After Frederic Jameson: A Practical Critique of Pure Theory and Postmodernity

Abstract

A central contention of this book is that most contemporary academic critical theories help to legitimate the status quo by failing to differentiate between a progressive social history and a regressive cultural order. In Frederic Jameson’s case, we shall see, through a close reading of his The Logic of Postmodernism, that the central problem of radical academics is that they often discount the importance of social movements and social groups in order to hold onto a Marxist stress on economic class and theoretical totalization. Instead of recognizing the essential roles played by multiple minority postmodern groups in critiquing and transforming modernity, Jameson equates postmodernity with the dominance of global capitalism and mass marketed culture. Moreover, by simultaneously debasing critical ocial movements and universalizing contemporary aesthetics, he ends up following the “radical” academic tradition of rendering all concrete political action suspect. To reverse Jameson’s academic theory, I will use the notion of automodernity as a way of distinguishing between a critical mode of postmodern political action and the contemporary automodern backlash against the progressive movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.