Fredric Jameson and the limits of postmodern theory Essay Example For Students

Fredric Jameson and the limits of postmodern theory Essay The impetus behind this paper has been the recent publication of Fredric Jamesons 1991 Welleck Lectures, The Seeds of Time. 1 As these lectures were delivered a decade after Jamesons initial attempts to map the terrain of postmodernity it appeared to me to provide an occasion to reflect upon the current status of Jamesons highly influential and much criticised theory of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism. It also enables me to return to, what I consider to be, one of the most troubling aspects of Jamesons writing on postmodernism, that is to say, the waning, to use Jamesons term, of the political imagination. As Jameson is probably the foremost Marxist theorist writing on postmodernism and one of the most influential of contemporary cultural critics, I find this paralysis of the political imagination in the face of postmodernism deeply problematic. As most of you are probably aware postmodernism is inherently paradoxical and playful. There is, suggests Jameson a kind of winner loses logic about it, the more one tries to define what is characteristically postmodern the less characteristic it turns out to be. Postmodernism, by definition resists definition. Theoretically, postmodernism can only theorise its own conditions of impossibility; with neither a fixed subject nor object there can be no theory of postmodernism as such. This paradoxicality is what Jameson now identifies as the antinomies of postmodernity, the aporia or theoretical impasses which mesmerise postmodern theory and unlike the older (modernist) discourse of dialectical contradiction remain unresolvable at a higher level of abstraction. Jameson identifies four fundamental antinomies of postmodernism: time and space, subject and object, nature and human nature, and finally the concept of Utopia. Today I will focus on just the first of these antinomies, what Jameson describes as the foundational antinomy of postmodernism, that is, time and space, and suggest that the failure to think beyond the antinomy is symptomatic of a more general failing in Jamesons theory as a whole. I shall also venture to suggest that a more dialectical understanding of temporality and spatiality may enable us to move beyond what Jameson sees as the limits of the postmodern. Before engaging with this debate, however, I will briefly recapitulate Jamesons original thesis and what I still consider to be the importance of his theoretical endeavour. Jamesons initial intervention in the postmodern debate, in a 1982 essay `The Politics of Theory,2 was primarily an attempt to map the ideological landscape of postmodernism, however, the article concluded on a characteristic Jamesonian note, insisting on `the need to grasp the present as history. Jameson, then, initially seemed to suggest the possibility of a way through the impasse of the two most influential strains of thought emerging at that time in relation to postmodernism. On the one hand, one encountered an uncritical celebration of the concept by the postmodernists themselves, and, on the other, the charge of cultural degeneracy was being levelled by more traditional critics and older modernists. We must avoid, argued Jameson, adopting either of these essentially moralising positions, and rather develop a more fully historical and dialectical analysis of the situation. Whether we like it or not there was a perception that culturally something had changed, we may disagree on what that change entails but the perception itself has a reality that must be accounted for. To repudiate such a cultural change was simply facile, to thoughtlessly celebrate it was complacent and corrupt; what was required was an assessment of this `new cultural production within the working hypothesis of a general modification of culture itself within the social restructuration of late capitalism as a system. It was this promise to historically situate postmodernism in relation to transformations in the capitalist system and the development of global multinational capital that, for many like myself who at once embraced aspects of postmodern theory whilst remaining critical of its often ambiguous political stance, was probably the single most significant aspect of Jamesons theory. At the same time, however, the precise nature of the relationship between postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon and late capitalism as a system was left somewhat under-theorised and, for myself at least, this has remained one of the most troubling aspects of Jamesons theory of postmodernity. That is to say, Jamesons notion of postmodernism as a cultural dominant, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Very briefly there are three broad uses of the term, postmodernism or postmodernity, to have emerged in the 1980s: firstly, as a cultural category, deriving mainly from debates in architecture but also applicable to the other arts and literature. In this sense postmodernism is defined in relation to modernism and specifically the high modernism of the inter- war years. The second sense concerns the notion of epistemic or epochal