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Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions) Paperback – Illustrated, January 6, 1992
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length460 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDuke University Press
- Publication dateJanuary 6, 1992
- Dimensions6.25 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-100822310902
- ISBN-13978-0822310907
- Lexile measure1710L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A classic of late 20th-century Euroamerican critical thought.”―Ned Lukacher, Choice
“An encyclopedic grasp of modern culture.”―Stuart Hall, Marxism Today
“For anybody hoping to understand not just the cultural but the political and social implications of postmodernism . . . Jameson’s book is a fundamental, nonpareil text.”―Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times (London)
“Fredric Jameson is America’s leading Marxist critic, a prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep magisterially from Sophocles to science fiction. . . . Postmodernism is an intellectual blockbuster.”―Terry Eagleton, Irish Times
“No one theorist illustrates the recent history of postmodernism’s history so well as Fredric Jameson.”―Michael Bérubé, Voice Literary Supplement
“The scope and profundity of Postmodernism, covering theory, architecture, film, video, and economics, is truly staggering. . . . Brilliant . . .”―Siauddin Sardar, The Independent
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Fredric Jameson is Professor and Chair of the Literature Program at Duke University. He is the coeditor, with Masao Miyoshi, of The Cultures of Globalization, also published by Duke University Press.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
By Fredric JamesonDuke University Press
Copyright © 1991 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-1090-7
Contents
Introduction,1 The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
2 Theories of the Postmodern,
3 Surrealism without the Unconscious,
4 Spatial Equivalents in the World System,
5 Reading and the Division of Labor,
6 Utopianism after the End of Utopia,
7 Immanence and Nominalism in Postmodern Theoretical Discourse,
8 Postmodernism and the Market,
9 Nostalgia for the Present,
10 Secondary Elaborations,
Notes,
Index,
Illustration Credits,
The Author,
CHAPTER 1
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the "crisis" of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s.
As the word itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them. The enumeration of what follows, then, at once becomes empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also photorealism, and beyond it, the "new expressionism"; the moment, in music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and "popular" styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock (the Beatles and the Stones now standing as the high-modernist moment of that more recent and rapidly evolving tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard, and experimental cinema and video, but also a whole new type of commercial film (about which more below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and the French nouveau roman and its succession, on the other, along with alarming new kinds of literary criticism based on some new aesthetic of textuality or écriture ... The list might be extended indefinitely; but does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style and fashion changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation?
It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism—as it will be outlined in the following pages—initially began to emerge. More decisively than in the other arts or media, postmodernist positions in architecture have been inseparable from an implacable critique of architectural high modernism and of Frank Lloyd Wright or the so-called international style (Le Corbusier, Mies, etc), where formal criticism and analysis (of the high-modernist transformation of the building into a virtual sculpture, or monumental "duck," as Robert Venturi puts it) are at one with reconsiderations on the level of urbanism and of the aesthetic institution. High modernism is thus credited with the destruction of the fabric of the traditional city and its older neighborhood culture (by way of the radical disjunction of the new Utopian high-modernist building from its surrounding context), while the prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly identified in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master.
Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough stage itself as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi's influential manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. However we may ultimately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric, it has at least the merit of drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms enumerated above: namely, 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 forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole "degraded" landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply "quote," as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance.
Nor should the break in question be thought of as a purely cultural affair: indeed, theories of the postmodern—whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation—bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized "postindustrial society" (Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society media society, information society, electronic society or high tech, and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle. The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted them with vehemence, with the signal exception of the economist Ernest Mandel, whose book Late Capitalism sets out not merely to anatomize the historic originality of this new society (which he sees as a third stage or moment in the evolution of capital) but also to demonstrate that it is, if anything, a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it. I will return to this argument later; suffice it for the moment to anticipate a point that will be argued in chapter 2, namely, that every position on postmodernism in culture—whether apologia 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
A last preliminary word on method: what follows is not to be read as stylistic description, as the account of one cultural style or movement among others. I have rather meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed. I have argued elsewhere that all isolated or discrete cultural analysis always involves a buried or repressed theory of historical periodization; in any case, the conception of the "genealogy" largely lays to rest traditional theoretical worries about so-called linear history, theories of "stages," and teleological historiography. In the present context, however, lengthier theoretical discussion of such (very real) issues can perhaps be replaced by a few substantive remarks.
