The passing of Fredric Jameson causes one to wonder who in cultural theory could possibly fill his shoes. Shoes were of course the subject of one of his most famous discussions of the difference between, on the one hand, the world that Martin Heidegger imagined Vincent Van Gogh imagined a bohemian peasant like himself inhabited and, on the other, the cultural logic of late capitalism, with its waning of affect and nostalgia for the present, which is to say, a moment of mediatized “time-space compression,” as David Harvey explained it, that does not leave the postmodern personality enough time, like the photographers Charles Marville or Eugène Atget, to register the extent to which the world around them has changed. Indeed, so much of the postmodern suggests the collapse of time and dialectics into spatialized arrangements that are the bleeding edge of capitalist transformation, as seen from the bunker buster bombs dropped on Gaza and the exploding pagers in Lebanon to the anti-immigrant media pranks of Republicans in Ohio and the use of TikTok influencers to sell hot sauce and cosmetics to teenagers.
Jameson noted the psychological and cultural impact of the breakdown of meaning in postmodern culture. He did not, as so many artists did after him, revel in postmodernism’s “resistance is futile” corporate and military-industrial sublime. This disappearance of the “house that Heidegger built” somewhere on a German hillside was not something that Jameson lamented, even as he argued that Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes – advertising analogues to Arman’s object portraits and Daniel Spoerri’s after-dinner snare sculptures – better captured the mediatized glass and mirror-covered world he lived in. No less aware of the brutality of this Ray Ban architecture than J.G. Ballard, or Joe Biden, Ballard’s creation, what made Jameson our literary critic was his sensitivity to the human condition, which implied his own sensitivity to the problems with capitalism and schizophrenia, which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari tried to playfully inhabit in an effort to escape the master code of Marxist alienation, leading the likes of Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Paul Virilio and Arthur Kroker, in valiant efforts to offer something even flatter than Édouard Manet’s Olympia, to chronicle the latest in supersonic reversals, scientific auto-colonization, engineered disappearance and excremental culture.
Very likely the biggest challenge to Jameson’s work came in the 1990s, when feminist scholars like Gillian Rose and Doreen Massey attacked the Marxist theorists of postmodernism as a boy’s club whose adherents felt threatened by postmodern decentring. This coincided with radical democratic attempts to shift the locus of anti-capitalist resistance away from the labour-capital contradiction and towards feminist and postcolonial struggles beyond the traditional left, adduced primarily to struggles over positions of power in academia. Chantal Mouffe’s call to academic agonism as a legitimate form of democratic contestation no doubt played its role in the cancel culture phenomenon that developed in the wake of Black Lives Matter and MeToo, with some attention belatedly given to the petty-bourgeois and middle-class character of this post-Marxist and now intersectional agenda.
Jameson’s effort to “dialectically” incorporate this race, gender and sexuality challenge, as noticed in his 2009 book, Valences of the Dialectic, was not unlike his sensitivity to cinema, literature or the built environment. He took it in but without conceding to dogma or empiricism, which is to say, by being attuned to its contradictions and by including psychoanalysis in his understanding of historical materialism. This effort to constantly give the dialectic a “new vocation” in the thinking of autonomous realities eschewed post-structuralism’s approach to unmediated binaries. With this, it was possible to consider how, for example, Leninism became Stalinism, or feminism became progressive neoliberalism and intersectional wokeism. It is not so much that things always go awry, or that nothing stands still, but that social change within the coordinates of capitalist totality produces problems that are dissimulated by culture and ideology. It is Marxism that allowed Jameson to resist the injunction to anti-dialectical thinking in today’s “new materialist” and “neo-positivist” academia, as with, for instance, discourse theories that ignore their own investments in power, such that, anything that might not coincide with those interests are perceived to be wrongly paranoid. One thinks of the Just Stop Oil activists who in late September 2024 souped two more of Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers without any consideration of the public’s indifference towards this t-shirt-branded tactic. Most of Jameson’s books are exercises in method rather than concept-poor but verbiage-rich exposés of activist agonism.
