W HAT WAS POSTMODERNISM? IF LARGELY ECLIPSED AS AN AES- thetic practice, might it not yet teach us something as a crit- ical object?1 And, if so, what might postmodern aesthetics tell us about the emotional and afective formations that currently magnetize critical interest across the humanities? Probing these ques- tions, I turn to the inal scene of David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), the controversial screen adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s no less controversial 1973 novella—and a ilm whose crystallization of canonical critical models of postmodernism makes it uniquely if unexpectedly useful to the efort to reappraise them. In keeping with the perverse spec- tacular and narrative predilections of the ilm as a whole, the scene in question inds the protagonists, James Ballard (James Spader) and his wife, Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), in a carefully contrived car chase that culminates in James’s deliberately driving his wife’s silver coupe of the freeway and down a grassy embankment. Yet like many another ripple in what Jesse Fox Mayshark has christened the “cultural tide of pop postmodernism” (1), the scene’s dramatically and morally inlammatory content is matched by a certain formal latness (Adams; Dery 44; Jones)—the same “latness or depthless- ness” that Fredric Jameson, writing in 1990, traced to postmodern aesthetics’ renunciation of hermeneutic depth (Postmodernism 9). he formal strategies t hrough which the ilm sustains this latness are readily isolated. Cinematographically, the scene favors the aloof, aerial detachment of the extreme long shot over the facial close-ups through which ilms conventionally secure meaning and identiica- tion. Whether descending toward the grassy median strip to disclose Catherine’s bloodied body and mangled car or reascending into the end credits, the mobile, crane-mounted camera maintains a crisp, un- impeachable distance from its subjects that invites us to consider the PANSY DUNCAN teaches at the Univer- sity of Auckland, where she is complet- ing a book manuscript examining the emotional life of postmodern aesthetics. Taking the Smooth with the Rough: Texture, Emotion, and the Other Postmodernism pansy duncan [ PMLA © 2014 pansy duncan PMLA 129.2 (2014), published by the Modern Language Association of America 204