Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative

3. Symptomologies and Intimations of the Global (1980s–1990s)

60 chapter 3 Symptomologies and Intimations of the Global (1980s–1990s) The same landmark volume, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983), that reprints Said’s essay also first publishes a work that signals a dramatic turn in Jameson’s intellectual program. Entitled “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” this short essay, originally presented in 1982 as a Whitney Museum Lecture, represents Jameson’s first explicit foray into issues and questions that he had touched on in passing for more than a decade previously but would only now come to the center of his attention.1 The labors begun here come to full fruition two years later in what is likely still his most well-known and influential essay, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” an essay that will then serve seven years hence as the first chapter of a book-length study of the same name.2 In his illuminating discussion of the context, origins, and subsequent adventures of Jameson’s theorizations of the postmodern, Perry Anderson notes that the 1984 essay “redrew the whole map of the postmodern at one stroke—a prodigious inaugural gesture that has commanded the field ever since.”3 In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Jameson investigates two features of an emergent postmodern culture: “pastiche and schizophrenia ,” characteristic of “the postmodernist experience of space and time respectively.”4 He finds the former exemplified by popular “nostalgia films”—Chinatown, American Graffiti, Star Wars, and Body Heat (a discussion that has its roots in an essay more than a decade earlier, “On Raymond Chandler”)5 —and the latter in the experimental work “China” by the Language Poet Bob Perelman. His concluding observations on Perelman’s text are especially interesting in that they offer some of the earliest clues as to what will become the original formal structure of Jameson’s 1991 book length study of postmodernism: In the present case, the represented object is not really China after all: what happened was that Perelman came across a book of photographs in a stationery store in Chinatown, a book whose captions and characters obviously remained dead letters (or should one say material signifiers?) to him. The sentences of the poem are his captions to those pictures . Their referents are other images, another text, and the “unity” of the poem is not in the text at all but outside it in the bound unity of an absent book.6 Similarly, I want to argue that the unity of Jameson’s own analysis of postmodernism will not reside in the text, but rather outside it, in the absent totality of the reigning global cultural condition. As a consequence , what disappears in the full Postmodernism study are the narrative rhythms that structured the two earlier texts we have already examined: even the “cancelled realisms” of The Political Unconscious are no longer evident in a work that moves from object to object and text to text with no immediately discernible narrative logic. We can read in the pastiche aesthetic of nostalgia films—which Jameson characterizes as “an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way”7 —the “schizophrenic fragmentation” of Perelman’s poem—“if we are unable to unify the past present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life”8 —and finally in the formal structure of Jameson’s Postmodernism book, powerful figurations of one of the central dilemmas of the postmodern condition: our inability to tell the stories that would enable us to position ourselves within and hence act in our new world. The political task of this phase of Jameson’s project will thus rest in the search for the forms of narrative, and hence an experience of history , that will aid us in moving beyond such a situation. The form of this book also reflects Jameson’s central contention that postmodernism is a cultural situation “increasingly dominated by space Symptomologies and Intimations of the Global ❘ 61 and spatial logic.”9 Indeed, while following the lead of the French social theorist Henri Lefebvre, and acknowledging that all social organizations are defined by distinctive productions of space, Jameson argues that “ours has been spatialized in a unique sense, such that space is for us an existential and cultural dominant, a thematized and foregrounded feature or structural principle standing in...