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Reviewed by:
  • The Seeds of Time
  • David Powelstock
The Seeds of Time. Fredric Jameson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Pp. 214. $22.95.

The loose structure of this book’s three sections show us not only Jameson’s usual brilliance as a cultural exegete, but also the intellectual conflicts and structural categories that both drive and delimit his theoretical moves. The pathos of this situation—the simultaneous internalization of modern utopianism and postmodern conservatism—is invoked by the book’s Shakespearian [End Page 167] epigraph: “for who can look into the seeds of time / And say which grain will grow and which will not. . . .” 1 It is this opening-up of Jameson’s voice to the general problematics of living, and theorizing, in the contemporary West that will appeal beyond his usual readerships—Jameson devotees, marxists, and critics of the postmodern—to anyone in the humanities or social sciences who takes seriously the question of the intellectual’s relationship to culture.

Here as in general, the strikingly eclectic critical approach Jameson brings to bear on a variety of cultural phenomena (from science fiction to high postmodern architecture) embraces the three modes of interpretation that constitute modernity’s most substantial contributions to critical thought: the psychoanalytical, the structural, and the marxist. But he stops short of a synthesis of the three great modernist projects (which concern themselves variously with the subject, narrative, and ideology). He has justified his hesitation by appealing precisely to the cultural ideology of postmodernism, i.e., to the need “to grasp this discontinuity [between style and narrative in cultural artifacts] as an objective reality in culture, rather than a methodological inconsistency which might be solved by tinkering with the methods in question.” 2 Jameson seems to be in two places at once: he stands far enough above culture to observe its ideological paradoxes with dispassion; but when there is no significant theoretical advance to be made, it is because the theorist himself is locked within the system.

Jameson’s resistance to the unification of critical theory is nothing if not postmodern in his own sense, that is, in its anti-utopianism. The antinomy concerning utopia is the central one for Jameson, if only because it most explicitly pits human desire against history. Jameson observes that postmodern culture suppresses explicit thinking about an ideal world through a rhetoric that is itself implicitly utopian, that of the market. Utopian thought constitutes the positive pole of Jameson’s normative politics, while “ideology”—in the sense of false consciousness—occupies the negative. Here again, though, it seems Jameson is hedging in the direction of postmodernity’s demilitarized zone. He is merciless enough in his critique of the ideologies of late capitalism (by his own account implicitly utopian), but still remarkably hesitant about providing any positive content to fill his formal requirement of a utopian ideal. As the dialectic of history teaches, a critical negation of anti-utopianism (the negation of a negation) does not return us to utopia. On the contrary, this stance brings the critic perilously close to the postmodern nihilism he abhors. He avoids this trap only by his willingness to search out, albeit very cautiously, the “seeds” of a new future in contemporary cultural phenomena.

However, before he embarks on that project (in part 3), Jameson interposes a discussion which, as the author himself admits, “stands out like a sore thumb from these other, postmodern” ones (xvi). Here Jameson confronts “what has vanished from the postmodern scene,” through an analysis of the Soviet modernist Andrei Platonov’s 1928 novel Chevengur as an example of a “Second World literature” that inscribes the experience of utopian thinking excised from First World culture. The fact that the critic looks to a work of Second World modernist literature (does “modernist” mean the same thing in that context?) for what First World postmodern culture has lost is odd enough (did we ever have this?). In his essentially nonironic reading, Jameson appears unwilling to treat the ambivalences of Platonov’s often brutal story of the rise and fall of a peasant utopia as historically determined antinomies on the same level as those he finds in the postmodern West. 3 Instead, the novel’s...

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