color, a dark, almost solid brown.

You get it. It's mid-century French guy stuff. And the whole book is like this. Just a single unbroken paragraph very flatly describing people and things. Note in particular here the transition between the description of the woman's body and the liver. There isn't a direct relationship between those two things but we sort of naturally want to infer that what's being described might be this woman and then her organs, and then maybe some buildings that she's walking past.

For Jameson, Conducting Bodies is notable first and foremost because of the "historical curiosity" that the necessity of this inference poses, or what he characterizes as a reading experience in which "we strain to identify what is happening beneath our eyes...while nervously anticipating the next shift without warning to an unrelated plot string" (132).

Part of what makes this novel difficult to follow is its resistance to good old fashion proper nouns: We get descriptions of a man on the phone with a woman, a man in a doctor's office, and a man travelling to South America for a writer's conference, and we're left to infer that this is all the same man, and then perhaps that the objects and people being described are all things that he's encountered.

But none of this is ever confirmed to us. And so the novel operates in this funny in-between zone of the personal (i.e., maybe this is all one guy, and we're getting this annoyingly stylized depiction of what he does and sees) and the highly impersonal (i.e., maybe this is all just random objects and occurrences with no governing logic or central "protagonist" around which we can orient ourselves).

What we're describing here is ultimately a breakdown of language as such, or the failure of words to meaningfully correspond to things. Of course, this breakdown is eventually theorized by our old pals Derrida and the poststructuralists as a feature of language in general. There is always going to be slippage between words and things, there's always going to be a gap between the signification of a thing and the actual thing itself.

But the innovation of the nouveau roman here being identified is that it forces a perpetual awareness of this breakdown. As Jameson describes, "it opens up a provisional space in which this breakdown is reexperienced over and over again as a process, a temporary runoff between the habitual onset of linguistic belief and the inevitable degradation of the signified into its material signifier or the sign itself into a mere image" (139). So where most usages of language (literary or otherwise) tend to paper over this slippage, the nouveau roman wants to keep it at the foreground.

the train in motion

The upshot here is that the nouveau roman really forces you to pay attention to what you're reading, not just for its narrative content but also the actual slipperiness of the language through which that narrative content is articulated.

This latter operation is something that "traditional" novels do for us most obviously just by naming characters and more clearly articulating the relationships between objects and plot points as their introduced, effectively labelling the components out of which the narrative will be assembled. The potential for slippage is still there (because there still isn't some fundamental ontic tethering between words and things) but generally novelists don't actively work against their readers in making sense of what is going on.

By not doing this work for us, the nouveau roman produces this very particular aesthetic experience, that Jamson describes (in my view, kind of amazingly) as "the first moments in which we feel the train in motion." Here's Jameson:

we are occupied with our various tasks— identifying this or that fragment of a gesture, making some preliminary inventory of the various plot strings as they appear one after the other— when suddenly we also become aware that something is happening, that time has begun to move, that the objects, even as imperfectly identified as they are, have begun to change under our very eyes; the book is actually getting on with it, getting written, getting finished (143).

Now that's nice.

Non-Alienated Labour

So what does all of this have to do with Postmodernism. Well. As we've been working to describe here, the nouveau roman forces us to pay attention to language on this really granular level. And as Jameson notes, this is an uncomfortable way to read: "We have to read these sentences word for word, and that is something already fairly unusual (and painfully unfamiliar) in an information society in which a premium is placed on briefing and instant recognition, so that sentences are either skimmed or preprepared for rapid assimilation as so many signs" (146). And here I'll just pause to thank you so much for subscribing to my "Jameson Summaries" newsletter.

But Jameson asks, "is it possible, then, that the reading of so specialized and highly technical an elite literary artifact as Les corps conducteurs might offer a figure or analogon for nonalienated labour and for the Utopian experience of a radically different, alternate society?" (146). As it turns out, it is possible. Kind of.

Importantly, what he's getting at here is not just a soft romantic point about how, like, taking the time to slow down and just really read a novel is itself a kind of ~radical praxis~ through which one might resist and subvert the unrelenting pace of life under late capitalism or whatever.

In fact, the idea of "unalienated labour" itself is really tricky to pin down in our contemporary moment. As he notes, "the very experience of art itself today is alienated and made 'other' and inaccessible to too many people to serve as a useful vehicle for their imaginative experience" (147), noting in particular that the production of both "high art" and "mass culture" are both rendered inaccessible by way of "special training, collective division of labour, unique technologies, a guild or professional mentality, along with the simple indifference that accompanies activities from which we are excluded" (147). I can't just wander onto the set of Bosch and unalienatedly experience participating in its production.

But surely the set of Bosch is not the only place art is being produced. I've got hobbies, for instance. My time spent dicking around in Garageband isn't "alienated labour." But here too Jameson finds alienation: "In our own (postmodern) period...in which the socialization and institutionalization of individual life have intensified beyond any equivalents in an earlier twentieth-century capitalism, we will not be surprised by the paradoxical discovery that the hobby has itself been organized and institutionalized" (148). What's being produced, even in the DIY confines of one's apartment, is always already figured within these institutional bodies and is thus potentially alienated.

Realism

All of this is to say, it's really tricky for art to thematize production and activity in a way that isn't immediately refigured as a kind of alienation. But Simon's foregrounding of the failure of correspondence between words and things might also be read as a kind of failed labour. As Jameson describes, "the palpable struggle to get sense data into sentences leaves a residue in its failure, lets you sense the presence of the referent outside to closed door" (150). The "labour" here then isn't so much the alienable labour of the (postmodern) subject, but rather the failed labour of language itself.

So then: what Simon offers us is a model for handling this failure of correspondance as a kind of unalienated labour. Conducting Bodies demonstrates how one can use language to index its own failure to do basically the one thing we need it to do, which is to refer to things in the world.

And while Simon is writing before the proper onset of "postmodernism," you can probably already see how this might correspond to the broader character of postmodernism that Jameson has been working to describe, where there has been a more generalized breakdown between signs and the things they're meant to signify, leaving behind only surfaces, logos, images, etc. etc. etc.