transition has taken place. That is, Lyotards much heralded theory of the end of grand universalising narratives. This is also linked to the specifically cultural definition of postmodernism through the idea that the arts can no longer associated with a wider socio-historical project of human emancipation. The whole Enlightenment project, argued Lyotard, has come to an end, how can we still meaningfully speak of human progress and the rational control of the life world after Auschwitz and Stalins gulags. This seems to me to be a particularly spurious argument but perhaps we can return to it later. The third use of the term postmodernism has been to define, albeit rather imprecisely, some recent trends within French philosophy, particularly what have been called the new Philosophies. Again I remain rather unclear about what is imputedly postmodern here as many of the philosophical positions adopted are strikingly modernist in tone and substance. Jameson use of the term attempted to straddle or incorporate these debates within a more totalizing theory of postmodernity. That is, Jameson takes postmodernism to be a periodising concept, it is neither a narrowly cultural category designating specific features which distinguish postmodernism from modernism proper; nor a global category designating a new epoch and radical break with the past; rather, the term serves to `correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order. What has become known as late or multinational capitalism. I should, perhaps, point out that the problem for Marxists with the notion of postmodernism, particular in the second sense in which I defined it above, as a new economic and social order, is that at a stroke it abolishes Marxisms founding premise. That is to say, its historical emancipatory narrative. Marxism, along with psychoanalysis, is exemplary of the kind of grand narratives that postmodernism has, allegedly, delegitimated. The significance of the theory of late capitalism, as it was developed by the Ernest Mandel, therefore, cannot be understated in relation to Jamesons overall project. The theory of Late capitalism at once acknowledges a further development and restructuration of the capitalism on a global scale but does not posit a radical break with the past. Late capitalism, consumer society, the post-industrial society, what ever one wishes to call it, is still fundamentally the same economic system. There are two other important factors regarding late capitalism that will concern us later: firstly each successive expansion of the capitalist system entails a corresponding technological revolution. Secondly that changes in the social and economic spheres involve a change in the spatial paradigm. I will come back to both of these points below. Late or advanced capitalism therefore does not present us with a radically new system or life world; Baudrillards world of protean communication networks, simulacrum and hyperreality but rather a restructuration at higher levels of production of the same system. Postmodernism represents not so much a break with the past but a purer form of capitalism, a further intensification of the logic of capitalism, of commodification and reification. Indeed, argues Jameson, late capitalism marks the final colonisation of the last enclaves of resistance to commodification: the Third World, the Unconscious and the aesthetic. Unlike modernism, postmodernism does not attempt to refuse its status as a commodity, on the contrary it celebrates it. Postmodernism marks the final and complete incorporation of culture into the commodity system. Hence the slippage within Jamesons work between the two terms, postmodernism and late capitalism, as both come to signify the same object and to be equated with the totality itself. In Jamesons first extended attempt to specifically define the postmodern, he suggested, that postmodernism was characterised by a new experience of time and space. Our experience of temporality has been radically transformed and dislocated through the dual effects of the dissolution of the autonomous centred subject and the collapse of universal historical narratives. Drawing on Lacans work on schizophrenia and the Deleuzes notion of the nomadic or schizoid subject, Jameson argued that our sense of temporality was now radically disrupted and discontinuous. Without a coherent or unified sense of the subject it becomes increasingly difficult to speak of temporality in terms of memory, narrative and history. We are condemned to a perpetual present, the immediacy of seemingly random, unconnected signifiers. In short, Baudrillards world of simulacra and hyper-reality, a world without reference or fixed meaning. The positive side of this, if one can speak of it in such terms, is that individual isolated signifiers appear to become more real, shorn of any residual meaning they become more literal and material in their own right. We now experience moments of schizophrenic intensity rather than modernist duration, of aesthetic boredom and estrangement. The spatial corollary of this loss of temporality has been the pervasive flattening of space. Initially structuralism bracketed the referent and any notion of the referentiality of