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Postmodernism in Parallax Author(S): Hal Foster Reviewed Work(S): Source: October, Vol Postmodernism in Parallax Author(s): Hal Foster Reviewed work(s): Source: October, Vol. 63 (Winter, 1993), pp. 3-20 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778862 . Accessed: 08/10/2012 21:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October. http://www.jstor.org Postmodernismin Parallax* HAL FOSTER Whatever happened to postmodernism?The darling of journalism, it has become the Baby Jane of criticism.Not so long ago the opposite was the case; prominenttheorists on the leftsaw grand thingsin the term.For Jean-Frangois Lyotard postmodernismmarked an end to the masternarratives that had long made modernityseem synonymouswith progress (the march of reason, the accumulation of wealth,the advance of technology,the emancipation of work- ers, and so on), while for FredricJameson postmodernisminvited a new nar- rative,or rather a renewed Marxian critique that mightrelate differentstages of modern culture to differentmodes of capitalistproduction. For me as for many others,postmodernism signaled a need to break withan exhausted mod- ernism, the dominant model of which focused on the formal values of art to the neglectnot only of its historicaldeterminations but also of its transformative possibilities.Thus even withinthe left- especiallywithin the left- postmodern- ism was a disputed category.And yet, not so long ago, there was a time of a loose alliance, a sense of a common project,especially in opposition to rightist positions,which ranged fromold attackson modernismin toto(as the source of all evil in our hedonisticsociety) to new defenses of particularmodernisms that had become official,indeed traditional,the modernismsof the museum and the academy. For this last position postmodernismcould only be "the revenge of the philistines"(the happy phrase of Hilton Kramer), the vulgar kitschof media hucksters,lower classes, and inferiorpeoples, a new barbarism to be shunned, like multiculturalismtoday, at all costs. In part our postmodernism was a refusal of this reactionarycultural politic and an advocacy of practices both criticalof institutionalmodernism and suggestiveof alternativeforms, of new ways to practice culture and politics. And we did not lose. In a sense a worse thing happened: treatedas a fashion,postmodernism became demode. * This text was writtenfor a conferenceon postmodernismat the Universityof Washington in May 1992 convoked by Charles Altieri,whom I want to thank for the kind invitation.I also want to thank two friendsat Cornell, Mark Seltzer and GeoffreyWaite, for much sympatheticcriticism. OCTOBER 63, Winter1993. ? 1993 4 OCTOBER Of course, the categorywas not only emptied by the media; it was also critiqued withinthe left,often with good reason. Despite its announcementof the end of master narratives,the Lyotardian (or poststructuralist)version of postmodernismwas regarded as just the latestproper name of the West,a West now narcissisticallyobsessed with its own postcolonialdecline. So too, despite its attention to the capitalistdynamic of fragmentation,the Jamesonian (or Marxian) version of postmodernismwas considered too totalistic,not sensitive enough to differentdifferences. Finally, the art-criticalversion of postmodern- ism was seen to seal modernismin the veryformalist mold that we wanted to break. In the process the termbecame not only banal but incorrect. I too became suspicious of the term. And yet recentlymy attitude has shiftedin a way that I can now only express anecdotally.In April 1992 I spent a few days in Detroit, a cityoccupied three times by the army,wounded by white flight,damaged by Reagan-Bush neglect. There the white touristtends to travel from one cosmetic fortressto another. On one such trek my group stopped at Highland Park, the primarysite of the Ford Model T, the first factorywith an assembly line, the paradigm of Taylorist labor around the modern world. On cue our taxi, a Ford, broke down, and so we were stranded at this rusted plant, perhaps the most importantsite in twentieth-centuryin- dustry,now lost between a deindustrialcity core and a posturban residential ring,witness to the uneven developmentof our late-capitalistspace-times, in a purgatorybetween modern and postmodernworlds. There I again saw thatthe categoryof postmodernismmight still be used to thinksuch a strangechrono- tropic terrain,one not unique to Detroit,of fortressedcities armored against urban inhabitantsand industrialremains suspended in twilightzones. How does one map such a space, measure such a