I

648 T E HR Y II A HPOL D
the author to ..cht<Jse [her] own approach" as to the appearance oflinks
Bolter, lit aI., Getting Started with 39), and authors com
leave links unmarked. joyce's rolc in the of Storyspace and his decision
to not mark the links in after/wotl, the Ur-text of the llelion boom
that his pre!i:rence for unmarked links has been decisive lor the school ofhypert.
that favors this method. The invisihility oflinh in afternoon is a crucial elemcnt
the coerciveness of the text's yield mechanism, in that it implicitly fOlmds the neld of au-
other to whom the links are rIOt invisible. This is reinfor(:ed the interface
)ermits the Storyspace user to see very brielly the location in the Cur
rent lcxia by holding down the Commaud and Option keys simultaneonsly (!inks are framed
rectangles as long as the keys are held down.) Peeking into the secret system of the
narrative structure is another form of till: petition to the other to eventual
<:!osuH,-though, Significantly, the Page Header format does not make visible in this
way.
4. Pan! de Man identines thh ilfllllicit contract with the dassical rhetorical fi"11rp of
(99).
5. llj'temoon's single-Window interface is nnusnal. joyce's choice of the PagE' Reader format
may have been determined by a decision to pusb a familiar compositional model-in the
typographic sense of the term-to its extremes. He began w,iting afternoon as a test of the
features of when the prognllll was in the
"Print Pathways, 3), and the Headingspaee format in which the text was
Eastgate Press in ]987 used a late beta vnsion of software. More recent
written in Storyspace (Joyce's WOE, Guyer and Izm" Pass, Monltbrop's
rim) have relied primarily on the program's mnlliple-wimlow, topographically-organized
readers,
Bibliography
Bolter. Jay Da'id. Writing Space: The Computer, IilflJertext, and the HistOfy ojWriting. Hills
dale, NJ: Lawrenee Erlbanm, 1991.
Bolter, Jay David, al. Getting Starled u:ith StorljSpace. Cambridge, MA: EastgatE' Systems,
Inc:., 1993.
Dt' Man, Paul. "Autobiography as De-fac-'ement." MI2'/94 (1979): 919--30.
Denida, jac'lues. Mel/wires jor Paul de Man. Trans, Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Ed"
nardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press, W86.
Dohmd, Virginia M. as au Interpretive Act." IiY,I,ermc.dia 1 (]989): 6-19.
Jane Yellowlees. "Gaps, Maps and Perception: Beaders (Don't) Do."
Perforations:> (1992).
and Interactive Labyrinths: How Hypertext Narratives Affect the Act
York UlIiv,'rsity, 1992.
Act of Reading: 111f WOE Beginner's Guide to Dissection," Writ
2.2 (1991): 112-2.5.
and Martha Petry. bnu: Pass
afternoon, II storY. Version J,0. MA: Eastgate
"A F"e1 f<)r Pros,,: Interstitia! Links and the Contours of Hypertext.
Ed!!.e 4.1 (1992): 8.3-101.
. WOE.' A will be. Writing Oil the Edge 2.2 (1991).
Moulthrop, Stuart. "Hypertext and 'the HYl'erreal'."llypeTte,rt '89. Pittsburgh, PA: Association
for Computing Machiuery, 1989. 25fJ--fi7,
ViCtOl1/ Garden. Version LO. Cambridge" MA:
Nielsen, jakob.lly/Jeltext ond llypemtedia, San Diegc
Zizek, Siavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! New York: Routledge, 1992.
"'1 Douht, Th"refore I aIll,' or, the Precipitous Identillcation." Newsletter
Fee,u/if'" Field 6. ]-2 (J (94): 34-48,
1994, rev, 1996
IIIIII1
TRINH T. MINH-HA
b. 1952
Trinh T. Minh-Ita is a filmmaker, composer, social theorist, and writer. Her work in
cludes the book Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcolonialit!1 and Feminisill (1989)
and the films Reassernhlage (1982), Naked Spaces---Living is Rowl11 (985), and Sur
name Viet, Given Name Nam Currently she teaches at San Frandsco State
From Woman, Native, Other
Infinite layers: I am not i can be you and me
A critical difference from means that I am not i, am within and
without L Iii can be 1 or i, you and me both involved. We (with capital W)
sometimes inelude(s), other times exclude(s) me. You and I are close, we
intertwine; you may stand on the other side of the hill once in a while, but
you may also be me, while remaining what you are and what i am not, TIle
differences made between entities comprehended as absolute presences
hence the notions of pure origin and true self-are an outgrowth of a du
alistic system of thought peculiar to the Occident (the "onto-theology"
which characterizes Western metaphysics). They should be distinguished
from the differences grasped both between and withiu entities, each of
these being understood as multiple presence, j Not not two either, "I"
is, therefore, not a unified subject, a fixed identity, or that solid mass cov
ered \vith of superficialities one has gradually to peel off bef()re one
can see its true face. ''1'' is, itself, infinite layers. Its complexity can
be conveyed through such 9-1)ographic conventions as I, i, or Ill. Thus, IIi
mn compelled by the will to saylunsay, to resOlt to the entire gamut of per
sonal pronouns to stay near this fleeing and static essence of Not-I. 'Whether
I accept it or not, the natures of I, i, you, slhe, We, we, they, and u;ohnan
constantly overlap. all display a necessary ambivalence, for the line di
viding I and Not-I, us them, or him and heris not (cannot) always
as clear as we would like it to be. Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to
