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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

re-considering postmodernism « Previous | |Next »
April 26, 2007

The term 'postmodernism' implies some rearrangement of features and some shift in presuppositions and procedures in the visual and verbal culture of the past thirty years. This turn has to do with modernism—with turning it, or turning it against itself, or turning away from it in some way. Many see this turning in a negative way, as a turning away from they---as modernists---hold most dear. In defending the sweet dream of rationality (universal reason) they forget the nightmare vision of the iron cage.

We can interpret Fredric Jameson's "intervention" in the "postmodern debate" as a way of avoiding what has been foreclosed by the phrase "po mo." Jameson effectively transformed what had been a number of diverse usages into a set of issues over which debate then became possible.

In The Origins of Postmodernity (1998) Perry Anderson had argued that Jameson enabled this by making five moves:
1) posing pomo as not a "mere aesthetic break or epistemological shift,"but nothing less than "the cultural logic of late capitalism";

2) an evocation of the new psychic Lebenswelt--the boredom, the "waning of affect"--concomitant with the achieved hegemony of consumerism;

3) a conspectus of the cultural surround embracing specialized discourses on pomo that had theretofore remained
discrete (literature, architecture, philosophy, science), and extending further to several in which it had not yet played much of a role (film and media, postcolonial studies);

4) a consideration of the social effects ("dedifferentiation," bourgeoisification of the proletariat and vice versa, "identity" politics displacing those of class) of the shift from production to service and information economies; and

5) "Jameson's final move a wholesale removal of the discussion from the plane of mere opinion and facilefor-and-against "debate" on which figures such as Habermas had left it: before Jameson, postmodernism was the stuff either of jeremiads or panegyrics; since, it has become a key to allmythologies, an ideology of ideologies, but also the theorization that newly enabled their comprehensive critique as well.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:10 PM |