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Sex, Needs and Queer Culture

From liberation to the postgay

Zed Books Ltd

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Postmodernity, neoliberalism, hegemony

In 1984, Fredric Jameson published his essay, 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', claiming we had entered 'the purest form of capital yet to have emerged', and one which was for that reason qualitatively distinctive. As I remarked in the introduction, the category he used to describe this stage has since substantially fallen out of fashion, though it is one that he has consistently defended. Jameson's essay may well be less familiar to readers today than it was to those of my generation, among whom it was ubiquitous, so I shall rehearse some of its key arguments here. In doing so, however, I want to focus on certain influences on Jameson's highly eclectic presentation of his case that are not normally accorded such prominence. These are ideas associated with Williams and Marcuse, some of which I have already outlined in the introduction. My reasons for focusing on them have to do with a dissatisfaction with the ways that he and others theorize the period with which this book is concerned, and especially the kind of qualitative transition in capitalism that most would agree has taken place.

I focus largely on Jameson's first essay on the topic rather than later accounts by him, both because of its general influence, and because it is necessary to an understanding of a less well-known adaptation by Marianne DeKoven in her book, Utopia Limited (2004), of many of the ideas expressed there. DeKoven presents arguments about politics that draw on, but are not consistent with, Jameson's purposes. Whereas Jameson professes a certain moral neutrality with regard to postmodernity on the grounds that it is an established fact there is no point in lamenting, DeKoven is instead a positive enthusiast for the phenomenon. She views it as an advance in all sorts of ways over modernity, in spite of a certain nostalgia she feels for the latter, and especially for the idealism of the movements of the sixties. Her position is therefore more characteristic of the postmodern left than Jameson's, and there is no question in her case about the appropriateness of that label; it is one she embraces.

The late capitalism of Jameson's title is an allusion to a book whose argument underpins his. Ernest Mandel describes a three-stage development from freely competitive to monopoly capitalism, and thence to a late capitalism that first emerges in the 1940s. This last stage is characterized by multinational corporations, increasingly global markets, and intensified consumerism, though Mandel also presciently places great importance on the mobility of the finance capital that has since taken on an even more extravagant life of its own. Jameson claims that the three stages Mandel outlines have successively determined aesthetic realism, modernism and postmodernism. The defining features of this last stage consist in two kinds of 'prodigious expansion' whose intimacy seems to prompt this identical phrasing about them, even though the precise nature of their relationship is left unclear.

The first of these expansions is that of capital itself 'into hitherto uncommodified areas' that most strikingly include the formerly pre-capitalist third world in consequence of the 'green revolution' in agriculture, and the subjective unconscious through the influence of the media and advertising. These two 'spaces' have generated distinctive kinds of resistance in the past. The second expansion Jameson points to is of a formerly semi-autonomous culture that has now become disseminated

throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life – from economic value and state power to practices and to the very psyche itself – can be said to be 'cultural' in some original and yet untheorized sense.

This expansion is a curious one, since it is predicated on a supposed prior restriction of modernist culture, whose limited circulation among a self-conscious aesthetic elite facilitated its preservation of a certain utopian promise through the artwork's distance from, critical relation to and transfiguration of reality. Under postmodernism, by contrast, culture has apparently expanded, not merely through the culture industry as identified by the Frankfurt School, but also through the proliferation of images and other modes of signification attendant on developments in the field of communication technology to the point of having become absolutely ubiquitous. Of course, since this essay was written, all the developments said to have determined the emergence of postmodernism have intensified (think of smartphones, for instance, and the even more rapid circulation they facilitate). If Jameson was right back in 1984, we must be more securely postmodern now than ever. Marianne DeKoven even cites this as the reason for the term's demise: the postmodern condition is so ubiquitous as to have 'become invisible'.

The cultural effects of capital's expansion, however, are made evident to us in Jameson's account through readings of novels, poetry, art photography, architecture, painting and so on. These works may have an ideological character, he suggests, in their playfully diverting qualities, but they also manifest a certain realism. This is not because they are generically realist – they do not aspire to recreate a plausible, recognizable world for us – but because they effectively convey traits that are associated with contemporary sensibilities. These include: the resort to blank pastiche and affectlessness, rather than parody; a displacement of temporal awareness by spatial consciousness; random heterogeneity, fragmentation and incoherence. The purpose in highlighting these characteristic works may be evinced from Jameson's concluding point that a

new political art (if it is possible) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object – the world space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.