In this way, Simon might anticipate what we could describe as a kind of postmodern realism. As Jameson argues, "For us today, it is generally the case that what looks like realism turns out at best to offer unmediated access only to what we think about reality, to our images and ideological stereotypes about it...That is, of course, also a part of the Real, and very much so indeed! But it is also characteristic of our period that we are very disinclined to think so, and that nothing chills us more, or is more calculated to break contact, than the discovery that this or that view of things is in reality 'merely' someone else's projection" (150).

While the signs and stereotypes that characterize the postmodern cultural landscape aren't quite the "realism" of like, Henry James, they do now effectively constitute a growing portion of the Real. And just as Simon's attentiveness to the more generalized failures of language leaves a kind of residual trace of its referent, so too might an attentiveness to the images and signs that populate the postmodern cultural landscape yield a fleeting glimpse of whatever world exists just beyond its borders.

wrapping

So as we've repeatedly noted, the basic character of postmodernism is the centrality of the image, and a problem that this centrality raises is how exactly we're supposed describe the relationship between all of these diffuse, contextless images. Jameson touches on this problem in the previous chapter, when trying to make sense of the sequence of images in that video AlienNATION, where no one image is really more substantial or informative than any other; they're just these disjointed elements that iteratively constitute what he wants to call "flow."

But this same problem extends to postmodern architecture, where "the elements and components of the work [are] held in solution by a kind of antigravity of the postmodern" (101). So it's a familiar problem for this book but with a kind of novel twist toward the basic physical realities of "built space." Postmodern architecture can be characterized by these messy assemblages of elements pulled from the past, which sort of inherently preclude any kind of singular organizational structure, but it is still like, a building, and is therefore at least sort of "governed" by basic rules of physics, and so describing its elements as "floating around" is sort of unhelpful and counterintuitive.

This is a formal problem that a term like "intertextuality" might describe but not really solve, mostly because it is pretty vague, implying a relationship between an element of the "text" (in this case, the building) and something outside of it but not really much beyond that. So instead, Jameson proposes to borrow the term "wrapping" from architecture to describe the relationship between elements, noting that "unlike intertextuality, [the term] retains the essential prerequisite of priority or even hierarchy— the functional subordination of one element to another (sometimes even called 'causality')— but makes that now reversible. What is wrapped can also be used as a wrapper; the wrapper can also be wrapped in its turn" (101-02).

This understanding of "wrapping" is useful more generally to make sense of how "texts" (i.e., basically everything) interact with each other in the logic of postmodernism. In literary criticism, for example, the more traditional distinction between "primary texts" (i.e., literature) and "secondary texts" (i.e., criticism or commentary or whatever), has given way to a kind of free interplay between those two things. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Jameson's own work, where the traditionally "secondary" work of interpretation becomes more "primary" than the works being interpreted. It's worth noting, for instance, that in the previous chapter only one of the video art works we talked about was real; the other one about the static floating head was just a hypothetical thing that Jameson made up for the purposes of his broader claims about "videoart" more generically.

So the idea is that things are just shifting around but also physically or materially supporting each other in some basic sense: what were once "works" become "texts," alternatingly wrapping and being wrapped by other "texts" to form the basic units of postmodern cultural production. As Jameson describes, the lasting result of this ongoing process of wrapping and rewrapping is a "loosening of primary unity, dissolving a work into a text, releasing the elements and setting them free for semiautonomous existence as information bits in the message-saturated space of late-capitalist media culture" (103).

Minimal Units of Built Space

Sort of along these same lines, he proposes to use “The Sentence” as a kind of model for identifying something like the "minimal units" of a building. This is a move that is borrowed from film studies, and it's just really great to read Jameson ponderously working his way through this idea: "the words of built space, or at least its substantives, would seem to be rooms...related and articulated by the various spatial verbs and adverbs—corridors, doorways, and staircases, for example— modified in turn by adjectives in the form of paint and furnishings, decoration, and ornament" (105).

What he's really setting up here is something that won't really pay off until the very end of this chapter, but for now we can just take a minute to enjoy the image of Jameson leaning back in his chair, rubbing his chin, and thinking to himself, "Rooms are surely the words of built space." Thank you so much man.

Frank Gehry House

Anyway. The bulk of this chapter is an extended examination of the Frank Gehry House.

Jameson cites an interview in which Gehry talks about how photographers who come to his house always want to rearrange the furniture, and he tries to stop them. True to form, Jameson wants to read this as a more general symptom of the postmodern condition, noting that "such discussions imply a displacement of architectural space such that the positioning of its contents— objects and human bodies alike— becomes problematical" (117). The move here is to argue that the displacement of furniture and people for the sake of staging a photograph is this sort of microcosmic demonstration of the displacement of the "subject" more generally as a unique condition of the postmodern.

This isn't a super compelling argument, in my view. It's another one of those moments where the vast argumentative scaffolding that Jameson is trying to lay out here sort over overcrowds the particularities of the thing he's talking about.

And it feels especially notable here because Jameson had literally just cited a passage from Gavin Macrae-Gibson that much more cleanly identifies more or less this same sense of displacement in Gehry's usage of weird angles and distorted perspective. For reasons that will become clear later, Jameson is trying to distance himself from Macrae-Gibson even though he sort of agrees with him, but it's worth noting for now that in trying to reach the same conclusion through a different angle, Jameson's argument ends up feeling much less convincing.

Anyway here's Macrae-Gibson:"For Gehry the world vanishes to a multitude of points, and he does not presuppose that any are related to the standing human being. The human eye is still of critical importance in Gehry's world, but the sense of center no longer has its traditional symbolic value" (116).

To me, this is much more satisfying analysis. Again, later in the chapter Jameson is going to tell me why I'm wrong for feeling this way. But for now I'm just going to enjoy it.

In any case, the broader point that Jameson wants to make is that, having shed the organizational logic of a central subject position, we're left with a kind of spacial messiness that is uniquely postmodern:

If the great negative emotions of the modernist movement were anxiety, terror, the being-unto-death, and Kurtz's "horror," what characterizes the newer "intensities " of the postmodern, which have also been characterized in terms of the "bad trip" and of schizophrenic submersion, can just as well be formulated in terms of the messiness of a dispersed existence, existential messiness, and the perpetual temporal distraction of post-sixties life (117).