separate, contain, and mend, always leak. Of all the layers that
form the open (never finite) totality of "I," which is to be filtered out as su
L1llTUpt, and which is to be called pure, true, genuine,
Ull!!,lIlill, authentic? Which, indeed, since all interchange, revolving in an
process? (According to the context in which they operate, the su
perfluous can become the real; the authentic can prove fake; and so
Authenticity as a need to rely on an "undisputed origin," is prey to an ob
sessivefear: that oflosing a connection, Everything must hold together. In
my craving for a logic of being, 1 cannot help but loathe the threats of in
terruptions, disseminations, and suspensions, To begin, to develop to a cli
max, then, to end. To fill, to join, to unify. The order and the links create an
illusion of continuity, which I for fear of nonsense and empti
ness. Thus, a clear origin give me a connection back through time, and
I shall, by all means, search for that genuine laver of mvself to which I can
649
650 TRINH T. MINH-IIA
To aholish it in such a is to remove the basis. the
prop. the overture, or the finale-giving thereby free rein to indetenni
the (i)refeared. is either an anan:hic succession of climaxes or
de(inlex)p:rcssiY'e. uninterrupted monotony-and to enter into the limit-
of interactiolls and changes that will stop, not even
In other words, things lllay be said to be what they are, not exclu
in relation to what was and what will be should 1I0t solelv be
seen as clusters chained together by the temporal sequence of cause' and
but also in relation to each other's immediate presences and to
themselves as The real, nothing else than a code of repre
sentation, does not coincide with the lived or the performed. This
is what Vine Deloria, Jr. accounts fiJr when he exclaims: "Not even Indians
can relate themselves to this of creature who, to anthropologists, is the
'real' Indian."" A realistic with such a code has, no
whatsoever: it is like "stonnin[J' the ear while trying to steal the bell"
The female identitv enclosure
DiHcnoncc as uniqueness or special is both limiting and deceiv
ing. Ifidentity refers to the wbole pattern of sameness within a human life,
the style of a continuing me that permeates all the changes undergone, then
difference remains within the boundmy of that which distinguishes one
identity from another. Tbis means that at heart, X must be X, 'I' must beY,
and X cannot beY, Those who run around yelling that X is not X and X can
be Y nsually land in a hospital, a "rehabilitation" center, a concentration
camp, or a res-er-va-tion. All deviations from the dominant stream of
thought, that is to the belief in a permanent essence of wo/man amI in
an invariant but identity, whose "loss" is considered to be a
human danger," can easily fit into tbe categories of the
"mentally underdeveloped," It is probably difficult for a
probing mind to recognize that to seek is to lose, for seeking presupposes
a separation between the seeker and the sought, the continuing me and the
changes it undergoes. What if the stOly of the identity crisis
prows to be only a stOly and Can identity, indeed, be viewed
other than as a by-product ofa ofHfe, one that, in fact, refers
no more to a consistent "pattern of sameness" than to an inconseqnential
process of otherness? How am I to maintain, or gain an (fe/male)
iclc>ntity when it is impOSSible to me to take up a position outside this iden
from which I presumably reach in and feel for it? Perhaps a way to por
is to borrow these verses from the Ltireni'-,W()-Ke:
YOIl cannot take hold of it,
Bnt you cannot lose it.
In not being ahle to (ret it. vou (!et it.
When vou are
vVhen y01l
FHOl\\ '\loman, Natire Otb r 651
Difference in such au insituable context is that !rhich undermines the very
idea of identity. deferring to the lavers whose totalitv I(mns "I." It
subverts the f(mndations affirmation or vindication of value and can
1I0t, thereby, ever bear in an absolute valliE". The diffiorence (within)
between difference itself and has so often been ignored and the use
of the two terms so readily that claiming a female/etlmic iden
tity/diff(orence is commonly tantamount to reviving a kind of naIve "lIIale
tinted" romantici.sm. If f(>minislIl is set I()fth as a demystifying then
it will have to questioll thorougilly the bdicf in its own identity. To
like Tndith Gardiner, that "the concept of female nrnvirl{,,,
to nnderstanding the special qualities of contemporary
women.. the divt'rse ways in which
men, and to "prop(;se the preliminary 'female identity is
""Mess' for the most fundamental of these differences" d()f's not, obvi
allow us to radically depart from the Such ,I formula
tion endeavors to "reach a theory of female identity. . that rariesfrom the
male model," and to demonstrate that:
for women is more flexible and relation ,11 thall
'f'ndprid,>nlilv is more staille thaulllale
inlantill: i(lelltil:ic,ltil)nS are less predictable than lIIale ones
""' J' .. ,ale cmmter/wIT of tIlE' male identity crisis lIlay occur 111 are
at a dil1ercnt stage. or not at all (my italics)
contribute to the im
provement and/or enlargement of the identity enclosure, but do not, in
way, attempt to remove its 'nce. The constant need to refer to the
model" I(n comparisons unavoidably maintains the subject nnder tutelage.
