The Beauty of a Social Problem (e.g. unemployment)

Abstract

In his new book on volume one of Capital, Fredric Jameson remarks that in post-war 1950s and 1960s, Marx's idea that capitalism would eventually begin to polarize society into a and smaller group of capitalists and ever larger percentage of poor object of much mockery (Representing 71). Today, he points out, no one's laughing. And, in fact, laughter should, if we had been paying attention, have begun to fade as early as 1977 when (relative) income equality that had prevailed since end of war began turning into stunning rise in inequality that has prevailed ever since. In 1984, for example, when Jameson published, Postmodernism: Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, top 10% of wage-earners in US earned about 37% of all income (up from about 34% in 1977 and including gains); now figure is more like 50%. (1) So insofar as our interest is in periodizing (then) postmodernism, thing to note is that its consolidation into a more or less identifiable set of theoretical commitments and artistic practices is more a phenomenon of years since mid-'70s (economists sometimes call it period of Washington Consensus) than of ones before (which they sometimes call period of Treaty of Detroit). (2) And second is that if, with advantage of hindsight, we think about not only in relation to what Jameson in 1984 called multinational capital (Postmodernism 3) but, more specifically, in relation to rise in inequality that has accompanied what today we more usually call neoliberalism, we can perhaps say something useful about as a theory of knowledge, as a theory of ontology of work of art, and most obviously, as a theory of social organization And finally, useful thing I want to say is that essence of postmodern has been precisely its theorization of equality, by which I mean its disarticulation of difference from inequality and, more generally, from conflict and contradiction. Of course, there's an important sense in which a pre-77, post-77 distinction is arbitrary. On one hand, it's not insignificant that The Postmodern Condition was published in 1979 or that art critic Douglas Crimp first found it useful to employ term postmodernism (Crimp 108) in 1979 revision of his catalog essay to groundbreaking Pictures show of 1977 or that if you produce a Google ngram for postmodern, word doesn't really get off ground until 1978. On other hand, many of crucial practices, positions, and arguments--ranging from critique of author and autonomy of work of art to invention of human and fetishization of education as key to social justice (3)--were put into place in more immediate post-war period. My idea in insisting on late '70s, then, is not so much to establish a serious discontinuity between before and after (much less to invoke a kind of nostalgia for distinctive injustices of affluent society) as it is to suggest that only from standpoint of developments that became visible in late '70s can we see which of inventions of post-War period really mattered. And point of invoking rise of economic inequality (rather than, say, mainstreaming of affirmative action in 1978 (4) or quadrupling of number of creative writing programs between 1975 and 1984 (5) or rise of legal immigration from 385,000 in 1975 to 1,826,000 in 1991 (6)) is that it helps us to see what new positions and practices turned out to do. To put point as teleologically as possible, in helping us see what was for, it helps us see what was, and is. We can get at same phenomenon analytically rather than chronologically by starting not with economic data but with a relatively straight-forward and authoritative statement of postmodern aesthetics, in effect, an account of what Crimp and others meant when they started to use the term postmodernism. …