Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Summary - Fredric Jameson PDF

Preview

Summary

Summary...

Description

Fredric Jameson – Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism – summary Fredric Jameson is considered to be one of the most important and influential literary and cultural critic and theoretician in the Marxist tradition of the English speaking world. In "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" Jameson attempts to characterize the nature of cultural production in the second half of the 20 th century, the era of late capitalism, and to distinguish it from other forms of cultural production of preceding capitalist eras. A substantial part of Jameson's "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" is dedicated to differential analysis of works of art and architecture from what Jameson terms "high modernism" and postmodern works. He characterizes the postmodern mode of production as a "cultural dominant" in the wake of concepts like "depthlessness" or the suppression of depth, the waning of affect and pastiche, terms which according to Jameson relate to the postmodern form of production and experience.

The problem of periodization and the cultural dominant The concept of postmodernism immediately raises the issue of periodization, entailed by the prefix "post-" assigned to the time of modernism. When did modernism begin and when did it end? Is it possible to set clear temporal boundaries between modernism and postmodernism? Jameson believes that it is possible to speak of cultural modes with in a defined timeline. Nevertheless, he restricts his periodization of postmodernism to the unbinding notion of cultural dominant which has a degree of flexibility which still allows for other forms of cultural production to coexist alongside it.

In the notion of cultural dominant Jameson stays true to the Marxist tradition of tying culture with the political and economical state of society. This stance holds that the socio-economical structure of a society is reflected in a society's cultural forms.

Jamson relies on the work of Ernest Mandel that divided capitalism into three distinct periods which coincide with three stages of technological development: industrialized manufacturing of steam engines starting from the mid 19th century, the production of electricity and internal combustion engines since the late 90's of the 19th century and the production of electronic and nuclear devices since the 1940's. these three technological developments match three stages in the evolution of capitalism: the market economy stage which was limited to the boarders of the nation state, the monopoly or imperialism stage in which courtiers expanded their markets to other regions and the current phase of late capitalism in which borders are no longer relevant. Jameson proceeds to match these stages of capitalism with three stages of cultural production, the first stage with realism, the second with modernism and the current third one with our present day postmodernism.

Postmodernism according to Jameson is therefore a cultural form which has developed in the wake of the socio-economical order of present day capitalism. Again, postmodernism in Jameson's view is not an all-encompassing trend but rather a cultural dominant that affects all cultural productions. This approach accounts for the existence of other cultural modes of production (thus protecting Jameson from criticism) while still enabling to treatment of our time as postmodern. Other types of art, literature and architecture which are not wholly postmodern are still produced nowadays, but

nevertheless postmodernism is the field force, the state of culture, through which cultural urges of very different types have to go. No one today is free from the influence, perhaps even rein, of postmodernism.

The rest of Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" is mostly devoted to the illustration of this initial claim by examining different examples of cultural products while continuing to develop some theoretical issues. The first characteristic of postmodernism defined by Fredric Jameson in "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" is that of depthlessness. A modern painting, Jameson suggests, invites interpretation, a hermeneutic development and completion of the world which is beyond what is represented. In a postmodern work, to put in simply, what you see is what you get, and no hermeneutic relations will be developed with the representation. This depthlessness is seen by Jameson as a new kind of superficiality.

Jameson illustrates his point of depthlessness by two thematically related works: Van Gogh's "A Pair of Shoes" which represents high modernism and Andy Warhol's " Diamond Dust Shoes" which are obviously postmodern.

Jameson quotes Heidegger's interpretation of Van Gogh's works as one which invites the reconstruction of a whole peasant world and dire life and offers another possible interpretation of his own which follows the basic notion of addressing something which is beyond the actual shoes in the painting.

In contrast, "Diamond dust shoes" do not "speak to us", as Jameson puts it. Different associations are possible when looking at a Warhol's work, but they are not compelled by it nor are they necessarily required by it. Nothing in the postmodern work allows a lead into a hermeneutic step.

Warhol's work is therefore an example of postmodern depthlessness because we cannot find anything which stands behind the actual image. Warhol is of course famous for stressing the commercialization of culture and the fetishism of commodities of late capitalism, but the stress in not positive or negative or anything at all, it just is. The depthlessness of cultural products raises the question of the possibility of critical or political art in late capitalism, especially when Jameson argues that aesthetic production today has turned into a part of the general production of commodities, an assertion which will be addressed later on. Another deference between high or late modernism and postmodernism which Fredric Jameson locates in "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" is what he calls "the waning of affect".

When we look at modern painting with human figures we will most often find in them a human expression which reflects and inner experience, such as in Edvard Munch's "The Scream" which

epitomizes the modern experience of alienation and anxiety. In contrast, Jameson holds to that in postmodern art feelings wane (therefore "the waning of affect").

