U.S. Intellectual History Blog

Postmodernism: The Sequel?

Dinosaur Comics, by Ryan North

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.

6 Thoughts on this Post

S-USIH Comment Policy

We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.

  1. Not a class-based, Marxist analysis as a leftist intellectual once would make.
    Isn’t Po-Mo the same old bourgeois subjectivism only marketed under a new label?
    It is a cultural symptom of the economic stagnation of a system that is failing.

  2. Andrew: Thanks for alerting me to this forum. I dip in and out of the Chronicle Review (even though I review new regular Chronicle stories every day), so I had missed this.

    Maybe it’s your enthusiasm above, but I really appreciate your underscoring Greif’s postmodernism1/2/3 thesis. That feels very useful to me—viewing it as a phased phenomenon, and emphasizing (of course!) its diversity and instability.

    Also, as a person who lived/survived/coped with “postmodernism” in graduate school—never really figuring out how to make it a part of my work, and never really deciding if I wanted to—I’m not going to lie that I like reading about it as a *closed* period.

    I do think that Perloff’s 9/11 thesis about it’s closure is right. I think that postmodernism/poststructuralism had been diminishing a bit before 9/11, but that event forced many thoughtful people into an existential decision about the usefulness of linguistic play (i.e. it had limits). That event also forced a reckoning with the baseline power of language as a needed and useful communicative tool, whatever its limits in the written or verbal medium. Also, relatedly, questions about political power (how to get it and keep it) had taken a back seat to fuzziness and instability. So I disagree with Perloff that few realized at the time of 9/11 that more concrete thinking was needed.

    I offer these comments without having read the forum. I will do so, now, over the next few days. – TL

  3. Thanks for this Andy, it’s great stuff, though I’m not sure I agree with the notion that postmodernism has pretty much evaporated, outside of reactionary permutations.
    For example, I wonder where you see Foucault in all this, as I think that he is the one post structuralist thinker that you did not mention on your list, but is still very useful.
    To some degree Foucault participated in the obfuscation of power structures, but he also helped explain how power can insinuate itself into so many nooks and crannies of the discourse and how we are still all misguided children of the enlightenment.
    It’s hard for me to imagine queer theory and contemporary analyses of gender, sexuality, and even race without Foucault.

    • I agree–he’s a big exception and I should have accounted for him in the post. To some extent, I think he has had the most divergent reception of any postructuralist theorist: he has been both absorbed relatively unproblematically into mainstream historiography, and yet also has become a figure of great contestation on the left, as people argue over his relationship to neoliberalism. Was he the earliest theorist of neoliberalism or somehow (also) symptomatic of it?

      I guess I tend to set him off to the side from postmodernism for these reasons: to me it seems like his place in the intellectual history of the last 50-60 years is closer to developments that span the whole period, rather than those explicitly related to postmodernism that are concentrated in, say, about 20 of those years. Does that make any sense? Maybe I’m off base.

      • I definitely see your point in applying him to broader trends, I just am not sure that we can untether those 20 years from broader trends. Foucault emerged as an ethnographer of truth regimes, in a time that truth was under attack. They make sense together and have left an indelible mark on the way we view the world, as far as I can tell.
        Don’t you think it’s a bit too self gratifying to characterize postmodernism as its most extreme outbursts and then tell ourselves that we are no longer under its foolish hold.
        I also can’t say that I agree with the three different archetypes of postmodernism noted above, but maybe my sense of postmodernism from where I came to it and understand it is different than those of the scholars in the Chronicle piece.
        Perhaps coming into it from a different vantage point as a student in a system far more influenced by the European academia is part of it.

  4. Eran,
    I do think that there were distinct experiences of postmodernism depending on where one was educated. I think that postmodernism was primarily experienced as a cultural practice in the US, with a rather shallower engagement with the epistemological challenges it presented. Or at least, most people in the US engaged with it that way, while a relative few actively absorbed the full import of its philosophical consequences and adjusted their work accordingly. I would say that this hard core of US-based poststructuralists (e.g., Gayatri Spivak, Joan Wallach Scott) had immense influence over a broad swath of US academics, but their mediations also formalized poststructuralism into more usable models of scholarship that others could more easily copy without necessarily engaging directly and consistently with the more evasive texts of, say, Derrida or Deleuze.

    Foucault, however, was different. I think his works were far more digestible for Americans; they required far less knowledge of Continental philosophy. To me, he was more like Gramsci, whose concept of hegemony had a somewhat parallel reception–it was a handy way to unpick some of the assumptions of mid-century Grand Theorizing, which seemed increasingly brittle as descriptions of power and its uses. But most of the people who picked up “hegemony” did not attempt to keep it embedded in a rigorous tradition of Marxist thought about class composition. Even some of his self-appointed interpreters (e.g. Lears) did not make that much of an effort to do so.

Comments are closed.