For the point is not to carve one's space in theories that ignore
women" and describe sOllie of the faeE.'s of f(Omale identity, saying. like (;ar
diner: "I picture as tYVically less fixed, less unitary, and
more flexible than male individuality, both in its prilUmy core and in til(' en
tire maturational complex developed from this core,"j hnt patiently to dis
mantle the verv notion of core (be it static or not) and ir]Pnh+u
vVoman can never he defined. Bat,
madam, lady of pleasure. MISTRESS. Belle-de-I11Jit.
woman. Cow, vixen, bitch. Call
and whore are both bred to please. The old
says She is a Womb, a mere baby's pOl1ch, or "nothing but " She is
a passive substance, a an enigma whose mystery proves to be a
snare and a delusion. wallows in night, disorder, and imm,mcIK'e and
is at the same time the factor (l)f'tween men)" and the to
the beyond. The further the nnfolds its images. the more en
tangled it gets in its attempts at Her. "Truth, Beauty,
is All: once more all under the form Other. All
mone De Beanvoir wrote. Yet, even with or because of Her capacitv
All. vVoman is the lesser luau, ,md amoug malc athletes,
a woman is still resented as the worst of insults. "\:Vo-" appended
I :
652 TRINH T. MINH-HA
in sexist contexts is not unlike "Third World," "Third," "minority," or "color"
afHxE'd to woman in pseudo-feminist contexts. Yearning for universality, the
"woman," like its counterpart, the generic "man," tends to efface
difference within itself. Not every female is "a real woman," one knows this
... Just as "m;m" provides an example of how the
women has been ignored, undervalued, distorted, or omitted
use of terminology presumed to be generic, "woman" more
often than not reflects the subtle power of linguistic exclusion, for its set of
referents rarely includes those relevant to Third World "female persons."
"All the Women Are \Vhite, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are
Brave" is the title given to an anthology edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia
Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith. It is, indeed, somehow devious to think that
WOMAN also encompasses the Chinese with bound feet, the genitally mu
tilated Africans, and thc one thousand Indians who committed suttee for
one royal male. Sister Cinderella's foot is also enviably tiny but never
crooked! And, Europl'an witches were also burnt to pUrify the body of
but they do not pretend to "self-immolation." "Third World," there
fore, belongs to a category apart, a "special" one that is meant to be both
complimentary and complementary, for First and Second went out of fash
ion, leaving a serious Lack behind to be filled.
IV. Grandma's Story
See all things howsoever theyfloutish
Return to the root from which they grew
This retUT1l to the root is called Quietness
-Lao Tzu, Tao-te-ching, 16 (tr.
A. Waley)
and fact: story and history
Let me tell you a story. For all I have is a story. Story passed on from gen
eration to generation, named Joy. Told for the joy it gives the stOlyteller and
the listener. Joy inherent in the process ofstorytelling. Whoever understands
it also understands that a story, as distressing as it can be in its joy, never
takes anything away from anybody. Its name, remember, is Joy, Its double,
Woe Morrow Show.
Let the one who is diseuse, one who is mother who waits nine
and nine nights be found. Restore memory. Let the one who is diseuse,
oue who is daughter restore spring with each appearance from be
neath the earth. The ink spills thickest heJ(Jre it runs dry before it stops
at all. ('fheresa Bak Kyung Cha)6
Something must be said. Must be said that has not been and has been said
before. "It will take 11 long time, but the story must be told. There must not
be any lies" (Leslie Marmon Silko). It will take a long time for living can
not be told, not merely told: living is not livable. Understanding, however,
is creatiIl!!'. and livin!!, such an immense gift that thousands of people ben-
FHOM \Voman, Native, Other 653
efit from each past or present life being lived. The story depends
one of us to COille into being. It needs liS all, needs our rcmembering,
derstanding, and creating what vve have heard together to
into being. story of a pcople. Of us, peoples. Story,
It'Ug,IUIL, philosophy, natural sciencc, ethics) -all ill one.
tool of primitive mall, the Simplest vehicle of truth. \Vhen history separated
itselffrom story, it started indulging in accumulation and facts. Or it thought
it could. It thought it could build up to History because the Past, unrelated
to the Present and the Future, is lying there in its entirety, waiting to be re
w'aled and related. The aet of revealing bears in itself a magical (not fac
tual) quality-inherited undoubtedly from "primitive" for the
Past perceived as such is a well-organized past whose organization is already
given. Managing to identify with History, history (with asmall letter h) thus
manages to oppose the factual to the fictional (turning a blind eye to the
"magicality" of its claims); the story-writer-the historian-to the story
teller. As long as the transformation, manipulations, or redistributions in
herent in the collecting of events are overlooked, thE' division continues its
COlIrSE', as of its itinermy as it certainly dreams to be. Story-writing
comes and history quickly sets itself apart, consigning
to the realm of tale, legend, myth, fiction, literature. Then, since fictional
and factual have come to a point where they Illutnally exclude each other,
not infrE'quently, means lies, and fact, tmth. DID IT BEAUX HAP
PEN? IS IT A TRUE STORY?
