The postmodern tendency in literature and literary criticism has been characterized as a "breakthrough," a significant reversal of the dominant literary and sociocultural directions of the last two centuries. Literary critics such as Leslie Fiedler, Susan Sontag, George Steiner, Richard Poirier, and Ihab Hassan have written about this reversal, differing in their assessments of its implications but generally agreeing in their descriptions of what is taking place. What is taking place, these critics suggest, is the death of our traditional Western concept of art and literature, a concept which defined "high culture" as our most valuable repository of moral and spiritual wisdom. George Steiner draws attention to the disturbing implications of the fact that, in the Nazi regime, dedication to the highest "humanistic" interests was compatible with the acceptance of systematic murder.1 Sontag and Fiedler suggest that the entire artistic tradition of the West has been exposed as a kind of hyperrational imperialism akin to the aggression and lust for conquest of bourgeois capitalism. Not only have the older social, moral, and epistemological claims for art seemingly been discredited, but art has come to be seen as a form of complicity, another manifestation of the lies and hypocrisy through which the ruling class has maintained its power.
Critifiction: Postmodern Essays (SUNY Series In Postmodern Culture) (Suny Series, Postmodern Culture
The position of structuralism and poststructuralism, however, on the postmodern spectrum of attitudes is equivocal. On the one hand there is Derrida's influential invocation of "the joyful Nietzschean affirmation of the play of the world and the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs which has no truth, no origin, no nostalgic guilt, and is proffered for active interpretation."60 On the other hand, there is the insistence on the risk involved in the enterprise of doing without a truth and an origin as anchoring points outside the infinite play of linguistic differences. As Derrida puts it, "this affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as a loss of the center. And it plays the game without security."61 As he does often, Derrida here seems to be echoing Nietzsche, who stated that "the genuine philosopher . . . risks himself constantly. He plays the dangerous game."62 However, neither the joy nor the risk invoked by this view seems fully convincing. The joy of affirmation is a diluted joy, since it comes about as a consequence of the absence of any reality or meaning in life to which effort might be directed. And the element of risk in the "dangerous game" becomes minimal when (a) relativistic philosophy has eroded the concept of error, and (b) the culture of pluralism and publicity has endowed deviation and eccentricity with "charisma."
My own conclusion about the theory and practice of criticism is securely unoriginal: like all discourse, criticism obeys human imperatives, which continually redefine it. It is a function of language, power, and desire, of history and accident, of purpose and interest, of value. Above all, it is a function of belief, which reason articulates and consensus, or authority, both enables and constrains.34 (This statement itself expresses a reasoned belief.) If, then, as Kuhn claims, "competing schools, each of which constantly questions the very foundations of the others" reign in the humanities; if, as Victor Turner thinks, the "culture of any society at any moment is more like the debris, or 'fall out' of past ideological systems, rather than itself a system"; if also, as Jonathan Culler contends, "'interpretive conventions' . . . should be seen as part of . . . [a] boundless context"; again, if as Jeffrey Stout maintains, "theoretical terms should serve interests and purposes, not the other way around"; and if, as I submit, the principles of literary criticism are historical (that is, at once arbitrary, pragmatic, conventional, and contextual, in any case not axiomatic, apodictic, apophantic), then how can a generic conception of criticism limit critical pluralism or govern the endless deferrals of language, particularly in our indetermanent, our postmodern period?35
In a series of recent essays, Fredric Jameson has been developing his own conception of postmodernism. It is explicitly a period concept, and thus does not fall prey to the difficulties enumerated above. Jameson believes that postmodernism has become the cultural dominant for the entire social order; accordingly, its force is to be found as much in the economy, the cinema, philosophy, and architecture as in literature itself. Indeed, Jameson says that his own formulation of postmodernism initially took shape in response to the continuing debates concerning the nature of contemporary architecture.4 Since Jameson's use of the term is so distinctive among literary critics, it will be instructive to see if it proves more adequate to its appointed task.
