Abstract
This essay attempts to define the limits of Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism, as reflected in his late writings, and to argue that Fredric Jameson effectively extends Williams’s theories into his own assessment of the condition of the postmodern. It will be necessary therefore, having indicated where their theoretical positions overlap, and having further tried to define what the postmodern means for Jameson, to indicate various ways in which they confront and engage with the problems of the postmodern, and begin to offer solutions to it. Finally, the essay looks beyond the present, to indicate what (for Jameson) seems to be the way to proceed ‘out’ of the postmodern in the future.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Raymond Williams, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), pp. 31–49;
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977; repr. 1989).
Terry Eagleton gives a typically robust critique of Williams’s position in ‘Base and Superstructure in Raymond Williams’, in Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, ed. Terry Eagleton (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 165–75.
Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), p. 48.
The problem of definition goes right back to the original formulations by Marx in the ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and Marx’s and Engels’ The German Ideology. For an example of Engels’ own attempt to ‘flex’ the model, see, for example, his letter to J. Bloch dated 21–22 September 1890, in Selected Correspondence (London; Law-rence and Wishart, [n.d.]).
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism [1972] (London: Verso, 1978).
Fredric Jameson, ‘The Ideology of the Text’, in The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971–1986, Volume I: Situations of Theory (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 17–71.
Mandel, Late Capitalism, chapter 4.
Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (1984), pp. 53–92 [hereafter, references are given within the text as ‘“Postmodernism”, page number’].
Mandel, p. 118, quoted Jameson, ‘Postmodernism’, pp. 77–8.
Ibid., p. 78. But note, however, the potential problems with this rather ‘Lukacsian’ model. See e.g. C. Barry Chabot, ‘The Problem of the Postmodern’, New Literary History, 20 (1988/89), pp. 1–20.
Doreen Massey, ‘Politics and Space/Time’, New Left Review, 196 (1992), pp. 65–84, 72.
For a view that this notion of time and history may itself be historical, see: Peter Osborne, ‘Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category’, New Left Review, 192 (1992), pp. 65–84.
Following Reinhart Koselleck, Osborne argues that ‘in the decades around 1800, “revolution”, “progress”, “development”, “crisis”, “Zeitgeist”, “epoch”, and “history” itself, all acquire temporal determinations never present before’ (p. 70).
Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), p. 17 (emphasis in original).
Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 115.
See also: Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–14.
Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 125.
Ibid., p. 125 (emphasis in original).
Ibid., p. 126 (emphasis added).
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 84.
Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Orders of Simulacra’, in Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), pp. 83–159.
Despite Baudrillard’s obvious relevance to the notion of ‘simulacra’, his work needs to be distinguished from that of Jameson and Williams, in particular with regard to this specific text, where he insists on replacing ‘mode of production’ with ‘code of production’.
Ibid., p. 94.
‘Postmodernism and Utopia: Interview with Fredric Jameson’, News from Nowhere, 9 (1991), pp. 6–17, 14.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, [1757] ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 1958; rev. edn. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 57–79.
Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Utopia’, p. 14.
See, for example, Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960).
Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. by Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989) [hereafter, references are given within the text as ‘POM, page number’].
Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1983; rev. 1988): ‘[Advertising is the myth of the commodity – commodity transformed into myth, into a fetish that parades, instead of hiding, its “arcane” features’ (p. 195, emphasis in original).
Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, New Left Review, 209 (1995), pp. 75–109, 92.
Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Utopia’, pp. 13–15.
For an extension of this view see: Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 317–38, 336.
Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 435.
Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, chapter 27.
The growth in publications dealing with the ‘Information Superhighway’, ‘Internet’, ‘Cyberspace’ etc. has been spectacular, and divides into two relatively distinct camps, akin to those taking sides on the postmodern (i.e. rapturous celebration or deep pessimism). For a reasonably balanced summary of current debate, see: Julian Stallabrass, ‘Empowering Technology: The Exploration of Cyberspace’, New Left Review, 211 (1995), pp. 3–32.
Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, p. 29.
Ibid., p. 34.
I would argue that this is a continuing feature of Jameson’s work, right through to his The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), where he at once anguishes at the skill of late capital in offering ‘simulacra’ of apparently localized new building projects, while at the same time he writes with some enthusiasm about one specific example of such development, known as ‘critical regionalism’.
Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chi-cago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 347–57, 353.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [1981] (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 285.
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 404.
Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 288.
Ibid., p. 291 (emphasis in original).
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of History’, VII, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 258.
Jameson uses this as the epigraph to his final chapter in The Political Unconscious’, and compare with: ‘the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror’ (Jameson, ‘Postmodernism’, p. 57).
Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Utopia’, p. 15.
Ibid., pp. 15–16.
Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, p. 22.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kavanagh, K. (1997). Against the New Conformists: Williams, Jameson and the Challenge of Postmodernity. In: Wallace, J., Jones, R., Nield, S. (eds) Raymond Williams Now. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373464_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373464_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39346-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37346-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)