The Intellectual Situation The Editors After Fredric Jameson Bonaventure Hotel, Downtown Los Angeles. Photo by Laura Owens. When exactly did we stop hearing the word postmodernism ? Fredric Jameson’s death this fall at the mighty age of 90 left us wondering. (The question reemerged a few weeks later with the reelection of Donald Trump, who for all his ominous contemporaneity is trailed by a permanent miasma of the tacky, made-for-TV ’80s.) The subtitle of Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism has enjoyed an enduring popularity into the 21st century, with academic treatises on this or that form-and-content dialectic recycling the formula like they’re trying to solve the 1980s landfill crisis. 1 But the headline term now has the status of relic, an outgrown holdover from a wavier time. Art critics we know report avoiding postmodern as a descriptor unless writing in the past tense; academics abandoned it years ago somewhere on the battlefields of the theory wars.…