Late Jameson, or, After the Eternity of the Present

Abstract

Fredric Jameson has long been described as the most important cultural critic writing today and the 'major theorist of postmodernity'. (1) This attribution of influence and status--most frequently voiced, to be sure, by critics who share Jameson's radical left outlook--can be traced to a number of reasons: Jameson's re-vitalisation of Marxism in American literary and cultural studies, his seminal contributions to critical theory, and a stylistic talent that transforms his writing into a rare dialectical performance. At the same time, much of this status hinges on what is no doubt Jameson's single most important theoretical intervention: the link between contemporary capitalism and the cultural logic of postmodernism. But if the concept of postmodernism--or, as a more explicitly periodising term, postmodernity--was always controversial to say the least, it seems to have lost most of its critical buzz, perhaps even much of its pertinence as a concept over the last decade. As one of postmodernism's better known advocates, Linda Hutcheon, dryly commented in 2002, 'Let's just say: it's over'. (2) Jameson himself acknowledged in A Singular Modernity in the same year that the humanities are currently characterised by the emergence and resurgence of various theories of the present, from the 'revival of the concept of modernity' to economic and cultural globalisation. (3) Amid this shift in academic discourses and the opening of new perspectives, Jameson's conception of postmodernism, dating in its canonical version from the very different political and cultural atmosphere of the mid-1980s, can easily seem dated and out of touch with today's theorising. In a recent review of Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson's magnum opus on utopia, Terry Eagleton chided Jameson, perhaps more vehemently than previously, for imagining the present as too static and stable, or even, for attempting to transcend 'time and space' itself: (4) For it's not as though there is a monolith called the present, which visions of the future must depressingly reflect. The present is a set of conflicting forces, some of which permit more hopeful projections than others. It is not, as Jameson sometimes seems to imply, a prison house which cuts us off from the future. On the contrary, an openness to the future is actually constitutive of the present, which points beyond itself by virtue of what it is. It is a horizon as much as a barrier. (5) Does Jameson, as Eagleton implies here, cling to a theorisation of the present that seems unnecessarily pessimistic and totalising almost exactly 25 years after its original conception? (6) Has he adapted to changes in political and theoretical discourse, and if so, in what ways? Finally, and following from these questions, what value does Jameson's most famous conceptual intervention have for us today? In a recent essay written for a symposium on the future of criticism, Jameson ventures to predict developments in theory. (7) Detecting a first moment in structuralism and a second in poststructuralism, both now past their peaks according to Jameson, he describes a third stage, that of politics, as presently 'new and imperfectly explored' and a fourth, prospective moment, 'as yet on the other side of the horizon', which will entail 'the theorizing of collective subjectivities'. (8) I would like to suggest that this description and forecast should not only be taken as a diagnosis of wider developments in theory but also of Jamesonian theory, of emergent strands in Jameson's own, recent thought. Like the third and fourth moment of politics and collective subjectivities that Jameson detects, this present essay should not be taken as the description of past achievements but of an incomplete and on-going emergence. The short-circuiting of established, even life-long themes in Jameson's thought with his most recent writing of the new millennium will thus allow for glimpses of fresh impulses in Jameson's critical project that have so far remained largely undetected and undertheorised in discussions of his work. …