NLR I/176, July–August 1989

FREDRIC JAMESON

M A R XISM AND
P O S TMODERN I S M

M
arxism and postmodernism: people often seem
to find this combination peculiar or paradoxical,
and somehow intensely unstable, so that some of
them are led to conclude that, in my own case,
having ‘become’ a postmodernist, I must have ceased to be a
Marxist in any meaningful (or in other words stereotypical)
sense. ＊ For the two terms (in full postmodernism) carry with
them a whole freight of pop nostalgia images, ‘Marxism’ perhaps
distilling itself into yellowing period photographs of Lenin and
the Soviet revolution, and ‘postmodernism’ quickly yielding a
vista of the gaudiest new hotels. The over-hasty unconscious then
rapidly assembles the image of a small, painstakingly reproduced
nostalgia restaurant—decorated with the old photographs, with
Soviet waiters sluggishly serving bad Russian food—hidden
away within some gleaming new pink and blue architectural ex-
travaganza. If I may indulge a personal note, it has happened to
me before to have been oddly and comically identified with an
object of study: a book I published years ago on structuralism
elicited letters, some of which addressed me as a ‘foremost’
spokesperson for structuralism, while the others appealed to me
as an ‘eminent’ critic and opponent of that movement. I was re-
ally neither of those things, but I have to conclude that I must
have been ‘neither’ in some relatively complicated and unusual
way that it seemed hard for people to grasp. As far as postmod-
ernism is concerned, and despite the trouble I took in my princi-
pal essay on the subject to explain how it was not possible intel-
lectually or politically simply to celebrate postmodernism or to
‘disavow’ it (to use a word to which I will return), avant-garde art
critics quickly identified me as a vulgar-Marxist hatchet man,
while some of the more simplehearted comrades concluded that,
following the example of so many illustrious predecessors, I had
finally gone off the deep end and become a ‘post-Marxist’ (which
is to say, a renegade and a turncoat).

I am therefore particularly grateful to Doug Kellner for his

thoughtful introductory demonstration of the ways in which this
new topic is not alien to my earlier work but rather a logical con-
sequence of it, something I want to rehearse again myself in terms
of the notion of a ‘mode of production’, to which my analysis of
postmodernism claims to make a contribution. It is first worth ob-
serving, however, that my version of all this—which obviously
(but perhaps I haven’t said so often enough) owes a great debt to
Baudrillard, as well as to the theorists to whom he is himself in-
debted (Marcuse, McLuhan, Henri Lefebvre, the situationists,
Sahlins, etc., etc.)—took form in a relatively complicated conjunc-
ture. It was not only the experience of new kinds of artistic pro-
duction (particularly in the architectural area) that roused me
from the canonical ‘dogmatic slumbers’: I will want to make the
point later on that as I use it, ‘postmodernism’ is not an exclu-
sively aesthetic or stylistic term. The conjuncture also offered the
occasion for resolving a long-standing malaise with traditional
economic schemas in the Marxist tradition, a discomfort felt by a
certain number of us not in the area of social class, whose ‘disap-
pearance’ only true ‘free-floating intellectuals’ could be capable of
entertaining, but in the area of the media, whose shock-wave im-
pact on Western Europe enabled the observer to take a little criti-
cal and perceptual distance from the gradual and seemingly natu-
ral mediatization of North American society in the 1960s.

Lenin on imperialism did not quite seem to equal Lenin and the
media, and it gradually seemed possible to take his lesson in a
different way. For he set the example of identifying a new stage
of capitalism that was not explicitly foreseen in Marx: the so-
called monopoly stage, or the moment of classical imperialism.
That could lead you to believe, either that the new mutation had
been named and formulated once and for all; or that one might be
authorized to invent yet another one under certain circumstances.
But Marxists were all the more unwilling to draw this second, an-
tithetical conclusion, because in the meantime the new mediatic
and informational social phenomena had been colonized (in our
absence) by the Right, in a series of influential studies in which
the first tentative Cold War notion of an ‘end of ideology’ finally
gave birth to the full-blown concept of a ‘post-industrial society’
itself. Ernest Mandel’s book Late Capitalism changed all that, and
for the first time theorized a third stage of capitalism from a us-
ably Marxian perspective.1 This is what made my own thoughts
on ‘postmodernism’ possible, which are therefore to be under-
stood as an attempt to theorize the specific logic of the cultural
production of that third stage, and not as yet another disembod-
ied culture critique or diagnosis of the spirit of the age.

