FREDRIC JAMESON’S INTERPRETATION OF POSTMODERNISM

PART 4

The success of the Iranian revolution and other conservative fundamentalist movements is a paradoxical sign of the increasing diversity fostered by postmodern society. Social diversity certainly troubles some people, who would like to insist that everyone adhere to "traditional values." Opposing diversity has become a sign of political conservatism, which is why some people on the left applaud postmodernism's kaleidoscopic diversity. But diversity illustrates the ambiguities of postmodernism. Like everything else, it has both good and bad points. Social diversity has given us a much more expansive understanding of freedom and autonomy. The idea that everyone is entitled to participate in society has now taken hold more deeply than ever before. As our Declaration of Independence demonstrates, once this idea is put into words people start to take it seriously, even if the writer does not really mean it. It takes on a power of its own, and its consequences cannot be foreseen or controlled. (Thomas Jefferson surely did not imagine, or want, an African-American or Native American or woman some day to be president.) The new emphasis on diversity may empower people to demand a greater share in making the decisions that shape their lives. It already challenges us to find our own place within society. Diversity opens up a wider range of options for thought and life. We must choose the groups we will join and put the pieces together for ourselves. We are more free than ever to choose our preferred codes.

We get this freedom because every code is a system of signs. The question of its relation to reality, which created the modern problem of "how to believe," no longer matters: "Where I used to 'believe' in a certain vision of the world, political system, or religion as such, today I speak a specific ideological code—the badge of group adherence, viewed from a different and more sociological perspective" (394). None of these codes can be judged as better or worse than the others, for postmodernism allows no higher standard of truth by which they all could be judged. So all are equally valid. This certainly fosters greater tolerance. Tolerance, in turn, gives disadvantaged groups an opportunity to enter into the political and social mainstream. The resulting progress in social justice is immensely important. And we all benefit because new groups bring their codes into the mainstream, where they become new options for all of us. The empowering of local and ethnic groups has also reminded us of the importance of place and space. This has turned our minds away from history. But it has led our concerns back to nature, at a time when nature's very existence is imperiled. This, in turn, has given new importance to the body's health and pleasures.

If this is what diversity means, the Iranian revolution seems an unlikely symbol for it. It is a paradoxical symbol because it used the great diversity of late capitalism to create a totalitarian state (with little concern for the pleasures of the body). Therefore it also symbolizes the limits of diversity. It suggests that all the current talk of pluralism, difference, the end of master narratives, and the evils of totality may be just convenient smokescreens. Behind them there is more totality than ever. This is just as true for us as it is for the Iranians. The sacred, the past, the future, nature, the unconscious—all have been conquered by the forces of the market and the media. There is no realm in which we can escape these all-enveloping forces. For the first time, perhaps, real difference and "otherness" has vanished. Neither fundamentalism nor any other belief system can challenge the ideology of the marketplace. The gradual shift in Iranian toward a more westernized, modernized and postmodernized, culture is evidence of this. The even more fundamentalist government in Afghanistan will soon find that it too must follow the same path.

The idea of "market forces" is the most crucial ideological battleground in our society today. If we believe that the marketplace, the free enterprise system, and the desire for profits are innate in human nature, we are likely to accept the basic structures of late capitalism and postmodernism. We are also likely to accept all of the shoddy merchandise and false advertising the market sends our way. "What do you expect?" we say. "They're just trying to make a buck like everyone else." Everything is justified in the name of greater profits. So we are not likely to think about how we might live differently. This is what is happening today. The media urge us to take the market ideology as self-evidently true and rewarding; no longer a matter of debate; beyond ideology. Therefore it seems useless to think deeply about this central reality of our lives. Our only option is to keep the wheels of the global corporate machine turning by ever greater feats of consumption. Even if we dimly sense that something is wrong with the totality of the system of late capitalism, that totality is simply too big and complex to represent in mental images. So why should we bother to try?

Since there can be no political challenge to the system itself, no one is concerned about the meaning of the body politic and its values as a whole. Therefore the system remains beyond the sphere of politics. Every group is labelled a "special interest" except the corporations, the media, and the government bureaucracy. They are supposed to be above politics, representing "the public good." In fact they represent the special interest of perpetuating the late capitalist system. But we don't call their interest a special interest because we accept the capitalist marketplace as the common playing field for everyone.

So all politics becomes micropolitics: the play of power relationships among many diverse groups, each focussed on its own particular issues. But all assume that those issues must be resolved within the total system. Politics now means accepting the system and using it for one's own best advantage. Competing political views within the system are treated like religions and other beliefs. They become mere ideological codes, the optional badges of different groups. We may learn how to transcode the ideas and concerns of one group to those of another group. On this basis we may build temporary shifting political alliances. But we assume that all these groups will remain separate, just as all the signs of a postmodern artifact remain sepearate. And we assume that each one's code is as valid as another.

