"Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" - Fredric Jameson

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I've just begun reading Fredric Jameson's masterpiece and was struck by this excerpt (page 4):

"As for the postmodern revolt against all that [i.e. modernism], however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism—no longer scandalize anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalized and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society.

What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.

Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage. Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.

It will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it. Later I will suggest that these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project.

Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror. "

Postmodernism is surely a liberal project. Jonathan Haidt (Moral Foundations Theory) has highlighted liberal blindness to the moral dimensions of sanctity, respect for due authority and sexual/social propriety. Pussy Riot are rightly postmodernist icons.

Jameson here nails the moral selectiveness of fashionable liberal opinion.

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Jameson is undeniably brilliant - his work suffused in the culture of Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School. I'm debating whether to get his later (2005) review, "Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions".

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"This is a brilliant study of utopia and science fiction, from Thomas More to Philip K. Dick, by the master literary critic. "Archaeologies of the Future", Jameson's most substantial work since "Postmodernism", investigates the development of the Utopian form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of Utopian thinking in a post-Communist age.

The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness...alien life and alien worlds...and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more."      [From the Amazon page].

"Postmodernism" by Christopher Butler (2002)

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Christopher Butler, who retired as Professor of English at Oxford University in 2008, is not a postmodernist. So this book is a classical liberal take on the whole sorry phenomenon. One thing he does not attempt is a sociological analysis as to how a doctrine so firmly anchored in total cultural relativism, philosophical idealism and textual reductionism became so culturally hegemonic (see here).

One thing that does become clear, however, is the extent to which postmodernism continues to provide the (rather shallow) foundations of the whole SJW movement and cultural-left politics in general.

Postmodernism's general silliness is most transparent when applied to natural sciences and mathematics, areas where commitment to the idea of a shared, depersonalised and asocial substrate is a precondition for practice.

From page 40.

"For example, Jean Baudrillard claims that in the Gulf War 'the space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple refractivity and the space of war has become definitively non-Euclidean'.

Sokal and Briernont comment on this that the concept of 'hyperspace' offered here simply 'does not exist in either mathematics or physics' and that it makes no sense to ask what a Euclidean space of war would be like, let alone to hypothesize the kind of space which Baudrillard has just 'invented' through his misunderstanding and misuse of scientific terminology. "

Baudrillard's text would have been unremarkable as a piece of metaphorical (and somewhat hyperbolic!) literary commentary, but he intended so much more.

And from page 41.

"For example, there is a much referred to article by the anthropologist Emily Martin on 'The Egg and the Sperm', which argues that 'the picture of egg and sperm drawn in popular as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology relies on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female'.

'The stereotypes imply not only that female biological processes are less worthy than their male counterparts but also that women are less worthy than men'. In such literature, it is asserted, we have a 'passive', 'coy damsel' female egg, versus the 'active', 'macho' male sperm, and it does indeed seem that some textbook accounts do employ this tendentious imagery.

But there is more to it than this. Patriarchal scientists are supposed by their postmodernist critics to have inevitably, given their subjective and politically contaminated presuppositions, got the science of this relationship wrong. For it is now believed that the (female) egg actively 'grabs the (male) sperm' (which has swum a long way before this happens).

But did male ideological presuppositions about male superiority and aggression as a matter of fact hold up or block the new view? Does it make sense, as an account of scientific activity, to say that any such presuppositions could have produced this particular hold up?

(This is not to deny that male preoccupations have indeed held up the proper investigation of female physiology.)

There are two issues here. One is the metaphorical resonance that various accounts of the egg and sperm have in relationship to gender stereotypes - for example, Scott Gilbert builds on this to write (vulgarly) about 'fertilisation as a kind of martial gang-rape' - 'the egg is a whore attracting the soldiers like a magnet', and so on.

But this resonance is in any case a gross exaggeration: no such phrases actually appear in the serious scientific literature on this subject.

All of this metaphorical interpretation, typical though it is of postmodernist concerns, seems to me relatively trivial and silly, and doesn't have far to go, because anyone who wanted to generalize either view of sperm and egg relations to justify or explain the nature of any larger-scale male-female interactions would surely be expressing a ludicrous essentialism - 'it's been like that from the sperm and egg on'.

This sort of thing rather misses the point about the potential for adjustment in male-female relations; but it also makes a much more damaging second implication about science - that there was a failure of objectivity here, and that the 'new' discovery corrected a masculinist bias in scientific work.

But, as Paul Gross shows, it is quite false to claim that male scientists had ignored the active role of the female egg until prodded into admitting it by feminists. It had been pointed out by Just in 1919 (also citing a paper of 1878) that the egg 'pulls in' or 'engulfs' the sperm. And this view was common, says Gross, in textbooks from 1920 onwards. "

I very much enjoyed this book, which repays close reading, but also despaired at the idiocy which walks amongst us.