It has not escaped anyone’s attention that my approach to post-

modernism is a totalizing one. The interesting question today is
then not why I adopt this perspective, but why so many people
are scandalized (or have learned to be scandalized) by it. In the
old days, abstraction was surely one of the strategic ways in
which phenomena, particularly historical phenomena, could be
estranged and defamiliarized; when one is immersed in the im-
mediate—the year-by-year experience of cultural and informa-
tional messages, of successive events, of urgent priorities—the
abrupt distance afforded by an abstract concept, a more global
characterization of the secret affinities between those apparently
autonomous and unrelated domains, and of the rhythms and hid-
den sequences of things we normally remember only in isolation
and one by one, is a unique resource, particularly since the his-
tory of the preceding few years is always what is least accessible
to us. Historical reconstruction, then, the positing of global char-
acterizations and hypotheses, the abstraction from the ‘blooming,
buzzing confusion’ of immediacy, was always a radical interven-
tion in the here-and-now and the promise of resistance to its blind
fatalities.

But one must acknowledge the representational problem, if only

to separate it out from the other motives at work in the ‘war on
totality’. If historical abstraction—the notion of a mode of produc-
tion, or of capitalism, fully as much as of postmodernism—is
something not given in immediate experience, then it is pertinent
to worry about the potential confusion of this concept with the
thing itself, and about the possibility of taking its abstract ‘repre-
sentation’ for reality, of ‘believing’ in the substantive existence of
abstract entities such as Society or class. Never mind that worry-
ing about other people’s errors generally turns out to mean wor-
rying about the errors of other intellectuals. In the long run there
is probably no way of marking a representation so securely as
representation that such optical illusions are permanently fore-
stalled, any more than there is a way to ensure the resistance of a
materialistic thought to idealistic recuperations, or to ward off the
reading of a deconstructive formulation in metaphysical terms.
Permanent revolution in intellectual life and culture means that
impossibility, and the necessity for a constant reinvention of pre-
cautions against what my tradition calls conceptual reification.
The extraordinary fortunes of the concept of postmodernism are
surely a case in point here, calculated to inspire those of us re-
sponsible for it with some misgivings: but what is needed is not
the drawing of the line and the confession of excess (‘dizzy with
success’, as Stalin once famously put it), but rather the renewal of
historical analysis itself, and the tireless reexamination and diag-
nosis of the political and ideological functionality of the concept,
the part it has suddenly come to play today in our imaginary res-
olutions of our real contradictions.

There is, however, a deeper paradox rehearsed by the periodizing

or totalizing abstraction which for the moment bears the name of
postmodernism. This lies in the seeming contradiction between
the attempt to unify a field and to posit the hidden identities that
course through it and the logic of the very impulses of this field,
which postmodernist theory itself openly characterizes as a logic
of difference or differentiation. If what is historically unique
about the postmodern is thus acknowledged as sheer heteronomy
and the emergence of random and unrelated subsystems of all
kinds, then, or so the argument runs, there has to be something
perverse about the effort to grasp it as a unified system in the first
place: the effort is, to say the least, strikingly inconsistent with the
spirit of postmodernism itself; perhaps, indeed, it can be un-
masked as an attempt to ‘master’ or to ‘dominate’ the postmod-
ern, to reduce and exclude its play of differences, and even to en-
force some new conceptual conformity over its pluralistic sub-
jects? Yet, leaving the gender of the verb out of it, we all do want
to ‘master’ history in whatever ways turn out to be possible: the
escape from the nightmare of history, the conquest by human be-
ings of control over the otherwise seemingly blind and natural
‘laws’ of socio-economic fatality, remains the irreplaceable will of
the Marxist heritage, whatever language it may be expressed in. It
can therefore not be expected to hold much attraction for people
uninterested in seizing control over their own destinies.
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