The vocation of art

So what is the problem that Jameson has with Macrae-Gibson, whose reading of the Gehry House, as alluded to above, is built around this constant perspectival challenge. He offers a reading of the Gehry House in which its weird angularity resists the formation of a singular "intellectual picture." You look at the building and there are all these different angles, all these different suggested vanishing points, the thing is very difficult to orient, spatially. And, as suggested above, this "displaces the subject," makes us feel "decentred," etc.

But here's the thing: This mode of analysis falls back onto a very modernist conception of the function of art, which as Jameson describes, relies on "the vocation of art to restimulate perception, to reconquer a freshness of experience back from the habituated and reified numbness of everyday life in the fallen world" (121). And this is a conception of "art" that we don't actually want to help ourselves to when dealing with the postmodern, in which we can no longer allow for the clean and autonomous function of the cultural sphere as something outside of late capitalism.

It's another frustrating but unavoidable feature of Jameson's broader point here: If postmodernism really is the cultural logic of late capitalism, then works of "postmodern" cultural production are themselves always already part of late capitalism. Once you recognize that, you can't really pretend otherwise.

Nor should you want to. Jameson puts this crudely and succinctly: "It is not clear, to put it crudely and succinctly, why, in an environment of sheer advertising simulacra and images, we should even want to sharpen and renew our perception of those things" (122). So the question then really is: What is the function of art and culture in late capitalism?

Architectural Photography

But Jameson isn't quite done with Macrae-Gibson. He wants to keep toying around with this idea of the house's resistance to the formation of an "intellectual picture," which we might read as synonymous with "memory." Roughly, we could say Macrae-Gibson's position is something like: we can directly perceive the house when we're in it or around it, but all of its tricky angles and spaces make it difficult to fit into our memory and think about later. Which, sure.

But check this out: We also know that so-called "direct perception" isn't really as direct as we generally pretend it is. The body has this whole sensory apparatus that interprets "direct" experience of the world into something we can actually handle. And this is a fundamentally material process: just as in our previous chapter we talked about how film, with its elaborate and unavoidable production infrastructure, rendered visible the more general materiality of culture itself, so too does the technology of photography (with its apparatus of lenses and plates and so on) render visible the inherent materiality of vision.

But so in a sense what Jameson is saying is that Macrae-Gibson's reading is kind of correct, only not quite in the sense that Macrae-Gibson intended. The problem posed by the angularity of the Gehry House is not an "architectural problem" but actually a photographic one. As Jameson describes, the house "[blocks] the choice of photographic point of view, evading the image imperalism of photography, securing a situation in which no photograph of this house will ever be quite right, for it is the photograph alone which offers the possibilities of an 'intellectual picture' in this sense" (125).

Space

Okay fine. So Macrae-Gibson thinks he's talking about architecture when he's actually talking about photography, and "perception" isn't really a properly architectural problem.

So then what is the "architectural problem" that the Gehry house is looking to solve? More broadly, what kinds of problems are properly "architectural"?

For Jameson, it all goes back to that classic three-dimensional extent we know and love as "space." As he describes, "if Gehry's house is a meditation on a problem, that problem must initially be a spacial one, or at least be susceptible to formulation and incarnation in properly spacial terms" (126).

With that in mind, the notion of wrapping introduced in the beginning of this chapter begins to suggest the weird nature of postmodern space, which we've already characterized through a kind of loose and free-floating interaction of images against which it can be difficult to orient oneself. As Jameson describes, "As individuals, we are in and out of all these overlapping dimensions [of communication networks and late multinational capitalism] all the time, something which makes an older kind of existential positioning of ourselves in Being— the human body in the natural landscape, the individual in the older village or organic community, even the citizen in the nation-state— exceedingly problematical" (127)

This is a big problem, and one that you're probably intimately familiar with: we are almost constantly in contact with a bunch of global networks of exchange and communication that we can't really conceptualize. Because they're really big! But we interact with them constantly!

Importantly though, our inability to cognize these problems is not really an ontological or metaphysical problem: None of the individual parts of the network are fundamentally obscured to us. Most of them are actually pretty simple and mundane. It's just their sheer volume that makes them difficult (but again, crucially, not like metaphysically impossible) to conceptualize.

This, for Jameson, is a fundamentally spacial problem for which Gehry's house can be figured as a kind of solution—and here's where he's going to cash out the "minimal units of built space" stuff described above— through an allegorical read of the building: The corrugated metal sheets are a symbol of "the junk of Third World side of American life today" (128) hemming in the suburban home, which is in turn intersected by the "tumbling" glass cube, denoting "an inconceivable financial system and a combination of abstract wealth and real power in which all of us also believe, without many of us ever really knowing what that might be or look like" (128). So the house as a whole is this allegorical spatial schematic for this broader representation problem of "the two antithetical and incommensurable features...of abstract American space, of the superstate of multinational capitalism today" (128). The house is an allegory for this weird hybrid space of the postmodern.

He's got kind of a nice way for thinking through the "success" of this answer: "If that space is meaningful, if you can live in it, if it is somehow comfortable but in a new way, one that opens up historically new and original ways of living— and generates, so to speak, a new Utopian spatial language, a new kind of sentence, a new kind of syntax, radically new words beyond our own grammar— then, one would think, the dilemma, the aporia, has been resolved, if only on the level of space itself" (129).

Now that sounds pretty nice. And this is a fun and plausible read. I think I would still have questions about how exactly these elements can be said to "connote" their allegorical dimension here, and I guess I might also wonder whether what Jameson is really solving here is actually a representational or literary problem, just as he argues Macrae-Gibson was solving a perceptual or photographic one.

And while Jameson won't actually evaluate the success himself, it's worth considering what that success would mean more generally. The caveat that the "dilemma" will perhaps be resolved "only on the level of space itself" is a telling one, I think. Because even if it were effectively "solved," spatially, I don't know how it would get me any closer to understanding my individual relationship to the globally scaled machinations of late capitalism, which is still the problem for which this building is the supposed answer.

Maybe I'm being a little unfair. Maybe there is a necessarily self-contained and untranslatable quality to "thinking a material thought" (129), as he eloquently phrases it. I don't know. To me, again, this is an instance where we sort of see the trade off being made by this huge totalizing structure that he's put in place, where his individual analysis of specific works ends up being sort of unsatisfying, even if it is technically "correct" or internally consistent or whatever.

