Troping History: Modernist Residue in Fredric Jameson's Pastiche and Linda Hutcheon's Parody - Critical Essay

Style, Fall, 1999 by John N. Duvall

History is unquestionably one of the most contentious areas of debate among those concerned with postmodernism. I would like to take up Fredric Jameson's and Linda Hutcheon's competing accounts of the relation between postmodernism and history not because their differences stand as a recognized debate (such as that of J[check{u}]rgen Habermas and Jean-Francois Lyotard), but rather because their accounts of postmodern fiction seem to leave little room for compromise. [1] For Jameson, postmodern narrative is a historical (and hence politically dangerous), playing only with pastiched images and aesthetic forms that produce a degraded historicism; for Hutcheon, postmodern fiction remains historical, precisely because it problematizes history through parody, and thus retains its potential for cultural critique. Despite the apparent polarization of these two views, I wish to negotiate a position that acknowledges both Jameson and Hutcheon because at certain turns I find both perspectives useful--depending on the c ultural texts that they scrutinize. Such a negotiation is not as daunting once one realizes that what they mean by postmodernism is not the same thing: Jameson's postmodernism focuses on the consumer, while Hutcheon's originates with the artist as producer. As a result of this different focus, Jameson and Hutcheon in many instances are speaking past each other, describing different cultural phenomena. [2] At the same time, for all their interest in defining the postmodern, both Jameson and Hutcheon owe much to modernism, albeit to differing strands: Jameson to the Adornian tradition and Hutcheon to the tradition of the avant-garde.

1. Jameson--Postmodern or Postmodernity?

Jameson makes a series of distinctions between modernization, modernism, and modernity that provide a productive insight into his work on postmodernism:

if modernization is something that happens to the base, and modernism the form the superstructure takes in reaction to that ambivalent development, then perhaps modernity characterizes the attempt to make something coherent out of their relationship. Modernity would then in that case describe the way "modern" people feel about themselves. (Postmodernism 310)

The response of art and literature to the alienating effect of modernization, as is well known, was often hostile. To invoke "modernism" as a category is to think in the terrain of oppositional aesthetics and poetics. But because Jameson is so interested in mapping the affect of the contemporary moment, the way "postmodern" people feel about themselves, when he speaks of postmodernism or the postmodern, what he means might more accurately be called-to borrow David Harvey's title-the condition of postmodernity. Hutcheon notes the confusion that results from Jameson's use of "the word postmodernism for both socio-economic periodization and the cultural designation," a move that deliberately collapses the distinction between postmodernism and postmodernity (Politics 25). Hutcheon's postmodernism, which focuses on the intentions of artists to comment critically on their contemporary moment through their interventions in aesthetics and poetics, is more clearly linked than Jameson's to what he himself means by mode rnism; in other words, Hutcheon's postmodernism, like Jameson's modernism, represents the response of the arts to the material conditions created by modernization. Jameson's postmodernism shows his debt to both reader-response criticism and the work of Jean Baudrillard, who as early as Consumer Society (1970) was attempting to shift attention away from a traditional Marxist category--the means of production--and toward a new one--the means of consumption.

In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson provides a post-mortem on modernist aesthetics, for he clearly sees as no longer viable modernism's protopolitical projects of defamiliarization, "with their familiar stress on the vocation of art to restimulate perception, to reconquer a freshness of experience back from the habituate and reified numbness of everyday life in a fallen world." (121) Jameson groups a range of theoretical formations into this defamiliarizing aesthetic-from Pound to the Surrealists, from the Russian Formalists to phenomenology. Jameson claims that "this remarkable aesthetic is today meaningless and must be admired as one of the most intense historical achievements of the cultural past (along with the Renaissance or the Greeks or the Tang dynasty)." When Jameson speaks of modernism, he retains a notion of the aesthetic formulations of its producers. Jameson's shift to the axis of consumption is signaled in his characterization of himself as a "relatively enthusi astic consumer of postmodernism" (298). Despite this characterization, his sympathies clearly lie with a lost modernist project because of its relation to Utopian thinking,

The Utopian imagination has been an important part of Jameson's thinking since The Political Unconscious. The "collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity" (Political 19) signals his commitment to the political value of Utopianism as a form of praxis. Indeed, the conclusion of The Political Unconscious, titled "The Dialectic of Ideology and Utopia," outlines a program for cultural analysis that goes beyond the negative hermeneutic of ideological demystification vis-[grave{a}]-vis texts in order simultaneously to decipher "the Utopian impulses of these same still ideological cultural texts" (296). Jameson remains committed to the Marxist narrative of liberation--the end of class--even if, with Louis Althusser, he does not see the end of class as the end of ideology.