As I completed my undergraduate degree in history in 1991, I became immersed in the world of contemporary art and urbanism from the perspective of the debate between Marxists and postmodernists. This debate has hardly simmered in these days when for example critical theorist Fabio Vighi suggests to podcaster Douglas Lain that we should not territorialize left politics around labour.1 The fact that it is Marx and Engels who taught us this, and not Deleuze, somehow seems lost to the requirement to make it new. Jameson recommended that we historicize instead, a strategy that seems inoperative for those who are concerned primarily with empowerment, which is a desire that is readily instrumentalized by social media. In my own little corner of this contradiction, I had this to say in one comment I posted on the Christian Parenti episode of The Chris Hedges Report, which was titled “Wokeness Kills Class Politics and Empowers Empire”:
“With wokeism in the 2000s, no one is talking about Lead Belly and the 1930s, but regardless, the uses of the word have changed over time. The left is responding to the changed uses of the word, after OWS and the rise of BLM, for example, and many in fact were not aware of this simple use until around 2022, when that became the thing to say to defend wokeism. According to Parenti's article:
‘Woke ideology has six features: 1) It is a self-consciously left oppositional politics that seeks to transform society through the moralizing micropolitics of politicized etiquette, thus a fixation on the politics of language and symbols; cultural appropriation and misnaming are cardinal sins, and centering historically oppressed groups is essential. 2) It sees the world through reductive and essentialist identity politics that fixates on the categories of race, gender, indigeneity, sexual orientation, physical disability, mental health diagnoses, immigration status, and sometimes even socioeconomic status. 3) Woke discourse is imbued with a therapeutic mentality expressed in safety-obsessed incantations about harm, trauma, healing, care, and “doing the work.” This leads to an excessive focus on subjectivity, which itself becomes an unacknowledged methodological individualism that posits personal struggles as political struggles, and vice versa. 4) Wokeness has a deeply anti-intellectual concern with moral and political hygiene that constantly draws a distinction between the politically clean and unclean, friend and enemy, good and evil; certain people, places, books, ideas, and consumer products must be avoided. 5) Woke culture is often operationalized through a horizontal, vigilante methodology that seeks to censor offending utterances and personages by means of “calling out” via public denunciation, condemnation, and harassment, and by pressure on and appeals to employers, corporations, and state agencies to silence, fire, deplatform, and otherwise punish wrongdoers. Thus the woke worldview is bound up with censorious and authoritarian “cancel culture” and the social media ecology in which that form of activism is most often enacted. 6) Most important, woke politics eclipse and displace old-fashioned universalist class politics — the struggle over who produces wealth, how, and for whom. Woke discourse will make occasional reference to class struggle and political economy. But more often, woke lefties explicitly condemn class politics as racist, sexist, or reductive.’3
Comments: 1) Left oppositional may be a misnomer if you are talking about micropolitics because many in this discourse theoretical or post-structuralist sector reject left-right-centre distinctions that are macropolitical. One can nevertheless talk about a postmodern left. One characteristic of this post-left is its focus on power-resistance, and nihilistic power politics, which have little or nothing, depending on who you’re talking about, to do with the socialist left. This postmodern left has little interest in etiquette, in fact, and more interest in so-called activism, even if that is around language and symbols, and so on, according to social justice methodologies. 