J don't want to listen to any mort> of your stories
Kingston screamed at her champion-story-talker mother]; they have
no lOgic. They scramble me up. You lie with stories. You won't tell me
a story and then say, 'This is a true story," or "This is just a story." I
can't tell the difference. 1 don't evcn know what your real names are.
r cau't tell what's real and what you made np.7
Which trnth? the question unaVOidably arises. The story has been defined
as "a free narration, not necessarily factual but truthful in character....
us human nature in its bold historv, in its individual
Not one but two: truth and fact, just like in the old times when
queens were born and kings were made in Egypt. (Queens and princesses
were then "Hoyal Mothers" from birth, whereas the king worc the crown
of high priest and did not receive the Horus-name until his coronation.) Po
etry, Aristotle said, is truer than history. Storytelling as literature (narrative
must then be truer than histOl'V. If we rely 011 history to tell us what
happened at a specific time and place:we can rdyon the sh'lry to tell us not
what might have happened, but also what is happE'ning at an Ilnspee
time and place. No wonder that in old tales storytellers are
witches, and prophets. The African griot and griotte are wea Known
for being poet, storyteller, historian, musician, and magician-all
But why truth at all? Why this battle for truth and on hehalf of truth? I do
not rememher having asked grand mother once whether the story she was
telling me was true or not. Neither do I recall her asking me whether the
1was readimr her was true or not. We knew we could make each other
never thought ofsayillg to each other. "This is
654 HE]) H rc .1 1\ \1 E " 0 i\
,I storY, A is a storv. There was no need fi:)r clarification-a need manv
considered "nat;mll" or imperative alllong chikIren-fi:)r thne w,;',
no sueh thing as "a blind aceeptanee of the story as literally true." Perhaps
the stmy has becolllejllst a stOly when I have become adcpt at consuming
truth as hlcL Imagination is thns equated with Calsificatiou, and I am made
to believe that if, I ,1ll1 not told or do uot establish in so
words what is true and what is I or the listener may no longer be
to differentiate fancy from Literatnre and history once were/still
mr stories: this nolnecessarily mean t1wt the space they fi:mn is un
diff(Jrentiated, hut that this space can articulate on a diHerent sel of
one whieh lIlav he said to stand outside the hienm:hieal realn I
On the onc haneL e:lCh society has its own of truth; on the other
hand, being truthful is Iwing the in-bctween of all regimes of trulh. Out
sidp specific time, antside specialized space: "Truth embraces with it all
other abstenlions other than itself' (T. IIak Kyung
Notes
dis{'usscd at lrngtl1 tIlt' notioll\'
\linh,ha. f'1l Art '1111.\ ,Wllrrc, //AIIOII1/1I1II1 dmls
Inlnnalional Knob I'll IIS., 1f)'" I'. '
2. Vine Jr,. lilllr Sinl ["Jel\' York: AVOll Book" W601.]1, li6.
:1. ()lloted ill \\. WaHs, ,\'all/rl'. ;\[all. a",! \\'Ollllll! rpt. 1'\('11' York: Vintage Books,
l!J7()). p. 121.
4. "On h',nalp an,1 \hiring by Critim!ll1i/lIiry H(lippciallsslH' on 'Friting
({w! S!'I/{({! ,'d.
,'). SillIO"" D(' Th"
6 'I']1('1'('sa Ilak Kyung ella, Die/,'e
7, 1,,1'1',iu(' Houg Kingston, The '\iJllwn (W75, 11'1. New York: Vintilg<' Books, 1977),
2:1.')
Ii. U'lrrell Horne, S/ury,(elling {II"! Siudying (Ncw York:\laclllillan,
2[1-2,1.