At crucial points in these essays, after lengthy discussions of various cultural manifestations of what he terms postmodernism, Jameson alludes to its characteristic economic forms. His conception of economic postmodernism clearly derives from Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism. Mandel argues that Western capitalism has evolved through three distinct stages: market capitalism, monopoly capitalism, and since the 1940s, what Jameson calls multinational capitalism. This latest form simultaneously clarifies the logic of capitalism and, to an unprecedented degree, expands its reach, drawing the entire globe within its ambit. In his contribution to The Sixties without Apology, Jameson suggests that the upheavals of that period parallel the culminating moments of the transition from monopoly to multinational capitalism, a shift that was largely completed by the early seventies. The postmodern, or so Jameson argues, is the culture appropriate to this last phase of capitalism, just as realism and modernism, respectively, had been appropriate to its earlier forms (78).
As we have seen, Jameson coordinates an apparent preoccupation with space with the establishment of a genuinely multinational economic system. He recognizes, of course, that the economic system became increasingly international throughout the earlier period of monopoly capitalism, as previously isolated cultures were penetrated and opened as markets. Jameson believes, however, that the effects upon local cultures of these earlier penetrations were comparably benign and that they are now being dramatically transformed as the logic of multinational capitalism takes hold on a global scale. I am not in a position to judge the adequacy of such sweeping claims; I do question, however, some of the cultural consequences Jameson would derive from them. In particular, I question his claim that contemporary arts are uniquely concerned with locating the individual within some "postmodern hyperspace" (83). Jameson himself makes substantial use of Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City, which argues that the "alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves" (89). Such cities and the confusions to which they give rise predate postmodernism, but Jameson nowhere differentiates specifically postmodern forms. Similarly, since at least the early years of this century Western culture has been exploring the implications of an increasingly interconnected world; such explorations have taken various forms, such as the use of artist resources drawn from other cultures, and the depiction of travel through distant and disorienting lands. The culminating achievement of Jameson's most recent book, The Political Unconscious, is his reading of Conrad's Lord Jim, one of many exemplary works concerned with such issues. Neither experiences of spatial dislocation nor the existence of a multinational world, in other words, are unique to the last decade. The manifestations of both might have changed and become more pronounced, but Jameson would then have to demonstrate how differences in intensity have become differences in kind, such that one can speak of a distinctly postmodern disorientation. I suspect that Jameson's reliance upon Mandel's economic stages compels him to make claims for corresponding cultural transformations that he has not as yet adequately supported.
As we have seen, architecture holds a special place within Jameson's conception of postmodern culture. Not only is it the art primarily concerned with the spaces we inhabit; the recent debates within architecture have also informed Jameson's own formulations in important ways. Within architecture, the claims for postmodernism have developed in an especially clear way, and Jameson has largely appropriated these claims for more sweeping purposes. I believe that the reason postmodernism has emerged with special clarity within architecture has to do largely with the remarkable agreement within that field about the nature of modernism, the aesthetic it would replace. Architectural modernism consists largely of the so-called International Style. The increasingly strident reaction against the main tenets of this style is carried out in the name of postmodernism. The comparative uniformity of architectural modernism lends credibility to the claims of its new rivals that they constitute a genuinely postmodern alternative.
Jameson, in brief, errs in attempting to apply the debate within contemporary architectural circles to contemporary culture generally. What might be true of one art need not be true of others. In particular, a genuine postmodern alternative might be emerging within architecture; but we have less reason to believe that a corresponding phenomenon is occurring within literature, due to the different nature of what is called literary modernism. A rhetoric of postmodernism might be common to both fields, but in the latter it is misplaced, at most a sign of impatience. Since Jameson is attempting to develop a period concept that encompasses all of social life, he presumes that changes occur across a broad front and thus discounts the conditions specific to discrete cultural spheres. As a Marxist, Jameson knows that contending energies are likely to be operative at any particular time, and that resolutions among them achieved in one sphere need not have occurred elsewhere. Social life changes unevenly. In his work on postmodernism, however, Jameson's awareness of these facts remains theoretical; whenever he gets to actual cases, postmodernism seems to be progressing apace in every cultural sphere. 2ff7e9595c
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