In considering Jameson's argument in more detail, though, I shall not be concerned with his specific readings of artworks; in relation to these, I shall simply say that his tendency to divorce the ideological from the realistic properties of those works, without taking into account questions of cultural production – institutions and ideologies of art, that is, that mediate their relations with reality – is one that is abrupt and obviously problematic. However, I am more concerned with his characterization of the kind of world that generates the consciousness said to be evinced by these works.

When Jameson speaks of the cultural dominance of modernism and postmodernism, he clearly means two quite distinct things. Whereas artistic modernism is held to have been dominant because it was the most advanced, most self-consciously uncompromising and experimental form of cultural production of its time, culture under postmodernism is dominant in the sense that it is everywhere. Modernism occupied a peculiar status in a distinct cultural sphere, but postmodernism saturates society with a culture that takes on uncritical, because integrated, commodified forms. At various points, Jameson qualifies this claim by allowing for 'the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yetsubordinate, features', but appears to be contradicting himself. Jameson's formulation proposes that culture as he understands it here is coextensive with capitalist totality as such ('everything in our social life'). This accounts for his initial 'failure' to distinguish between postmodernism (a style) and postmodernity (a historical period): the latter is defined by the other's utter pervasiveness, so that the two are inseparably merged.

The most significant influence on Jameson in this essay is that of the Hegelian Marxist tradition, though not in the form of the most obvious candidate, Georg Lukács, about whom Jameson has written extensively and sympathetically, and often against the grain of Marxist theorizing. The account of modernist culture's critical relationship to capitalist society draws instead on the arguments of Marcuse in his famous essay on 'affirmative culture', but I would go so far as to say that Marcuse is plausibly the dominantinfluence on Jameson's whole essay, since it effectively describes a state of one-dimensionality that is even more entrenched than that proclaimed by Marcuse in the sixties. Not only did Marcuse there first draw attention to the integration of art into consumer society, but he also spoke of repressive desublimation, or the commodified sexualization of everyday life. The main distinction between the world Marcuse describes and the one we encounter in Jameson relates to the third world, whose often militant resistance to western imperialism in the postwar world had apparently been exhausted by the early eighties. Today, under conditions often described as 'globalized', the very category of third world is redundant, though continuing disparities of wealth and divisions of labour are indicated by reference instead to the global south. Jameson is arguing that postmodernism represents the globalization of one-dimensionality.

While basing her account on Jameson's, DeKoven presents a compressed, somewhat different version of this shift. She gives an abstract and schematic discussion of the distinctive properties of modernity and postmodernity that goes beyond the economic and cultural foci of Jameson's essay to allude to political movements. Modernity, she claims, was dominated by ideals of freedom that were nonetheless contradicted by their hegemonic form. Hence, 'the white, bourgeois western man [was] the Self of modernity ... defined in opposition to its oppressed, suppressed Others of race, gender, class, nation, and location.' Modernism, however, as the dominant aesthetic movement of the early twentieth century, was bound to various crises in which 'modernity's hegemonies'came to be contested by those 'Others'. Modernity is therefore characterized by dialectical forms of contestation and conflict.

Postmodernity, by contrast, results in a displacement of such clashing forces through the emergence of a dominant, globalized capitalism characterized by pervasive commodification, dramatic technological innovation and spectacular cultural forms, bringing with it inequality and environmental destruction. Although these conditions appear to sponsor unwelcome resistant fundamentalisms DeKoven notes but does not consider, they have also generated diverse, particularistic and localized movements that do not presume to challenge the system as such, but are to be welcomed for this very reason. This indicates her postmodern affiliations: such movements are simultaneously more democratic and less utopian than those that typified modernism. 'The democratic project of modernity', she suggests, 'has become in postmodernity at once (in its historical link with capitalism) a project of capitalist globalization, and also, at the same time, a project of egalitarian populism.'

Indeed, DeKoven's case might be put more strongly: contemporary movements are more democratic precisely because they are not utopian. The reason for this is that so-called master, or meta-, narratives now seem to her not only implausibly ambitious, but actually 'oppressive', as they entail a privileging of certain political struggles over others. While claiming to be attracted in some respects by the idealism of the past, then, Dekoven engages in the kind of extended critique of the supposedly modernist left that has animated and preoccupied postmodern thought in general far more consistently than any disagreements it has with the political right.

