Postmodernism: Jameson's Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
In the opening chapter of his book, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", Jameson outlines for the reader what postmodernism is, how it feels, what it looks like. This “inverted millenarianism” is the end of the ‘Modern Era’, and all things related to it, such as ideology, art, social democracy, the welfare state, the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, etc. These are all concepts that have been shaped and have shaped modern society. But to offer a description creates the problem of obliterating difference. Rather, he continues to view it as a “periodising hypothesis”, and so postmodernism becomes the cultural dominant, and not just a style. This allows for the presence and coexistence of other subordinate features. To illustrate his arguments, he draws heavily from the visual world: art, architecture, film and writing. Architecture is the most important for Jameson, as the break from modernism to its ‘post-state’ can be seen better, and illustrates more than other forms the blurring of the distinction (set by high-modernism) between the ‘High’ culture of modernism and the ‘Mass (or Commercial)’ culture of postmodernism.
Postmodernism then focuses on the “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" (Jameson 1991: 2)
The break is not a purely cultural affair however. It also signals the arrival of a new type of society: “postindustrial” (which he doesn’t believe is an appropriate term), or consumer society, media society, information society, or electronic society. When interpreting postmodernism then every position is necessarily a political stance, implicit and explicit, on the nature of multinational capitalist society. In this society, aesthetic production has been integrated in to commodification. There is an urgency to be constantly producing fresh, new innovative products, like clothing fashions, cars, music, film, etc.
Architecture is the closest of the arts to economic, and is patronised by the multinational business. Expansion and development of the two go together hand in hand. He continues,
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. (1991: 5)
The difference can then be measured and analysed if we view Postmodernism as the dominant cultural logic, the hegemonic norm. If we ignore the sense of the cultural dominance, then we run the risk of seeing the period as just another phase, a random difference. Although he does recognise that ‘Late Capitalism’ is the third stage of evolution of Capitalism as an entirety.
Jameson then runs through postmodernism’s constitutive features: a new depthlessness; a consequent weakening of historicity; a new type of emotional ground tone, the return of the sublime; and the relationships of all these to the new technology, which remains a figure of the whole new economic system.
THE NEW DEPTHLESSNESS
Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes can be read in two ways: 1) a response to the agricultural misery experienced by those who wear shoes like that. 2) The shoes recreate the whole missing object world, which was once their lived-in context. This latter idea comes from Heidegger’s idea of the gap between earth (the physical) and world (the conceptual). Both readings are considered “hermeneutical”: in other words, interpretational. He then compares it to Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes. The first is high modernist, the latter is postmodernist. The difference between the two is the emergence in the latter of a sort of depthlessness, a kind of superficiality; whilst the former possesses ‘depth’. Also apparent in the Warhol picture are the role of photography and the use of the photographic negative: the depthless image also has a mortifying look, like an x-ray.
It is here that Jameson introduces the reader to the waning of affect: not all emotion, feeling, subjectivity is gone – it is transformed into something else. If modernism highlighted the ego, it also highlighted everything the ego created. Subjectivity is the source of many varied and wonderful styles. The end of the ego (coming at the end of modernism) brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego; it brings about the end of style: the sense of the unique and the personal. It is the end of feelings and emotions, as the self is decentred and no longer present to do the feeling. The postmodern then is not totally devoid of feeling, but that feeling which exists is impersonal.
Surface or multiples of surfaces replace depth, and can be experienced metaphorically (in paintings) and physically – being confronted by Wells Fargo Court. This building is like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, “it confronts its viewers like an enigmatic destiny, a call to evolutionary mutation” (1991: 13-14).
THE WEAKENING OF HISTORICITY
The loss of subjectivity and style lead on to the practise of Pastiche. Modernist styles become postmodernist codes – professional and disciplinary jargon operates for nearly everything, and there is differentiation between various groups: race, gender, religion, class, etc. Since there is no longer the high-modernist ideology of style, producers of culture have to turn to the past – “the imitation of dead styles” (1991: 18). For example, the nostalgia film is not a representation of historical fact, but approaches the past through stylistic connotations. Movies like American Graffiti, Dazed & Confused, The Wedding Singer and The Last Days of Disco are fine examples of this type of movie. This heralds the disappearance of the historical ‘referent’: history is no longer representing the past, it is only our ideas and stereotypes of that past – it is ‘pop history’.
