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To take an attitude of partisanship towards key ranging practice of Marxist criticism. The salutary
struggles of the past does not mean either choosing gesture of Jameson’s 1984 programme essay was to
sides, or seeking to harmonise irreconcilable differ- displace merely celebratory or derogatory references
ences. In such extinct yet still virulent intellectual
to the ‘postmodern’, both of which failed to under-
conflicts, the fundamental contradiction is between
stand the structural causes of its prevalence. His
history itself and the conceptual apparatus which,
seeking to grasp its realities, only succeeds in repro- subsequent work has been a primary and productive
ducing their discord within itself in the form of an point of reference for discussions of our major peri-
enigma for thought, an aporia. It is to this aporia odising categories, pushing us to situate these as me-
that we must hold, which contains within its struc- diating terms between cultural and economic pro-
ture the crux of a history beyond which we have not duction. This work having been accomplished, how-
yet passed. ever, it is now unclear what will become of the cat-
Fredric Jameson egories of postmodernity and postmodernism them-
selves. Do they retain the conjunctural utility for
The term ‘postmodernism’ may no longer seem to
critical reflection upon the present that Jameson lent
tell us much about the present. In his 1996 preface to
them in the 1980s and early ’90s? Or are they now to
the third edition of his classic survey, Modern Archi-
be located within their limits, not as the names of
tecture Since 1900, William J.R. Curtis remarks that
historical and cultural situations extending into an
“‘postmodernism” proved to be a temporary and loc-
unknown future, but rather as designators of a by-
alised phenomenon, while the string of “isms” since
gone era – in the same manner as they putatively
then have continued in the usual way to distort his-
consigned modernity and modernism to the past?
tory for their own purposes.’1 Likewise, Peter Os-
And if the latter is the case, how are we to period-
borne has more recently remarked that, in the con-
ise the present? An uninviting answer to this last
text of art criticism, ‘the category of postmodern-
question involves a simple terminological redoub-
ism is now well and truly buried’, and, in a 2014 art-
ling of our posteriority to modernity and to mod-
icle in this journal, argues that ‘those, like [Fredric]
ernism. This is the manouevre of Jeffrey Nealon’s
Jameson, who took the road called postmodernism
2012 book, Post-Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic
have long since had to retrace their steps or accus-
of Just-In-Time Capitalism, in which he characterises
tom themselves to life in a historical and intellec-
twenty-first century culture and economics as an ‘in-
tual cul-de-sac.’2 From the morass of debates con-
tensification and mutation within postmodernism’
cerning the significance of ‘postmodernism’ during
correlated to just-in-time production.3 Nealon thus
the 1970s and ’80s, Jameson’s account of the cul-
positions the cultural logic of contemporary capital-
tural logic of late capitalism emerged as a frame-
ism both ‘within’ and beyond postmodernism, while
work capable of integrating the descriptive and ideo-
the terminological posteriority of the latter with re-
logical aspects of the periodising label within a wide-
spect to modernism is simply redoubled. The im-
plicit ambivalence attendant upon this redoubling logical shift in our reference to the cultural situation
(within yet beyond) is suggested as well by the title of of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century –
a 2007 collection, The Mourning After: Attending the but one that has major consequences for a historical
Wake of Postmodernism. Here we find N. Katherine materialist grasp of what is at stake in the wrench-
Hayles and Todd Gannon opening their contribution ing passage of the present through the crux of the
to the volume by declaring that ‘On or about August past’s intersection with the future. Thus, the point
1995, postmodernism died’, citing as the cause of of my suggestion is not to attempt a belated and op-
death a routinisation of informational complexity by portunistic ‘correction’ of a major thinker and critic;
Netscape, the first user-friendly internet browser.4 rather, it is to take up the generative contradictions
And it was in 1996, just five years after the publica- of Jameson’s work in order to pass through the dis-
tion of Jameson’s signal book, that landscape archi- crepancy between the conjuncture in which it was ar-
tect Tom Turner published City as Landscape: A Post- ticulated and our own.
