Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson

Author:Fredric Jameson [Jameson, Fredric]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Film & Video, Performing Arts, Modern, History & Criticism, Social Science, Postmodernism (Literature), Postmodernism [Literature], Semiotics & Theory, Philosophy, History & Theory, Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945), General, Literary Criticism, Political Science, Civilization; Modern, Art, History & Surveys, Postmodernism, History
ISBN: 9788190340328
Google: oRJ9fh9BK8wC
Amazon: 0822310902
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 1990-11-14T23:00:00+00:00

In the manuals the eighteenth century is customarily identified as the moment of the birth of History -- of historicity and the sense of history as well as the possibilities (if not yet the practice) of modern historiography. How this characterization is to be related to its other pseudonym, the Age of Reason, lies in the peculiar coordination between the exercise of reason and the emergence of those new historical realities (the discovery of older radically different modes of production in the Americas and Tahiti, the conflict of modes of production in prerevolutionary Europe) with which it had never previously had to deal. Now, for one long moment, Reason will "set all the facts aside" (to reproduce one of Rousseau's most scandalous gestures) and try to work history up by sheer abstract deduction or reduction. In other words, to think its way back to the origins of this or that (virtually the central category in this philosophical debate on "history") by removing what is inessential from the materials of contemporary life. Kant's word for this procedure, which he follows in his own philosophical reasoning, was rather freely rendered by an early translator as "to annihilate in thought" After the richer empirical historiography that developed in the nineteenth century, the procedure will cease to characterize the exercise of philosophical Reason in any central way, and fall to the status of the "thought experiment," or, in phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty's notion of the "phantom member" (feeling in a limb that has already been amputated as a dramatization of the impossibility of grasping something we can never be without, such as Language, or Being itself, or the body). The epistemological privilege of the eighteenth century, then, its value for us as a unique conceptual laboratory, lies in the paradoxical situation that (particularly with Rousseau) it not merely produced the concept of "origins" but also, virtually simultaneously, its most devastating critique. This seems in part to have been what made Rousseau an ideal object of study for DeMan.

Rousseau can also be read as opening that conceptual space later on secured by the dialectic itself; but DeMan's chapter on that fundamental dialectical text which is the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality (hereinafter called simply the Second Discourse) does not give (nor does it try to give) an adequate picture of the larger narrative form of this essay, in part because his central illustration, the giant as metaphor, is drawn from a secondary fragment (draft or sequel to this one, no one quite knows which) called the "Essay on the Origins of Language."

Rousseau's thoughts on language in the Second Discourse are certainly interesting enough, but as much for their function and narrative position as for their content. They can serve as a fundamental demonstration of that "reduction in thought" just referred to, and of the way in which Rousseau necessarily "sets all the facts aside" to arrive at what is at least a negative concept of the "state of nature": peeling away successive layers of

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