Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions) Paperback – January 6, 1992

A thorough, yet occasionally vague study of postmodernism. Jameson's flowery, somewhat esoteric writing style should be wrestled with care, as your journey through this book will most likely be met with more dead ends and re-readings than an actual elucidation of the topic, as the words "Yeah, okay...but what does that mean?" will probably pop into your head from time to time. Of course, the author is a distunguished critic and writer, and the book reflects that. However, if your aim is to get a brief review or critique on what postmodern is, search elsewhere.

Great service and great book!!

Should you buy it -- go to paragraph 3 below. What follows is my commentary.

Jameson's Ideas are unabashedly Marxist, which is fine. Marx was an economist and made some prescient observations about capitalism. Whether Jameson's comments explain phenomena in visual culture can be a stretch, but it is methodology for criticism that works well enough, especially in the hands of thoughtful writers. I think Jameson is that, if at times too eager to stretch Marxism beyond its bounds. What is less forgivable is that Jameson continues the tradition common among cultural theorists of doing in ten pages what they could do just as well in one. In addition, he makes up words, terms, and phrases that attempt to draw 'just the right' distinctions and capture new ideas, but just add confusion, instead of just making the distinction and stating the idea. This practice is amusing since a working premise of a lot of postmodern theory is that language is intrinsically unreliable and imprecise. Of course Jameson tries to cure this by making more of it, rather than refining his use of it. It seems that Jameson, like his colleagues, thinks two spoons-full of bad medicine are better than one: More is better as an antidote to modernism's 'less is more'.

So, should you by it? If you must get the stuff from the horse's mouth and just want to read it, Yes. If you like things that are needless difficult to access -- yes. Better from him than from another windbag who will add his own 'critical distinctions', making your job longer, or worse, sending back to read Jameson. If you need it for a course, of course you should buy it. The rest of the world should avoid it-- unless you have a taste for intellectual root canal-- wonderful if needed but an acquired taste otherwise.

Postmodernism is not so much characterized by fragmentation--that was already a characteristic of Modernism, especially in Cubist painting and in poetry like T.S. Eliot's or Ezra Pound's--as by a hostility toward historical metanarratives,or "master narratives," as they are also dismissively called in order to evoke a colonialist slant. That Hegel and Marx, two of postmodernism's theoretical godfathers, were precisely that, i.e. creators of historical metanarratives, is generally quietly overlooked.

Fredric Jameson's book is not designed for the general reader as an introduction to postmodernism, but rather as an overview of postmodernism for the literate and intelligent reader who is already familiar with some of its basic tenets. It is very well written, and the comments from reviewers on this page regarding Jameson's unreadability are simply wrong. Jameson is lucid, clear and distinct. Descartes would have liked him.

Jameson points out that Postmodernism, by contrast with Modernism, has a certain depthlessness about it, and in this respect he is quite right. Jameson contrasts the depth and concern with such issues as anxiety and Existenz evident in thinkers like Heidegger and in painters like Munch with the shallowness of Andy Warhol or the fascination with simulacra of Baudrillard. This seems to me to be one of its decisive characteristics, as is also its mixing of Top and Pop. Whereas Modernist theoreticians like Adorno and Spengler were dismissive and scornful of the so-called "Culture Industry," in Postmodernism, the boundaries between popular culture and elite culture are generally effaced. James Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, THE apotheosis of Modernist literature, was already looking ahead to Postmodernism with his "Here Comes Everybody!" In Postmodernism, it is just as permissible to discourse on James Bond or the Beatles as on classical art and culture, just so long as you don't attempt to frame anything in terms of authoritative metanarratives. Those smack too much of the kinds of narratives that structured and framed the rise of the various fascisms that brought WWII into being. WWII, in fact, was a war fought over metanarratives, for the Nazis believed that the Aryans were descendants of a lost Atlantean civilization--which is one kind of historical narrative--while the Allies believed in the Enlightenment faith in the Brotherhood of Man and the perfectibility of reason-guided rational democracy--another metanarrative altogether.

Jameson's book is something of a handbook on Postmodernism. If you were confused about the subject before reading it, you won't be when you finish Jameson's book. He makes it very clear that, antipathy to historical narratives aside, Postmodernism IS an epoch with certain structural features that define it in distinct opposition to Modernism. In reading the book, you will also become aware of certain features that are MISSING from Postmodernism which really ought to be there: being generally a creation of Marxists, there is scant regard for human spirituality or emotional depth of any kind in Postmodernism (after all, these subjects smack too much of religious and state authoritarianisms). In Postmodernism, there is a pretense that spirituality is completely unnecessary and that all human beings are basically whimsical and slight with little concern for the dark regions of the psyche that produce the kinds of death fantasies that drive terrorism and religious frenzy. What a shallow and inadequate estimation of the human being such a view is need hardly be remarked.

Postmodernism is simply an inadequate view of the place of the human being in the world. It presupposes that history is meaningless (which it isn't) and that the human being is basically a "worldless" entity in Heidegger's sense and has no need to belong anywhere specific. The human being, in this view, is just as happy surrounded by strip malls, airports and gas stations as he would be in an environment structured by cathedrals and palaces. But this, too, is wrong.

However, if you want to read one book about Postmodernism, then Jameson's is the book for you.

--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion" and "Dead Celebrities, Living Icons."