This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Discipline/Field: philosophy, critical theory, literature, aesthetics
Year: 1991
Main Arguments & Concepts
Jameson describes his goal for this work as “to project some conception of a new systemic cultural norm and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today” (6). So, postmodernism, for Jameson, is not an aesthetic or arts movement (though it can be expressed that way), but a dominant social condition. It is the “cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism” (46).Postmodernism has a strong spatial element (365), and one key feature of postmodernism is disorientation. According to Jameson, postmodern people cannot conceive of the networks that we are a part of anymore, like communication and capitalism (44). So, if art is going to act against this postmodern conditions, it should work to help orient people again (56).
Early on, Jameson delineates the features of the postmodern include depthlessness; weakening historicity,; emotional tone / the sublime, or “intensities” in his words; embeddedness in new technology; and late capitalist space. However, at the very end of the book, he discusses the challenges in studying postmodernism: “systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and historizing something that is resolutely ahistorical” (418).
Postmodernism vs. Modernism
Postmodernism is different than modernism, but even if it was the same, it would be different because it is set in a context of late capitalism (5). “Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.”
Aesthetics
Jameson uses several examples for art, literature, and (particularly) architecture to analyze postmodern aesthetics. The postmodern aesthetic blends ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, using the features of mass production that were criticized by the moderns in art. Nostalgia and kitsch are key aesthetic features. For example, the prominence of the remake (of film, television, etc)is a sign that “we are now ... in ‘intertextuality’ as a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect and as the operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudohistorical depth, in with the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history” (20) At the same time, postmodern art has become more and more like a commodity, and is produced similarly: “Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation” (4-5).
History
Postmodernism cannot deal with an actual history. It only deals with a popular understanding of past eras, it represents simulacrum (25). At what level of T&P do you need to be to not even write out the title of the book anymore? Jameson argues against a totality view of history, but for an understanding of the “cultural dominant” (6) to understand history
Sublimity & Technology
He sets out the sublime in Burke’s and Kant’s terms, which is basically an encounter with something that feels much, much bigger than yourself, so big that it cannot be accurately represented by the human mind (35). Jameson suggests the postmodern sublime comes from encounters with technology: “Our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely , the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism” (37). I believe he is saying that the immensity of technological networks can give us a similar sort of terrifying glimpse at the immensity of global capitalism.
Quotes
“One fundamental feature of all the postmodernism enumerated above: name, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the form, categories, and the contents of that very cultural industry so passionate denounced by all the ideologies of the modern” (2).“Every position on postmodernism in culture -- whether apologie or stigmatization -- is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today” (3).
“The other of our society is in that sense no longer Nature at all, as it was in precapitalist societies, but something else” (35).
This problem with describing a social system: “Insofar as the theories wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degere he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself” (5-6).
The example Jameson gives is Foucault in the “prisons book” (I’m assuming that is his very tenured way of saying Discipline & Punish).
Notes
Jameson offers a definition of late capitalism (xviii); Late capitalism is a “literal translation” of postmodernism (xxi).‘Totalize’ vs. ‘totality’ (332).
Related
Barthes, Mythologies (referenced in text, p. 19)Debord, Society of the Spectacle (referenced in text, p. 18)
Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto”
Latour, Reassembling the Social
