Once More, with Fredric Jameson

What might Fredric Jameson's 1989 volume, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, have to say to the rich, transdisciplinary body of work generated across the past two decades under the auspices of the so-called affective turn (Clough, 1)? A theoretical tour de force that dominated debates in critical and cultural theory for more than a decade after its publication (Anderson, 54), Postmodernism is not the most obvious place to turn in an effort to enrich contemporary understandings of the role of affect and emotion in shaping individual and collective life.¹ For many critics associated with "affect theory," in fact, the book has come to serve as scholarly shorthand for what, in turning toward feeling, contemporary critical and cultural theory is turning away from (Massumi 2002, 27; Berlant 2008, 7; Grossberg, 22; Pellegrini and Puar, 36).² And Postmodernism's ascendance to this status is far from accidental. It is not just that the book is the locus classicus of a late twentieth-century critical practice, postmodernism, that—alongside a host of other, related practices, from Marxism to psychoanalysis—stands accused by scholars of affect and emotion of eliding feeling (Leys, 436). Rather, it is that, while decidedly out of step with some of the theoretical and terminological verities of recent thinking about feeling, Postmodernism is also weirdly intent on engaging with feeling. There's the jaw-dropping anachronism of the book's announcement that the postmodern moment is characterized by "the waning of affect"—the waning, that is, of the very phenomenon that now animates so much contemporary analysis of feeling (10). And there's the eyebrow-raising idiosyncrasy of what follows in the wake of this announcement—namely, an account of postmodern cultures of feeling that cycles through terms like "intensity," "affect," "emotion," and "expression" in ways not readily reconciled with contemporary critical nomenclature (24, 23, 10, 23).

To say that Postmodernism's statements about feeling are at odds with recent scholarship on affect and emotion is not, of course, to say that what we might dub "feeling theory" names a unified critical corpus. Yet two powerful terms, "affect" and "emotion," have come to steer, if not entirely settle, the theoretical conflicts that continue to rock the field. Affect, of course, is the most prominent of the pair, naming a noninterpretative and nonsubjective organic order of feeling that, far more heavily mortgaged to Brian Massumi's Deleuze-and Spinoza-inspired work (1995) than to Sedgwick and Frank's initially galvanizing work on Silvan Tomkins, is at once "a-signifying," "not ownable or recognizable," and "irreducibly bodily and autonomic" (Massumi 2002, 41, 28, 28).³ Consistently set up over and against affect, meanwhile, is a far less critically prestigious and seemingly less critically interesting emotion. If affect is a prepersonal and asignifying phenomenon, then emotion, still under the sway of the "appraisal-based theories of emotion" that "have dominated research on emotion these last twenty years or more" (Frank and Wilson, 872), emerges as a subjective and interpretative phenomenon fully embedded in and wedded to existing social and cultural regimes of meaning.⁴ The validity of the distinction between affect and emotion, of course, remains hotly contested.⁵ Yet the terms of the distinction are well enough established that Postmodernism's own unusual handling of affect and emotion confirms its status as a hoary relic of a moment before the current coinage acquired its established critical tender.⁶ And in this respect, Jameson's recent offering, Antinomies of Realism, a radical reappraisal of the nineteenth-century realist novel, only bears out what we already knew. Hitching his organizing opposition, "story" and "scene," to models of "affect" and "emotion" that cleave very closely to those now presiding over feeling theory, Antinomies saw the renowned critic "jumping on the affect theory bandwagon" (Follett) in a gesture that many critics have taken as both an implicit recantation of the "waning of affect" theme that sounded throughout Postmodernism and an explicit endorsement of the terminological paradigms that now govern critical discussion of feeling.

Are Jameson's remarks on feeling in Postmodernism, then, merely historical curios with little or...