2) The postmodern left is not only concerned with historically victimized groups, and you could attribute aspects of far-right culture to postmodern anti-foundationalism. For example, white supremacists who fear they are being “replaced” express their grievance as though they too are victimized groups, this being the most improbable claim in the “oppression Olympics.” There are reactionary and fascist sources – as I argue in Too Black to Fail – to postmodern thinking that the postmodern left is oblivious to. 3) In Bernie Bros Gone Woke I comment that Catherine Liu’s notion of virtue hoarders (derived in part from Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Fear of Falling) should add vice signalling because the “extreme centre” (Tariq Ali) in the petty-bourgeois PMC is concerned, by definition, with status seeking and is a “mediocratic” class (Alain Deneault) that is willing to sacrifice its own professionalism and political ideals for the sake of empowerment. The talk about trauma and care is related to developing fields of research that are compatible with the neoliberal academy. However, in practice, these people who cancel others on the basis of flimsy differences are playing a class game that often does not apply to other middle-class people in their social circles, and they themselves do not consider their own hostilities and micro-aggressions to be problematic but instead justified, much like the U.S. military. The postmodern left has difficulty being obsessed with subjectivity because in anti-humanist and anti-normativity terms it thinks itself anti-bourgeois (it isn’t, it’s petty-bourgeois), and so it rejects individuality on the basis instead of “structural” categories like gender, race and sexuality. It justifies attacking individuals on the basis of group agendas, which is why people like John McWhorter and Helen Pluckrose created advocacy groups to help support those who are being unfairly cancelled in the workplace. The personal is political line belongs to a universalist second wave feminism that does not exist in third wave feminism, which is focused on difference, not the individual. Of course, in practice, these different waves can be confused in people’s minds. Fourth wave online feminism is intersectional and focused on diversity more than difference. Pluckrose and Lindsay refer to this as “applied postmodernism,” which is by and large an oxymoron. 4) The fourth point goes too far into anthropology categories. Others compare it to religion. One could also talk about trends and cool culture that are derived from postwar counterculture and activism, not to mention anarchist trends and moralizing. It is best to keep to a historical materialist analysis of wokeism and its class dimensions. 5) What Parenti describes here is correct except for the fact that wokesters also “do the work” through tacit and underground means that are not publicly stated. The reason is that they reject notions like human rights that are based on universality and the rule of law, which they reject as a naturalization and ideologization of specific interests, usually straight, while, male, European. When everything comes down to power, “all is permitted,” in this Nietzschean-Foucauldian way of thinking. This is why the woke are more interested in culture wars than in class wars – because they are in fact not leftists, as Salvoj Žižek said to Jordan Peterson about so-called cultural Marxists. 6) This last point is entirely correct except for the fact that intersectionality theory pretends to be concerned with class in the race, class, gender, sexuality formula. There are reasons why this does not work, especially when you get into the more postmodern versions of intersectionality, relationality and decoloniality.”
None of what is said here can be derived from the usual categories associated with postmodernism, and presented for instance by Ihab Hassan and re-presented by David Harvey in his book on the condition of postmodernity as the obverse to modernism: romanticism-Symbolism / paraphysics-Dadaism, form / anti-form, closed / open, purpose / play, design / chance, hierarchy / anarchy, mastery-logos / exhaustion-silence, art object-finished work / process-performance, distance / participation, creation-totalization / deconstruction-antithesis, presence / absence, centring / dispersal, boundary / intertext, semantics / rhetoric, metaphor / metonymy, depth / surface, signified / signifier, code / idiolect, symptom / desire, cause / effect, paranoia / schizophrenia, transcendence / immanence, and so forth. That Marxism continues to be the main contender to postmodernism, which, as we were admonished, is the cultural logic of late capitalism, made Jameson one of the towering cultural critics of the second fin de siècle that this time around was dominated by the culture of the decadent petty bourgeoisie.
Notes
1. Sublation Media with Douglas Lain, “Žižek and Emergency Capitalism,” YouTube (September 27, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gjeoxV6Owg.
2. The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel, “Wokeness Kills Class Politics and Empowers Empire (w/ Christian Parenti) | The Chris Hedges Report,” YouTube (September 25, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTpeQ4V-YeY&lc=UgyvTXORFs58eYel1Gp4AaABAg.A8orBnHYwnnA9-SwSmOu2R.
3. Christian Parenti, “The Cargo Cult of Woke,” Catalyst 8:1 (Spring 2024), 117-139.