Anyway. It's a nice house! Wouldn't want to be the guy cleaning those windows though ha ha! Catch you next week.

The materiality of culture

Jameson starts this one off with a little heat for leftist twitter guys: As a result of "Capitalism, and the modern age," he writes, "it is clear now that culture itself is one of those things whose fundamental materiality is now for us not merely evident but inescapable...it is because culture has become material that we are now in a position to understand that it always was material, or materialistic, in its structures and functions" (67).

Here you could insert that meme of the astronaut looking back at the earth and saying "wait...culture is material?" and the other astronaut is holding a gun and saying "always has been." Probably 100 faves on the table folks.

Anyway. For Jameson this materiality is the basis for the shift away from the antiquated terminology of "genre and form," and toward "media," which, as he notes, more accurately evokes the material conditions that are an inherent feature of any cultural or artistic production. He breaks this down into a nice tripartite schematic: "that of an artistic mode or specified form of aesthetic production, that of a specific technology, generally organized around a central apparatus or machine; and that, finally, of a social institution" (67). As he argues, a given piece of media is not wholly defined by these three dimensions, but these three dimensions need to be addressed in order for any kind of definition to be produced. Culture is a product of its material conditions. Always has been.

This materiality finds its clearest expression in movies: "For some seventy years the cleverest prophets have warned us regularly that the dominant art form of the twentieth century was not literature at all...but rather the one new and historically unique art invented in the contemporary period, namely film; that is to say, the first distinctively mediatic art form" (68). Why this is the case is obvious enough. Making and distributing movies takes a whole bunch of people, technology, institutions, and money. The infrastructure that sustains them as a form is fundamental and obvious in a way that can then be sort of retroactively evident in other forms, like literature. Because books are also material objects, and obviously require a whole bunch of technologies and infrastructure for their production and distribution, but that materiality can sometimes feel a little secondary to or beside the point of a lot of conventional "literary analysis."

So what. Well to link back up with the broader project here, the reason that this materiality matters is that movies, like books, have a relation to "the postmodern" that tends to revert back into the (moralizing) question of style. Certain movies are stylistically "postmodern," and are therefore asked "to serve as some supreme and privileged, symptomatic, index of the zeitgeist" (69). But, as Jameson has repeatedly pointed out already, that's not what we're here to do. And so turning to the materiality of the production of a given bit of media is a useful way to avoid this “moralization” about style he’s so concerned about.

And if we're looking not only to stylistic elements but instead the actual material conditions of production, then for Jameson that means we’re going to be looking at that classic medium we know and love as "video, in its twin manifestations as commercial television and experimental video, or 'video art.'"(69). The big claim in this chapter is that video constitutes the dominant medium of postmodernism, but in classic Jamesonian style he's got a sort of frustrating way of phrasing this. "This is not a proposition one proves; rather, one seeks, as I will in the remainder of this chapter, to demonstrate the interest of presupposing it, and in particular the variety of new consequences that flow from assigning some new and more central priority to video processes" (69). Fine. Have it your way.

Flow

So how he's going to get there is by talking about what makes television work as a distinctive medium. And to do this he's going to use the concept of "flow," borrowed from Raymond Williams. This concept is really useful and Jameson doesn't really define it all that clearly for us, so we can just go right to the source on this one: Raymond Williams introduces this term "flow" in a book on television he wrote back in the 70s, and he uses it to characterize the unending sequencing of programming as the defining feature of television as a medium.

As Williams describes, "In all communications systems before broadcasting the essential items were discrete. A book or a pamphlet was taken and read as a specific item. A meeting occurred at a particular date and place. A play was performed in a particular theatre at a set hour. The difference in [television] broadcasting is not only that these events, or events resembling them, are available inside the home, by the operation of a switch. It is that the real programme that is offered is a sequence or set of alternative sequences of these and other similar events, which are then available in a single dimension and in a single operation" (81). So when we're talking about television as a medium, it’s less about any discrete "item" of television but rather the formal organization of television as such, the flow or sequence of "items" as a whole.

For Jameson, this notion of flow is useful primarily in what it tells us about the relationship between television and memory. As he describes, "Turning the television set off has little in common with the intermission of a play or an opera or with the grand finale of a feature film, when the lights slowly come back on and memory begins its mysterious work...But memory seems to play no role in television, commercial or otherwise...nothing here haunts the mind or leaves its afterimages in the matter of the great moments of film (70-71). Um sir have you ever heard of a little show called The Wire.

Just kidding. But you can probably already see here that Jameson is setting up a problem similar to the one described in the previous chapter, about the collapse of critical distance. If the thing never ends, you can never really theorize it. It's another snake eating its own tail. The more recent transition from "media" to "content" makes this notion of flow even more pronounced. The discrete items matter even less, they're just the stuff that flows through their respective distribution networks. It's evident in the things that streaming platforms try and replicate from classic television: You have to specifically direct Netflix to let you watch the end credits of a show before it fires you into the next episode. It's sort of what's implied when pop critics describe TV shows as "binge-worthy," which seems less about the show itself than how smoothly it accommodates your participation in this more general "flow" of content.

Boredom

So there's this collapse of critical distance that renders television difficult to theorize. But, Jameson posits, this is why we need to turn to "video art." Much in the same way that a study of poetry can yield some interesting insights into the normal and quotidian functions of language, so too can a turn toward experimental "video art" tell us some stuff about commercial television. Here's a fun example of the video art that Jameson has in mind. He asks you to imagine

a face on your television screen accompanied by an incomprehensible and never-ending stream of keenings and mutterings: the face remaining utterly without expression, unchanging throughout the course of the "work," and coming at length to seem some icon or floating immobile timeless mask. It is an experience to which you might be willing to submit out of curiosity for a few minutes. When, however, you begin to leaf through your program in distraction, only to discover that this particular videotext is twenty-one minutes long, then panic overcomes the mind and almost anything else seems preferable (72).

For Jameson, this is a type of boredom that is unique to video art and television, and this has to do with video’s unique relationship "real time." Obviously, literature and movies don't generally operate in "real time" but rather move through a kind of foreshortened fictive temporality: the plot of a movie might take place over several days, but what's represented is the like 120 minutes relevant to the telling of the story. There's another set of terms for this that I'm sure some film studies guy will DM me about on twitter later. As Jameson argues, this is not the case in video art, which doesn't operate in fictive time at all, but rather indexes "the ticking away of real time minute by minute, the dread underlying irrevocable reality of the metre running" (75).

