Postmodernism: The Sequel?

Last week, The Chronicle Review published a forum marking “the 35 years since Fredric Jameson’s New Left Review essay ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ — and the 40 years since the publication of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition.” The piece is paywalled, so I thought I’d briefly describe some of its contents for the USIH readership and then offer a few thoughts of my own.

The forum canvasses ten scholars’ reflections on the place of postmodernism in contemporary culture. Some are defensive, some are dismissive, some are analytical, some are perplexed. A few acknowledge the way that postmodernism has found a second life in the polemics of figures like Jordan Peterson and Glenn Beck, but most insist that almost no one actually regards it as a living artistic or intellectual position and—apart from those pseudo-intellectuals making money from denouncing it—no one wishes for its revival.

Marjorie Perloff stamps a time of death on it: “The turning point came, I believe, with 9/11, although no one realized it at the time.” Or, perhaps, that was when the mortal blow fell, but it is certain that by 2016 a new directness had wiped away postmodernism’s obliquity. The emphatic had obliterated the undecidable:

Indeed, in 2019 the pendulum seems to have swung as far away from “postmodernism” as possible. The sentence “Trump is a racist” is now regularly pronounced on CNN as if it were a simple fact, equivalent to “Trump is 6’3″.” The assumption is that racist means a specific thing and Trump is definitely that thing. Or again, when people today refer to “social justice,” a term postmodernism would have been reluctant to use, they see no need to define the term. No simulacrum here: We all know what social justice would and should look like.

Perloff reads this complete demolition of the attitudes of postmodernism as an indication that its only meaning today is as a period marker, “from around 1960 to 2000,” and she concludes from this that its eclipse revealed the “unsurpassed” superiority of modernism, at least in terms of artistic endeavor.

That simple non-dialectic—modernism-postmodernism-modernism—is what Mark Greif’s contribution calls into question. He agrees with Perloff’s assessment that postmodernism is now only of value as a historical term: it does not meaningfully describe any current intellectual position. But like Caesar did to Gaul, he divides postmodernism into three: postmodernism1 concerned the master narrative of art’s advance since the Renaissance; postmodernism2 was a world historical narrative about the fate of capitalism, socialism, and democracy; and postmodernism 3 was an argument mostly internal to the academy about the division of labor and the hierarchy of the “hard” sciences on the one hand, and theory on the other.

For Greif—and I find this an extremely illuminating insight—the energy that animated postmodernism as a multiform intellectual phenomenon came from the gap between postmodernism1 and postmodernism2. Culturally, postmodernism’s claims of progress grinding to a halt—of fiction, painting, and sculpture running out of new ideas—made quite a bit of sense: creative exhaustion was manifest in the literature and art actually being produced. But exhaustion only seemed like an accurate description of changes in the political economy, 70s malaise be damned. In fact, although Greif doesn’t dilate upon this point, it should be clear given the revisionist historical work of the past decade or so that the reputation of the 1970s as a decade of doldrums rather than a decade of transformation—as a period of reculer pour mieux sauter—was a major perceptual blockage preventing a more punctual and accurate reckoning with capitalism’s mutation in the 1980s and 1990s. The “post” of postmodernism was not, in fact, the “post” of postindustrialism. Modernism might have run out of gas, but industrialism merely moved “offshore.”

Postmodernism, then, flattened culture and political economy into a single narrative of termination, of a gradual depletion of originality and a laughable fizzling of revolutionary hopes. But hidden from view, its liveliness as an intellectual debate and path of inquiry derived from its very inaccuracy. Those critics who thought most keenly about the interface between culture and political economy—mostly Marxists: Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson—were by far the most creative and remain the most useful analysts of this period. Their commitment to probing the tender spot in society where narratives about cultural invention and proclamations about political economic progress overlap (or fail to) pointed the way forward for future scholars looking to escape the blind alleys of postmodernism.

The other contribution that I want to single out from the forum is by Moira Weigel. Weigel provides a wonderful mini-reading of Jameson’s 1984 “Postmodernism” essay (available here), but her main focus is on the way conspiracy theorist and professional paranoiacs have mined postmodernism’s own tendency toward and fascination with conspiracism, turning postmodernism’s opacity and indirectness into signs of its sinister inner workings. “[T]he claim [is] that a coalition of critical theorists, poststructuralists, multiculturalists, feminists, queer theorists, and African-American and other “studies” professors have successfully conspired to take over educational institutions, the media, and the U.S. government, and even to establish a new International World Order.” Often flying under the banner of “cultural Marxism,” this theory—Weigel points out—has migrated from Holocaust-denier conferences and terrorist manifestoes to White House memos and the opinion pages of The New York Times.”

