Epochality and the End of History

Yesterday I picked up a cheap copy of The Cultural Turn, Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 by
Fredric Jameson. It's a book that I should've read long ago but didn't, because I was under the impression that the book just recycled essays, including the famous "Postmodernism and the Consumer Society," that had been published before elsewhere. Although much of what Jamseon has to say in the book is already familiar to me, I'm finding it quite useful for my own research on the present-day status of the aesthetic. In particular, the chapter "'End of Art' or 'End of History'?" is proving to be a great catalyst for my thinking about a cluster of novels written in the past couple decades.

For example, I'm quite taken by the term "ephochality." I know, I know, y'all think that academics are all too frequently smitten with neologisms and esoteric jargon that makes their writing impenetrable to all but a select coterie. Well, in this case, I'm here to tell you that the term is straightforward and necessary, for it provides an effecient way of describing a pervasive phenomenon of our--hell, let's not be bashful about using the term--postmodern condition. Jameson uses the term "epochality" to describe the dominant attutide that we have to the beliefs held by people living in other temporalities. Jameson writes, "I believe, however, that the historical significance of Fukuyama's essay is not really to be found in Hegel or Kojeve, even though I also think we have something to learn from them: namely, a relationship to our own presesnt which I will call 'epochality' and by way of which we defend the historical meaning and significance of the present moment and the present age against all claims of the past and the future" (CT 90).

Jameson is commenting here on Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, an enormously influential article and later book (Fukuyama had a position in the George H.W. Bush's State Department). I don't want to rehearse Fukuyama's arguemnt, which concerns the idea that from an evolutionary perspective, political systems have reached their final stage of development. In other words, the Westernized liberal democracies that emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the United States, France, etc. are more or less where it's it, and everything to come will just be fine tuning the systems to make them better conform to the abstract ideals (liberty, fraternity, equality, etc.) upon which they were founded. egarding our relationship to the present, namely, our inability to imagine that alternative beliefs from either the past or the future could alter our beliefs about the present. I us "ed the colloquialism "where it's at" deliberately, because one of Jameson's insights into Fukuyama's essay is that "despite the appearances, Fukuyama's 'end of history' is not really about Time at all, but rather about Space" (CT 90) and the recognition that, in the new globalized economic system, there are virtually no uncommodified parts of the world left.

But let's return to "epochality." The term, as Jameson uses it, provides a shorthand way of articulating our (i.e., those of us living in Westernized democracies) inability to imagine that beliefs from either the past or the future could possibly alter our beliefs about the present or provide the model for an alternative social system. In his previous writings, Jameson urged readers to "always historicize," but recently he has, I think, grown even more aware of the amnesiac nature of our contemporary existence.

One result of our lack of knowledge about the past is that it makes it more difficult to imagine that the present too will one day be regarded as a historical moment. Thus, our attention is fixated on the present and the immediate, or, at best, the near future. In the United States, for example, the general failure to act now in order to limit global warming, or the tendency to ring up huge debts without much consideration about how future generations will pay them off are two symptoms of our epochality.

Basically, Jameson is concerned about our inability to imagine a better world than the one in which we currently live, which is filled with extreme poverty and suffering due in part to inequalities perpetuated by global or postmodern capitalism. Because capitalism is fueled by the capitalists' extraction of surplus labor from workers, and because the current global capitalist order is, to a widely unacknowledged degree, dependent upon a pyramidal distribution of wealth and resources, including food, shelter, health care, etc. Jameson believes that we need to implement a different global social order. Unfortunately, in his view, this project strikes most people as being not just impossible to realize, but impossible to even conceptualize. That is, for many, at least for the political and economic elite who own most of the world's wealth and are the primary benefactors of the all-mighty market, the present order appears to be the be all and end all. Jameson is a Marxist thinker. He still believes in a socialist or communist project. What I would like to know, is how does he think we could get from here to there without a bloody, world revolution that could possibly leave the planet uninhabitable?