POSTMODERNISM, OR THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM

Abstract

Jameson’s engagements with the cultural phenomenon of ‘postmodernism’ began to appear in the early 1980s. An article entitled ‘Postmodernism and consumer society’ was published in a collection of essays in 1983; this essay, considerably revised, appeared as ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ in the British journal New Left Review in 1984. It is this article that has been more often cited and probably more discussed than anything else Jameson has written. Douglas Kellner has called it ‘probably the most quoted, discussed, and debated article’ of the 1980s, and Hans Bertens describes it as having been ‘immensely productive and. . .seminal in getting the more traditional, that is non-poststructuralist, left involved in the discussion’ about postmodernism (Bertens 1995: 160). This article then appeared in book form as the first chapter of Jameson’s enormous 1991 book, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. This chapter is going to examine this famous statement on the boundaries and logic of postmodern culture, partly with a view to positioning it in the discourses surrounding postmodernism out of which it grew, and partly to try and explain just why it has been so influential. But the first thing to note is the way in which Jameson’s approach to the postmodern condition has always been thoroughly Marxist. Where previous theorists had looked at postmodern poetry, or art, or architecture, as a style or a series of styles, Jameson was the first to link it directly to socio-political circumstances – to history, in other words. Just as realism was an embodiment, in terms of literary form, of nineteenth-century capitalism, and modernism was the expression of the reified, post-industrial capitalism of the early twentieth century, so what postmodernism is (for Jameson) is the expression on an aesthetic and textual level of the dynamic of ‘late capitalism’. Clearly, late capitalism has a particular economic logic, one which is different in various ways from the old capitalisms of the nineteenth century (fewer workers have old-style factory jobs, for instance; more are working in service industries; less emphasis is placed on manufacturing actual things like tables and cars, more on knowledge and the exchange of knowledge with TV and the Internet). Just as capitalism has this economic logic, so it also has a cultural logic, and the cultural logic of late capitalism is what we call ‘postmodernism’.

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