20.05.1999

Exposing the fault lines

Philip Bounds reviews 'The origins of postmodernity' by Perry Anderson (Verso 1998, pp143, £11) and 'The cultural turn: selected writings on the postmodern 1983-1998' by Frederic Jameson (Verso 1998, pp206, £11)

The belief that western culture has now entered a ‘postmodern’ phase has been central to academic work for over 20 years. It is generally regarded as a byword for political pessimism. Many of the leading theorists of post-modernity, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard in France, are disillusioned ex-Marxists who have used their work on contemporary culture to pronounce the death rites on the political hopes of their youth.

But others have taken a more sanguine view. Most observers would agree that the leading figure in postmodern studies is the American critic, Frederic Jameson, who remains a committed Marxist. One of the symptoms of his growing influence is the recent publication of The cultural turn and The origins of post-modernity, which should henceforth serve as the starting points for anyone interested in his work. The first book is a collection of papers, each of them building on the panoramic insights contained in Jameson’s early essay, Post modernism - the cultural logic of late capitalism (1984).

The second, written by a former editor of New Left Review, is a brief history of postmodern studies which aims to relate Jameson’s work to the wider tradition of ‘western Marxism’.

The great virtue of Anderson’s book is that he neatly subsumes Jameson’s highly digressive work under five headings. In the first place, he argues, Jameson is important because he has theorised post- modernity as the cultural expression of what he chooses to call “late capitalism” (the phrase is borrowed from Ernest Mandel). There is no systematic description of late capitalism in Jameson’s work, but its outline is clear enough. Its central characteristic is a global structure more far-reaching than any which existed in the past, even during the age of high imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century. Driven by the needs of multinational corporations and a deregulated financial sector, late capitalism has created a “world system”. The relationship between the global and the local is mediated by electronic media whose chief effect is to reduce everyday life to a confusing blur of rapidly changing images. The ensuing sense of radical impermanence is reinforced by the structure of modern consumerism, with its emphasis on planned obsolescence and market segmentation.

But what precisely are the cultural changes which this new form of capitalism has helped to create? At the heart of Jameson’s work - here we come to Anderson’s second heading - are a series of lugubrious reflections on the nature of everyday consciousness. The impression they convey is of a populace thrown into confusion by the haemorrhaging of its emotional capacities and by a transformed relationship to both space and time.

Jameson’s starting point is what he regards as the extreme superficiality of modern experience. In a society dominated by the manic rhythms of consumerism and the media, most of us direct our attention only towards the surfaces of the external world. Yet because real emotion is fundamentally “cognitive” in its origins, arising from genuine knowledge of what people and things are actually like, it follows that the characteristic postmodern attitude is one of extreme indifference to everything that exists. Insofar as consumer society also puts a premium on “intense” states of feeling, this should be seen less as a sign of emotional health than as a hysterical act of overcompensation. Jameson describes the continuous alternation between emotional extremes as a symptom of mass schizophrenia.

The same air of gloom pervades his remarks on perceptions of time and space. Whereas early bourgeois culture, with its roots in the industrial and French revolutions, was predicated on the expectation of continuous social change, Jameson contends that postmodern culture inhabits a “permanent present” in which a thoroughgoing challenge to the existing system is dismissed as impossible. The paradoxical source of this historical defeatism is the rapid rate of change in our everyday lives, which obliges us to take refuge in comforting fantasies of social stability. At the same time, however, postmodern culture has also succeeded in distorting our understanding of the past. The result is a society which seems instinctively to believe that history embodies a process of decline from some remote period of social harmony.

Pessimism about historical change also explains Jameson’s conviction that postmodern societies are oriented more towards space than towards time. The nub of his argument, elaborated in a famous passage on the architecture of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, is that globalisation has made it impossible to fix an accurate picture of the spaces in which capitalism now operates. When we gaze out at a system which has slowly expanded across six continents, our only impression is one of unyielding complexity. Jameson’s rather startling assumption is that disorientation at the global level has compromised our ability to deal with space at the local level. Instead of moving easily through a world whose “spatial coordinates” are familiar, we find instead that we are uncertain of our surroundings and stunted in our movements. Space has given way to “hyperspace”.

The third aspect of Jameson’s work which Anderson singles out is the arts. In a virtuoso display of compressed paraphrasing (pp57-62), he identifies the principles that underscore Jameson’s account of contemporary architecture, cinema and literature. The most important of these is the assumption that the distinction between “high” and “popular” culture is now being progressively eroded. Not only is ours a society in which people are nervous of saying that John Keats is better than Bob Dylan; it is also one in which hitherto elite forms are regularly enjoyed by a vast public. Although this has, on the one hand, led to a measure of reconciliation between artists and the wider market system, it has also dealt a fatal blow to most of the forms of cultural elitism which have traditionally been used to justify inequality.

The explanation for this sort of cultural levelling must be sought in the fourth aspect of Jameson’s work, which Anderson broadly defines as the analysis of the “social bases” of postmodernity. The central argument here is that advanced capitalism has recently undergone a dramatic process of “plebeianisation”, characterised by the expansion of the working class, to the point where it constitutes a sort of immovable presence at the core of contemporary awareness.

At first sight, this idea might seem inconsistent with prevailing assumptions about post-war changes to the class structure. And it is certainly true, Jameson concedes, that it has largely been the middle class which has expanded to historically unprecedented proportions in the heartlands of late capitalism. But this is to miss the point. The novel factor in contemporary perceptions of class is that globalisation has dragged the third world proletariat into the frame of western consciousness, with the result that the effects of “embourgeoisement” at home are powerfully offset by those of rapid industrialisation in the developing countries. It is this, more than anything else, which accounts for our deep suspicion of the cultural hierarchies of the past.

The outline of Jameson’s theory should now be clear. The final aspect of his work, though praised for its originality by Anderson, has less to do with describing postmodernity than with specifying the correct attitude which the radical left should take towards it. Unlike the majority of his fellow theorists, whose pessimism has already been noted, Jameson believes that we should resist the temptation to simply denounce post-modern culture for its “complicity” with the existing order. Our goal instead should be to inhabit the postmodern sensibility as fully as possible, with a view to exposing its fault lines and identifying the forms of collective action which can bring about its demise.

In a valuable final chapter to The origins of postmodernity, Anderson examines some of the ways in which Jameson’s work has been contested and expanded by subsequent writers. Among his most important critics are British Marxists such as David Harvey (The condition of post modernity), Terry Eagleton (The illusions of postmodernism) and Alex Callinicos (Against postmodernism). Yet Jameson remains the starting point for a non-reductive Marxism which sees the analysis of contemporary culture as an integral part of revolutionary politics. Anderson has done us all a service by imposing a graspable structure on one of the most important theoretical interventions of the late 20th century.

Philip Bounds