Solid gold creativity

Benjamin Kunkel has written an elegant article about the Marxist theorist, Fredric Jameson, for The London Review of Books. Given the technicality of the concepts discussed – including those of Marxism (the dialectic, superstructure, and so on) and “that enlargement of literary criticism” which became “all-purpose theory” — it takes something to read the article.

Yet it takes something x 100 to read Jameson himself.  So in comparison Kunkel lets us off lightly.  The article is deft, often entertaining, and summarises, very sweetly, one of Jameson’s most enduring analyses: the phenomenon of postmodernism.

*****

I’ve mentioned before that I’m intrigued by postmodernism.  What it is, what it means, how it was that at some moment we all became postmodernist.  It’s this last that intrigues me most of all.  What was it that changed in our world, and when?

This makes me an historicist like Jameson himself — “Always historicise!” — and just as belated.  Not only because the historicising imperative is, as Kunkel points out, a “traditional” trait rather than a postmodernist one (meaning Jameson, and me, want to periodise that which spurns periodicity), but because terms such as “late capitalism” and “postmodernism” are themselves outdated.  As Kunkel says, invoking the term “late capitalism” suggests a chronic “immaturity”, while “postmodernism” raises only the “weariness it once served in part to describe.”

The features

What does Jameson mean by postmodernism precisely?  What are its features or “superficial textures”?  According to Kunkel, Jameson’s catalogue has never been bettered.  It includes:

the erosion of the distinction between high and pop culture

the reign of stylistic pastiche and miscellany

the dominance of the visual image and corresponding eclipse of the written work

a new depthlessness – “surrealism without the unconscious” – in the dream-like jumble of images

the strange alliance of a pervasive cultural nostalgia (as in the costume drama or historical novel) with a cultural amnesia serving to fragment “time into a series of perpetual presents.”

Which just about covers the situation, especially if we add in one other that Kunkel raises:

… the special difficulty critics and thinkers of recent generations have experienced in conveying their thoughts except through the medium of someone else’s; intellectuals today tend to offer their commentary on the world by way of comments on another’s commentary.

Antecedents

If this is the outline of the phenomenon, what about its origin?  The antecedents of what Kunkel calls this “great ensphering system,” if not its causes?

For Jameson, as a Marxist, it’s all about capitalism, specifically, what he calls “late capitalism.”   By “late” he simply means recent, Kunkel notes, not something about to be superseded.  Because, in fact, late capitalism, is the

… dawn, not the dusk, of a thoroughgoing capitalism”, a period in which “humankind had only now embarked, for the first time, on a universally capitalist history.”

And this dawn, this birth, of postmodernism, Jameson locates in the following phenomena:

• the postwar elimination of pre-capitalist agriculture in the Third World and the last residue of feudal social relations in Europe
• the full commodification of culture (no more Rilke and Yeats and their noble patrons)
• the infiltration of the old family-haunted unconscious by mass-disseminated images.

All this is good and just, and that “infiltration of the old family-haunted unconscious by mass-disseminated images” promptly re-haunts anon.  Yet, as Kunkel notes, the Belgian writer who preceded Jameson and inspired the term late capitalism, Ernest Mandel, had also cited many other, albeit smaller phenomena including:

• computerisation
• rise of the service industries
• accelerated turnover time for fixed capital
• replacement of the gold standard with floating currencies.

And Kunkel cites his own additions:

• mass introduction of women into the paid workforce
• expansion of advertisable space
• displacement of cash by credit cards and digital transactions.

For mine, I think the introduction of the Pill, the espionage of the Cold War and the nuclear bomb have also contributed to the peculiar texture of life in the last few decades, what Kunkel calls its “oddly becalmed quality.”

To conclude, the age we’re living in is a postmodern one, one that came progressively into existence between, say, 1945 and 1980 and one with the distinction of being, Jameson says, the age of the “totally man-made world.”

We have indeed secreted a human age out of ourselves as spiders secrete their webs: an immense, all-encompassing ceiling … which shuts down visibility on all sides even as it absorbs all the formerly natural elements in its habitat, transmuting them into its own man-made substance … we continue murmuring Kant’s old questions – What can I know?  What should I do?  What may I hope? – under a starry heaven no more responsive than a mirror or a spaceship, not understanding that they require the adjunct of an ugly and bureaucratic representational qualification: what can I know in this system?  What should I do in this world completely invented by me?  What can I hope for alone in an altogether human age?

*****

Images: Benjamin Kunkel (above); The starry night by Victor Passmore (1986-7) (bottom)