There can be no unifying political movement or political thought, so there is no point in debating basic political ideas. In the era of market ideology and micropolitics, we see less and less value in the old tradition of intellectual thought and rational debate. Soon we forget that it is even possible to think deeply and debate about the central concerns of life. Instead of taking stands on issues of great importance, we just consume ideas, perhaps transcode them, and then let them go. So the mind turns into one giant TV or shopping mall, and no questions are asked. We rest content in our euphoric powerlessness.

In fact the whole fight for diversity and equal rights can easily become a fight for equal time on TV and in shopping malls: "Are minority quotas not to be understood first and foremost as the allocation of segments of television time, and is not the production of the appropriate new group-specific products the truest recognition a business society can bring to others?" (325). Equality may now mean, above all, the equal right to consume the products of the marketplace. The codes of the many groups are turned into signs, which then become commodities. We value ethnic, regional, political, and all the other differences because they are fashionable. We wear group identities—our own and others'—the way we wear the latest styles. In fact our favorite commodities are often the "group-specific products" of other groups that have become fashionable: frozen sushi dinners, rap music, Latino films, Wilderness Society tote bags, Grateful Dead t-shirts, etc. But these examples demonstrate the limits of diversity too. As commodities, all are measured by their monetary value. The current passion for diversity is itself the best evidence that we see genuine diversity disappearing. It is rapidly being swallowed up in a homogenous culture that reduces everything to the almighty dollar.

Perhaps the hidden decision-makers at the top of the system allow so much diversity only because it perpetuates the system and defeats all challenges to it. The focus on diversity may create an illusion that merely entering into the mainstream, making free choices, and making more money is all that matters. Multiculturalism may encourage us to believe that, once all groups are participating freely in the mainstream, nothing more is needed to make life better for all. It may therefore distract us from the common political problem we all face: that a few people still control the process of production, forcing the rest of us to live by the choices that they make.

CHANGING THE TOTALITY

For Fredric Jameson, as a Marxist, the problems of postmodern culture must be transcoded into problems of political and economic change. His own analysis does not seem to offer much hope for change. By exploring our society in its totality, he shows us why change in one or another part of the system is not enough. All the pieces of the system are interlocked. Nothing can really be different unless everything is different, which is why we need to think about the totality. One reason to study postmodernism is to learn why such a total change is so difficult to imagine today: we see no point in even thinking about, much less challenging, the totality of the prevailing media/market system. For the time being, the system seems immune to any political challenge.

But another reason to study postmodernism is to begin thinking about alternatives to the system. Postmodernism is the world we actually live in, the only kind of world we are likely to live in for many years to come. If we want to begin to think about a new way to live, beyond postmodern culture, we must do it while we are still living within that culture. We must accept the postmodern world on its own terms. So, for example, when we think about the totality we must do it in a postmodern way. The notion of "totality" no longer means that a single integrated reality exists or can exist. A postmodern totality can only be a kaleidoscope where all the pieces remain separate. "Totality" is now a symbol for our efforts to put all the pieces together—efforts that must ultimately fail. Yet "totality" reminds us that things can still be related by transcoding, even though they will never unite into a single code. It urges us to keep on transcoding, getting better at it, constantly discovering new interpretations and new relationships. It is a way to keep on enlarging our perspective.

If we look far enough, we may find a way to see beyond postmodernism while still living in it. The challenge is to use the elements of postmodern culture to transcend it. This is theoretically possible because everything is dialectical. The present, no matter how constricting, holds the seeds of change that will lead to a different, perhaps better, future. The crucial question is what specific resources postmodernism gives us for that change. Diversity itself is certainly one resource. It has put a new emphasis on freedom and equality as well as on nature and the body. All of these have created important new political ideas and movements. There is no way to predict where they will lead.

On another level, social diversity is an image of the immense diversity of signs throughout our culture. The flood of fragmented signs filling our lives has many harmful effects. But it also gives each of us a freedom to connect the pieces of our world, our culture, and ourselves in our own unique way. This freedom is a challenge. There is no authority to tell us how to do it. We have to figure it out for ourselves. Nor is there any possibility that we will arrive at a permanent solution. We will have to keep on playing with the kaleidoscope. This gives us unprecedented possibilities for ingenuity, innovation, and experimentation. It also gives us a new responsibility for shaping and constantly reshaping our own world. This can release unprecedented energies in us. Postmodernism now channels the energy in ways that reinforce the late capitalist system. But if we could understand what is happening to us and choose to use our energies to change the system, the system's endless diversity and freedom could become the seed of its own undoing. One reason to think about the totality is to regain free choice in the exercise of our energy.

