Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (review)

REVIEWS mined refusal ofintelligible content and its ceaseless formal experimentation. Few of Adorno's theses display his modernist biases quite so openly; such a dispensation would seem to exclude most aesthetic production since, say, Warhol. In an extended commentary on the problem ofnominalism and innovation in Adorno'sAesthetic Theory, Jameson labors mightily to vindicate the force of Adorno's categorical judgments and to demonstrate their flexibUity. Drawing heavily on musical examples, always a privileged source ofreflection for Adorno, Jameson shows how Adorno assimUates aU genuine art to the modernist problematic, and radicaUy extends the scope of the dialectic of aesthetic enlightenment. Looking closely at Adorno's assertion that art has a "transaesthetic vocation," Jameson insists that the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy is more compUcated than its critics have acknowledged and, in particular , more capable of addressing the status of poUtical art and cultural poUtics that figure so largely in contemporary debates. Illuminating as it is, LateMarxism is ultimately a frustrating book. While reminding us that Adorno is worth reading carefully, Jameson's own prose appears deliberately unworked, even rambling. Too many arguments remain hastily sketched, too many comparisons merely suggestive; Jameson would clearly rather be provocative than precise. His fondness for grandiose gestures ("MeanwhUe...") suffers by comparison withAdorno's lapidary concision. A constant fencing with postmodern antagonists, real and imagined, gives a certain polemical verve to Jameson's formulations but leaves him seeming edgy and defensive. Nowhere is this sense of demoralization more evident than in the book's conclusion: having delineated the dialectical rigors of Adorno's thought, Jameson recommends him to us as a form of moral tonic, "to restore the sense of something grim and impending within the poUuted sunshine of the shopping maU." Having mobilized a magisterial command of Marxian phUosophical tradition, he dismisses the reading of "Marxist classics" and vests his hopes in "young people whose temperaments and values are genuinely left ones and embrace visions of radical social change." Although understandable on historical and poUtical grounds, such sentiments emit an air of futUity quite different from Adorno's passionate pessimism. In the end, theybeUe the work Jameson himselfhas done in lettingAdorno's intransigent intelligence shed Ught on more contemporary controversies. Robert Eric Livingston University of Virginia FREDRIC JAMESON. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. xri + 438 pp. Fredric Jameson, now a professor ofcomparative Uterature at Duke, has been a leading interpreter of contemporary theory since the early seventies. He is probably best-known as a resourceful defender of historical thinking against its various post-structuralist chaUengers, as a West European Marxist who not only gave a new aUure to realism but who could also read modernists with relish—if not with the briUiance ofAdorno or Benjamin, then certainly without the guUty conscience of Sartre or Lukács. But lus work deserves the attention of comparatists for two other reasons as weU. Ranging beyond his French training to consider English, American, and Latin American topics, 152 THE COMPARATIST Jameson has developed into an resolutely international critic. He also has a deepening commitment to mterdisdplinary study, to a point where Uterature is just one feature on the cultural landscape, and not necessarily a major one. Both traits strongly mark this coUection of ten essays on postmodernism as a period concept. Four of the essays reprint work from the late eighties, whUe two others update weU-known programmatic pieces that appeared in 1984. Jameson's title is, of course, a Marxist thesis statement stressing the linkage between contemporary culture and recent economic history. Just as realism and modernism were the distinctive cultural modaUties of laissez-faire capitalism and imperialism, so postmodernism is the new dominant of our present multi-national economy. As pointed reminders ofchanging economic contexts for the arts, such assertions are undoubtedly useful; but in this book at least, Jameson does not deUver on the rigorous correlations between history and culture that he seems to promise. Indeed, his very title ends up losing much of its force due to ambivalences about the provocative term "late capitalism ." This historical label apparently goes back to Jameson's admiration for the Frankfurt School (xvüi), and for the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel...