Postmodern Temptations

Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities Volume 4 Issue 2 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities Article 9 January 1992 Postmodern Temptations Robert Post Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh Part of the History Commons, and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Robert Post, Postmodern Temptations, 4 Yale J.L. & Human. (1992). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol4/iss2/9 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities by an authorized editor of Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact . Post: Postmodern Temptations Book Reviews Postmodern Temptations Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism,or, The CulturalLogic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Pp. xxii, 438. $34.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper). Robert Post Pereat mundus, fiat philosophia,fiat philosophus,fiam! Fredric Jameson has long been among our most sophisticated and 3 2 influential cultural critics. Combining Marxism and structuralism, Jameson's persistent effort has been to locate and fix the social dimensions of structural cultural patterns. In his most recent book, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson applies this perspective to the important phenomenon of postmodern1. 243. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS (Francis Golflng trans., 1956) 2. FREDRIC JAMESON, MARXISM AND FORM: TWENTIETH-CENTURY DIALECTICAL THEORIES OF LITERATURE (1971); FREDRIC JAMESON, LATE MARXISM: ADORNO, OR, THE PERSISTENCE OF THE DIALECTIC (1990). 3. FREDRIC JAMESON, THE PRISON-HOUSE OF LANGUAGE: A CRITICAL ACCOUNT OF STRUCTURALISM AND RUSSIAN FORMALISM (1972). 4. FREDRIC JAMESON, THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS: NARRATIVE AS A SOCIALLY SYMBOLIC ACT (1981). Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 1992 1 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 4, Iss. 2 [1992], Art. 9 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 4: 391 ism. 5 The book ought to be required reading for the many legal academics who have greeted the advent of postmodernism with unrestrained enthusiasm. Jameson, through close attention to the actual cultural manifestations of postmodernism, tells a far darker tale. Postmodernism, Jameson tells us, expresses "an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that."6 The postmodern condition defines itself through its interrogation of the great movements of the past, especially of modernism. It is thus a particular way of organizing experience and most specifically of structuring time. In the postmodern moment the great upward march of history seems suddenly to have culminated and ceased. As Jameson explains, "[i]t is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place." 7 This loss of history, and its resulting "structure of feeling," 8 is the theme of Jameson's Postmodernism. His earlier influential essays on this subject compose the beginning of the book, which then goes on comprehensively and vigorously to explore the postmodern condition in contemporary architecture, video, painting, sculpture, photography, fiction, and cultural theory. Jameson's analyses of Paul de Man and Walter Benn Michaels, his readings of Robert Gober's "Untitled Installation" and the Frank Gehry House in Santa Monica, his assessments of the video work AlienNATION and Claude Simon's Les Corps conducteurs, to mention only a few, are deeply intelligent and, given the intrinsic difficulty of the terrain, surprisingly illuminating. Taken together, these encounters sustain a convincing portrait of the generic characteristics of postmodern sensibility. These characteristics may be conceptualized as concentric circles of deprivation. There is, first, the loss of time as a dimension of social meaning and the substitution of synchronic for diachronic forms of explanation. The dominant metaphors of postmodernism are spatial rather than temporal. They evoke systemic interrelationships, a "logic of difference or differentiation" 9 instead of narrative continuity. Jameson brilliantly illustrates the point through his analysis of contemporary videowork, which continually defeats the instinctive effort to attain interpretive clarity by confronting the viewer with "a constant stream, or 'total flow,' of multiple materials, each of which can be seen as something like a shorthand signal 5. FREDRIC JAMESON, POSTMODERNISM, OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM (1991) (hereinafter POSTMODERNISM). 6. Id. at 1. 7. Id. at ix. 8. Id. at xiv. 9. Id. at 342. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol4/iss2/9 2 Post: Postmodern Temptations 19921 Post for a distinct type of narrative or a specific narrative process. '' The viewer is thus forced to search for "synchronic" interconnections among a "ceaseless" barrage of images. Synchronic analysis, however, requires that experience be abstracted and flattened so as to fit into whatever system (or "discourse" or "code" or "structure") is deemed relevant. The result is a second loss, that of "depth," which is everywhere "replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces."" Exemplary is the replacement of the older language of the 'work'-the work of art, the masterwork ... by the rather different language of the 'text,' of texts and textuality-a language from which the achievement of organic or monumental form is strategically excluded. Everything can now be a text in that sense (daily life, the body, political representations), while objects that were formerly 'works' can now be reread as immense ensembles or systems of texts of various kinds, superimposed on each other by the way of the various intertextualities, successions of 2 fragments. 1 Even the past is deprived of its specifically historical character and transformed into that unidimensional collection of "visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts"' 3 which has become the signature of postmodern architecture and contemporary nostalgia films. This textualization of the world is made possible by yet a third loss, that of nature. Jameson writes that postmodernism corresponds to "the effacement of Nature,"' 4 which occurs because we have so dominated and reconstructed our human environment that the only reliable referents for reality have become those of our own culture. Jameson compares Van Gogh's "A Pair of Boots" to Andy Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes," and demonstrates how the tension between humanity and nature that sustains the former has entirely disappeared from the latter. He keenly observes the extent to which postmodern painting generally "reinvents the 'referent' in the form of ... collective cultural fantasies."' 5 While this etiolation of nature (...truncated)