The totality of postmodernism could also prove to be its own undoing in another respect. The managers of the late capitalist system have united the whole world in a single, total system. They understood this long before environmentalists began talking about our shared planetary fate. Our global environmental, economic, and cultural interdependence are all parts of the same total picture. We see this picture every day via by the global media that wire the whole thing together. Eventually some basic changes in the system will occur, and they too will be global (perhaps, as many Marxists predict, a global economic collapse). The postmodern may turn out to be "little more than a transitional period between two stages of capitalism, in which the earlier forms of the economic are in the process of being restructured on a global scale, including the older forms of labor and its traditional organizational institutions and concepts" (417).

This means that the traditional opposition between the managers and the managed (the workers) will continue. Right now it is hard to see this because postmodern culture has absorbed us all into its unified system. But the opposition will emerge again in some new unpredictable form, and it too will be global. Not only are the managers of the system now linked together, so are the rest of us—the managed. There are always a few people, in odd corners around the world, who resent being managed and are thinking about creative ways to resist. Whenever and wherever such forces of change begin stirring, they can quickly connect with other forces of change thousands of miles away. Eventually a brand new mode of production and brand new forms of culture are bound to emerge. The process will happen more quickly than ever before because people can communicate so rapdily across such great distances. Indeed change can now happen simultaneously everywhere, thanks to postmodern media.

Now, for the first time, it is possible to imagine a global process of shared innovation and experimentation. It is possible to imagine people all over the world joining together to explore new ways of living: "What is wanted is a great collective project in which an active majority of the population participates, as something belonging to it and constructed by its own energies" (278). This project would include setting common social goals, planning means to achieve them, and then engaging the forces of the world community to implement them. For the first time, people all over the world would freely choose their shared purposes, unleashing an immense amount of productive energy.

This is a political goal. It is also obviously a utopian goal. "Utopia" literally means "no place," and such a great shared political project has never existed anywhere. There is nothing new about linking politics and utopia, however. Utopia traditionally meant a totality like the Garden of Eden where perfect harmony reigned, where all the pieces magically fit together because all came from, and referred back to, a common source. People have often hoped that their political system would create this kind of total harmony. Leaders have often used this hope to justify their power.

For example, in the ancient world the king was often represented as a savior, symbolizing the people's hope to live some day in paradise. Sometimes he also claimed to represent the first man, who already lived in paradise (which is why his royal court had to be as opulent as paradise). These traditions influenced Christianity, where Jesus is depicted as a king, the new Adam, and the savior who leads his followers to paradise. In the Middle Ages, Christian kings claimed that their rule was part of God's plan for redeeming the world and bringing all Christians into the Garden of Eden. The modern era linked democracy to utopia: politics alone, without religion, was expected to bring an era of harmony, abundance, and peace in this world. In the U.S., though, the hope for a democratic utopia remained closely linked to traditional Christian images of salvation. The 20th century has made this hope more difficult to believe in. Earlier in this century, people felt that democracy was getting weaker as more countries turned to totalitarian systems. When modern people wondered about how to believe in religion, with its utopian promises of salvation, they also wondered about how to believe in the utopian political hopes of democracy. This tension between what is and what might be helped to give their lives a feeling of depth.

Today we no longer wonder about how to believe in utopian promises or politics. We cannot imagine a "great collective effort." We see no point in even thinking about a common national effort to build a new kind of society together. Leaders still use the traditional utopian symbols to justify their power. But the utopia they claim to lead us to is no radically new and better realm. It is merely more of what we already have: the postmodern late capitalism they control, which seems to shut out any utopian images of the totality. The traditional utopia of integrated harmony will not work for us, and we cannot see what other kind of utopia might be possible. The tension between what is and what might be has disappeared.

Again, though, there may be seeds of something just the opposite within our culture itself: a postmodern utopia. Suppose we could begin to imagine something truly different than our current culture. Because our culture is so filled with diversity, we could imagine that trait greatly magnified. We could imagine the whole world filled with infinite diversity. We could imagine a world free to change endlessly because its pieces have no common source or goal and refer to nothing else at all. In this world a new kind of harmony would prevail, based not on integration but on difference and separateness. No one part would be considered more "real" than another. All would have equal value. So no one part would be able to coerce or oppress any other. Each part would be able to develop its unique qualities alongside all the others. The world would have infinite channels, all going constantly, and all would be free.