I find DeKoven's account unclear on key points it seems relevant to mention, though these are not the issues I wish to focus on especially. For instance, metanarratives seem to legitimate what she calls 'modernist hegemonies', and also to be the framework within which oppositional movements work. Thus, at one level, she seems to be suggesting a certain equivalence between the dominant and those who opposed it on the basis of their common formal, 'narrative' justifications, but without clarifying what the significance for her of that equivalence is. In other words, these movements seem somehow appropriate to the forms of hegemony to which they responded, and yet to reproduce the oppressive, because exclusive, features of those hegemonies. Furthermore, modernity was characterized by diverse oppositional movements, even on DeKoven's account, but they were also frequently solidaristic, so it is not wholly clear why they are also convicted of consistently privileging one cause over another. One can easily think of instances where this was the case, of course – and even of ones where the labour movement reproduced racism, or anti-colonialism reproduced sexism – but it is surely a reductive history that suggests this was always and everywhere so. Moreover, postmodernity may have generated a proliferation of movements in DeKoven's description of it, but it isn't clear why we should simply welcome their plurality as such without evaluatively considering their particular causes. Nor is it clear why their singularity is a virtue, given that this suggests – or, at least, must surely facilitate – an absence of solidarity, and may even sponsor a competitive spirit among them. The sense that these movements constitute a desirable diversity attributes to them a kind of unity that is predicated on a perspective left inexplicit.

Moreover – and to move on to a point more pertinent to my overall argument – while DeKoven recognizes, at least in passing, that postmodernity has brought with it greater inequality, she is unclear about what relationship she is proposing between that inequality and the 'egalitarian populism' she welcomes. Alan Sinfield, by contrast, has argued that it is naïve to perceive a more general democratization taking place in the breakdown of high and low cultural forms: 'it is likely,' he writes, 'that the fading of certain kinds of hierarchy is producing the compensatory strengthening of others'. Pop music in Britain, for instance, is now dominated by the privately educated, even while it reproduces the gestural repertoire of revolt against the mature and supposedly conservative in the cause of (mostly sexual) desire. The highly privileged now dominate even the popular cultural sphere as celebrities, because there are lucrative careers to be made there, and money is the great solvent of any principled commitment to 'cultural standards' elite schools might have instilled in the past. This is a far from trivial point, as it highlights the ways in which social relations are mediated in the kind of totality with which we are concerned.

DeKoven's validation of postmodernity also occurs through an explicit revision of Marcuse's arguments about one-dimensionality (and, implicitly, of Jameson's tacit reliance on them). She claims that Marcuse's wholly negative account of one-dimensional life evinces a characteristically modernist, revolutionary sensibility that blinds him to postmodern truths and possibilities. What Marcuse regards as one-dimensionality, she suggests, 'also often describes what has come to be positively valued in some postmodern theories as complicitous critique or resistance from within'. Postmodern resistance, by contrast, rejects master narratives

in favour of broader, more egalitarian, and more realistic notions of everyday tactics [that] involve partial, local refunctioning and subversion, not of a totalized domination but of an incomplete, malleable, shifting, continually redefined, recontested, and reinstituted hegemony.

One-dimensionality is not so stark, after all, and is actually more agreeable than the situation that obtained under modernity.

DeKoven also follows Jameson's mode of thinking about the transition to postmodernity in terms of Williams's categories of dominant, residual and emergent to which I now turn. At stake here is the distinction between the categories of totality and hegemony I have been so far merely alluding to, so let me attempt a brief account of that distinction. Totality is a term that has been invoked in different ways within the Marxist tradition as a means of grasping capitalism as a system. It rejects the empiricist analysis of phenomena as isolated facts, and insists rather on understanding them in their relations with each other in a way that helps us appreciate their determination by the forces and relations of production, the material means by which that society is quite literally made. For the most part, this system has been grasped as contradictory, and therefore productive of crisis and conflict, but Marcuse's one-dimensional totality is defined by its absence of contradiction, an absence that is accentuated still further by Jameson.

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Excerpted from Sex, Needs and Queer Culture by David Alderson. Copyright © 2016 David Alderson. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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