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  • Periodizing the Present
  • Lee Konstantinou (bio)
Jeffrey T. Nealon , Post-Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. 248 pp. $22.95.

According to Jeffrey T. Nealon's Post-Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism, postmodernism has changed its stripes. There has been an "intensification and mutation within postmodernism" since critics first articulated the concept (ix). It has "passed beyond a certain tipping point to become something recognizably different in its contours and workings," though "it's not something that's absolutely foreign to whatever it was before" (ix). In making these claims, Nealon joins many scholars who have struggled to describe the nature of these transformations. There's no critical consensus on what to call postmodernism's successor. Strong candidates include globalization, cosmodernism, metamodernism, altermodernism, digimodernism, performatism, postpositivist realism, the New Sincerity, or, for more lexically austere analysts, the contemporary. These terms refer to as many domains as postmodernism itself once did: to a new form of socioeconomic organization, a new kind of style, a new configuration of affects, and a new relationship of persons to the world, time, and experience. For his part, Nealon offers one of the most audacious statements yet on what follows postmodernism. But for all of his rhetorical confidence and wide range of reference, Nealon's provocative analysis is wanting, partly because he seems unsure of how our present moment differs [End Page 411] from the prior period, and partly because his analysis doesn't follow its own post-postmodern critical premises to their ultimate conclusion.

Nealon discusses a range of phenomena, from the mania for leveraged buyouts in the 1980s, to the spectacular, intensity-driven economy of Las Vegas, to the strange persistence of classic rock, to the corporate restructuring of the university, to the fate of theory, criticism, and literature today. As this list already suggests, Post-Postmodernism often reads more like a collection of essays than a unified monograph. Nonetheless, a larger argument emerges from these chapters. Nealon's ultimate ambition is legible in his choice of title, which summons Fredric Jameson's famous 1984 New Left Review essay, "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." Nealon's invocation of Jameson is revealing. In Jameson's title, the words at either end (postmodernism, late capitalism) point outside the university, away from Jameson's own social location, toward developments in the arts and transformations in capitalism. Jameson's intellectual contribution was to show how these two seemingly discrete domains needed to be linked together. In doing so, he captured an already well-established debate about postmodernism.1 By contrast, Nealon's title, Post-Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism, only incidentally points outward to a variety of social, cultural, and economic phenomena. Despite his insistence that his book "ha[s] little or nothing to do with academic professionalism or orthodoxy," the referent of Nealon's title is Jameson's essay (xii). His true subject becomes nothing less and, at times, nothing more than the future of the liberal arts. If one identifies postmodernism with theory, as Nealon does, then to be post-postmodern is to theorize at a moment when theory seems to have lost its luster and to write criticism at a moment when symptomatic reading has itself come under suspicion. For Nealon, the question is not whether to do theory but rather how to do it. Post-Postmodernism means to show us one way forward. [End Page 412]

Nealon might be right to proceed this way. Any successful account of what follows postmodernism needs to grapple with Jameson's formidable intervention. At a critical juncture devoted to synchronic sociocultural analysis, skeptical of metanarratives, dedicated to deconstructing binaries and myths of all shapes and sizes, Jameson insisted on the primacy of history. Jameson fixed disparate debates about identity, textuality, postindustrial society, artistic postmodernism, and poststructuralist thought into a totalized intellectual constellation under whose gleaming patterns many critics still do their work today. Whatever its faults, Jameson's analysis made subsequent references to postmodernism that did not mention its political or economic dimensions appear balefully incomplete. So Nealon is right to take stock of Jameson...

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