And of course this "real time" is itself strongly informed by the tightly regulated temporalities of our old friend Capitalism. Here he cites E.P. Thompson's "Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” but a more contemporary example (and one that is similarly concerned with "late" capitalism) would be Jonathan Crary's 24/7. In either case, the basic idea is that since industrialization, machines have allowed for a much tighter regulation of time, and therefore a more rigid structuring of both the labour and relaxation time of workers. This has all kinds of weird effects on our relationship to time, leisure, and productivity: Even when we're "off the clock," we're still some tightly regulated amount of time from being back on the clock.

This more regulated "machine time" usually relents when we're watching a movie or reading a book or whatever, but crucially, this isn't how it works with TV. As Jameson argues, "Material or machine time punctuates the flow of commercial television by way of the cycles of hour and half-hour programming, shadowed as by a ghostly afterimage by the shorter rhythms of the commercials themselves" (76). A lot of this has to do with the interface of the television itself. It's not really meant to be the immersive experience of the movie theatre. You're always sort of halfway still in the real world, never fully absorbed into fictive time. This is another thing that has only gotten more pronounced in the time since this book was published: David Lynch describes this problem really succinctly here.

Logo

So he gives another description of "video art," this one of a piece called (no joke) alienNATION. It sounds extremely '90s:

"[the video features] experimental mice, voice-overed [sic(?!)] by various pseudoscientific reports and therapeutic programs...then science fiction footage...optical effects, children's blocks and erector sets, reproductions of classical paintings, as well as mannequins, advertising images, computer printouts, textbook illustrations of all kinds, cartoon figures rising and falling" (80)

What's interesting about the video for Jameson is that it's hard to say what, if anything, this piece is "about." If you try to apprehend it through a more conventional "filmic analysis" type lens it doesn't really yield all that much. The juxtaposition of, say, classical paintings and cartoons might sort of evoke a more general thematic of the distinction between "high culture vs. low culture," but it doesn't seem to be actually saying anything about that distinction.

Again, the reason for this is that the figures portrayed in the video (the paintings, the advertising, the cartoons) are not so much meant to be read on their own terms but rather interpreted as "logos," each vaguely gesturing toward the historical context from which they've been clipped. As Jameson describes, the logo "is something like the synthesis of an advertising image, a sign or emblem which carries the memory of a whole tradition of earlier advertisements within itself in a well-nigh intertextual way"(85). The idea here is a loss of specificity. He doesn't say which paintings are shown in the video but as "logos" they'd all be flattened out as allusions to the idea of "classical paintings" more generally.

So the real action of the video is in this rapid and seemingly random "flow" of intertextual logos. And there isn't really a good "traditional" analytic framework for figuring out how to interpret what that is supposed to "mean" in any conventional sense:

the terminology and nomenclature of the traditional models do not register what surely becomes a fundamental property of the stream of signs in our video content: namely, that they change places; that no single sign ever retains priority as a topic of the operation; that the situation in which one sign functions as the interpretant of another is more than provisional, it is subject to change without notice (87).

So okay: Is that what the piece is about? It's a kind of meta thing about our weird impulsive need to find "meaning" in a random string of signifiers? There's definitely a kind of pressure imposed by the constant shifting of signs and logos, the demand that the viewer decodes their relationship, determining the relative cultural impact of sci-fi vs. cartoons vs. classical music vs. advertising. After all, Jameson points out, this impossible search for meaning is in itself obviously fairly alienating.

But this would be a pretty unsatisfying read. Jameson points to two reasons why: First, he notes that "alienation is, first of all, not merely a modernist concept but also a modernist experience" (90). More substantively, though, if alienation is itself a modernist experience, then the insight that "life is alienating" is itself recontextualized not as a theme but just another sign or logo, just like the laboratory mice or the high vs. low culture distinction, ideas that the video evokes and gestures toward more or less ironically. As he summarizes, "these ‘themes’ are corny...but not old-fashioned enough to be camp" (90).

This is the point that Jameson wants to make about video art: the videotape is "a structure of sign flow which resists meaning, whose fundamental inner logic is the exclusion of the emergence of themes as such in that sense, and which therefore systematically sets out to short-circuit traditional interpretive temptations...whatever a good, let alone great, videotext might be, it will be bad or flawed whenever such interpretation proves possible, whenever the text slackly opens up just such places and areas of thematization itself" (92).

Production/Reproduction

So is video art fundamentally uninterpretable? Not necessarily, it turns out: "Another way of interpreting such a tape is conceivable…an interpretation that would seek to foreground the process of production itself rather than its putative messages, meanings, or content" (95). Rather than pointing to the content of the tape, which as discussed above really is just a random string of signifiers or logos that seem to actively resist any attempt at understanding, you can instead look to the process of its production.

This seems plausible. As the earlier portion of this chapter worked to describe, the general trend of art from "genre and mode" to "media" could suggest the growing importance of the actual technologies of production, even positioning them as the "subject" of the work they serve to produce.

The problem with this method of interpretation, though, is that it would basically flatten out all video art to be about the same thing: "if all videotexts simply designate the process of production/reproduction, then presumably they all turn out to be 'the same' in a particularly unhelpful way" (95).

Jameson's not going to solve this one for us. In fact, this particular bind is why video art and TV are the definitive media of postmodernism, which signals the end of "interpretation," at least in the conventional sense, alongside historicization. As Jameson describes, "we are left with that pure and random play of signifiers that we call postmodernism, which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts— such is the logic of postmodernism in general, which finds one of its strongest and most original, authentic forms in the new art of experimental video" (96) Ooof. Now that is grim.

Be sure to tune in next week, when I'll have some more fragments of preexistent texts to shuffle around for you.

Modernism vs. Postmodernism

This chapter opens with a kind of overview of the critical discourse on "postmodernism,” which Jameson breaks down into a nice clean schematic of antimodern/propostmodern and promodern/antipostmodern, all of which can be more generally characterized "by an acceptance of the new term, which is tantamount to an agreement on the fundamental nature of some decisive break between the modern and the postmodern moments, however these last are evaluated" (59).

