The drive behind this paper has been the recent publication of Fredric Jameson's 1991 Welleck Lectures, The Seeds of Time. 1 As these lectures were delivered a decade after Jameson's initial attempts to map the terrain of post modernity it appeared to me to provide an occasion to reflect upon the current status of Jameson's highly influential and much criticized theory of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism. It also enables me to return to, what I consider to be, one of the most troubling aspects of Jameson's writing on postmodernism, that is to say, the "waning", to use Jameson's term, of the political imagination. As Jameson is probably the foremost Marxist theorist writing on postmodernism and one of the most influential of contemporary cultural critics, I find this paralysis of the political imagination in the face of postmodernism deeply problematic. .
As most of you are probably aware postmodernism is inherently paradoxical and playful. There is, suggests Jameson a kind of winner loses logic about it, the more one tries to define what is characteristically postmodern the less characteristic it turns out to be. Postmodernism, by definition resists definition. Theoretically, postmodernism can not only theorise its own conditions of impossibility; with a fixed subject nor object there can be no theory of postmodernism as such. This paradoxically is what Jameson now identifies as the antinomies of post modernity, the theoretical impasses which mesmerize postmodern theory and unlike the older (modernist) discourse of dialectical contradiction remain irresolvable at a higher level of abstraction. Jameson identifies four fundamental antinomies of postmodernism: time and space, subject and object, nature and human nature, and finally the concept of Utopia. Today I will focus on just the first of these antinomies, what Jameson describes as the foundational.