People living in such a world would find their minds similarly kaleidoscopic and liberated. They would be able to experience many channels simultaneously, constantly creating new codes by endless transcoding, embracing the infinite diversity. People would be free to enjoy the experience of each moment without comparing it to past or future, without having to prove that it is "authentic" or "really real." They would not have to worry about forcing all their experience into a single "identity" or discovering their "true self." Every experience would be considered equally real and true. So there would be no reason for society to enforce consistency in everyone's behavior. The motives for conformity and totalitarianism would disappear.

These liberated people would join together to decide on their mode of production—what they really want to produce and how they really want to do it. Their goal would be to make the things they really want—not to consume the things someone else tells them to want. Everyone could participate equally in making and carrying out the decisions. Everyone's capacity to explore, experiment, and innovate would be fully honored and set completely free. So they would go beyond today's alternatives of the modern "centered self" or the postmodern "schizophrenic" self. They would create a new kind of identity "which would be very precisely the non-centered subject that is part of an organic group or collective" (345). This is the kind of utopia that postmodern people can try to imagine.

How could all this be done? Nobody knows yet. It seems totally "unrealistic." That is no argument against the utopian possibility, however. Capitalist culture has taught us to define "realistic" as the opposite of "imagined." But imagination is an essential part of reality. So imagination can be very "realistic," as long as we act on it. Every real change has to be imagined first; imagining is the first step in figuring out a new reality. Most of us cannot even take that first step today. However a few artists have made some initial attempts. Some postmodern works of art suggest that the way to radical change is to subvert the system from within. The idea is to show society its true face by exaggerating it, by turning everything into simulacra as quickly as possible. This includes making all the institutions of society nothing but simulacra.

For example, an artist might mount an exhibit in an art museum showing t-shirts he made with pictures on them, just like the t-shirts the museum sells in its gift shop. In both cases the pictures would be simulacra. The museum's shirts would bear its logo, or a famous painting turned into a simulacrum. But the artist's shirts would have pictures of the museum itself, or the gift shop, or his own exhibit. This would turn the institution and art itself into a simulacrum. (If he is very political, he might have pictures of the museum's trustees, who are also directors of local corporations that pollute the air, make weapons, have no minority executives, etc.) Some postmodernists believe that the more simulacra we create in this way, the quicker we will show society that it is built on simulacra. Society will see how empty its whole life is. This will drive society to a point where it will simply collapse into its hollow core. Then something new will emerge: a utopian society that releases the virtues of postmodernism because it is free of the totalitarian structure of late capitalism.

However this is a risky route. Who can say whether a totally empty society will necessarily turn into a utopian one? Moreover it gives no basis for a great collective utopian project. How can we come together to plan the kind of life we want together if all things remain radically separated? Jameson has no answer to this question. Again, the problem is that we don't know how to think about it clearly yet. The necessary first step is to understand where we are now. Perhaps the most useful political act we can do now is just to analyze the totality in all its complexity and understanding why it is so hard to change it. This means we must have shared images to describe our relationships to the system of postmodern late capitalism. These images must be like maps, showing us how to locate ourselves in the overall scheme of things. We need "cognitive maps" to symbolize our place in the system.

Now that culture has suffused all of life, there is no difference between the culture and life. So it should be possible to use culture to map our experience of life. Cognitive maps could be images drawn from postmodern culture and transcoded in new ways. They cannot literally represent the totality of the system, since that totality is beyond our capacity to represent. But they can give us a symbolic language to relate the various parts and levels of the totality to each other by transcoding them. Most importantly, the maps would link together three crucial codes: the media and its imagery, the mode of production of late capitalism, and the individual's experience as a member of a particular economic class within late capitalism. This would enable us to express our relationships within, and attitudes toward, the totality. It would also show us how little power and control most of us have over the circumstances of our lives. It would show how few people actually own the means of production and therefore make the basic decisions that shape our society; it would show how many people have only the illusion of ownership and free choice. Once we understand the truth about what we have and don’t have today, we can talk together about what it is that we really want for tomorrow.

Jameson's own analysis moves toward such cognitive mapping. It is meant to be an example of an ongoing process of transcoding, not a synthesis that puts all the pieces together. But he concludes that much more needs to be done. The most valuable work is likely to be done by creative artists, rather than by scholars and critics. Artists have always given societies the symbols through which they could imagine their relationships to reality. Today artists who want to create cognitive maps must accept the premises of postmodernism. But they can begin to create cognitive maps that also bring out the utopian possibilities within postmodernism. These maps would show us different parts of the culture developing side by side, with no necessary relationship to each other. They would also show us how each part can be interpreted in terms of the others. No one can yet predict what those maps will look like. But the very act of creating them is itself an image of liberation. Merely imagining the possibility of such creative acts may be enough to pry us away from our televisions and shopping malls long enough to start thinking about whether today's postmodern culture is really the way we want to live.