One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is that these tend to obliterate difference and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable chronological metamorphoses and punctuation marks). This is, however, precisely why it seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features.
Consider, for example, the powerful alternative position that postmodernism is itself little more than one more stage of modernism proper (if not, indeed, of the even older romanticism); it may indeed be conceded that all the features of postmodernism I am about to enumerate can be detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding modernism (including such astonishing genealogical precursors as Gertrude Stein, Raymond Roussel, or Marcel Duchamp, who may be considered outright postmodernists, avant la lettre). What has not been taken into account by this view, however, is the social position of the older modernism, or better still, its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally "antisocial." It will be argued here, however, that a mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered such attitudes archaic. Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly; they now strike us, on the whole, as rather "realistic," and this is the result of a canonization and academic institutionalization of the modern movement generally that can be traced to the late 1950s. This is surely one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which "weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living," as Marx once said in a different context.
As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features—from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism—no longer scandalize anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalized and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society.
What has happened is that 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. Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage. Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship. It will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it. Later I will suggest that these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project. Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.
The first point to be made about the conception of periodization in dominance, therefore, is that even if all the constitutive features of postmodernism were identical with and coterminous to those of an older modernism—a position I feel to be demonstrably erroneous but which only an even lengthier analysis of modernism proper could dispel—the two phenomena would still remain utterly distinct in their meaning and social function, owing to the very different positioning of postmodernism in the economic system of late capital and, beyond that, to the transformation of the very sphere of culture in contemporary society.
This point will be further discussed at the conclusion of this book. I must now briefly address a different kind of objection to periodization, a concern about its possible obliteration of heterogeneity, one most often expressed by the Left. And it is certain that there is a strange quasi-Sartrean irony—a "winner loses" logic—which tends to surround any effort to describe a "system," a totalizing dynamic, as these are detected in the movement of contemporary society. What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic—the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example—the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree 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.
I have felt, however, that it was only in the light of some conception of a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could be measured and assessed. I am very far from feeling that all cultural production today is "postmodern" in the broad sense I will be conferring on this term. The postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses—what Raymond Williams has usefully termed "residual" and "emergent" forms of cultural production—must make their way. If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. At any rate, this has been the political spirit in which the following analysis was devised: to project some conception of a new systematic cultural norm and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today.
The exposition will take up in turn the following constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary "theory" and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose "schizophrenic" structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone—what I will call "intensities"—which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world system; and, after a brief account of postmodernist mutations in the lived experience of built space itself, some reflections on the mission of political art in the bewildering new world space of late or multinational capital.
I
We will begin with one of the canonical works of high modernism in visual art, Van Gogh's well-known painting of the peasant shoes, an example which, as you can imagine, has not been innocently or randomly chosen. I want to propose two ways of reading this painting, both of which in some fashion reconstruct the reception of the work in a two-stage or double-level process.
I first want to suggest that if this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation—which has vanished into the past—is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end product impossible to grasp as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production.
This last term suggests that one way of reconstructing the initial situation to which the work is somehow a response is by stressing the raw materials, the initial content, which it confronts and reworks, transforms, and appropriates. In Van Gogh that content, those initial raw materials, are, I will suggest, to be grasped simply as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state.
