Concluding Notes

Abstract

Today, even if the term “postmodern” is passé, the fundamental ideas associated with postmodernism—radical social articulation, the racial/cultural Other as unknowable sublime, the privileging of difference and heterogeneity for their own sakes— permeate progressive cultural studies. Take, for example, a conversation in the 2005 issue of PMLA. Bill Brown and his students rightly opine that Jameson greatly overestimates the cognitive unmappability of the Hotel Bonaventura in Los Angeles; according to many, it is actually a very boring building. But the crux of his critique hinges on the similarity of Jameson’s Marxist faith to Dante’s Christian one. In other words, the problem with Jameson is not that he dehistoricized the aptitude for cognitive mapping of a particular group of people at a particular point in time, that he has become dated or stodgy, or even that he was simply wrong, but rather that he appeals to a universal met a narrative and tries to incorporate into it that which is actually un assimilable. It is yet another manifestation of the same rhetorical moves that we see ad nauseum.