THE RETURN OF THE SUBLIME
For the purposes of the essay, Jameson uses ‘schizophrenic writing’ as a suggestive aesthetic model. This ‘style’ of writing can best be described as a breakdown in the signifying chain. Meaning is no longer in the sentences of logical sequencing of related signifiers – now it is generated by the movement from one signifier to another – the reader is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time. But schizophrenic disjunction is no longer morbid when elevated to some sense of euphoria – this is when it becomes a cultural style.
NEW TECHNOLOGY
The most important feature of material technology is the development of machines of reproduction. This is not an age of production (which is implied in Daniel Bell’s term, ‘postindustrial’) but an age of reproduction and can be seen evidently in the defining inventions of the postmodern era: TV’s, stereos, photocopiers. In these machines we can also see something of the depthlessness of the reproduction: the TV image is two-dimensional; the photocopier reproduces an image, but only as black-and-white, two-dimensional – even a Van Gogh painting lacks depth when reproduced by a Xerox! New technology is not the cause of the break, but is rather the result of the movement into this new phase of capitalism. Jameson sees this as being the third and purer phase of capitalism. The first phase was market capitalism, where markets within a country competed with one another; the second phase was Imperialism, or the ‘monopoly stage’, where countries expanded and formed Empires. These colonies were new markets to exploit, and within the boundaries of the particular Empire; the third and current phase is the Multinational or Consumer Capitalism, where old boundaries have dissolved and we all exist in one global market. Indeed, the Internet – the ‘international network’ of computers is a fine model of this new global phase.
Jameson presents the reader with the image of the Bonaventure building, in California. He describes it as a sort-of microcosmic world within our own. The outside is reflective; looking at it only shows you a warped reflection of the world you’re standing in. Much like Thomas More’s Utopia, it doesn’t care if the outside world changes or not, as long as its own functioning continues unabated.
What is the fate of culture then? Jameson believes it has changed in function. Postmodernism is the dissolution of the autonomy of culture. The break was like an explosion, with tiny fragments flying out in all directions. People no longer are determined by a culture that they ‘belong to’ or grow up within – people now determine culture. Because of this every aspect of social life has become cultural and has thus followed as becoming commodified.
Do U Lyk?
Then come to Ravenwolfe's LyKosmOs at
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~ravenwolfe
Postmodernism then focuses on the “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" (Jameson 1991: 2)
The break is not a purely cultural affair however. It also signals the arrival of a new type of society: “postindustrial” (which he doesn’t believe is an appropriate term), or consumer society, media society, information society, or electronic society. When interpreting postmodernism then every position is necessarily a political stance, implicit and explicit, on the nature of multinational capitalist society. In this society, aesthetic production has been integrated in to commodification. There is an urgency to be constantly producing fresh, new innovative products, like clothing fashions, cars, music, film, etc.
Architecture is the closest of the arts to economic, and is patronised by the multinational business. Expansion and development of the two go together hand in hand. He continues,
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. (1991: 5)
The difference can then be measured and analysed if we view Postmodernism as the dominant cultural logic, the hegemonic norm. If we ignore the sense of the cultural dominance, then we run the risk of seeing the period as just another phase, a random difference. Although he does recognise that ‘Late Capitalism’ is the third stage of evolution of Capitalism as an entirety.
Jameson then runs through postmodernism’s constitutive features: a new depthlessness; a consequent weakening of historicity; a new type of emotional ground tone, the return of the sublime; and the relationships of all these to the new technology, which remains a figure of the whole new economic system.
THE NEW DEPTHLESSNESS
Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes can be read in two ways: 1) a response to the agricultural misery experienced by those who wear shoes like that. 2) The shoes recreate the whole missing object world, which was once their lived-in context. This latter idea comes from Heidegger’s idea of the gap between earth (the physical) and world (the conceptual). Both readings are considered “hermeneutical”: in other words, interpretational. He then compares it to Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes. The first is high modernist, the latter is postmodernist. The difference between the two is the emergence in the latter of a sort of depthlessness, a kind of superficiality; whilst the former possesses ‘depth’. Also apparent in the Warhol picture are the role of photography and the use of the photographic negative: the depthless image also has a mortifying look, like an x-ray.