The concept of expression, Jameson notes, presupposes a model of inside and outside, a distinction between ones inner and outside world and the individual person as a single monad. But when we look at postmodern portrait such as Warhol's Marilyn we can hardly speak of any expression, and that is because, Jameson holds, postmodernism rejects traditional models of the depth (see depthlessness) such as the Freudian model of conscious and unconscious or the existential model of authentic and unauthentic.

The idea of the subject as a monad, of individualism, is a 19th and early 20th century capitalistic bourgeois notion. With the rise of global economy this notion began to fade away with the sole trader, consumer and employee made insignificant, reduced to statistical numbers. Private human agency plays little part in the faceless era of corporate economy and Jameson notes how the crisis of alienation and anxiety gave way to the fragmentation of subject or "death of the subject".

Jameson proceeds to describe the waning of affect through the process in which the subject has lost his active ability to create a sense of continuity between past and future and to organize his temporal existence into one coherent experience. This reduces his cultural production abilities to nothing but random and eclectic "piles of fragments" Pastiche is one of the main characteristics of cultural production in the age of postmodernism according to Fredric Jameson. The existence of an autonomous subject was an essential part of artistic as cultural production in the modern times, Jameson argues. It allowed for the artist as subject to the address his consumer as subject and thus to affect him. But with the waning of affect the artist's unique individuality, one a founding principle, has been reduced in the postmodern age to a neutral and objectifying form of communication. With the fragmentation of subjectivity and subjectivity in a sense coming to a gloomy end, it is no longer clear what postmodern artists and authors are supposed to do beside appealing to the past, to the imitation of dead styles, an "empty parody" without any deep or hidden meanings, a parody that Jameson calls pastiche.

Pastiche, like parody, is the imitation of some unique style, but it is an empty neutral practice which lacks the intension and "say" of parody, not satirical impulse and no "yin" to be exposed by the "yang". The postmodern artist is reduced to pastiche because he cannot create new aesthetic forms, he can only copy old ones without creating any new meanings.

Pastiches leads to what is referred to in architectural history as "historicism" which is according to Jameson a random cannibalism of past styles. This cannibalism, pastiche, in now apparent in all spheres of cultural production but reaches its epitome in the global, American centered, television and Hollywood culture.

When the past is being represent through pastiche the result is a "lost of historicalness". The past is being represented as a glimmering mirage. Jameson calls this type of postmodern history "pop history" – a history founded on the pop images produces by commercial culture. One of the manifestations of this pastiche pop history are nostalgic or retro films and books which present the appearance of an historical account when in fact these are only our own superficial stereotypes applied to times which are no longer accessible to us.

Jameson lengthily discusses the brilliant "Ragtime" by E.L.Doctorow as a postmodern novel and notes George Lucas's "American Graffiti" as a movie which attempts to capture a lost reality in the history of the untied-states. Pastiche, then, is the only mode of cultural production allowed by postmodernism according to Jameson. Depthlessness, pastiche, the fragmentation of the subject and other characteristics of postmodern culture introduced by Fredric Jameson (see previous parts of the summary) strongly question the notion of "high culture" as opposed to popular culture. Jameson notes how boundaries between high and low culture have been transgressed in postmodern times with kitsch and popular culture integrating with forms of high culture to produce one big varied consumer culture.

Jameson argues that not only is postmodernism a cultural dominant (i.e. the dominant form of cultural production) but that it has turned into a prime consumer product, with the aesthetic production being integrated into the general production of consumer goods. The growing need to produce ever newer products now allocates an essential structural position to aesthetic novelty.

Jameson notes to the aesthetic field which has the strongest ties with the economical system is that of architecture which has strong ties with real-estate and development which give rise to a tide of postmodern architecture, epitomized in the grandeur of shopping malls.

Jameson famously analyzes the postmodern features of the L.A. Westin Bonaventure hotel. His main argument concerning the Bonaventure hotel is that this building, as other postmodern architecture, does not attempt to blend into its surroundings but to replace them. The Bonaventure hotel attempts to be a total space, a whole world which introduces a new form of collective behavior. Jameson sees the total space of the Bonaventure hotel as an allegory of the new hyper-space of global market which is dominated by the corporations of late capitalism. It seems that in Postmodernism Jameson often laments the shortcomings of postmodern culture, though there is also a sense of inevitability in his writing. Postmodernism according to Jameson is an historical situation, and therefore it will be wrong to assess it in terms of moral judgments. Jameson proposes to treat postmodernism in line with Marx's thought which asks us to "do the impossible" of

seeing something as negative and positive at the same time, accepting something without surrendering judgment and allowing ourselves to grasp this new historical form....