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Postmodernity, Not Yet Toward a New Periodisation Nathan Brown Postmodernity, not yet Toward a new periodisation Nathan Brown 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- conficts, 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 refection 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-frst century culture and economics as an ‘in- tual cul-de-sac.’2 From the morass of debates con- tensifcation and mutation within postmodernism’ cerning the signifcance 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-frst century – a 2007 collection, The Mourning After: Attending the but one that has major consequences for a historical Wake of Postmodernism. Here we fnd 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 frst user-friendly internet browser.4 rather, it is to take up the generative contradictions And it was in 1996, just fve 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’ faith’.5 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 diffcult’, 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 modifcations of all 7 was meant to displace. To periodise the present levels of the system we call late capitalism.’ Thus, through the redoubled application of a prefx 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 8 not to think history, rupture or negation, but rather capitalism as posterior to modernity. That is, di- to perpetuate a narrative of sequential succession verging from Marx’s identifcation 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- frst century, but that it continues after – and en- modern’ itself. Indeed, this problem was among the acts, through its ‘thoroughgoing modifcations’– 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 9 sense of this term while retaining it through critical modern and the postmodern moments of capital.’ 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” 10 ism. The remedy I will suggest is a minor termino- wished to underscore.’ Against the ideological pre- 12 RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.01 sumption that ‘society’ had somehow moved beyond 1980s. My methodological model for this ‘exper- the contradictions of capitalism, Jameson wanted to iment’, however, would not be the vulgar sociolo- underscore the continuity of capitalism under trans- gical obfuscation of the continuing contradictions formed structural conditions – which transforma- of capitalist modernity, but rather Marx’s own iden- tion he thus emphasises by aligning the lateness of tifcation of modernity with capitalism. From this contemporary capitalism with a periodising break perspective, modernity would necessarily continue between the modern and the postmodern. Thus the throughout the history of capitalism, precisely as the terminological tension between the ‘late’ and the history of its contradictions – the history of what ‘post’ in Jameson’s account, the condition of being Marx called ‘the moving contradiction’ – while post- within capitalism but after modernity, constitutes an modernity could only mark a radically transformed effort to mark both continuity and rupture, against cultural and historical situation after capitalism had the notion that everything is different or that noth- well and truly ended. From this perspective, post- ing has changed. modernity is not a fait accompli but a state of af- Yet Jameson will also recommend, in A Singular fairs to be struggled toward; nor would the end of Modernity, ‘the experimental procedure of substitut- capitalism be something already achieved, as in the ing capitalism for modernity in all the contexts in ideological model Jameson attempted to counter, but which the latter appears.’ This, he tells us, is ‘a thera- rather a historical horizon. ‘The condition of post- peutic rather than a dogmatic recommendation, de- modernity’ would attend the end of capitalism, not signed to exclude old problems (and to produce new its late phase.
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