Fredric Jameson

FREDRIC JAMESON POSTMODERNISM , or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM Seventh printing in paperback, 1997 © 1991 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper <x>; Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.A number of chapters, or parts of chapters, of this book have appeared in previous publications, sometimes in an earlier form. Chapter 1. 1984 "Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." New Left Review, no. 146 (July-August): 59 - 92. Chapter 2. 1984 "The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Debate." New German Critique, no. 53 (Fall): 53 - 65. Chapter 4. 1990 "Spatial Equivalents: Postmodernist Architecture and the World System," The States of Theory, ed. David Carroll (Columbia University Press): 125 - 48. Chapter 6. 1988 "Postmodernism and Utopia." Institute of Contemporary Art publication (Boston) (March): 11 - 32. Chapter 8. 1990 "Postmodernism and the Market," in The Retreat of the Intellectuals: Socialist Register 1990, ed. Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch (London: Merlin): 95 - 110. Chapter 9. 1989 "Nostalgia for the Present." SAQ 38 no. 2, (Spring): 517-37. For Mitchell Lawrence Contents Introduction CULTURE 1 The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism IDEOLOGY 2 Theories of the Postmodern VIDEO 3 Surrealism Without the Unconscious ARCHITECTURE 4 Spatial Equivalents in the World System SENTENCES 5 Reading and the Division of Labor SPACE 6 Utopianism After the End of Utopia THEORY 7 Immanence and Nominalism in Postmodern Theoretical Discourse ECONOMICS 8 Postmodernism and the Market FILM 9 Nostalgia for the Present CONCLUSION 10 Secondary Elaborations Introduction It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place. In that case, it either "expresses" some deeper irrepressible historical impulse (in however distorted a fashion) or effectively "represses" and diverts it, depending on the side of the ambiguity you happen to favor. Postmodernism, postmodern consciousness, may then amount to not much more than theorizing its own condition of possibility, which consists primarily in the sheer enumeration of changes and modifications. Modernism also thought compulsively about the New and tried to watch its coming into being (inventing for that purpose the registering and inscription devices akin to historical time-lapse photography), but the postmodern looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same; for the "When-it-all-changed," as Gibson puts it, or, better still, for shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things and of the way they change. The moderns were interested in what was likely to come of such changes and their general tendency: they thought about the thing itself, substantively, in Utopian or essential fashion. Postmodernism is more formal in that sense, and more "distracted," as Benjamin might put it; it only clocks the variations themselves, and knows only too well that the contents are just more images. In modernism, as I will try to show later on, some residual zones of "nature" or "being" of the old, the older, the archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at transforming that "referent." Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable "second nature." Indeed, what happened to culture may well be one of the more important clues for tracking the postmodern: an immense dilation of its sphere (the sphere of commodities), an immense and historically original acculturation of the Real, a quantum leap in what Benjamin still called the "aestheticization" of reality (he thought it meant fascism, but we know it's only fun: a prodigious exhilaration with the new order of things, a commodity rush, our "representations" of things tending to arouse an enthusiasm and a mood swing not necessarily inspired by the things themselves). So, in postmodern culture, "culture" has become a product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself: modernism was still minimally and tendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself. Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process. The "life-style" of the superstate therefore stands in relationship to Marx's "fetishism" of commodities as the most advanced monotheisms to primitive animisms or the most rudimentary idol worship; indeed, any sophisticated theory of the postmodern ought to bear something of the same relationship to Horkheimer and Adorno old "Culture Industry" concept as MTV or fractal ads bear to fifties television series. "Theory" has meanwhile itself also changed and offers its own kind of clue to the mystery. Indeed, one of the more striking features of the postmodern is the way in which, in it, a whole range of tendential analyses of hitherto very different kinds -- economic forecasts, marketing studies, culture critiques, new therapies, the (generally official) jeremiad about drugs or permissiveness, reviews of art shows or national film festivals, religious "revivals" or cults - have all coalesced into a new discursive genre, which we might as well call "Postmodernism theory," and which demands some attention in its own right. It is clearly a class which is a member of its own class, and I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters are inquiries into the nature of such "Postmodernism theory" or mere examples of it. I have tried to prevent my own account of Postmodernism -- which stages a series of semiautonomous and relatively independent traits or features -- from confiating back into the one uniquely privileged symptom of a loss of historicity, something that by itself could scarcely connote the presence of the Postmodernism in any unerring fashion, as witness peasants, aesthetes, children, liberal economists, or analytic philosophers. But it is hard to discuss "Postmodernism theory" in any general way without having recourse to the matter of historical deafness, an exasperating condition (provided you are aware of it) that determines a series of spasmodic and intermittent, but desperate, attempts at recuperation. Postmodernism theory is one of those attempts: the effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an "age," or Zeitgeist or "system" or "current situation" any longer. Postmodernism theory is then dialectical at least insofar as it has the wit to seize on that very uncertainty as its first clue and to hold to its Ariadne's thread on its way through what may not turn out to be a labyrinth at all, but a gulag or perhaps a shopping mall. An enormous Claes Oldenburg thermometer, however, as long as a whole city block, might serve as some mysterious symptom of the process, fallen without warning from the sky like a meteorite. For I take it as axiomatic that "modernist history" is the first casualty and mysterious absence of the Postmodernism period (this is essentially Achille Bonito-Oliva's version of Postmodernism theory): Mn art, at least, the notion of progress and telos remained alive and well up to very recent times indeed, in its most authentic, least stupid and caricatural, form, in which each genuinely new work unexpectedly but logically outtrumped its predecessor (not "linear history" this, but rather Shklovsky's "knight's gambit;" the action at distance, the quantum leap to the undeveloped or underdeveloped square). Dialectical history, to be sure, affirmed that all history worked this way, on its left foot, as it were, progressing, as Henri Lefebvre once put it, by way of catastrophe and disaster; but fewer ears heard that than believed the modernist aesthetic paradigm, which was on the point of being confirmed as a virtual religious doxa when it unexpectedly vanished without a trace. ("We went out one morning and the Thermometer was gone!") This seems to me a more interesting and plausible story than Lyotard's related one about the end"master narratives" (eschatalogical schemata that were never really narratives in the first place, although I may also have been incautious enough to use the expression from time to time). But it now tells us at least two things about Postmodernism theory. First, the theory seems necessarily imperfect or impure: Mn the present case, owing to the "contradiction" whereby Oliva's (or Lyotard's) perception of everything significant about the disappearance of master narratives has itself to be couched in narrative form. Whether, as with Godel's proof, one can demonstrate the logical impossibility of any internally self- coherent theory of the postmodern -- an antifoundationalism that really eschews all foundations altogether, a nonessentialism without the last shred of an essence in it -- is a speculative question; its empirical answer is that none have so far appeared, all replicating within themselves a mimesis of their own title in the way in which they are parasitory on another system (most often on modernism itself), whose residual traces and unconsciously reproduced values and attitudes then

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