Jameson & "capital"

[Michael Hoover]

> Speaking of Jameson, I want to strongly recommend Perry Anderson's latest,
> titled "The Origins of Postmodernism". The book started out as a preface to
> collected writings of Jameson, but it became too big. What I find
> interesting in what I have read so far is Anderson's careful research into
> the first usages of the word postmodern. It seems that poet Charles Olsen
> was one of the first to use the word in the context of his leftist,
> Melvillian, Mayan eclectic world-view. One of the things I enjoy about
> Anderson is his ability to drawn in a wide panoply of information when
> writing about something like this.
> Louis Proyect

According to Steven Best and Douglas Kellner (_Postmodern Theory_):

English painter John Watkins Chapman spoke of 'postmodern painting' 
around 1870 to describe at-that-time avant-garde work

German Rudolf Pannwitz used the term in a 1917 book to describe European
nihilism

British historian D. C. Somervall referred to a 'postmodern' break with 
the modern age in a one volume edited version of Arnold Toynbee's _A 
Study of History_ (1947)...Toynbee used the term as well in a 1963 revised 
edition of the complete work

cultural historians Bernard Rosenberg and David White described mass 
society as postmodern in their 1957 book _Mass Culture_...economist 
Peter Drucker subtitled his book of the same year, _The Landmarks of 
Tomorrow_, 'A Report on the New Post-Modern World' 

C. Wright Mills wrote of the modern age 'being succeeded by a post-
modern period' in _The Sociological Imaginaion_ (1959)

 
in 1961, Huston Smith characterized the view that reality is unordered
and unknowable as the 'postmodern mind'

the term 'postmodern' was used a bit in the 1940s & 1950s to designate
certain developments in architecture & poetry (would include Olson,
I think)...term began to be used in the 1960s & 1970s by cultural
theorists (as listers, no doubt, already know)...Michael Hoover