Fruit trees in this world are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out of poor soil; the people of the village are worn down to their skulls, caricatures of some ultimate grotesque typology of basic human feature types. How is it, then, that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees explode into a hallucinatory surface of color, while his village stereotypes are suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and green? I will briefly suggest, in this first interpretative option, that the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure color in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture, an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses, or at least of that supreme sense—sight, the visual, the eye—which it now reconstitutes for us as a semiautonomous space in its own right, a part of some new division of labor in the body of capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson. Copyright © 1991 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Duke University Press; Reprint edition (January 6, 1992)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 460 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0822310902
- ISBN-13 : 978-0822310907
- Lexile measure : 1710L
- Item Weight : 1.8 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.25 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #117,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #170 in Modern Western Philosophy
- #283 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #422 in History & Theory of Politics
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- Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2017This book reminds me of Moby Dick: pursuit of a leviathan topic, Don Quixote: tilting at multivalent windmills (erudite, imaginative, wide-ranging titlting) – Infinite Jest: easily reduced by one-third for clarity and finally The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould, fellow traveler in academia: erudite to the extreme, in-depth information, vocabulary builder, regular use of “Gould’s Glu-Stik”, i.e. never use just one word when you can use three that mean more or less the same thing and find the most obscure jargon with the most syllables. The professor wants us to learn new words and new ways to discuss abstract, subtle, often ephemeral ideas. Jameson takes the reader on a journey through stuff he enjoys but knows little of with an amateur’s enthusiasm– architecture, music and visual art into matters that only he can understand – the work of his colleague Paul De Man, and deep into his own fully-explored and richly appointed wheelhouse filled with exciting ideas parsed from literature, literary theory, Marxism and economics. This book starts very slow and proceeds very slowly but the 100-page conclusion is balls-to-the wall big ideas in plain English – a fine summary of the particulars of postmodernism. This book is a great “broken plow” it is inefficient in its brokenness, but it stirs up all of the ideas necessary for others to formulate a broad synthesis. Jameson makes a few big errors-misreadings that create intellectual energy. His key error is that of too much optimism about the nature of late capitalism. He assigns its key feature to its multinational omnipresence without mentioning its destructive (to the USA middle class) cannibal colonialism, i.e. it is eating its young (and middle aged and old) Postmodern capitalism’s salient feature is its rampant destructiveness over the past 40 years, of the environment, the American middle class and third world autonomy (wrecked via “Economic Hitman” banking-mineral extraction infrastructure construction and operation). To miss this is to miss the Late Capitalism part of his ambitious title. As for the postmodernism part. FJ makes it clear in all he discusses throughout (though not noted by him as such) that there are three hermeneutics that might be used to explain postmodernism. These are 1. Marxism 2. Poststructuralism (PS) and 3. My own theory reinforced throughout the book by multitude confusions-perplexities all noted and few explained - the Station Point (SP) (pinned/linear-modern, unpinned/multivalent-postmodern). Jameson uses the first two. The first centered on Marx, the other on Ferdinand de Saussure and his progeny, the F-9 (Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Debord, Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard – The French Nine). Jameson uses the language (intense jargon) of Saussure and his poststructuralist sons (filtered through Levi-Strauss and the Frankfurt School: Adorno, Lukacs, Bloch) mixed with standard Marxist econ-speak (commodities, proletariat, praxis, fetishism, labor, money, bourgeoisie etc) hoping that he can cover the entire postmodern waterfront. He cannot. He can speak about much of it in many realms and he finds many beautiful examples that he explores with imagination but his two-part heuristic only allows the Marxian-Saussurean to become theorized under his umbrella. The Marx-PS hermeneutic used by FJ is clarifies only part of the postmodern idea, the Saussurean-semiotic part whose language and ideas FJ uses in his effort to describe it all – the entire shebang. The key sign of this failure is his assumption of periodicity, i.e. that pomo-late capitalism is all the new stuff that happened in a certain era rather than all the stuff that has this or that specific characteristic. It is his periodizing that hobbles any effort to formulate a thesis. The stuff of postmodernism noted by Jameson DID occur, DOES occur within a period but it’s nature is deeper and is explained by pinning / unpinning. FJ asserts that the postmodern-late capitalist idea is of the post WWII era and especially post 1965 (When Yale literary criticism professor Paul De Man caught F-9 Derriditis-a meme that spread like wildfire throughout the social sciences during 1970s and 1980s) Key takeaway from Jameson’s 2-part hermeneutic is that things-ideas-art-science that can be labelled postmodern are about space (synchronic) rather than time (diachronic). Postmodernism obliterates history and the privilege that precipitates from it. This space-time duality holds for all three hermeneutics: Marx, Saussure, Blake (pinned-unpinned) thus it is fundamental. The beauty of Jameson’s approach is that his territory is so large. He explores-reveals-discusses-analyzes much that can be left to others to label / analyze as genuinely postmodern ( JB-omnimodern) or simply additional High modernism-modernism (JB Ultramodernism). Bottom line: The postmodern epoch (JB:omnimodern epoch) began in 1912 not post WWII or 1965-1990. This is a great book more its own postmodern novel that a work of non-fiction and a fine entry point into the subject. Like a great novel or any great work of art this book has struggle written on every page.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2020This is a great book, albeit one that requires patience to read. Being a left wing materialist is also recommended. :)
Note on the Kindle version: This is one of those ebppks produced by scanning a hardcopy. The result is rather messy. There is a whole section where "fi" is turned into "A": "Active" instead of "fictive", "Almic" instead of "filmic", etc. Very annoying!
- Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2018I like logically consistent and materialistic approach to representation of cultural phenomena. I use this material for writing essays on media and cultural studies.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2014Should you buy it -- go to paragraph 3 below. What follows is my commentary.
Jameson's Ideas are unabashedly Marxist, which is fine. Marx was an economist and made some prescient observations about capitalism. Whether Jameson's comments explain phenomena in visual culture can be a stretch, but it is methodology for criticism that works well enough, especially in the hands of thoughtful writers. I think Jameson is that, if at times too eager to stretch Marxism beyond its bounds. What is less forgivable is that Jameson continues the tradition common among cultural theorists of doing in ten pages what they could do just as well in one. In addition, he makes up words, terms, and phrases that attempt to draw 'just the right' distinctions and capture new ideas, but just add confusion, instead of just making the distinction and stating the idea. This practice is amusing since a working premise of a lot of postmodern theory is that language is intrinsically unreliable and imprecise. Of course Jameson tries to cure this by making more of it, rather than refining his use of it. It seems that Jameson, like his colleagues, thinks two spoons-full of bad medicine are better than one: More is better as an antidote to modernism's 'less is more'.
So, should you by it? If you must get the stuff from the horse's mouth and just want to read it, Yes. If you like things that are needless difficult to access -- yes. Better from him than from another windbag who will add his own 'critical distinctions', making your job longer, or worse, sending back to read Jameson. If you need it for a course, of course you should buy it. The rest of the world should avoid it-- unless you have a taste for intellectual root canal-- wonderful if needed but an acquired taste otherwise.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 13, 2017as insightful 30 years ago and as it is today
- Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2015I was so pleased to find book on my table. Will continue purchasing .
- Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2017Very good.
Top reviews from other countries
- Subhabrata BanerjeeReviewed in India on September 25, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars One True Hard Nut To Crack
This books requires a good understanding of the theories of the Postmordern Theories as the book is a critique on Postmodernism and how consumerism and commodification in this stage has gradually served as a boon for the development of the finest stage of capitalism according to Jameson the late capitalist stage. Thus to understand this book I repeat once more, the reader must have a good understanding of Postmodernism
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Gaia LalliniReviewed in Italy on March 27, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Gran libro
Ritengo sia per addeto ai lavori e devo dire che è stato davvero interessante, preciso e mi ha aperto davvero la mente. Consigliatissimo
- Amazon CustomerReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 19, 2016
5.0 out of 5 stars It's full of great ideas. The only thing is that it is ...
you must get this book. Essential for any basic understanding of post-modernism and late capitalism. What Jameson has done here is to try to relate aesthetics to the mode of production -- something that is ambitious and rare. It's full of great ideas. The only thing is that it is prolix. Don't let that put you off however and you will be rewarded.
I should note that it's advisable buying this only if you've read a bit of Marx.
- Guilherme MarianoReviewed in Canada on May 26, 2014
5.0 out of 5 stars Jameson is simply awesome.
One of the best analysis of post-modernity ever made. Good for art, literature and architecture enthusiasts, professionals, critics and whatsoever.
- Joan LemmonReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 6, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Good Condition and an excellent read
This book is just what I wanted, and is an excellent read