1989
FREDRIC JAMESON
b. 1934
Marxist critic and literal} Fredric Jameson is William A. Lane,
ProlEcssor of COlliparativ(' I ,iteraturc and Director of the Cra<luate
Litcrat ure the Duke Centc'r fi)r Critical Theon' at Duke His books
inclnde SmIre: The Origim ul a Slyle (JJ)61), rlIal Form: TU:('lIlielll GCI/
fllry Dialec/ical Thcorie, 41 ,fleraillre (1971), The Priso!l-Hollse ojLal/glla(l,e (1972),
The Pulit iut! Uncol/sciolls: Sarm/it;" as a Soc!rt/lll SlImholfc Act (1981 Land Pust
modernisill. or: The Cultllrlll
From Postmodernism and Consumer Society
COII(:cpt of postmodernism is not a(;ccpted or eVCll llnldclrsltocl(j
Some of the resistancc to it lIluy cOllie from the unfamiliarity of the
it covers. which (;all be f()lUld in all the arts: the poetry orrohn Aslr
FEO"'I Postmoderni 111 and Consumer Society 655
li)r instance, but also the much Simpler talk that came out of
the reaction against complcx, ironic, academic poetry in the '60s;
the rcactiou against modern architecture and in particular against the mon
ullleutal buildings of the International Style, the pop buildings and deco
rated sheds cclebrat('d by Robert Venturi in his manifesto,
Las Andy \Varhriand Pop art, hnt also the more receut Photoreal
ism; hI music, the moment ofJolm but also the later synthesis of clas
sical and "popular" styles found in like Philip Glass and
and also punk and new-wave with such groups as the Clash,
Heads and the Gang of Four; in film, everything that comes out of
C;odard--contemponny vanguard mm and video-but also a whole new
commercial or fiction films, which bas its in contempo
rary novels as well, where the works of \Villimn Burroughs, Thomas PYll
chon and Ishmael Reed on the one hand, and the Frellch new novel on the
are also to he llumbered among the varieties of what can be' called
)(Iernisnl '
This list would seem to make two clear at once: first most of the
Istmodernisms mentioned above emerge as specific reactions
established fi:mns of bigh modernism, this or that dominant
lllodemism which muquercd tbe university, the museum, the art gallery
network, and the foundatioIls. Those formerly subversive aud embattled
styles--Abstract Expressionism; the modernist ofPouml, Eliot
or Wallacr" Stevens; the International Stvle (Le Frank L10vd
Mil'S); Stravinsky; Proust ,{nd Mann-felt to be
shocking by our grandi)arents are, for the generation which arrives at the
in the 1960s, felt to he the establishment and the enemv---dead, sti
canonical, the reined monuments one has to destroy tr;' do anytiling
new. This means that there will be as lIIany diH(;rent fi:Jrl1ls of postu[lOrl
ernism as there vvere high lIloc!t'rnisnls in since the fanner are at least
initialJy and local reactions against those models. That obviously
does not make the job of describing postmodernism as a coherent thing any
easier, since the unity of this new has one-is not in it
self but in the very it to displace,
Tile second feature of this list of postmodernisms is thc eflaeenwnt in it
some kev boundaries or most notably the erosion ofthe older
high culturc and so-called or popular culture. This
perhaps the most distrpssing development of all from an academic staud
has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a reaIrn of
or elitr' cnlture the surrounding environment of philistinism,
schlock and series and Header:)' cultnre, and in trans
mitting di mcnlt and complex skills of reading, listening and to its ini
tiates. But many of the newer postmodernisllls Iwvc been filscinated
thaI whole landscape of and motels, of the Las
the Jate show and Grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliter
ature vvith its airport paperbaek of the gothic and romanee,
tire biography, the nlllrder mvsterv and the science fiction or fim
novel. Thev 110 Ir;nger as a migh t have
incorporate them, to the point the line between
commercial forms seems inercnsinQ'lv ehffk:ult to draw,
656 F HE D HI(: J,\ tv! E S () 1\
A rather different indication of this effacemcnt of the older categories
genre and diseomse can be found in what is sometimes called con
;Illorarv theorv. A l:!eneration a[.;o tbere was still a tedmical discourse
sYstems of or the phenouw
analytical or COllllllon hmguage
distin[.;ltish that quite
of political scieuce, for
increasingly, we have a
which is all or none of those
gt'nerally associated with France
becoming widespread and marks the end of
Foucault, for example, to he
called philosophy, history, social theOlY or political science? It's nndecid
able, as they say nowadays; and I ,viII suggest that snch "theoretical dis
course" is also to be llumbert'd among thc manifestations of postmod
eruislll.
Now I must say a word about the proper lIse of this concept: it is not
another word for the description of a particular style. It is also, at least
use, a periodiziug concept whose function is to correlate the t'mergence
new formal katures in cultnre with the tOmergt'nce of a new t:Ve of so
dallife and a new economic order-what is often E'uphemistically callt'd
modernization, postindustrial or eOllSlmwr society, the society of the media
or the spectac-le, or multinational capit<Jism. This ne"v moment of capital
ism can be dated from the postwar boom in the United States in the late
I940s and early 'SOs or, in France, from the establishment of the Fifth Re
publie in 1958. The 1960s are in lllany ways the key transitional period, a
iu which the new international order (nt'ocolonialism, the Green
information) is at one and the
samI' time set ill place and is swept and shaken by its own internal contra
dictions and bv external rt'sistance. I want here to sketch a ti:ow of the
in which the postmodernism expresses the inner truth of that
emergent social order oflate capitalism, hut ,vill have to limit the descrip
tion to only two of its Significant features, which I will call pastiche and schiz
ophrenia: they will give ns a clIance to sense the specificity of the post
modernist experience of space and time resneetively.
