Knowing What We Are Doing: Time, Form, and the Reading of Postmodernity

The fruit was gleaming and wet, hard-edged. There was a self-conscious quality about it.

—Don DeLillo, White Noise

In "The End of Temporality," an essay that condenses his much longer A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Fredric Jameson has recently described "the 'end of temporality' as a situation faced by postmodernity in general and to which its artists and subjects are obliged to respond in a variety of ways." The features of this "end" include the "shrinkage of existential time and the reduction to a present that hardly qualifies as such any longer, given the virtual effacement of that past and future that can alone define a present in the first place" (708). Jameson depicts a fervent cult of presentness derived from the nominalist tendencies of late capitalism's socioeconomic order and exacerbated by postmodern theories such as Deleuze and Guattari's ideal schizophrenia. This thin and flimsy present circumscribes our event horizon, facilitating a pornography of violence to which our postmodernity has grown immune.

In addition to updating in temporal terms the work he performed in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, where he correlates postmodernity and spatialization, Jameson's recent work also rehabilitates long-denounced concepts such as lived experience, the subject, and even humanism. Jameson, however, does not give experience carte blanche; for instance, he criticizes the phenomenological project—stretching from Bergson, through Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, up to Deleuze—for trusting in the transparent and immediate "plenitude" of corporeal and intellectual experience. What is new here, then, is that the inevitable mediation of experiential knowledge does not necessarily preclude the truth, legitimacy, or existence of experience as such. For Jameson, temporality and our lived experience of it ground this compromise between the ostensible immediacy of experience and the inescapable mediacy of representation. In other words, discursivity only precludes existence (of experience, subject, humanity, and so on) when time has been ontologically reduced to space, when we live only in the present and fail to embrace a fuller sense of time that includes the past and the future. Contrary to conventional treatments of postmodernism's turn to language, Jameson insists that "to position language at the center of things is also to foreground temporality, for whether one comes at it from the sentence or the speech act, from presence or the coeval, from comprehension or the transmission of signs and signals, temporality is not merely presupposed but becomes the ultimate object or ground of analysis" (706).

Using Don DeLillo's White Noise, the proliferation of critical responses to it, and several other cultural artifacts as examples, I contend that incorporating temporality as the nondiscursive grounding of linguistic and cultural difference can avoid the paradoxical and chiasmatic dead ends that mark much postmodern literature, scholarship on that literature, and cultural theory in general. Furthermore, I will argue that foregrounding the temporality of literary and cultural reference can fructify meaning beyond the postmodern impasse because it provides access to a formal production of meaning that resists conflation with its content.¹

The present Bush administration's 2002 national security strategy, equally hailed and decried for instituting the most radical shift in foreign policy since the United States' doctrine of Cold War containment, offers a timely example both of Jameson's cultural diagnosis and of how reducing temporality to presentness conflates time's form and content. The strategy's doctrine of preemption reduces a thick and complicated past and future to a present polluted with a politics in which an unknown future predicates both discourse and action in the present. On September 14, 2001, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., President Bush proclaimed, "Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Bush went on to say...