Have you heard of this book, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism? As I start putting pen to paper on the dissertation, I find myself needing a deep reading of this iconic text. It grounds my notion of “futurity,” and since the diss is about character and time/place in sci-fi, I suppose I should be an adept on the Jamesonian views regarding the virtual distance sci-fi puts between reader and text, how the future is (and isn’t) imagined in the context of neoliberalism, and so on.

So I’m reading the introduction, the one he added in 1990, or rather I read it yesterday (slow and steady). Super valuable, of course, but I’m bothered by this preoccupation with modernism as such. Let me explain:

I understand that, especially in the west, modernism was all-consuming in terms of cultural production. Sure, there were some hold-out creators that were preoccupied with the 19th century and couldn’t move on in the spirit of a Miró or a Woolf, and sure there were also stirrings from the very beginning to push beyond the horizons of nascent modernist sensibilities in the form of both high art (one could argue that Dada was somewhat postmodern) and pop culture (film noir, proto-beatnik lit a la Nelson Algren supposing that counts..). Okay. Fine. I also get that this movement went on to colonize the non-west in myriad ways, for example, Cèsaire’s surrealism via his discovery of the movement and friendship with Andre Breton in Paris.

But I have two main categories of question which might be anachronistic, or at least contingent on the contemporary notion of the modernist past. The first regards modernism in its relationship to capital. Jameson points out that postmodernity works hand-in-hand with late capitalism, or in one way of putting it, post-industrial capitalism, with its emphasis on the service industry, entertainment, and financial products as drivers of value. over production of actual stuff, is a natural corollary to a cultural movement that is also, in some way, recursive rather than observant. What I mean is, postmodernism conflates the infrastructure with the superstructure, to use Althusserian terms, which I like because they make me feel comfortable and seen. The generation of value is, if not decoupled, at least further alienated from productive labor in the traditional sense. This is a gross oversimplification, but I think you see what I mean. Does this imply that modernism proper worked as a corollary to industrial capitalism, or even more bizarrely, that nascent capitalism and the Industrial Revolution interfaced in a similar manner with romanticism, naturalism, or impressionism? Obviously, I don’t have enough knowledge of pre-war culture to answer this or even meaningfully pose the question – still less am I prepared to articulate the question in 18th or 19th century terms, but it’s there.

The other set of questions has to do with what happens when one ventures out of the west, especially between the turn of the 20th century and WWII. I would argue that modernism finds itself imposed upon native forms of artistic expression in numerous and complex ways, supplanting popular forms of the short story, drama/performance, music, and representational arts over the course of the century. If we now find ourselves post-modern, then what does that say about the forms that creative production took outside of the west but concurrently with western modernism? In other words, does postmodernism deal with global neoliberal capitalism in its relation with cultural production and the logic of being-in-this-world on a global scale, or is it only meaningful for a certain hegemonic perspective, one where western modernism seems perfectly salient as shorthand for “creative production 1900-1941?”

But why, you might ask, is this relevant at all? In many ways it isn’t. I don’t know that any answer to the above would shake the foundations or even rattle the windows of Jameson’s astute analysis, which is indispensable in our current era for understanding the shift from the liberal paradigm of the US and Europe from WWII until 1973 to the reigns of Reagan and Thatcher which traded material advances for the working and middle class for the chimera of production for its own sake. I ask because, as an academic just starting to realize my own context, professionally speaking, I want to know how long I have to deal with modernism as neoliberalism becomes more and more a caricature of itself, as the ecological catastrophe and economic contradictions conspire to undo this era of postmodern logic that licenses post-industrial capitalism. What comes after postmodern, and does it need to tarry with the modern, or can we, can I, reframe the logic of the current epoch in other terms, like the anthropocene, in terms of genre, in geopolitical or identitarian terms?