One of the most significant features or practicps
is pastiche. I mnst first explain this term, which
confllse with or assimilate to that related verhal phenomenon GLUed par-
Both pastiche and parody involve the imitation or, hettpr still, the milll
of other styles and partieularly of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches
other styles. It is obviolls tltat modern literaturc in general offprs a
rich field /i:Jr parody, since the great modern wIiters have all bf'Pll
the invention or production of rather nnique styles: tllink of the Faulkner
ian long sentence or of D.H. Lawrenee's charackristic natnre imagery;
think of \Vallace Stevens's peculiar way of using abstractions; think also of
the malllJerisItIS of the philosophers, of Heidcgger for example, or Sartre;
think of the lIlUsical stvles of Mahler or Prokofiev. All of these stvlcs, how
ever different frolll other, are cmnnarable in this: each is' nllite un-
FHOyl Postinodernislil (//Id COIlSlIlIler Society 657
mistakable; once one is learned. it is not to he con/ilsed with some-
else.
parody capitalizes on the lllliqneness
their idios.\1lcrasies and ecccntricities to prodnce
the OliiZinal. I "'on't sav that the satiric inmlllse
comic
which may
and whv '
component is what'is
658 FREDHiC iA'viESUN
individuality, which can be to generate its own uniuue vision of
the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable ,
Yet today, from any nmnber of distinct perspectives, the social
the psvchoanalysts, even tbe linguists, not to speak of those of us who work
in the area of culture and cultural amI formal change, arc all exnlorinl! the
notion that that kiud of individualism and identitv is a
that the old individual or individualist is "de:lcL and tllat one
lllight even cIt-scribe the concept of the unique individual and tbe tbeoret
ical basis of individnalism as ideological. There are in fact two positions on
all this, one ofwhich is more radical than the other. The first one is contcnt
to say: yes, onee upon a time, in the classic agc' of competitive capit;JJislll,
in the heyday of the nnc!"ar and tbe emergence of the bourgeoisie
til(' social there was such a thing as individualism, as in
dividnal subjects. But today, in tbe age of corporate capitalism, of the so
called organization man, of bureaucracies in business as well as ill the state,
of dernograpbic explosion-today, that older individual subject
no longer exists.
Then there is a second position, tbe more radical of the two, what oue
might call tbe position. It adds: not only is the bourgeois
individual subject a thing
this construct is merely a philosophical and cultural nmdifi""tinn
of the past, it is also a myth; it never reallv existed
in the Hrst place; tbere have never been autO[l()]nOliS snbjeets
to persuade peonle that tlwv "had" individual
sessed this unique personal
For our purposes, it is not particularly important to decide which of these
positions is correct rather, which is more and productive).
\Vhat we lrave to retaiu from all this is rather an aesthetie dilemma: because
if the experience and tht" of the unique self. au experience and ide
which inforIlH"d thc stylistic practice of cIassicalmodernislll, is over
done with, then it is no longer clear what the artists and writers of the
are snpposed to be doing. What is clear is merely that the
Proust, T.S. Eliot-do not work anv ][lore are
since nobody bas that kinel of unique world and
style to express any longer. And this is not merely a '"psyehologi
cal" matter: we also have to take into account the immense weight of sev
entvor veal'S of classical modernism itself. There is another sense in
which the and artists of the present day will no be able to in
vent new stvles and alreadv been onlva limited
number o(combinations are possible; the'most uniqne ones lrave been
thought of already. So the weight of the whole modernist aesthetic tradi
tion unow dead-also "weighs like a nieJltmare on the brains of the
as Marx said in anotlwr context.
