Hello! Hope everyone has been doing well. I just wrote up this little piece - I intend to add some more content to this, but I wanted to get a bit of feedback before I do regarding the plausibility of the aesthetic and cultural developments therein. Of course, as before, this isn't anything like canon, but is merely my attempt to think my way through how our culture and the way we think about it might change in this time-line.
Excerpts from Frederick Jameson's Communist Reflexo-Modernism, Capitalist Post-Modernism: A Comparative Study of Cultural Logics (New York: University of America, Columbia Press, 1982)
Conclusion: The Cultural Logics of Transition
This is not the first study to raise the issues posed by the simultaneous advent of Reflexo and Post-Modernism. A number of recent scholars, most prominent among them Terry Eagleton and Stuart Hall, have drawn attention to elective affinities between the post-modern turn in capitalist culture and the reflexo-modernism which emerged during the second cultural revolution within the UASR. Hall contends that it was not simply a coincidence that the turn away from classical modernist cultural and aesthetic forms occurred nearly concurrently within the UASR and the FBU, for example, and Eagleton thinks that the end of classical modernism was occassioned not simply by transnational networks of influence that sprung up during the period of detente between the world's superpowers but also by the change in both the FBU and UASR from Fordist to more flexible forms of industrial production. The work of both Hall and Eagleton is undoubtedly helpful as a corrective to some of the vulgar materialist scholarship on the development of American culture and thought which conceives its essential dynamics to be driven solely by the internal structure of the American economy.
Nonetheless, an equal and opposite error must be warned against: the facile and easy cultural internationalism which ignores or simply just downplays the importance of pre-existing, endogenous factors in the reception and appropriation of external cultural forms. While Hall, having played a great part in the development of reader-response theories of interpretation, is attentive to this issue, there are plenty of less thoughtful disciples who are not. In the previous chapter, we have surveyed some of these mistakes in the writings of both British and American scholars, both of whom have the tendency to understand the folks across the pond from them as much more like them than they really are. In a world of global super-power struggle and ideological fervor, this may seem somewhat surprising. But at its root lies the simple fallacy of assuming that the transmission of cultural forms between differently structured societies will leave their basic meaning and content mostly intact. This amounts to a form of unwitting, though not for that reason necessarily less harmful, ethnocentrism.
We have tried to shy away from directly discussing transnational networks of influence here. This is not because they do not exist. Rather, it is because we have operated throughout with an
explicative and
logical understanding of culture: culture has a
logic which is intelligible upon close inspection. This logic is intelligible because culture is produced by socially situated human beings whom exist within a particular life-world, and constitutes a response to the problems, contradictions, and felt needs of those living within that world. We may thus speak, more broadly, not simply of the intelligibility and logical structure of a culture, but also of a cultural logic itself: a series of practices, forms, and structures which may be viewed both as a shared mark of many different cultural products and as a relation between these practices, forms, and structures and the underlying situation which they respond to. The existence of cultural logics means that transnational influences, however robust, must be understood in terms of the distinctive way such influences are taken up and transformed by the domestic culture.
Reflexo-Modernism and Post-Modernism bear a superficial similarity because they are both cultural logics of societies in transition. The UASR is slowly groveling toward lower-stage communism, and the FBU has entered a late stage of capitalism in which there are increasingly fewer markets to exploit, a falling rate of profit and consequently forms of technologically-driven displacement of labor have become increasingly prominent. The loss of the utopian potential of 19th century liberalism and the bourgeoie's consequent movement from a progressive, to centrist, to reactionary global class is unsurprisingly coupled today in capitalist states with an art which spurns not simply the hope for utopia, but also the presence of any inner depths. Reflexo-modernism, though sharing a similar skepticism toward the implicit romanticism and utopianism of the grand modernist architecture and art of the 30s and 40s, has at root a very different series of motivating factors.
To speak somewhat simply and programatically: if post-modern art is self-absorbed and self-contained, having little ability to point beyond itself toward the transcendent or authentic, reflexo-modernist art is ceaselessly tripping over itself in anxiety over the future and the myriad possibilities it holds, a reflection of the UASR's terminal consternation about what a communist future may really hold.
In modernism, the surfaces and appearances of things point to inner depths below with a potentially transcendent or revelatory character. In post-modernism, surfaces are elevated in such a fashion that it is difficult to see beyond them, and any attempt at interpretation on the part of the cultural consumer is confounded. In Reflexo-Modernism, by contrast, there is an attempt to bring the depths to the surface, to bring what was previously mediated to our immediate attention. Of course, we might not like what we see, but the equal measure of optimism and pessimism in the aesthetic culture of the UASR bears little resemblance to the utter absence in Post-modern artwork of any value-judgment, however implicit.
