Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism

by Jeffrey T. Nealon

Post-Postmodernism begins with a simple premise: we no longer live in the world of "postmodernism," famously dubbed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" by Fredric Jameson in 1984. Far from charting any simple move "beyond" postmodernism since the 1980s, though, this book argues that we've experienced an intensification of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life. If "fragmentation" was the preferred watchword of postmodern America, "intensification" is the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary era.

Post-Postmodernism surveys a wide variety of cultural texts in pursuing its analyses--everything from the classic rock of Black Sabbath to the post-Marxism of Antonio Negri, from considerations of the corporate university to the fare at the cineplex, from reading experimental literature to gambling in Las Vegas, from Badiou to the undergraduate classroom. Insofar as cultural realms of all kinds have increasingly been overcoded by the languages and practices of economics, Nealon aims to construct a genealogy of the American present, and to build a vocabulary for understanding the relations between economic production and cultural production today--when American-style capitalism, despite its recent battering, seems nowhere near the point of obsolescence. Post-postmodern capitalism is seldom late but always just in time. As such, it requires an updated conceptual vocabulary for diagnosing and responding to our changed situation.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction

244 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2012

About the author

Jeffrey T. Nealon is Professor of English at Penn State University. He is the author of "Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction" (1993), "Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity" (1998), and "The Theory Toolbox" (2003).

Reviews

[J.D. Isip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nealon's book is a surprisingly easy read (as far as criticism goes) considering the perplexing area(s) of postmodernism he is taking on. In a sense, aside from a few lesser critiques by the likes of Terry Eagleton and Alan Kirby, postmodernism has remained pretty much the culture dominant - mostly because nobody seems to be able to move past it; Nealon's book is at the very least that - a move past. Unfortunately, he remains far too beholden to the postmodern forebears (in spite of some pretty saucy writing about big theory in his two literary criticism chapters) - we are ever conscious that he does not want to proclaim a "death of postmodernism." Indeed, the premise of the book is an awkward "intensification" of postmodernism (but don't worry, Nealon gets past that and just lays into some observations of moving past postmodernisms). Nealon's best in this book is when he is free with his observations, unafraid of making a claim (see, again, the big theory stuff). But this is just the start of a wave of scholarship moving past postmodernism - not in reactionary ways, but in necessary ways, in ways that acknowledge that this is not post-war 1945 and the thought that has grown out of big theories of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s must at least alter (if not metamorphose entirely) to speak to and of the current generation/period.
But Nealon's book will be important - it will likely be the one every new scholar will begin with. So it is well worth the read.

[E. C. Koch · Rating 4 out of 5]

You would be forgiven if you walked in on a college English class today and mistook it for an Economics lecture. Eventually you’d notice that everyone in the room was turned to the same page of a novel rather than a textbook and that the professor was bedecked in tweed rather than pinstripes and that you were in a closet rather than a state-of-the-art lecturing palace, but I’ll hazard that the content would strike you as similar. Indeed, within the last two decades the study of literary concepts has necessitated the study of economic ones as the lessons of Fredric Jameson have trickled down, as it were, to become ever more widely accepted and fundamental. As we all know, the publication of Jameson’s now-canonical critical text, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, offered a materialist, historicist accounting of how what is referred to as postmodernism is not to be understood as an artistic aesthetic, and should instead be recognized as the cultural reflection of capitalism’s mutation into late capitalism. And of course, as we also all know, this argument was meant as a corrective to the aestheticist approach to postmodernism, which held that postmodernism was the cultural expression of certain changes in understanding explained by a movement away from old (Modernist) epistemological questions toward new ontological ones as codified by a disparate body of philosophy called French Theory. Here, then, as Jameson has it, understanding literature – unpacking the aestheticization of certain universal experiences, revealing the dominant forces of a given place and time, tracking the shifts in a culture’s values – requires an understanding of the most universal experience, the most dominant force, around which all American values are ultimately organized: capitalism. So, had you accidentally walked into the course on Hip-Hop Poetics I took a few years ago, you might have interrupted a discussion of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos or Loïc Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor or Milton Freidman’s Capitalism and Freedom. And the reason you would have walked in on us discussing those texts is because in order to understand the experiences and values animating the vanguard of contemporary poetry one has to make sense of the dominant force acting upon those poets, the term for which force is now no longer capitalism, or even “late capitalism,” but neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has, unfortunately, attained buzzword status in today’s university; like “Anthropocene” and “biopolitics,” neoliberalism is something that gets tossed out in conversation to show interlocutors how current one is. The effect of this buzzwordyness is, at least in part, that lots of people have only a sense of what this thing is, making its study seem either redundant (“I already know what neoliberalism is”) or embarrassing (“No one can find out that I don’t really know what neoliberalism is”), when in reality, like the Anthropocene and biopolitics, it’s totally crucial to understanding literature today (which is really just a metaphorical way of saying the world today). All of this is what makes Nealon’s book (and Brown’s and Waquant’s books (the subtitles of which books are Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution and The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity respectively)) so important—it is an up-to-the-minute reckoning of how the latest mutation of capitalism has manifested in culture, and how in turn we might read future cultural effects for what they are. Nealon’s thesis (which, as his title suggests, draws heavily from Jameson) is that the current claims that literature has passed into a period after postmodernism, into a post-postmodernism, is marked, as postmodernism was, by a change in capitalism. This change, of course, is neoliberalism, the intensification of capitalism that demands ever-greater efficiency from businesses, ever-greater flexibility from employees, and ever-greater consumption from everyone. This is the world where we’re told to make ourselves into brands, where identity is defined through the commodities we consume, where all manner of social safety nets and public interests and welfare is deemed inefficient, where careers have become gigs, and where privatization is the byword on everyone’s lips. Here, intensification is precisely how Nealon characterizes post-postmodernism; it’s distinct from postmodernism in how the social organization around capitalism has intensified. The reader is shown how the 2008 market crash, the War on Terror, and the Las Vegas strip all evidence how we have wholly inhered neoliberalism’s tenets to the point to which we need a new name for the current period. And the name Nealon chooses, the dysphemistic “post-postmodernism,” is meant to be both intentionally ugly and a clear expression of how the current period is just an intenser version of the last one. I’d say that the first part of this book is manifestly superior to the second part and that Nealon over-relies on Jameson (though, to be fair, he constantly says he’s doing this), and that, nonetheless, this remains an important account of how understanding neoliberalism is central to understanding the world today.

[Jay Shelat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mehh... part one is excellent. Part two isn’t.

[Trinity Benstock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good, just a bit disjointed in a non-Jameson purposefully disorienting manner, so just disjointed.

[Zekiye Antakyalıoğlu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cool and entertaining

[Roger Whitson · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has some great and needed analysis of post-2008 capitalism. But it is sometimes too aware of its debt to Jameson to get out from under his shadow.

[Nathan Stewart]

1. I'm firmly situated in the PoPoMo camp, double prefix be damned. 2. Sometimes I hate reading theory. I feel like I'm expected to have read Deleuze, Foucault, Adorno, Derrida, etc., but to read (and understand) those people I need to have already been familiar with Nietzsche, Kant, Freud, Marx, etc. It's impossible.

[Iñigo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deluzian Adorno? Weird. But pretty good