Hence,onee pastiche: in a world in which stylistic innovation is no
longer possihle, that is left is to imitate (!f'ad to speak tllrough the
lJIasks and with the voices of tIre styles in the imagiH<lry musemn. Bnt this
means that r:ontcllIponny or postlllodr:rnist art is going to he ahout art it
self in a new kind of wav; even more, it means that one of its essential mes
will involve tire failnre of mt and tlie aesthetic, the failure
rl('W, the inrprisOlUnf'nt in
II
II
FHOM Postlllodernislll and ConsltJllcr Society 659
As this may seem verv abstract, I want to
link it with the kinds of dpvt'!0pJ1lpnts
giw=' a lew ('x;lIll,nl,",
which is so onlllipresent that \H'
art discusspd here. This particular practice of pastiche is not
r:nltural hut very much within mass cultUrE>, amI it is generally knowll as
"J)()st:algia film" (what tire French neath, call/a !Hode
"'';1. \Ve ITlllst conceive of this categorv in the broadest wav: narrowly,
no doubt, it consists of films abont tire and ahout specifie gt'n
erational moments of that Thus, one of the inaugural flhns iu this new
"genre" (if that's wIrat it was Lucas's American Graffi/i, which in 197,3
set ont to recapture all the atmosphere and stylistic peculiarities of the
1950s United States, the United States of the Eisenhower era. Polanski's
film China/men does something similar for the 19:30s, as does
Bertolncd's Tile COII!(wlitis/ for the Italian and European context of the
the fascist era ill and so ft)rth. \Vc cOllld go on listing these
films ftJr somc time: why call them pastiche? Are not rather work in
the more traditional geurc known as the historical whir:h can
more simplv be theorized extrapolating that other well-known Itmn
which is the historical
I have my reasons It)), thinking that we need new categories for such
films. But It:t me first add some anomalies: supposing I suggested that Star
Wars is also a nostalgia film. \Vhat could that mean'? r presunw we can
agree that this is not a historical film about our own intergalactic Let
me put it somewhat difTerentlv: one of the most important cnltural
ricnces of tIre gene rations that grew np from the ',30s to the '50s was
Saturday afternoon serial of the Buck Hogers t
Y
l'e-alien villains, true
American heroines in distress, the death rav or tIle doomsday box,
and the cliffhanger at the end whose miraclllons was to be wit
nessed next Saturdav afternoon. Star \\lars reinvents this in the
form of a pastiche: that is, there is no longer any point to a parody of such
serials since they are loug extinct. Star \Vars, far from beiug a pointless
satire of such now dr'ad forms, satisfies a dpcp (might I even
to experipnce thcm again: it is a complex object in
on SOlII(' Ilrst Ipve! childrcn ami adolesec'nts can take the adventnres
straight, while the adult pnblic is able to gratify a decper amI more prop
nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its
aesthetic nrtifac'ts through once again. TItis film is thns I/w/oll1jlltically
a historical or nostalgia film: unlike American Graffiti, it does not reinvent
of thc past in its lived rather, by the f(,el amI
of cItaracteristic mt of an older period (the it seeks
to remvakeu a sense of the past associated with those objects. Haiders
the Lost Ark, llIeamvhile, ocenpies an interrnediary position here: on some
level it is aboHt the ':30s an(1 '40s, hut in it too couwvs that
metouymicaIlv tlmmgh its own characteristie adventnn' stOl:ies (which are
110 IOllger '
Now let me discHss another interesting anomaly which
ther towards lInderstanding nostalgia fUm in particular and pa:,tiche
This one involves a rccent film ealled Body Heat, which, as has
bcen pointed Ollt by thc' critics, is a kind of distant [('make of The
PoslHum l\/tcm/s Hil/gs 1'1./.:i('(' or Double il/delHl/itl! (Tht' allusive ami elll
660 FREDHIC JAMESON
sive plagiarism of older plots is, of course, also a feature of pastiche.) )Jow
Body Heat is technically not a nostalgia film, since it takes place in a con
temporary setting, in a little Florida village near Yliami. On the other hand,
this technical contemporaneity is most ambiguous indeed: the credits-al
ways our first cue-are lettered and scripted in a '30s Art-Deco style which
cannot but trigger nostalgic reactions (first to Chinatown, no doubt, and
then bevond it to some more historical referent). Then the very style of the
hero hi;nself is ambiguous: \Nilliam Hurt is a new star but of
the distinctive style of the preceding generation of male superstars like
Steve McQueen or even Jack Kicholson, or rather, his persona here is a kind
of mix of their characteristics with an older role of the type generally asso
ciated with Clark Gable. So here too there is a faintly archaic feel to all this.
The spectator begins to wonder why this story, could have been sit
uated anywhere, is set in a small Florida town, in spite of its contemporary
reference. One begins to realize after a while that the small town setting
has a crucial strategic function: it allows the film to do without most of the
signals and references which we might associate with the contemporary
world, with consumer SOCiety-the appliances and artifacts, the high rises,
the object world of late capitalism. Technically, then, its objects (its cars,
for instance) are 1980s products, but everything in the film conspires to blur
that immediate contemporary reference and to make it pOSSible to receive
this too as nostalgia work-as a narrative set in some indefinable nostalgic
past, an eternal '30s, say, beyond history. It seems to me exceedingly symp
tomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even
those movies today which have contemporary settings: as though, for some
reason, we were unable today to focus our own present, as though we have
become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own cur
rent experience. But if that is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer
capitalism itself--or at the very least, an alarming and pathological symp
tom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and
history.
So now we come back to the question of why nostalgia film or pastiche
is to be considered different from the older historical novel or film (I should
also include in this discussion the major literary example of all this, to my
mind the novels of E.L. Doctorow-Ragtime, with its turn-of-the-century
atmosphere, and Loon Lake, for the most part about our 1930s. But these
are, to my mind, historical novels in appearance only. Doctorow is a seri
ous artist and one of the few genuinely Left or radical novelists at work
today. It is no disservice to him, however, to suggest that his narratives do
not represent our historical past so much as they represent our ideas or cul
tural stereotypes about that past.) Cultural production has been driven
back inside the mind, within the monadic subject: it can no longer look di
rectlv out of its eyes at the real world for the referent but must, as in Plato's
cave: trace its images of the world on its confining walls. If there is
any realism left here, it is a "realism" which springs from the shock of grasp
iug that confinement and of realizing that, for whatever peculiar reasons,
we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop im
ages and stereotypes about that past, which itself remaius forever out of
reach.
