Page 157 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POSTMODERNISM

I am familiar with at least three other attempts to theorize something
like a third “stage” in the history of capitalism: E.P.Thompson’s famous
essay on exterminism, Michael Kidron’s account of the post-war
permanent arms economy and Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital. 70
Interestingly, the latter had served much the same function in Jameson’s
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earlier Marxism and Form as does Mandel in Postmodernism itself.
All three of these analyses have the merit of pointing to the deep
complicity between the post-war political-economy and post-war
militarism. If postmodernism is indeed the cultural dominant of late
capitalism, then late capitalism itself has been not only consumerist,
computerized and televisual, but also, as Jameson sometimes appears
to forget, hypermilitarized. Though Mandel himself certainly recognized
the sheer scale of the permanent war economy and conceded that it
substantially accelerated, but did not fundamentally shape, the pattern
of post-war capital accumulation, Jameson appears virtually
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indifferent to the phenomenon. Postmodernism, we must insist, has
been underwritten throughout by the arms economy, the visual symbol
of which—the mushroom cloud, not the missile—has become so
universally culturally available as to have in effect displaced the phallus
as the ultimate signifier. As such, it has signified the ultimate hurt, the
ultimate refusal of desire. No matter how much it is able to consume,
a civilization permanently confronted by the prospect of its own
extinction, such as ours has been, is understandably tempted by the
notion that history might come to an end. That global environmental
catastrophe comes increasingly to substitute for large-scale nuclear
warfare in no way diminishes the power of the trope. The postmodernist
effacement of history by “the random cannibalization of …the past,
the…increasing primacy of the ‘neo’”, which Jameson also records, 73
thus runs in close counterpoint to a powerfully apocalyptic element
in the post-war culture of the West.
This hypermilitarism is itself only one, peculiarly significant, aspect
of the more generally internationalizing nature of socio-economic
postmodernity. Here, Jameson is especially acute: “it is precisely this
…original new global space which is the ‘moment of truth’ of
postmodernism”, and which will require an “aesthetic of cognitive
mapping—a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the
individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the
global system”. It is one of the weaknesses of Bell’s approach, for
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example, that it remains quite extraordinarily preoccupied with

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