[In the following review, Regan offers positive assessment of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.]

Fredric Jameson’s critique of postmodernism is salutary reading for anyone who might blithely assume that Marxist criticism lies in ruins with the Berlin Wall. It is precisely because Jameson’s vigorous political intelligence resists any simple celebration or easy disavowal of postmodern culture that we are given a book of such enormous intellectual ambition and theoretical complexity. Like Raymond Williams, whose presence in [Postmodernism] is strongly marked, Jameson approaches culture not just as a set of styles but as ‘lived experience’. For both writers, questions of culture are deeply implicated in questions of economic production and organization. Without abandoning the classical Marxist concepts of base and superstructure, Jameson is able to construct an elaborate thesis which recognizes postmodernism as the dominant cultural form of multinational capitalism. If realism was appropriate to an earlier market capitalism and modernism corresponded to the later monopoly capitalism underwritten by imperialism, then postmodernism is the cultural logic of a third stage of capitalist enterprise, dominated by a new global network of corporate wealth.

While accepting that postmodernism is fraught with contradictions and inconsistencies, Jameson attempts to outline its constitutive features. A prominent characteristic of postmodern culture is its apparent depthlessness; it is essentially a culture of the image or ‘simulacrum’, manufactured and promoted by a whole new technology. An obvious consequence of this superficiality is the eclipse of historicity, so that while postmodernism flaunts an eclectic ‘history’ of styles it nevertheless denies any genuine experience and understanding of the past. The temporal experiments of modernism have given way to a new concern with spatial relationship, typified in this book by the postmodern hyperspace of the Western Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. The bewildering sense of space in such buildings aptly conveys the individual subject’s disorientation within ‘the great global multinational and decentered communicational network’ (p. 44).

One of the unnerving contradictions of postmodernism is that while it partakes of a populist rhetoric, seeming to break down distinctions between high culture and mass culture, it abandons the oppositional tendency and political potential of earlier modernist art. While Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes, A Pair of Boots, directs attention to its social context, Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes elicits a different kind of hermeneutical response, appearing to revel in its own decorative exhilaration. What Jameson observes here is ‘the waning of effect’ in postmodern culture, a seeming indifference towards emotion or feeling and a resulting loss of critical awareness. Similarly, while Edvard Munch’s The Scream displays a modernist aesthetic of anxiety and alienation, postmodern art seems to exist beyond ‘expression’ and shows little regard for the psychopathologies of the individual self. Jameson’s analysis of postmodern culture, however, is not simply dismissive. While acknowledging the diminished social and political function of the new art forms, he is clearly impressed by the sheer exuberance of experimental video. There are many excellent and detailed examples of the new aesthetic at work in architecture, painting, literature, and film, though some of the chosen artefacts (the videotext AlienNation, the Frank Gehry House in Santa Monica, and Claude Simon’s novel The Conducting Bodies) might lead one to think that postmodernism reached its zenith in the 1970s. Jameson is an engaging and companionable guide, and his own prose style is replete with the exhilarating rhythms and buzz words of contemporary American culture, with its ‘roller skates and multinationals, word processors and overnight unfamiliar postmodern downtown high rises’ (p. 367).

The energy and intensity of Jameson’s remarkable study are generated by an enduring concern with problems of interpretation and value. There is throughout this book a reassertion of the cognitive and pedagogical dimensions of art and culture in the face of a growing form of image addiction. Jameson recognizes at the same time, though, that moral disapproval of postmodernism has somehow become ‘unavailable’ or untenable and that criticism must make its way through ‘some effective contemporary cultural politics’. What this involves in the first place is learning how to contend with the world space of multinational capital, so as to ‘regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion’ (p. 54). What Jameson proposes is an aesthetic of ‘cognitive mapping’, a new form of spatial awareness which will enable a better understanding of our bewildering contemporary world system. From a British Marxist perspective, Jameson might appear to give too little attention to questions of social class; it is difficult to see how his call for a new spatial awareness might issue simultaneously in a new class consciousness. Welcome as it might be, there is a lack of historical specificity in his summoning of ‘a class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind’ (p. 410). But if Jameson’s political thinking is utopian, it is utopian in the best sense: not a species of romantic idealism but a clear-sighted realization of our desperate need to imagine something else, ‘a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all’ (p. xvi).