ABSTRACT
From the perspective of almost ten years now, it seems undeniable that Jameson maximized the shock of that moment by seeming not to be shocked, by not condemning, like some Jeremiah, what we were presumably going through, but by refusing all normative judgements, refusing to say that the postmodern was bad and that capital had just reached a horrendous new plateau of evil. Indeed he insisted without obvious regret that there would be no return to some ‘more traditional and
reassuring perspectival…enclave’. The absence of this amniotic enclave he left for Allan Bloom, Hilton Kramer, and the rest of the New Right to bewail when they arrived late on the scene at the end of the decade. Meanwhile we were given to understand that within the current moment there was hope for future years, that there could even be seeds of a new communality as yet untheorized and unforeseen, that in any case we had now to ‘hold to the truth of postmodernism’, after all simply the cultural emanation of the huge multinational dynamo of capital, and that someday perhaps, ‘with new cognitive mapping’, we might regain our orientation, and with it a renewed capacity ‘to act and struggle’.
