FREDRIC JAMESON

POSTMODERNISM OR THE
CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE
CAPITALISM
 ECONOMIC ALTERATIONS IN LATE
CAPITALISM
• Anchorage of postmodernism in objective alterations of the
economic order of capital itself. (Stages of capitalism according to
Ernest Mandel)
• Technological explosion
• Organizational predominance of transnational corporations
• Immense increase in speculation
• Rise of media conglomerates
• A change in the new existential horizon of these societies:
COMPLETE MODERNIZATION
• Culture as life under capitalism is now our second nature
• Modernism drew its purpose from the persistence of pre-modern
elements/ postmodernism is a closure, the saturation of every pore of
the world in the serum of capital.
 CONSEQUENCES OF THESE CHANGES FOR
THE EXPERIENCE OF THE SUBJECT: TRAITS
OF THE NEW SUBJECTIVITY
• Loss of any active sense of history, either as hope or as
memory: loss of historicity
• The modernist heightened sense of expectancy of the
future is all gone
• Instead, we live in a perpetual present, retro-styles and
images proliferate as surrogates of the temporal
• Ascendancy of space over time
• The only sensation is either a ‘hysterical sublime’ or ‘the
waning of affect’ –something of the fragmentation of
schizophrenia
 POSTMODERN CULTURE
• ARCHITECTURE: Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel, Frank
Gehry Space becomes paramount
• CINEMA: Body Heat, Blue Velvet, Star Wars, American
Graffiti, Indochine (the contamination of the actual by the
wistful- all of them are surrogates of true, periodic
memory- nostalgia)
• VIDEO: the postmodern medium par excellence
• SCIENCE: Implosion in disciplines (history, literary
criticism, sociology, philosophy- the work of Foucault)
 THE SOCIAL BASES OF
POSTMODERNISM
• Late capitalism remained a class society, but no
class was the same as before
• No stable class structure –segmented identities
multiply (women, ethnic groups etc.)
• Class structure: those above have the coherence of
privilege, those below lack unity and solidarity
• A demotic culture is the accompaniment to the
economic order, not the antagonism.
 WHAT IS THE APPROPRIATE
STANCE TOWARDS THE
POSTMODERN?
• Simple condemnation is sterile. Moralizing
about it is futile. The collective agency to
confront postmodernism was still missing.
But a condition of its emergence was the
ability to grasp it from within, as a system.
 COGNITIVE MAPPING
• Without a conception of totality no socialist politics is possible.
• The call for cognitive mapping as an answer to the
poststructuralist critique of representation, i.e. Lyotard ( rejection
of the position that there is no one to one correspondence
between propositions and reality)
• The importance of narrative (grasping society as a systemic
whole)narratives make connections between events. The
narrative enables us to grasp the lost unity of social life
• Cognitive mapping does not represent the world, but rather
transcodes it through historically conditioned frames
• Cognitive mapping makes possible a politics of alliance
(alliances between diverse groups of people, yet asserting the
ultimate commonality of their oppression within late capitalism)
• Aufhebung of Postmodernism into Marxism