When exactly did we stop hearing the word postmodernism? Fredric Jameson’s death this fall at the mighty age of 90 left us wondering. (The question reemerged a few weeks later with the reelection of Donald Trump, who for all his ominous contemporaneity is trailed by a permanent miasma of the tacky, made-for-TV ’80s.) The subtitle of Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism has enjoyed an enduring popularity into the 21st century, with academic treatises on this or that form-and-content dialectic recycling the formula like they’re trying to solve the 1980s landfill crisis.¹ But the headline term now has the status of relic, an outgrown holdover from a wavier time. Art critics we know report avoiding postmodern as a descriptor unless writing in the past tense; academics abandoned it years ago somewhere on the battlefields of the theory wars. In literature and film, one encounters rather less metafiction and upcycled kitsch than might be expected in our AI- and IP-laden times. One recent exception, Francis Ford Coppola’s brashly pomo production Megalopolis, confirmed our suspicion that only architects still embrace the P-word — architects, and a smattering of far-right YouTubers, who decry “postmodernism” as a gateway drug to low-IQ wokeness, immorality, and (only sort of wrongly) Marxism.

Never mind that the right’s own preferred hermeneutic approach to mass culture — with Disney movies as cipher for DEI conspiracy or whatever — can resemble a kind of impoverished and inverted mid-career Jamesonianism, “an essentially allegorical act” of “rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive master code,” as Jameson had it in The Political Unconscious. (Fittingly, the Jamesonian term “cultural Marxism,” dormant for years, has been taken up as a dog whistle by internet cranks in the Jordan Peterson mold, and promises to leach further into the political mainstream during the second Trump term.) In any case, the cross-disciplinary drift away from postmodernism has come to look, retrospectively, like something of a loss. For all the vexing, near-tautological elasticity it acquired in the ’80s and ’90s (postmodernism is characterized by utter heterogeneity — therefore everything affirms the rightness of postmodernism!), it’s a good term, a useful and sturdy term. In Jameson’s formulation, postmodernism registered an economic and cultural vibe shift, rippling through a world whose final barriers to global capital circulation were crumbling. Under so-called late capitalism, an alchemy of multinational finance and postindustrial consumer fantasias powered a cultural regime of ahistorical pastiche, defanged irony, and high-low melange — a regime of glitz and surfaces, networks and mass-market sheen.

What does it mean to live in an era whose only good feelings come from coining names for the era (and its feelings)?

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The critic’s task was to persuasively narrate these aesthetic tendencies as symptoms and allegories of the heady new economic mood. Given the Jameson treatment, “every weightless postmodern artifact in fact testif[ied] to the specific gravity of the fully capitalist planet it only appeared to float free of,” as Benjamin Kunkel summarized; no writer, he added, “seemed to embody more than Fredric Jameson the peculiar condition of an economic theory that had turned out to flourish above all as a mode of cultural analysis.” As a periodizing hypothesis, the achievement of Postmodernism was its rigorous materialism in both the theoretical and colloquial senses of the word — a dialectical merging of Marx and Madonna.

1. See David Golumbia’s The Cultural Logic of Computation, Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism, and, most recently, Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or, The Style of Too-Late Capitalism. ↩