language, post-structural and postmodernist theory took this a step further and bracketed any sense of a signified. Words, signs, images no longer refer us to anything other than other words, signs, images in endless chains of signification. The Flu Epidemic F 1918 EssayBut one gets very little sense of how the one relates to the other. In terms of postmodern spatiality what Jameson wishes to emphasis is the alarming disjunction between the individuals perception of their own bodies and their immediate surroundings and the global environment that we now find ourselves within. Jameson finds this new spatiality particularly disorientating and suffocating, he writes, that postmodern space `involves the suppression of distance and the relentless saturation of any remaining voids and empty places, to the point where the postmodern body s now exposed to a perpetual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed. Postmodern spatiality is a realm of chaotic immediacy, in which our bodies are bereft of any spatial co-ordinates and are incapable of distantiation. Although, I would venture, that if Jameson paid more attention to the mediating role of institutional, local and n ational aspects of postmodernism he would find postmodern spatiality a little less bewildering. However, such concerns are ruled out, a priori, by Jamesons overly totalizing perspective, postmodern spatiality is, by definition, without mediation, I can elaborate on this later if anyone wishes. Quite simply, the problem with this is that it reinstates the position that Jameson and a number of other notable theorist were trying to get away from in the first place. The emphasis on spatial analysis in Jamesons work, and postmodernism generally, has emerged from a much wider debate within the social sciences and particularly from the work of Marxist geographers in the mid-70s. The new geographers challenged the privileged position accorded to temporality in social theory, insisting on the necessity of a more dynamic conception of space. Space had always been assigned a secondary position in relation to time; temporality is history, it is dynamic, the site of the dialectics, it is the potential for change and transformation, the historical possibility of revolution. Space, on the other hand, has always been seen as static and inert, space is simply given, a neutral category, an emptiness which is filled up with objects. The new geographers challenged the contemporary conceptions of space insisting that space is not given but produced. Socially produced space, spatiality, is not inert and static but is itself constitutive of social relations. Spatial relations and spatial processes are infact social relations taking a particular geographical form. Therefore, we cannot simply take space as a given but require what Henri Lefebvre called a unitary theory of space, a theory of space which brings together all its elements: physical space, mental space and social space. What Lefebvre calls the perceived, the conceived and the lived. For the postmodern and Marxist geographers spatiality is differential, conflictual and contradictory, the very antithesis of Jamesons conception of postmodern space. Whereas, originally the transformation of space was a constitutive feature of postmodernism by the late 80s it had become the constitutive feature of postmodernism. Modernism was seen as essentially temporal whereas postmodernism became spatial. Modernism was valorised as dynamic, the site of history, narrative and memory, in short, the potential for change. Postmodernism the site of pure immanence, immediacy, stasis and above all a disorientating and disempowering realm of space. Space is the place from which no meaningful politics can be conceived. Despite Jamesons ostensible intentions space he has once more become negatively defined in relation to time. In an interesting article on the politics of space and time, Doreen Massey has observed how Jamesons dichotomy of space and time is clearly linked to a second dichotomy, that of transcendence and immanence: temporality is ascribed transcendence and spatiality immanence. Faced with the horror of multiplicity of postmodern space Jameson can only vainly call in the wind for new forms of cognitive mapping. This is what I referred to a moment ago as Jamesons residual modernist sympathies, sympathies clearly indicated in the opening chapter of The Seeds of Time, `The Antinomies of Postmodernity with its echoes of Lukcs and the antinomies of bourgeois thought. Jameson comes out of an essenti ally literary and modernist tradition, his concern with spatiality has always been a concerned with what I called early conceived space. Jameson reads space as a text, and the semiotics of space its grammar and syntax. Jameson has no sense of space as either lived physical space or social space. Jamesons notion of cognitive mapping is founded upon a dialect of perception but it lacks any real sense of the physical and spatial practice that would follow from it. The flattening of space that Jameson identifies as characteristic of postmodernity is itself a symptom of his own theory which sees space simply in terms of representation. By ignoring what Lefebvre called the perceived