As described in the previous chapter, Jameson has been kind of resistant to the idea of this "break," opting instead to characterize postmodernism as something like a heightening of the basic logic of capitalism (which has similarly given way to the both-novel-and-not period of "late capitalism"). Why he's been so evasive on the question of whether the postmodern is a break or extension of the modern is really the big question of this chapter, and he spends a lot of time laying out why its so difficult to identify “postmodernism” as a distinctive historical period.

So: he gives this very cramped little discussion of Lyotard, Habermas, Manfredo Tafuti, Hilton Kramer, and Tom Wolfe that I'm mostly going to sidestep here, in part because describing each of their positions would be tedious and I'm only sort of familiar with like two of these guys, but also because really Jameson is just outlining their various positions to say that the general schematic for distinguishing between the modern and the postmodern is to go, "modernism is good, postmodernism is bad" or vice versa. This, in turn, is being set up to reinforce his big claim at the end of the previous chapter, which is that anyone seeking to figure out whether the phenomenon of postmodern is good or bad is making a category mistake.

He argues: "most of the political positions which we have found to inform what is most often conducted as an aesthetic debate are in reality moralizing ones that seek to develop final judgements on the phenomenon of postmodernism, whether the latter is stigmatized as corrupt or, on the other hand, salute as a culturally and aesthetically healthy and positive form of innovation" (62). Again, the thing about postmodernism for Jameson is that it is a "cultural logic" and not a style. So to exert too much time going like, "it's good!" or "it's bad!" only serves to distract us from our old friend The Dialectic, which is neither good nor bad but simply is.

Populism

So if any attempt to distinguish the modern from the postmodern boils down to a kind of “moralizing structure” where one needs to be affirmed over the other, then how are we supposed to distinguish them? He's already sort of said that they are, somehow, distinguishable. So what gives.

To try and work this out, Jameson turns to architectural theorist Charles Jencks, who distinguishes postmodern architecture from its high modernist counterpart by its relation to populism. As Jameson describes, in an architectural context, "where the now more classical high-modernist space of a Corbusier or a Wright sought to differentiate itself radically from the fallen city fabric in which it appeared...postmodernist buildings, on the contrary, celebrate their insertion into the heterogeneous fabric of the commercial strip and the motel and fast-food landscape of the superhighway American city" (63).

This embrace of populism in postmodern architecture, Jameson says, can serve as a jumping off point for distinguishing postmodernism from modernism in more general terms. As he notes, Postmodernism in all its forms can be characterized by a generalized "effacement of the older distinction between high and so-called mass culture, a distinction on which modernism depended for its specificity" (63). So we're back on solid ground a little bit. Here's a characteristic of the postmodern. And a political one at that. Again, though, there's this little two-step that Jameson is doing, where he's going to extrapolate outward from "style" into this kind of generalization, which as it turns out can be either "moralizing," or, depending on how you look at it, a little keyhole into this underlying "cultural logic."

This, it turns out, is symptomatic of the larger, much weirder problem that he's identifying here. He says, "it seems at least possible that what wears the mask and makes the gestures of 'populism' in the various postmodernist apologias and manifestos is in reality a mere reflex and symptom of a (to be sure momentous) cultural mutation, in which what used to be stigmatized as mass or commercial culture is now received into the precincts of a new and enlarged cultural realm" (64). In this case, "populism," which at one point could have been "moralized" about in accordance with one's ideological leanings, is now robbed of its political dimension and translated into something else: A hollowed out signifier, an aesthetic that gestures toward "that Popular Front class coalition of workers, peasants, and petit bourgeouis generally called 'the people'" (64), but doesn't actually connect with it, because it no longer meaningfully exists as such.

So what you’re left with is a vaguely political-sounding set of ideas that are actually pretty thoroughly depoliticized. This is the problem hinted at in the previous chapter: if postmodernism means that everything is flattened out into "cultural signifiers," then that really means everything, including evocations of any kind of ideological formation that would have held some kind of political weight before the "emergence" of the cultural logic represented by postmodernism. It's just contextless cultural signifiers all the way down.

historicity

So it's a tricky problem. But it's tricky in this really precise and sort of perversely satisfying way: The postmodern, in Jameson's conception, forecloses on any attempt to position itself historically, as any invocation of history is always already (always already!) flattened out into a decontextualized cultural signifier. But this flattening out itself is "new," thus seeming suggesting that there is some kind of historicization in play here, somewhere. Or at least that is what you'd expect! But as soon as you identify it as such, you've effectively played right into the trap. It's a signifier again. The impulse to historicize is eating its own tail.

He describes this whole situation really starkly: "The postmodern thus invites us to indulge a somber mockery of historicity in general, wherein the effort at self-consciousness with which our own situation somehow completes the act of historical understanding, repeats itself drearily as in the worst kinds of dreams, and juxtaposes, to its own pertinent philosophical repudiation of the very concept of self-consiousness, a grotesque carnival of the latter's various replays" (64-65). The somber mockery of historicity! Come on.

I guess the thing to note is that this might feel like we're getting into some vaguely Francis Fukuyama-style "end of history" type problem. If any attempt to point to historical precedent dissolves into "cultural signifiers," then history would seem to be "over," late capitalism having sort of "completed" or I guess prematurely foreshortened the arc of historical progression or whatever.

But that's not quite the point that Jameson is making here: Even if we can't "historicize" in the typical sense, we aren't necessarily "trapped" in the postmodern. What we've lost isn't "history" so much as the critical distance that allows us to engage with history as anything other than a bunch of cultural signifiers. So it’s really a problem of how to talk about history, when the basic move of identifying historical moments or ideological tendencies seems to be foreclosed upon in advance by the historical moment that you’re trying to identify. And Jameson won’t yet say exactly how he's going to get himself out of this particular jam.

But he's got some ideas: "Only the following simple and hygienic recommendation can be proposed: namely, that the dualism be used in some sense against itself...So it is that, rigorously conducted, an inquiry into this or that feature of the postmodern will end up telling us little of value about the postmodern itself, but against its own will and quite unintentionally a great deal about the modern proper, and perhaps the converse will also turn out to be true"(66). Hm. Okay. Tune in next week and we'll see if it does.