The theory of cultural Marxism depends on a pulverization of distinctions internal to the academy—including important ones, such as that between graduate students trying to unionize and administrators relying on Trump appointees to quash those unions—assuming that, underneath it all, everything connects with everything. But some liberals, Weigel acknowledges, have blamed postmodernism itself for this manic tendency to connect rather than to distinguish. Wasn’t postmodernism all about the deconstruction of binaries and the promotion of relativism?

Weigel makes her own distinction here. Postmodern culture often did rely on what Jameson called the “technological sublime”—the sense of being overwhelmed by the superhumanity and superindividuality of technology’s power and scope (much as, for Romantics, Nature’s manifestations in storms or mountains could overwhelm the human individual). This sense is probably most familiar to us from films like The Matrix or even The Terminator, and it is by no means (I would add) a coincidence that The Matrix has been so essential to various paranoid movements on the right such as the men’s rights movement, where “the red pill” is a central motif.

Jameson, however, did not accede to being overwhelmed, Weigel argues. Instead, he pointed out how these cultural evocations of technologically-enabled conspiracies merely “went through the motions of revealing truth — the shadowy agency behind the global plot, the men in smoky rooms who had made everything happen.” (X-Files, anyone?) “[U]ltimately conspiracy theory preserved the invisibility that it thematizes,” Weigel concludes.

And this is where Jameson is different from Glenn Beck or Alex Jones or Jordan Peterson. Where they promise an inner truth, a vision of the plotters pulling the levers of power, their intention is to defer any actual engagement with the question of how power is in fact distributed.

The key difference is that [Jameson’s method] aims to demystify. The frantic activity of Glenn Beck at his chalkboard or Jordan Peterson tweeting about “cultural Marxists” does not ultimately enable the reader or viewer to recognize the forces that keep her in her place. Rather it exaggerates their incomprehensible sublimity. The Big Boss’s Boss stays offscreen—for the sequel.

Sequel is a key term here, and it reveals the insightfulness of Jameson’s critique. In 1984 (when Jameson’s essay was published), sequelization or franchising was emerging as a new model of cultural production, but it may not have been evident that it would become by far the dominant model, as it undoubtedly is today. Return of the Jedi had come out the year before, and The Search for Spock would be released in 1984 as the third episode of Star Trek’s cinematic run, and Temple of Doom’s success demonstrated the viability of an Indiana Jones franchise. The box office top ten demonstrates what an excellent inflection point 1984 was, in terms of the balance between original content creation and franchising. Eight of the top ten films were original—only Temple of Doom and Search for Spock excepted—but six of those eight kickstarted franchises (Beverly Hills Cop; Ghostbusters; Gremlins; Karate Kid; Police Academy) or produced a sequel (Romancing the Stone), and the other two (Footloose and Splash) have been recently or soon will be remade.

To return to Greif’s notion about postmodernism1 and postmodernism2—culture and political economy—we might see the sequel as a crucial point at which those two narratives or paths of analysis meet. The language of franchising—of “reboots” and “spin-offs”—has invaded both politics and the market, such that we see these domains of life as hopelessly uncreative. Each market “innovation” or “disruption” is quickly revealed to be a reinvention of something previously existing, only in a form that is less easily monetizable. In politics, we spend so much of our time arguing about whether old names (fascism or socialism) are accurate descriptors of current phenomena, or about whether a norm has been transgressed or if instead some new policy is just incrementally more cruel or authoritarian than policies already in place.

Yet in some way, our adjustment to the sequelization of both culture and political economy has opened up new avenues for personal and collective engagement—a phenomenon that Jameson and other analysts of the postmodern did not anticipate. Some of this engagement has been captiously reactionary, such as the complaints that the Star Wars franchise has sidelined white male heroes. But it is also easier, I think, to name and organize around oppression when it is so repetitive. That is true even when oppression crosses categories of difference—gender, race, religion, sexuality, nationality, etc. Although oppression is not everywhere the same, the family resemblances are strong enough for fellow victims to recognize themselves as kin. This may be cold comfort, but it is also, perhaps, a reason for hope.