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A review by variouslilies
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson may be the biggest name in American contemporary Marxist cultural theory, with a heavy catalogue of theoretical work. Jameson has a reputation in being a challenging author, and I did find his style of writing convoluted and complex at times. However, the core themes of what he proposes in this book are intriguing enough to warrant wading through the heavy prose and subject matter.
What Jameson tries to do in this book [which is based on a long essay he wrote in 1982] is to carve out the historical niche of the current cultural moment, by analyzing the ways in which contemporary culture has gone under major shifts. Through this effort, Jameson grounds postmodernism by treating it as a historically contingent phenomenon, emerging in a specific context, and open to be diagnosed and described: The emerging logic of late capitalism. This historically materialist approach is one that chips away a lot of the confusions around what postmodernism is and how it can be studied. His approach can be identified through this short paragraph from the book:
Jameson borrows various categorization of capitalism’s modes of production and expansion from Marxist thinkers and superimposes the cultural implications on them. For him, the late capitalism is not the capitalism that is about to die, but capitalism as of late, in its expanded and accelerated state, having permeated every aspect of our lives. This expansion itself is something he presses on further in the book, touching on phenomena such as commodification of various forms of culture and art in late capitalism.
Jameson goes on to extensively explore the characteristics of postmodernity and how these characteristics manifest in culture, by drawing various examples from postmodern works of art and literature and how they differ from high modernist and modernist works of art. A wealth of such works are mentioned, by the way, and gradually getting familiar with them while you read the book can greatly assist in understanding Jameson's points and interpretations.
This book is highly interesting, stimulating and influential. If you are not familiar with Jameson and his work, it might surprise you just how many pieces of artistic and literary criticism you have encountered in the last two decades have been directly and indirectly influenced by his work. Particularly in tandem with Mark Fisher's books (and preferably read prior to picking up Fisher; Since Fisher applies Jameson's lens to later stages of capitalism's expansion and 21st century), it has so many interesting observations and vital theories to offer about our current state of living within postmodern culture.
What Jameson tries to do in this book [which is based on a long essay he wrote in 1982] is to carve out the historical niche of the current cultural moment, by analyzing the ways in which contemporary culture has gone under major shifts. Through this effort, Jameson grounds postmodernism by treating it as a historically contingent phenomenon, emerging in a specific context, and open to be diagnosed and described: The emerging logic of late capitalism. This historically materialist approach is one that chips away a lot of the confusions around what postmodernism is and how it can be studied. His approach can be identified through this short paragraph from the book:
The conception of Postmodernism outlined here is a historical rather than a merely stylistic one. I cannot stress too greatly the radical distinction between a view for which the postmodern is one (optional) style among many others available and one which seeks to grasp it as the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism: the two approaches in fact generate two very different ways of conceptualizing the phenomenon as a whole: on the one hand, moral judgments (about which it is indifferent whether they are positive or negative), and, on the other, a genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in History.
Jameson borrows various categorization of capitalism’s modes of production and expansion from Marxist thinkers and superimposes the cultural implications on them. For him, the late capitalism is not the capitalism that is about to die, but capitalism as of late, in its expanded and accelerated state, having permeated every aspect of our lives. This expansion itself is something he presses on further in the book, touching on phenomena such as commodification of various forms of culture and art in late capitalism.
...what we have been calling postmodern (or multinational) space is not merely a cultural ideology or fantasy but has genuine historical (and socioeconomic) reality as a third great original expansion of capitalism around the globe (after the earlier expansions of the national market and the older imperialist system, which each had their own cultural specificity and generated new types of space appropriate to their dynamics).
Jameson goes on to extensively explore the characteristics of postmodernity and how these characteristics manifest in culture, by drawing various examples from postmodern works of art and literature and how they differ from high modernist and modernist works of art. A wealth of such works are mentioned, by the way, and gradually getting familiar with them while you read the book can greatly assist in understanding Jameson's points and interpretations.
This book is highly interesting, stimulating and influential. If you are not familiar with Jameson and his work, it might surprise you just how many pieces of artistic and literary criticism you have encountered in the last two decades have been directly and indirectly influenced by his work. Particularly in tandem with Mark Fisher's books (and preferably read prior to picking up Fisher; Since Fisher applies Jameson's lens to later stages of capitalism's expansion and 21st century), it has so many interesting observations and vital theories to offer about our current state of living within postmodern culture.