From the outset, Jameson’s Postmodernism is positioned as an examination of "a series of semiautonomous and relatively independent traits or features"(x) of Postmodernism, all tethered to this idea of "historical deafness"(xi) but not wholly reducible to it. Still, being Jameson, what this really means is he's going to take a stab at defining the whole thing, and all of these “semiautonomous” features are actually tightly interlocking components of some broader argumentative framework that he’s going to slowly reveal over the course of the book.

The central tension that he’s pushing back against is the idea that "postmodernism" can be hailed as "a wholly new social order" (xii), because any actually new order could only emerge through good old fashion revolutionary struggle. What postmodernism is, then, is "the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself" (xii).

On the other hand, though, there does seem to be something kind of new about it, at least sort of: The lack of historical understanding (or “deafness”) serves to generate "a pathology deeply autoreferential, as though our utter forgetfulness of the past exhausted itself in the vacant but mesmerized contemplation of a schizophrenic present that is incomparable virtually by definition" (xii). So there's a nice little dialectic here between continuity and rupture. And Jameson is having fun with it. He sets up this tension and goes, "in what follows— but for pragmatic reasons I will disclose at the proper time— I have pretended to believe that the postmodern is as unusual as it thinks it is, and that it constitutes a cultural and experiential break worth exploring in greater detail" (xiii). Okay.

Along these same lines, he wants to clarify what exactly he means by "late capitalism," which he traces back to Adorno and Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School guys. This is another one of those terminological problems you still see pop off on twitter every so often, so it's sort of fun to see Jameson weigh in.

What it seems to boil down to for him is a kind of transformation of capitalism beyond Marx's claims about the rise of a monolithic "world market.” Jameson points to "the new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt), new forms of media interrelationship,... computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced Third World areas" etc. etc. etc.

The upshot is that actually periodizing the emergence of "late" capitalism is complicated by a whole bunch of more or less independently operating developments within capitalism that in turn congeal into something much less unified than the "world market" that Marx envisioned: "What 'late' generally coveys is...the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive" (xxi). So like the term "postmodernism," "late capitalism" has this built-in tension between rupture and continuity. It’s this basic tension—or how this tension plays out within a range of “postmodern” cultural artifacts— that animates much of the book.

Chapter 1: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

The first chapter operates in this really uncomfortable zone of attempting to periodize something while simultaneously unpacking why "the very conception of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed" (3). So the question of defining the postmodern “period” is always couched in this broader problem of how postmodernism itself sort of resists the notion of historical periodization in general.

For this reason, he's careful to position postmodernism not as a "style" but rather a "cultural dominant," which allows for "the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features" (4). Because while the bulk of this book is spent doing a fairly typical literary criticism style analysis of a handful of postmodern works, what we’ll find is that the works themselves are useful to Jameson only insofar as they provide a kind of glimpse into the operations of this “cultural dominant,” or the underlying logic of late capitalism. As a result, his analysis of any particular thing is always going to be secondary (or “subordinate”) to that broader argument about this cultural logic.

It’s worth noting that he's acutely aware that that is going to piss people off. As he describes, "what happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic...the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constituting an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself" (5-6).

I get it, man. I hate when my vision is too powerful as well.

Depthlessness

The first thing Jameson wants to do is talk about modernism vs postmodernism through van Gogh's A Pair of Boots and Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes. The van Gogh, which he takes as an archetypal example of "high modernism," can be read as either a kind of utopian aestheticization of peasant life, or, following Heidegger, an effort to render visible a world of toil and material hardship through aestheticization.

What Jameson wants to highlight is that either interpretation of van Gogh's shoes is going to be hermeneutical, "in the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or a symptom of some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth" (8). The meaning of the work is tethered to the world: the peasant shoes carry with them this whole history of peasant labour and pre-industrial labour relations.

The Warhol, by contrast, seems to actively resist any kind of historical contextualization: We're instead presented with "a random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips" (8), and the hermeneutic gesture becomes impossible to complete. This lack of historical context leads Jameson to what is really the central feature of postmodernism: Depthlessness; Images without historical context.

This is the same depthlessness that has impacted academia, which, he notes, is now "for the most part a conception of practices, discourses, and textual play, [wherein] depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces" (12). This might explain, for instance, why academia generates so much hyper-specific disciplinary jargon that usually only serves to make interacting with non-specialists more complicated and annoying. It’s just more surface.

Importantly as well, this depthlessness is primarily a discursive or cultural phenomenon, and it doesn't really extend to the underlying economic system. As he describes, "if the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to)" (17). This also seems basically correct, and while the question of whether these "faceless masters" either no longer need or are unable to impose their speech is basically moot, it's interesting to think about.

Pastiche

So along with all this depthlessness comes a mode of cultural production that operates through reorganizing these surface level images, or what Jameson calls "Pastiche." As he argues, "Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style...But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists" (17). Think like, Wes Anderson vs. Paul Verhoeven.

But this doesn't exhaust the representational potential opened up by the "cultural logic" of postmodernism: As Jameson points out, this depthless intertextuality can also provide a "new and original way of thinking and perceiving" (31), like Nam June Paik's TV Garden, an installation of scattered television screens and vegetation, which calls upon its viewer "to do the impossible, namely, to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference...to rise somehow to a level at which the vivid perception of radical difference is in and of itself a new mode of grasping what used to be called relationship: something for which the word collage is still only a very feeble name" (31).

This seems like a kind of qualitative judgment on Jameson's part, and I guess it's not entirely clear to me how Paik escapes the vaguely condemnatory designation of pastiche (given that his work is literally just a bunch of surfaces), but again, Jameson is less invested in really unpacking any specific artwork than he is in kind of jamming it into his big overarching structure. Which is frustrating but also kind of fun.

Euphoria

Anyway: the suggestion of the “new and original way of thinking” in Paik’s work hints at something like the new function for postmodern artistic production, which arises in response to the unique challenges posed by postmodernism itself.

If the clash of the modern liberal individual against the depersonalized machinations of industrial society generated what Auden termed the "Age of Anxiety," the collapse of that individual into a heap of decontextualized signifiers has given way to a vaguely psychedelic exhilaration that Jameson terms "euphoria."

As he describes it, it's a sensation that sits halfway between the sublime and Sontag's notion of camp. This whole thing sort of reminds me of when my wife tries to show me something on her computer and she's got like 75 tabs on 3 different browser windows. A totally unassimilable wave of information, evoking what Jameson calls the "postmodern or technological sublime" (37).