It is here that Jameson introduces the reader to the waning of affect: not all emotion, feeling, subjectivity is gone – it is transformed into something else. If modernism highlighted the ego, it also highlighted everything the ego created. Subjectivity is the source of many varied and wonderful styles. The end of the ego (coming at the end of modernism) brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego; it brings about the end of style: the sense of the unique and the personal. It is the end of feelings and emotions, as the self is decentred and no longer present to do the feeling. The postmodern then is not totally devoid of feeling, but that feeling which exists is impersonal.
Surface or multiples of surfaces replace depth, and can be experienced metaphorically (in paintings) and physically – being confronted by Wells Fargo Court. This building is like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, “it confronts its viewers like an enigmatic destiny, a call to evolutionary mutation” (1991: 13-14).
THE WEAKENING OF HISTORICITY
The loss of subjectivity and style lead on to the practise of Pastiche. Modernist styles become postmodernist codes – professional and disciplinary jargon operates for nearly everything, and there is differentiation between various groups: race, gender, religion, class, etc. Since there is no longer the high-modernist ideology of style, producers of culture have to turn to the past – “the imitation of dead styles” (1991: 18). For example, the nostalgia film is not a representation of historical fact, but approaches the past through stylistic connotations. Movies like American Graffiti, Dazed & Confused, The Wedding Singer and The Last Days of Disco are fine examples of this type of movie. This heralds the disappearance of the historical ‘referent’: history is no longer representing the past, it is only our ideas and stereotypes of that past – it is ‘pop history’.
THE RETURN OF THE SUBLIME
For the purposes of the essay, Jameson uses ‘schizophrenic writing’ as a suggestive aesthetic model. This ‘style’ of writing can best be described as a breakdown in the signifying chain. Meaning is no longer in the sentences of logical sequencing of related signifiers – now it is generated by the movement from one signifier to another – the reader is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time. But schizophrenic disjunction is no longer morbid when elevated to some sense of euphoria – this is when it becomes a cultural style.
NEW TECHNOLOGY
The most important feature of material technology is the development of machines of reproduction. This is not an age of production (which is implied in Daniel Bell’s term, ‘postindustrial’) but an age of reproduction and can be seen evidently in the defining inventions of the postmodern era: TV’s, stereos, photocopiers. In these machines we can also see something of the depthlessness of the reproduction: the TV image is two-dimensional; the photocopier reproduces an image, but only as black-and-white, two-dimensional – even a Van Gogh painting lacks depth when reproduced by a Xerox! New technology is not the cause of the break, but is rather the result of the movement into this new phase of capitalism. Jameson sees this as being the third and purer phase of capitalism. The first phase was market capitalism, where markets within a country competed with one another; the second phase was Imperialism, or the ‘monopoly stage’, where countries expanded and formed Empires. These colonies were new markets to exploit, and within the boundaries of the particular Empire; the third and current phase is the Multinational or Consumer Capitalism, where old boundaries have dissolved and we all exist in one global market. Indeed, the Internet – the ‘international network’ of computers is a fine model of this new global phase.
Jameson presents the reader with the image of the Bonaventure building, in California. He describes it as a sort-of microcosmic world within our own. The outside is reflective; looking at it only shows you a warped reflection of the world you’re standing in. Much like Thomas More’s Utopia, it doesn’t care if the outside world changes or not, as long as its own functioning continues unabated.
What is the fate of culture then? Jameson believes it has changed in function. Postmodernism is the dissolution of the autonomy of culture. The break was like an explosion, with tiny fragments flying out in all directions. People no longer are determined by a culture that they ‘belong to’ or grow up within – people now determine culture. Because of this every aspect of social life has become cultural and has thus followed as becoming commodified.
Do U Lyk?
Then come to Ravenwolfe's LyKosmOs at
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~ravenwolfe
