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?