and the lived Jameson has eradicated from space its differential, conflictual and above all contradictory character. Characteristics that we once more need to restore if any meaningful spatial politics are to be conceived. A reductionism at the level of theory rather than at the level of the experiential. Finally, therefore, I would suggest that what Jamesons theory lacks is any real sense of a spatio-temporal dialectic. That is to say, that modernism cannot simply be conceived in terms of a thematics of temporality any more than postmodernism can be conceived as completely spatial. I will conclude by suggesting a few ways in which this spatio-temporal dialectic can be thought of and perhaps offers a more theoretical satisfying position than Jamesons antinomies. In a recent article on modernity Peter Osborne has persuasively argued that what is unique about the temporality of modernity is its notion of contemporaneity. That is to say, modernity designates what is new, and what is new must be distinguished from even its most recent past, the modern will always be that which is new. In other words, modernity is a qualitative and not a chronological category. What interests me here is that the temporality of modernity can only be grasped as a dialectic of homogenisation (its contemporaneity) and differentiation (its distancing of itself from other historical epochs). Furthermore this dialectic can only be in relation to modernitys spatial relations; that is the geopolitics of modernity, the history of colonialism. Osborne writes: the concept of modernity was first universalized through the spatialization of its founding temporal difference, under colonialism; thereafter, the differential between itself and other times was reduced to a difference within a single temporal scale of progress, modernisation and development. As Althusser reminded us, different modes of production project different temporalities, the universalisation of the capitalist system could only take place through the eradication of distinct temporalities, that is to say the colonisation of all sites of pre-capitalist production. Now this in itself does not discredit Jamesons notion of postmodernism as the latest and purest form of capitalism. But it does begin to suggest a way of conceiving postmodernist temporality beyond the antinomy outlined above. Postmodernism does not represent a complete break with modernist temporality so much as an acceleration of this dialectic of homogenisation and differentiation, or what David Harvey has called time-space compression. 6 According to Harvey, `the history of capitalism has been characterised by the speed-up in the pace of life whilst simultaneously overcoming spatial barriers. What has happened with regard to postmodernism argues Harvey is that this speed-up has once more accelerated. That capitalism has embarked on one more fierce round `in the process of the annihilation of space through time that has always lain at the centre of capitalisms dynamic. But does not Harveys assertion that postmodernism is marked by an increased annihilation of space through time seem to be at odds with Jamesons assertion that space is now the experiential dominant? On the contrary, if space is increasingly eradicated through temporal acceleration then what spaces that remain become ever more important, ever more significant. `The superior command of space, writes Harvey, `becomes an even more important weapon in class-struggle. If this is the case, then one can begin to think of the ways in which political struggles now take place, as struggles over space. The recent emergence of road protesters as well as animal rights protests over the transportation of live stock are both essentially spatial conflicts. Questions of Third World development, famine and debt are also spatial in the sense that they concern the particular utilisation and control of space. I am not suggesting that all traditional forms of struggle be replaced by joining road protesters but I am suggesting, contrary to Jameson, that it is possible to envisage forms of political action within the postmodern spatial paradigm. Some of us may wish to link up these protests with more traditional or orthodox forms of political activity but we disregard them at our peril. We would also need to conceive of a form of spatial politics in terms of the way our urban environments construct and constrain our subjectivity and different forms of social life. The development of shopping centres may provide safe, although that is now seriously questionable, and clean environments to shop but they also privatise what may have previously been public space and our access to that space is now limited and policed. Furthermore, the steadily increasing privatisation of public means that there are fewer and fewer places to freely congregate in the centres of cities. In many cities, and Manchester does not appear to be one of them, the homeless in particular are being forced further and further out of sight and out of the commercial districts. I am not articulating a clearly thought out programme here, these are just a few of the areas though that I could conceive of a properly postmodern form of spatial politics emerging.