Jameson, Fredric

Bio Sketch

Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) was a Marxist critic and theorist (Duke University), the most influential interpreter of postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism." His work on periodization, pastiche, the nostalgia mode, and "cognitive mapping" underpins Geoffrey's postmodernism & critique and semiotics & representation areas.

Key Works

• *Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism* (1984) — ; Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).
• The Political Unconscious (1981); The Prison-House of Language (1972).

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Critical Architecture
• Ideology
• Spectacle
• Capitalist Realism

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Jameson is central to Geoffrey's postmodernism & critique and semiotics & representation areas: his account of postmodern depthlessness/pastiche and the Bonaventure "hyperspace," and his call for "cognitive mapping," frame the question of whether (and how) architecture can represent or resist late capitalism.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
• Architecture and the Critique of Ideology (1985)
• Architecture's Image Problem: Have We Ever Been Postmodern?
• The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance
• Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals (Marinic 2018) — the Portman corpus via Marinic's chapter: "He claims that a 'new world of multinational capital' assumes an 'impossible' representation in the interior hyperspaces of the John Portman megastructures" (in his 1984 criticism of Portman's work, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism); pastiche "linked to an inability to develop new 'styles' as they are perceived to have already been invented," so that "art and the past are endlessly recycled and modernism becomes merely a postmodernist code"; postmodern "schizophrenia" as "a lack of historicity, or the disappearance of a sense of history due to postmodern recycling of the past"; and the extension: "He posits that Portman engaged in postmodern spatiality well before the overtly literal postmodern follies" — Portman's spatiality as "the postmodern excesses of a consumptive society blindly producing pastiche as a placeholder for high culture." See postmodernism, atrium-hotel.