Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is a 1991 work of critical theory by Marxist cultural and political theorist Fredric Jameson. Limiting his conception of “postmodernity” to the late capitalist ideologies and practices that evolved in the latter half of the twentieth century, Jameson argues that the postmodern era is neither a clean break from, nor a smooth continuation of, modernity. Jameson applies Marxist theory to late capitalism, an era not generally thought of in Marxist terms. He casts a wide net over the late twentieth century, touching on visual art, architecture, “high modernist” techniques, and trends in new media, showing how these expressive modes translate both capitalist and Marxist assumptions into material objects. Within these genres, he focuses on techniques such as pastiche, the reduction of affect (emotional content), the flattening of fields and spaces, and recursivity (the involvement of some artworks’ human observers in the artworks themselves). In his analysis, he suggests new ways in which art is used now to transmit ordinary lived experience.

Jameson spends the first part of his book reflecting on what he calls the “problem of periodization.” The notion that there is a postmodern world which has somehow broken off from the modern world begs the questions: when did modernity begin and end, and how? Jameson argues that it is not correct to separate the timeline of human history into discrete periods. Rather, the timeline is made up of many strands, some of which predominate over others, give rise to new strands, and fade out. Given this way of mapping out the history of ideas, Jameson believes that terms such as “postmodernity” can still be useful, since they express which strand predominates in a given moment. Jameson suggests that culture remains closely interrelated with economics and politics: an insight first shared by Marx. In other words, any given society’s socioeconomic conditions are mirrored in its culture.

Next, Jameson borrows the ideas of the German-Belgian economist Ernest Mandel to explain the progression of global capitalism and its relationship to cultural production. Mandel divides capitalist history into three phases. The first, taking place in the early 1800s, was the creation of steam engines; the second, the widespread production of combustive and electrical power in the late 1800s; and the third the invention of digital and nuclear technologies in the 1940s. These technological stages correspond with three economic ones: respectively, the intra-state market economy phase; the globalizing phase; and the late capitalist phase. In turn, he states three artistic associations: the realist phase, the modernist phase, and the postmodern phase, respectively.



Jameson argues that in the postmodern era, the borders between the state, other information-manufacturing institutions, and even many individuals, have virtually dissolved. As a result, exchanges of goods and information are now much more fluid and have opened up discourses between fields of knowledge that were once thought of as unrelated. Jameson stresses that postmodernism is not the only social arrangement of his present moment; rather, it is merely a “cultural dominant” that happens to currently exert lots of power over lived experience and intellectual life. Indeed, many works of art and literature and socioeconomic arrangements in Jameson’s time are not postmodern. However, since postmodernism is the cultural dominant, it is impossible to live totally outside the conditions it imposes on all aspects of contemporary life. Jameson concludes his book with a series of examples of recent cultural products that demonstrate postmodern thinking. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is a rigorous criticism of a period often taken for granted as well as a treatise on the downsides of periodization.