As he notes, though, this euphoria isn't just the product of technology as such, but rather emerges through technology as a distorted figuration of globalized capitalism. As he describes, "The technology of contemporary society is… mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp" (37-38).

This is more obvious now than it was in the 80s, and it speaks to the prescience of Jameson's analysis there: The thing that's sublime about being on the computer isn't the technology itself. Being awed by technology is for nerds. What is sublime is the moment in which the incomprehensibly vast networks of technology and information that undergird the global economic system are rendered dimly perceptible to us by the technologies themselves. You catch a brief glimpse of yourself situated within this huge and complex network of stuff that you always knew was out there but can never fully apprehend.

Not a Style

Jameson continually returns to the idea that what he's describing is not a "style" but rather the "cultural dominant of late capitalism" (46). In part, this insistence helps clarify why the book as a whole is less interested in analysis of particular postmodern works than it is in a kind of systematic description of our present historical moment.

But it also provides a nice little rejoinder to the pejorative usage of "postmodernism" that we still see coming from the Right. In Jameson's formulation, if postmodernism is not an individual stylistic choice but rather the non-negotiable underlying logic of late capitalism, there isn't really a point in trying to condemn its practitioners: As Jameson argues, "if postmodernism is a historical phenomenon, then the attempt to conceptualize it in terms of moral or moralizing judgments must finally be identified as a category mistake" (46). Rather than see it in moralizing terms, then, what Jameson advocates is that we attempt to "think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together" (47). It’s the dialectic folks.

But there's another much darker implication of the idea that Postmodernism is not a style but rather a cultural logic. If postmodern cultural production is no longer the result of individuated authorial voice but rather a kind of byproduct of the logic of late capitalism, then what postmodernism signals is the final stage of capitalism's colonization of culture as a whole, as well as the dissolution of any kind of critical distance through which the machinations of capitalism can be meaningfully interrogated and critiqued. This also seems basically true, and we've seen over the last year how easily stuff like "resistance" can be readily integrated right back into capitalism as an aesthetic.

So what is to be done. Hard to say, exactly. Jameson describes the need for "a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system" (54). This is what he was hinting at above, in this notion of the “technological sublime.” He says, ultimately, that "the political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as spatial scale" (54). Sounds good man. Tune in next week and we’ll figure out what that means.

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Last year I taught Donald Barthelme’s story "The Phantom of the Opera's Friend" as an example of postmodernism. I pointed out how it interpolates both the Gaston Leroux character as well as Leroux himself into the same story, and we talked a bit about intertextuality, the funny tension between the Phantom’s theatricality and the quiet and unglamorous lives of the unnamed friend and Leroux himself. "That's postmodernism," I told my students, and they pretended to type that into their computers.

When you describe something as "postmodern"—like a book or a building or whatever— you’re generally identifying something like this. American Psycho is "postmodern." A Frank Gehry building is “postmodern.” Postmodernism usually names a kind of aesthetic sensibility that has to do with pastiche, intertextuality, or the juxtaposition of “high culture” and “pop culture” elements.

But there's this secondary usage that I see on twitter every so often, mostly coming from those right-wing "retvrn to tradition" type guys. For those guys, from what I can gather, identifying something as "postmodernism" signals that it is guilty of something like "anti-Enlightenment" or "anti-Western" thinking, but it also seems to be related to communism somehow. I’m pretty sure those guys inherited this understanding of the postmodern from Jordan Peterson before he passed away or whatever happened to him. He used to talk about "Postmodern neo-Marxists," which has become kind of a punchline now.

When you see someone throwing around “postmodern” like that on the computer, the right move is usually to tell them to fuck off or ignore them. But I do sometimes catch myself wondering what exactly is being lost by allowing these weirdo right-wing guys to define “postmodernism” as a philosophical or theoretical tendency in the public discourse. Because it remains the case that certain “postmodern” philosophical tendencies are still very much a part of “theory” in an academic context, even if very few people identify as “postmodernists," and it seems like a huge unforced error to glibly write off postmodernism as a movement that is definitively over and observable only in its aesthetic remnants.

Because even the more conventional "stylistic" conception of postmodernism is sort of tricky to parse when you actually think about it too much, and it’s hard to imagine deriving a robust sense of what "postmodernism" ultimately is based on the stylistic elements of the works most commonly identified as postmodern. There's obviously a lot of differences between Barthelme and Bret Easton Ellis, but they're lumped together as "postmodern" for reasons that I think have more to do with syllabi modules than some kind of rigorous theorization of the postmodern as such.

So: What might such a rigorous theorization of the Postmodern even look like?

Well folks, hello and welcome to the Book Man Gets Paid newsletter, where over the two and a half months or so I'm going to do a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which is probably the best or at least most systematic effort to describe “the postmodern,” not as a style or ideological position, but rather as an underlying “logic” that is expressed through cultural production. For Jameson, to talk about the postmodern is less about either chastising or celebrating the set of works named “postmodern,” but rather to examine those works as a kind of keyhole into this underlying cultural logic.

It’s a good book. But it’s also long and dense. And while Jameson can be a very clear thinker, he also assumes a familiarity with a wide breadth of material, and he moves through it at a pace that can be kind of uninviting. But the conception of “The Postmodern” that he develops over the course of the book is compelling, and actually provides a lot of fun and useable ideas and arguments for the present cultural and discursive landscape.

If you’re a grad student, or even just someone who likes to act like a grad student on the computer, wrestling “the postmodern” out of the hands of guys like Jordan Peterson and turning it into something you can actually use is probably kind of worthwhile. But for whatever reason, there are about 100000 hours of guys on youtube decrying the evils of postmodern neo-marxism and very few good and in-depth guides to Jameson’s extensive work on the subject.

So that’s basically what this is: I am going to read Postmodernism, and I’m going to tell you about it one chapter at a time, in a way that is hopefully sort of fun and accessible but still basically accurate. And you can subscribe to this thing and either read along or just sit back and wait for me to fuck something up so you can send me a DM about it like the snakes that you are. It’s going to be fun, I think. And hey, at the end of the day maybe that’s what postmodernism is all about just kidding.

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