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The Seeds of Time. By Fredric Jameson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. xviii + 214 pages.
The three chapters in this, Jameson's latest engagement with the postmodern, were originally delivered as lectures in the Wellek Library Lecture series at the University of California, Irvine, in 1991, but his style of writing betrays none of this oral context. Jameson's density of prose has always been the price to pay for his density of thought, and The Seeds of Time is no exception:
Getting rid of the old names, of all those abstractions that still reek of universalism or generality, cleaving with even greater determination to the empirical and the actual, stigmatizing the residual as philosophical in the bad sense, which is to say as sheer idealism, without thereby lapsing into a materialism equally occult and metaphysical--these are the postmodern watchwords, which were once a guide to a kind of Wittgensteinian witch-hunt in the name of the health and purity of the language, but now circulate through the economy as effortlessly as the deliveries at your corner supermarket. (6)
Would that the comprehension of this "reduction" and its "current hegemony" were as effortless. Alternately frustrating and stimulating, Jameson's cryptic telegraphic mode of relating complex ideas assumes an audience familiar with not only fifteen years of general debates about the postmodern but also his own position on the central issues.
This book is his extended meditation on one aspect of those debates: what he sees as the destruction of the utopian impulse in the postmodern challenges to both modernism and the "master narrative" of Marxism. The first essay, "The Antinomies of Postmodernity" traces the consequences of the re-emergence in postmodernity of "two large and crude sorting systems"--"Identity and Difference" (6). Antinomies are, by definition, non-dialectical; they turn "effortlessly" into one another in contemporary theory, Jameson argues, and therein lies their intellectual danger. For example, on the level of the temporal, Jameson outlines the paradox of unparalleled mutability and unparalleled standardization: everything changes constantly on all levels of social life and yet everything is the same. It is this kind of change/stasis antinomy that spells "paralysis of thought" for Jameson, as does, on the spatial level, the Difference/Identity antinomy configured as variety and heterogeneity, on the one hand,...