time? Such an anecdote mightlead one to the model of postmodernismdevel- oped byJameson over the last decade throughwhich he relatesdifferent stages of Western culture to differentmeans of capitalistproduction. To do so he adapts the long-wave theoryof economic cycles propounded by the Marxian economist Ernest Mandel, according to which the capitalistWest has passed through four fifty-yearperiods since the late eighteenth century (roughly twenty-fiveyears each of expansion and stagnation):the industrialrevolution (until the politicalcrises of 1848) marked by the spread of handcraftedsteam engines, followed by three furthertechnological epochs --the first(until the 1890s) marked by the spread of machined steam engines; the second (until World War II) marked by the spread of electricand combustionengines; and the third (our own) marked by the spread of machined electronicand nuclear systems.'Mandel relates these technologicaldevelopments to economic stages: 1. See Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism(1972), trans.Joris De Bres (London: Verso, 1978), and FredricJameson, Postmodernism,or The CulturalLogic of Late Capitalism(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Postmodernismin Parallax 5 from market capitalism to monopoly capitalism (around the last fin-de-siecle) to multinationalcapitalism (in our own millennialmoment). Jameson in turn relates these economic stages to artisticparadigms: the world view of realistart and literatureincited by the pragmatic individualismencouraged by market capitalism; the subjectivistabstraction of high-modernistart and literaturein response to the complexity,indeed the opacity,of bureaucraticlife under mo- nopoly capitalism;and the pasticheof postmodernistpractices (art, architecture, fiction,film, food, and fashion) as a symptomof the dispersed borders, the mixed spaces, of multinationalcapitalism. His model is hardlyas mechanical or deterministicas my precis: Jameson stressesthat this development is very un- even, that each period is a palimpsest of emergent and residual forms,that there is never a clean break fromone to the next. Nevertheless,his account has itscritics. I noted the charge thatit is too totalistic,that it sees the logic of capital as a great reaper that sweeps up everythingin its path. For my purposes it is too spatialistic,not sensitiveenough to the differentspeeds as well as the mixed spaces of postmodern society,to the deferred action as well as the incessant expansion of capitalistculture. I borrow the notion of deferred action (Nachtrdglichkeit)from Freud, for whom subjectivity,never set once and for all, is structuredin a series of antic- ipations and reconstructionsof events that are often traumaticin nature: we come to be who we are only in deferred action. I believe modernism and postmodernismare comprehended, if not constituted,in an analogous way, in deferredaction, as a continualprocess of anticipationand reconstruction.2Every epoch dreams the next, as Walter Benjamin once remarked,but by the same token it also (re)constructsthe one before it. There is no simple Now: every present is nonsynchronous,a mix of differenttimes.3 Thus there is never a 2. The classic discussion occurs in the Wolfmancase history,"From the Historyof an Infantile Neurosis" (1914/18). This slippage between "comprehended" and "constituted"is not only my vacillation;it operates in the veryconcept of deferredaction, where the traumaticscene is famously ambiguous: is it actual, fantasmatic,and/or analytically constructed? My application of this concept is a stretch.In a future text I will develop its possible uses for (post)moderniststudies (especially around questions of retrospectionand repetitionin the avant-garde)as well as its potentialabuses. For the time being, I can only assert that psychoanalysisis not restrictedto the individual subject, even as I can only admit that most applications to culturalhistory tend to psychologizeit. Even as I intend to complicate "development" with "deferred action," with the nonlinear and the never- complete, my extension of a concept regardingthe (re)constructionof the individual subject to the (re)constructionof a historical"subject" is fraughtwith dangers. For example, can I address the categoryof the subjecthistorically if mymodel of historypresupposes itslogic? Is thisa productively deconstructivedouble-bind or a paralyticallyparadoxical one? (For the persistenceof the logic of the subject in psychoanalysis,see Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen,The Freudian Subject,trans. Catherine Porter [Stanford:
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