Fredric Jameson
Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of
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Late Capitalism T he last few years have been marked by an inverted millennarianism, in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by ns of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.): taken together, all of the perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. T he ca for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure,generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s. As the word itlf suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). T hus, abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of reprentation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs,or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the works of Wallace Stevens): all the are now en as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high modernist impul which is spent and exhausted with
and the Frankfurt School. T he postmodernisms have in fact been fascinated precily by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV ries and Readers’ Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery and science-fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply ‘quote’, as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance.
Nor should the break in question be thought of as a purely cultural affair: indeed, theories of the postmodern—whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation—bear a strong family remblance to all tho more ambitious sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized ‘post-industrial society’ (Daniel Bell), but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society or ‘high tech’, and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely the primacy of industrial production and the omniprence of class struggle. The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted them with vehemence, with the signal exception of the economist Ernest Mandel, who bo
ok Late Capitalism ts out not merely to anatomize the historic originality of this new society (which he es as a third stage or moment in the evolution of capital), but also to demonstrate that it is, if anything, a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it. I will return to this argument later; suffice it for the moment to emphasize a point I have defended in greater detail elwhere*, namely that every position on postmodernism in culture—whether apologia or stigmatization—is also at one and the same time, and necessarily,an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today.
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Postmodernism as Cultural Dominant孤独之旅教案
A last preliminary word on method: what follows is not to be read as stylistic description, as the account of one cultural style or movement among others. I have rather meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception of historical periodization has come to em most problematical indeed. I have argued elwhere that all isolated or discrete cultural analysis always involves a buried or represd theory of historical periodization; in any ca, the conception of the ‘genealogy’ largely lays to rest traditional theoretical worries about so-called linear history, theories of ‘stages’, and teleological historiography. In the prent context, however, lengthier theoretical discussion of such (very real) issues can perhaps be replaced by a few substant
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One of the concerns frequently aroud by periodizing hypothes is
that the tend to obliterate difference, and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable ‘chronological’ metamorphos and punctuation marks). T his is, however, precily why it ems to me esntial to grasp ‘postmodernism’ not as a style, but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the prence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate features.
Consider, for example, the powerful alternative position that postmod-ernism is itlf little more than one more stage of modernism proper (if not, indeed, of the even older romanticism); it may indeed be conceded that all of the features of postmodernism I am about to enumerate can be detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding modernism (including such astonishing genealogical precursors as Gertrude Stein, Raymond Rousl, or Marcel Duchamp, who may be considered outright post-modernists, avant la lettre).What has not been taken into account by this view is, however, the social position of the older modernism, or better still, its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and p
一样爱着你ost-Victorian bourgeoisie, for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive and generally ‘anti-social’. It will be argued here that a mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered such attitudes archaic. Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly; they now strike us, on the whole, as rather ‘realistic’; and this is the result of a canonization and an academic institutionalization of the modern movement generally, which can be traced to the late 1950s. This is indeed surely one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itlf, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a t of dead classics, which ‘weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living’, as Marx once said in a different context.
As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stresd that its own offensive features—from obscurity and xually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism—no longer scandalize anyone and are not only received with the greatest complac-ency but have themlves become institutionalized and are at one with the official culture of Western society.
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What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity produ
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ction generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-eming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly esntial structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities then find recognition in the institutional support of all kinds available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to muums and other forms of patronage. Architecture is, however, of all the arts that clost constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship: it will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the
new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multina-tional business, who expansion and development is strictly contem-poraneous with it. That the two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project we will try to suggest later on. Yet this is the point at which we must remind the reader of the obvious, namely that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this n, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror.猪八戒的故事
T he first point to be made about the conception of periodization in dominance, therefore, is that even if all the constitutive features of postmodernism were identical and continuous with tho of an older modernism—a position I feel to be demonstrably erroneous but which only an even lengthier analysis of modernism proper could dispel—the two phenomena would still remain utterly distinct in their meaning and social function, owing to the very different positioning of postmodern-ism in the economic system of late capital, and beyond that, to the transformation of the very sphere of culture in contemporary society. More on this point at the conclusion of the prent essay. I must now briefly address a different kind of objection to periodization, a different kind of concern about its possible obliteration of heterogeneity, which one finds most often on the Left. And it is certain that there is a strange quasi-Sartrean irony a ‘winner los’ logic—which tends to surround any effort to describe—a ‘system’, a totalizing dynamic, as the are detected in the movement of contemporary society. What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic—the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example—the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly clod and terrifying machine, to that very degree he los, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyd, and the impuls of negation and revolt, not to speak of tho of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itlf.
I have felt, however, that it was only in the light of some conception of
a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could be measured and assd. I am very far from feeling that all cultural production today is ‘postmodern’ in the broad n I will be conferring on this term. The postmodern is however the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impuls—what Raymond Wil-liams has ufully termed ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ forms of cultural production—must make their way. If we do not achieve some general n of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of prent history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces who effectivity is undecidable. This has been at any rate the political spirit in which the following analysis was devid: to project some conception of a new systemic cultural norm and its reproduction, in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today.
