History, Politics, Theory: Biographies of the Postmodern

Simultaneously released by the same press, Verso, two new books on postmodernism reenact the intellectual drama of “late marxist” cultural analysis following the demise of marxism-inspired totalitarianisms in the late ‘80s. Fredric Jameson’s collection of essays originally published between 1983 and 1998 is one of them; accompanying it is Perry Anderson’s overview of Jameson’s own postmodern thought. I want to briefly present them together because, for one thing, they raise the same issues; for another, they struggle, as critical models, for legitimacy during a time that has queried the very principles underlying them. Also, Anderson’s book was meant to serve as an introduction to Jameson’s anthology. In fact, the latter opens with a short foreword by Anderson, while the initial introduction has grown into a full-fledged book on Jameson’s theory of the postmodern. Thus, The Cultural Turn and The Origins of Postmodernity make up a complex kind of history. This history contains an intellectual biography of Jameson as well as the biography of an idea, possibly the most influential idea in the literary and cultural studies of the late twentieth century. Appropriately enough, Anderson’s book begins with a survey of the pre-Jameson history—some would say, “pre-history”—of the term postmodernism and goes on to narrate the “cultural turn” taken, chiefly owing to Jameson’s momentous intervention, by the postmodern debate. But, of course, the trajectory of Jameson’s own thought constitutes the main focus here. And TheCultural Turn, to begin with, traces this itinerary closely, from the famous 1984 essay “Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” to be afterward retooled as Chapter 1 of Jameson’s widely read book on postmodernism (1991), to recent contributions on architecture, urbanism, culture and finance, the “end of history” controversy, and so forth.

There would be much to say about the evolution of Jameson’s criticism. Anderson does a good job, I think, of identifying the principal forces shaping it. But what I find particularly startling both in The Cultural Turn and in Anderson’s account of this “turn” is a certain relation of mutual inscription or representation between the critical subject, viz., Jameson, and his object, that is, postmodernism and postmodernity. Let me clarify this. The articles in The Cultural Turn work out a (“neo”? “late”? “post-“?) marxist model of reading and evaluating culture and history—postmodernism—during a transitional moment in world history that, according to Jameson’s critics, has wound up challenging his approach and assumptions. In other words, his historicization and overall critique of postmodernism as a “symptom” or “logic” of capitalism’s “late” stage have been disputed by history itself, which has chosen a spectacular course that has confused many. If the collapse of marxist regimes in Europe is of any relevance to marxism as a body of doctrine and contemporary history as a body of events whatsoever, then Anderson’s assessment of Jameson’s theory and, it goes without saying, this theory itself, call for some adjustment. And Jameson’s more recent essays included in The Cultural Turn do strike me as an attempt to recover from, and deal with, that “other” historical turn that has challenged his own historical and political paradigm.

Now, Terry Eagleton, Christopher Norris, and others have dismissed this sort of historical argument offhand without bothering to offer a coherent reply. Therefore, their critics have been delighted to note the paradoxical “ahistoricism” of “late marxism.” My point here is different, though. What if that “other” turn—the historical turn marked by the collapse of communism in the late ‘80s—is part and parcel of the same process as the rise of the transcultural/transnational “style” of postmodernism? Anderson is right, after all, to remind us that the origins of the term postmodernism do not lie in Jameson’s “depthless” society of the spectacle, to recall the title of Guy Debord...