Texas-(s)ized Postmodernism; Or, Capitalism without the Dialectic

Abstract

The programmatic erasure of the concept of capitalism by the state (here paradigmatically represented by the state of Texas) is allied with the waning of Fredric Jameson’s dialectical concept of postmodernism. “Postmodernism” as the critique of the cultural logic of late capitalism is no more, and capitalism, it would seem, is now to be thought without the dialectic. Indeed, the discourses of capitalism and postmodernism have mutated into discourses of the security state and technological innovation. “Postmodernism” was not, however, a panacea; rather, in a way analogous to the state of Texas’s prohibition of the term slavery (in addition to capitalism) in its history textbooks, the conceptualization of postmodernism failed to adequately consider gender and racialization under what Cedric Robinson called racial capitalism.