Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Author: Fredric Jameson
Year: 1983 (New Left Review 146; repr. as The Anti-Aesthetic)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/jameson-1983.md
Summary
Jameson's foundational essay proposes postmodernism not as a style but as "a cultural dominant" — the "internal and superstructural expression" of late/multinational capitalism. Its constitutive features include a new depthlessness (the culture of the image/simulacrum), a weakening of historicity (pastiche supplanting parody; the nostalgia mode), a waning of affect (replaced by "intensities"), and a transformation of lived space (exemplified by the Bonaventure or postmodern architecture). Architecture, "of all the arts that closest … to the economic," is the privileged site of this mutation.
Key Claims
- Postmodernism as cultural dominant: "I have rather meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis"; postmodernism is "not a style," but "a cultural dominant … which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate features." "Every position on postmodernism in culture … is also … an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today."
- Depthlessness: the new "flatness or depthlessness" replaces the depth models (essence/appearance, latent/manifest, authenticity/inauthenticity, signifier/signified); the world becomes "a set of texts or simulacra" — Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes against Van Gogh's Peasant Shoes.
- Pastiche and the waning of historicity: "pastiche is … blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs"; with the death of the individual subject and unique style, culture "have[s] nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks … stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture." The "nostalgia mode" colonizes the present; the past becomes "a multitudinous photographic simulacrum" (Debord: "the image has become the final form of commodity reification").
- Waning of affect / intensities: anxiety and alienation give way to "free-floating and impersonal" "intensities"; "the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject."
- Architecture and economics: "Architecture is … of all the arts that closest constitutively to the economic, with which … it has a virtually unmediated relationship"; postmodern architecture is "grounded in the patronage of multinational business." Postmodern architectural aesthetic populism (Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas) effaces the high/mass-culture frontier.
- Political art in the new space: the task is "cognitive mapping" adequate to the bewildering "new world space of late multinational capital" — the Bonaventure as the "hyperspace" that calls for new perceptual and political orientation.
Connections
Concepts: Critical Architecture · Ideology · Spectacle · Capitalist Realism Authors: Fredric Jameson Debates: Critical vs. Projective · Spectacle vs. Function Related source notes: Recodings (Foster) · Capitalist Realism (Fisher) · The Age of Spectacle (Dyckhoff)
Direct Quotes
"[T]o grasp 'postmodernism' not as a style, but rather as a cultural dominant."
"[P]astiche is … blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs."
"[T]he underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror." (on the new postmodern culture as the expression of American domination)
"[A]esthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally."
Open Questions
- Does Jameson's "cognitive mapping" offer architecture a critical task within late capitalism, or does it concede that the postmodern built environment (and its "hyperspace") defeats representation — and how does the contemporary iconic/spectacular city extend or complicate this?
