Postmodernism

POSTMODERNISM OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM FREDRIC JAMESON POSTMODERNISM, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Post-Contemporary Interventions Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson POSTMODERNISM, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism • FREDRIC JAMESON VERSO London· New York First published in the UK by Verso 1991 and in the United States by Duke University Press First printing in paperback 1992 791086 © 1991 Duke University Press All rights reserved Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London WIF OEG USA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606 Verso is the imprint of New Left Books British Library Cataloging in Publication Data Jameson, Fredric Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism. 1. Culture. Postmodernism. 1. Title 306 ISBN 0-86091-314-7 ISBN 0-86091-537-9 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 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: PostmodernistArchitecture 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 Artpublication (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 ix CULTURE 1 The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 1 IDEOLOGY 2 Theories of the Postmodern 55 VIDEO 3 Surrealism Without the Unconscious 67 ARCHITECTURE 4 Spatial Equivalents in the World System 97 SENTENCES 5 Reading and the Division of Labor 131 SPACE 6 Utopianism After the End of Utopia 154 THEORY 7 Immanence and Nominalism in Postmodern Theoretical Discourse 181 ECONOMICS 8 Postmodernism and the Market 260 FILM 9 Nostalgia for the Present 279 CONCLUSION 10 Secondary Elaborations 297 Notes 419 Index 433 Introduction I t 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. Postmod ernism, postmodern consciousness, may then amount to not much more than theorizing its own condition of possibility, which consists primar ily 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,l 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 varia tions themselves, and knows only too well that the contents are just more images. In modernism, as I will try to show later on, some resid ual 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 trans forming 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 "cul ture" has become a veritable "second nature." Indeed, what happened x INTRODUCTION to culture may well be one of the more important clues for tracking the postmodern: an immense dilation of its sphere (the sphere of com modities), an immense and historically original acculturation of the Real, a quantum leap in what Benjamin still called the "aestheticiza tion" 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 post modern ought to bear something of the same relationship to Horkheimer and Adorno's 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 tenden tial analyses of hitherto very different kinds-economic forecasts, marketing studies, culture critiques, new therapies, the (generally offi cial) jeremiad about drugs or permissiveness, reviews of art shows or national film festivals, religious "revivals" or cults-have all coa lesced into a new discursive genre, which we might as well call "post modernism 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 ha\'e to decide whether the following chapters are inquiries into the nature of such "postmodernism theory" or mere exam ples 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 conflating back into the one uniquely privileged symp tom of a loss of historicity, something that by itself could scarcely con note 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 Introduction xi general way without having recourse to the matter of historical deaf ness, an exasperating condition (provided you are aware of it) that deter mines 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 situa tion 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 laby rinth 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 warn ing 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 essen tially Achille Bonito-Oliva's version of postmodernism theoryJ:Z in 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 carica tural, form, in which each genuinely new work unexpectedly but logi cally 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 reli gious 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 stcry than Lyotard's related one about the end of "master narratives" (eschatalogical sche mata 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:3 in the pres ent case, owing to the "contradiction" whereby Oliva's (or Lyotard's) perception of everything significant about the disappearance

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