FHOM Postmodernism and Consumer Society
661
Now I must try very rapidly in conclusion to characterize the relationship
of cultural production of this kind to social life in this country today. This
will also be the moment to address the principal objection to concepts of
postmodernism of the type I have sketched here: namely that all the fea
tures we have enumerated are not new at all but abundantly characterized
modernism proper or what I call high-modernism. 'Vas not Thomas Mann,
after all, interested in the idea of pastiche, and are not certain chapters of
Ulysses its most obvious realization? Did we not mention Flaubert, Mal
larme and Gertrude Stein in our account of postmodernist temporality?
What is so new about all of this? Do we really need the concept of a post
modernism?
One kind of answer to this question would raise the whole issue of peri
odization and of how a historian (literary or other) posits a radical break be
tween two henceforth distinct periods. I must limit myself to the sugges
tion that radical breaks between periods do not generally involve complete
changes of content but rather the restructuration of a certain number ofel
ements already given: features that in an earlier period or system were sub
ordinate now become dominant, and features that had been dominant again
become secondary. In this sense, everything we have described here can be
found in earlier periods and most notably within modernism proper: my
point is that until the present day those things have been secondary or
minor features of modernist art, marginal rather than central, and that we
have something new when they become the central features of cultural
production.
But I can argue this more concretely by turning to the relationship be
tween cultural production and social life generally. The older or classical
modernism was an oppositional art; it emerged within the business society
of the gilded age as scandalous and offensive to the middle-class public
ugly, dissonant, bohemian, sexually shocking. It was something to make fun
of (when the police were not called in to seize the books or close the exhi
bitions): an offense to good taste and to common sense, or, as Frcud and
Marcuse would have put it, a provocative challenge to the reigning reality
and performance-principles of early 20th-century middle-class society.
Modernism in general did not go well with overstuffed Victorian furniture,
with Victorian moral taboos, or with the conventions of polite society. This
is to say that whatever the explicit political content of the great high mod
ernisms, the latter were always in some mostly implicit ways dangerous and
explosive, subversive within the established order.
If then we suddenly return to the present day, we can measure the im
mensity of the cultural changes that have taken place. Not only are Joyce
and Picasso no longer weird and repulsive, they have become classics and
now look rather realistic to us. Meanwhile, there is very little in either the
form or the content of contemporary art that contemporary society finds
intolerable and scandalous. The most offensive forms of this art-punk
rock, say, or what is called sexually explicit material-are all taken in stride
by society, and they are commercially successfill, unlike the productions of
the older high modernism. But this means that even if contemporary art
I
662 FHEDHIC
Ims aU the sanw feJrlllal fe'atnres as tile older mnd,'mi,"l
its Dositicm fi.mdamentaIlv within our culture.
ge111clration of poets, painters and musicians.
Hut oue can also come at the break from the other side, aud describe it
terms of periods of recent social life. As I have suggested, nou-Marxists
and Marxists alike have come around to the general that at some
following \Vorld \Var II a new kind of society began t(; ernerge (vari
llluitinational capitalism, consumer
"le\v types of consumption; planned ob
solescence; an ever more rapid rhytlnn of fashion and styling changes; the
advertising. television and the media gencrally to a hitherto
throughout society; the replacement of the old tension
coulltry. center and province, by the suburb aud by nlli
vt'rsal standardization; the growth of the great networks of superhighways
and the arrival of:mtOlllobile cnlture--these are some of the features wi licIt
would scem to mark a radical break with that older prewar society in which
high modernism \vas still an underground force.
I believe that the emergence of postmodernisl11 is closely related to the
emergence of this new lliOllwnt onate. consumer or l11ultinational
ism. I believe also that its formal features in lIlany ways express the
logic of that particular social system, I will only be able, however, to
this for ont' major theme: Il<unely the disappearance of a sense of
the way in which onr entire contemporary social system has little
to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a
petual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the
kind which all earlier social formations have had in one wav or another to
pn>s(O]ve. Think only of the media exhaustion of news: of I{ow "lixon
even more so, Kennedy an' from a now distant past. One is tempted
to say that the very function of the ]WWS media is to relegate such recent
historic-'ll into the past. The inf<Jnllational
function media to hdp us lorget, to serve as the very
and IYlPchanisllls Ie)r our historical amnesia.
But in that case the two features
dwelt hen
L
"the trausformation
time into a series of both extraordinari Iv consonant
with this proeess. own conclnsion here llIIlst take the fon;l of a ques
tion <tbout the value of thf' newer art. There is sOllie agreement that
the older modernism functioncd a\!ainst its sodetv in \vays whicb arc vari-
FROM Postmodernism and Consumer Sod 663
described as
and the like. Can anything of the sort be postmodernism and affirmed
its social moment? "'Ve have seen that there is
replicates or reproduces-reinforces-the logic ofconsumer capitalism; the
more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists
that logic. But that is a question we must leave open.
1983