Postmodern View of Design and Planning, in which
he suggests (from a very different perspective) that The Post and the Late
‘there are signs of post-postmodern life, in urban
design, architecture, and elsewhere’, by which he The symptomatic ambivalence of Jameson’s account
means an attitude that ‘seeks to temper reason with lies in the tension between the ‘post’ and the ‘late’
5
faith’. With this attitude in mind, Turner goes so far that it inscribes in the periodisation of ‘postmodern-
as to equate sensibilities he refers to indifferently as ism’ and ‘postmodernity’ as the cultural and histor-
‘post-Postmodern, or pre-Modern’. 6 ical logic of ‘late capitalism’. Interestingly, Jameson
‘Giving names to periods is difficult’, Turner ac- does not refer to ‘postmodernity’ at all in his 1984
knowledges. Nevertheless, to periodise the present essay, but he will tell us in Archaeologies of the Fu-
as post-postmodern is to surrender the project of ture that ‘the presumption of the existence of some-
historicising cultural production to the same im- thing like postmodernity was always based on the
pulses of ahistorical thought that Jameson’s account evidence of those thoroughgoing modifications of all
was meant to displace. To periodise the present levels of the system we call late capitalism.’7 Thus,
through the redoubled application of a prefix mark- while Jameson acknowledges that ‘for Marx mod-
ing it as after what was after what came before is ernity is simply capitalism itself’, he periodises late
not to think history, rupture or negation, but rather capitalism as posterior to modernity.8 That is, di-
to perpetuate a narrative of sequential succession verging from Marx’s identification of capitalism and
that reduces the past to a terminological prop for the modernity, Jameson wants to hold that capitalism
indeterminacy of the present. To recognise this is continues in the late twentieth and early twenty-
to recognise the same problem with the term ‘post- first century, but that it continues after – and en-
modern’ itself. Indeed, this problem was among the acts, through its ‘thoroughgoing modifications’ – the
motives for Jameson’s complex ground-clearing op- end of modernity. Indeed, Jameson will refer in his
eration, his effort to account for the symptomatic 1991 book to his ‘systematic comparison between the
sense of this term while retaining it through critical modern and the postmodern moments of capital.’9
transformation. Nevertheless, in what follows I will This putative disjunction between the end of mod-
offer a prescription for treating the contemporary ernity and the continuation of capitalism was always
impasse of periodisation by diagnosing the symp- central to Jameson’s intervention in debates about
tomatic ambivalence of Jameson’s own pivotal the- the category of the postmodern. Jameson’s deploy-
ory of the postmodern; an ambivalence that I think ment of the term ‘late capitalism’, drawn from Ern-
both occludes and implicitly indicates the way to- est Mandel, was meant to ‘mark its continuity with
ward a coherent understanding of the historical re- what preceded it rather than the break, rupture, and
lation between capitalism, modernity and modern- mutation that concepts like “postindustrial society”
ism. The remedy I will suggest is a minor termino- wished to underscore.’10 Against the ideological pre-
Here, the lateness of modernity during which speed culture of Italian futurism, Fiat industrialism
McCarthy writes is figured allegorically through the and its harvesting of rubber from Latin America, the
persistence of cultural exteriority and geological radical politics of the Italian movement of ’77 and
prehistory at the core of modernity itself. The his- the Red Brigades, and the New York art world of the
torical torque of uneven development, of the non- 1970s. We are immersed in the contradictions of real
identity of modernity to itself in its forward march, subsumption as we move from the technophilic, fas-
is displaced into the radical discrepancy between the cist aestheticisation of politics in the early twenti-
history of modernity and that of the earth. The eth century, to the development of ‘Fordist’ manu-
novel shows that the time in which it was composed facturing, to the fallout of its declining profitabil-
still bears this non-identity of modernity within it- ity and rising class conflict in the 1960s and ‘70s,
self, through the figuration of its outside as geolo- all the while shadowed by the abstractions and ca-
gical prehistory. The outside of modernity is thus reer moves of an art world that seems to double, dis-
limned as the void ground of what it is, ‘the abso- place and integrate both capitalist logics and anti-
lute rock’ prior to its venture, to its western move- capitalist energies. Kushner’s book is of particu-
ment. It is the persistence of this not-knowing from lar interest as a canny, implicit commentary on the
the mid nineteenth century into a lateness-not-yet- upsurge of radical political movements during the
after that haunts the imaginary of late modernity, as period of its composition, following the 2008 eco-
the spectre of its own exteriority.45 nomic crash and thus shadowing political move-
Despite his evocation of the ‘inverted millenari- ments after the crash of 1973. Thus we are drawn
anism’, the ‘sense of an ending’ proper to postmod- into a concatenated history of the twentieth cen-
ernism,46 it is difficult to make much sense of a novel tury and the persistence of its contradictions into
like Blood Meridian through Jameson’s characterisa- the twenty-first, absorbing and articulating the cul-
tion of postmodernism as a cultural dominant. His tural resonance of real subsumption from its futur-
pursuit of simulacra, leaning heavily upon Baudril- ist moment to its results in the inception of the long
lard, is oriented toward superficial depthlessness, downturn and the consequences of the latter in the
the waning of affect, the complexity of the global sys- present. We are invited to consider this as one tra-
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