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Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. Verso: London and New York, 1998.
Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity. Verso: London and New York, 1998.
1.
Fredric Jameson's new volume offers itself as a compendium of his "key writings" on postmodernism; but let the buyer beware that it does not contain the famous "Postmodernism" essay published in New Left Review (1984) and reprinted as the opening chapter of Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Instead it opens with that essay's earliest, much shorter, first take, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"--the kernel that grew, at about three and a half times its original length, into the "landmark" essay.1 Presumably, the decision to reprint the earlier version was about marketing: publishers want to minimize overlap between competing products. But motivation aside, reprinting the earlier version has the effect of highlighting a little-noticed feature of Jameson's thinking about postmodernism since the big essay, namely that ever since its first appearance and astonishing impact, Jameson has been moderating its grandest claims, qualifying just what had excited its enthusiastic readers most.
2.
On the evidence, the enormous success of the 1984 essay was not altogether what Jameson had hoped for. Many read it as a manifesto on behalf of the "postmodern"--modernism was dead, long live postmodernism--despite Jameson's cautions in the essay itself against any such for-or-against reading. Granted, Jameson here and elsewhere in his '80s writing allowed himself considerable hope on the score of postmodernism, but even in the essay itself, the culminating theme of "the sublime" was inflected as much with terror as with hope. "The sublime" was "unrepresentable," and since we can't understand what we can't represent, the chronic Jamesonian burden of "Marxist hermeneutic" ("we are condemned to interpret at the same time that we feel an increasing repugnance to do so" [Jameson, Ideologies 6]) was for the nonce "relieved." Jameson seemed, at last, to have joined the clamor (from Susan Sontag to Deleuze and Guattari) "against interpretation"; and the aesthetes of jouissance delighted to hear him talking the talk of "delirium," "euphoria," and "intensity." This release involved others: like dominoes, all the direr Jamesonian themes seemed to be falling, as Hegelian "time" (History, temporality, the diachronic, narrativity) yielded to...