Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is a 1991 book by Fredric Jameson, in which the author offers a critique of modernism and postmodernism from a Marxist perspective. The book began as a 1984 article in the New Left Review.[1][2] It has been presented as his "most wide-ranging and accessible book".[3]
Overview
Jameson defines postmodernism as the cultural system of a global, financialized stage of capitalist society. Jameson argues that postmodernism is characterized by a "crisis of historicity", a "waning of affect", and a prevalence of pastiche. He traces these characteristics of postmodernism across a variety of fields and media, including film, television, literature, economics, architecture, and philosophy. In one of his most prominent examples, he draws out the differences between modernism and postmodernism by comparing Van Gogh's "Peasant Shoes" with Andy Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes". For Jameson, postmodernism, as a form of mass-culture driven by capitalism, pervades every aspect of our daily lives.
In 1984, during his tenure as Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Jameson published an article titled "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" in the journal New Left Review.[note 1] This controversial article, which Jameson later expanded into a book, was part of a series of analyses of postmodernism from the dialectical perspective Jameson had developed in his earlier work on narrative. Jameson viewed the postmodern "skepticism towards metanarratives" as a "mode of experience" stemming from the conditions of intellectual labor imposed by the late capitalist mode of production.[further explanation needed]
Postmodernists claimed that the complex differentiation between "spheres" or fields of life (such as the political, the social, the cultural, the commercial), and between distinct social classes and roles within each field, had been overcome by the crisis of foundationalism[citation needed] and the consequent relativization of truth-claims. For example, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), which helped establish the term "postmodernism", Jean-François Lyotard described a shaken or failed public trust in the promise of enlightenments, faiths, or governments, with their metanarratives of epistemic or historical progress, leaving individuals to their own experiences.[4] This was sometimes criticized as a metanarrative about the end of metanarratives and therefore considered ironic or paradoxical.[5]
Jameson argued against postmodernists, asserting that these phenomena had or could have been understood successfully within a modernist framework; the postmodern failure to achieve this understanding implied an abrupt break in the dialectical refinement of thought.[citation needed] In his view, postmodernity's merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole was the result of the colonization of the cultural sphere, which had retained at least partial autonomy during the prior modernist era, by a newly organized corporate capitalism. Following Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry, Jameson discussed this phenomenon in his critical discussion of architecture, film, narrative, and visual arts, as well as in his strictly philosophical work.[citation needed]
Two of Jameson's best-known claims from Postmodernism are that post-modernity is characterized by "pastiche" and a "crisis in historicity". Jameson argues that parody (which implies a moral judgment or a comparison with societal norms) was replaced by pastiche (collage and other forms of juxtaposition without a normative grounding). Jameson recognizes that modernism frequently "quotes" from different cultures and historical periods, but he argues that postmodern cultural texts indiscriminately cannibalize these elements, erasing any sense of critical or historical distance and resulting in pure pastiche.[6] Relatedly, Jameson argues that the postmodern era suffers from a crisis in historicity: "there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the American history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current, multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life".[7]
Jameson's analysis of postmodernism attempts to view it as historically grounded; he therefore explicitly rejects any moralistic opposition to postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon, and continued to insist upon a Hegelian immanent critique that would "think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together".[8] His refusal to simply dismiss postmodernism from the onset, however, was misinterpreted by some Marxist intellectuals as an implicit endorsement of postmodern views.[citation needed]
^Giri, Meenakshi; Kellner, Douglas M., eds. (2001). "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism". Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. pp. 550–587. ISBN9780631220954. OCLC44650979.
^Grossberg 2024, "Modernists in search of the postmodern". sfn error: no target: CITEREFGrossberg2024 (help)
^Grossberg 2024, "Modernists in search of the postmodern" sfnm error: no target: CITEREFGrossberg2024 (help); Sheehan 1998, 85 sfnm error: no target: CITEREFSheehan1998 (help).
^Sim, Stuart. Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought. Icon Books. p. 150.
