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Chapter-3

Jamesonian Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic

There are number of theoretical discuses available on postmodernism as there are many

postmodernisms and theorists on it. However this large and wide variety of theories includes the

categorization based on the ideologies they articulate and the place that theorists retain in this

framework. Fredric Jameson makes a categorization in his essay, “The Politics of Theory:

Ideological position in the postmodern debate. He writes:

The problem of postmodernism --- how its fundamental characteristics are to be

described, whether it even exists in the first place, whether the very concepts is any use

is, on the contrary, a mystification--- this problem is at one and the same time an aesthetic

and a political one. The various positions can be taken on it, whatever terms they are

couched on it, can always be shown to articulate visions of history, in which the

evaluation of the social moment in which we live today is the object of an essentially

political affirmation or repudiation. Indeed, the very enabling premise of the debate turns

on an initial strategic presupposition about our social system. (Postmodrenism, 47)

Jameson’s critique of postmodernity resides beyond the plus and minus value judgments as

defined by the other thinkers namely, Jean Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard in their

writings. Jameson was the major and the foundational figure to watch postmodernism as the

representation of political and historical circumstances. Jameson’s engagements with

postmodernism started to appear in 1983 with the publication of essay entitled ‘Postmodernism

and Consumer Society; this essay was reprinted as ‘Postmodernism as the Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism’ in New Left Review in 1984. Hans Bertens describes it as having been, immensely
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productive and seminal in getting the more traditional, that is non-poststructuralist, left involved

in the discussions’ about postmodernism. Though Jameson’s approach to postmodernism has

been remained Marxist. The other theorists approached and defined art, literature and

architecture as a style, but Jameson linked it with to social-political situation. For Jameson

realism, was the representation of nineteenth century capitalism and modernism was the reified

post Industrial capitalism and postmodernism is aesthetic and textual expression of late

capitalism. Late capitalism has a particular economic and cultural logic, and the cultural logic of

late capitalism is what we call ‘postmodernism’.

Noel Gough introduces postmodernism as partial and imprecise. He says that words that

are refer to complex areas of human understanding cannot be reduced to unambiguous

definitions. No doubt postmodernism is too difficult to define, is complex because it varies from

the perception of a person to person. Ihab Hassan in his essay, “From Postmodernism to Post

Modernity: the Local /Global Context” delineates about the uncertainty and inability of

describing the term postmodernism. He mentions that postmodernism haunted the discourse of

art, architecture and social sciences. Leslie Fiedler understands postmodernism as anti-modernist

and anti- interpretation. Stephen Hicks in Explaining Postmodernism says that postmodernism

has no philosophical basis and realities are linguistically created. The term postmodernism

signifies a movement following modernism historically.

Jean Francois Lyotard, in his seminal work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on

Knowledge (1984) considers postmodern as mode not an age, describes the condition of

knowledge in the times and describes transformations in the arts and science. He focuses

epistemologically than historically and presents the status of science and technology in

contemporary times. He supports postmodernism against modernism as the continuation of the

project of enlightenment. He finds postmodernism as an alternative of all the meta-narratives in

modernism. It is characterized by heterogeneity, fragmentations and split narratives. All the

Grand narratives focus to keep all under similar type of nature, this rises the problem and does

not help in making the society better. Lyotard mentions:

Postmodern is incredulity towards metanarratives… Postmodern knowledge is not simply

a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability

to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert’s homology, but the

inventor’s paralogy. (The Postmodern Condition, xxiv)

For him human experience is fragmented into various local roles and languages and therefore

multiplicity, plurality and fragmentation are the major characteristics of postmodernism. It was a

reaction against totality, singularity and linearity.

Ihab Hassan employs the term indeterminate in his essay “Culture, Indeterminacy and

Immanence: Margins of the postmodern age” (1997) to highlight the two postmodern tendencies

i. e. Cultural indeterminacy and technological immanence. The first was produced with the

abstract use of symbols more in nature. This play and new creation of symols brought

technological turn to replace the old forms and symbols. Therefore, language played a significant

role in transforming the culture into “immanent semiotic system via technology and media. This

brought dispersion, difference and ambiguity in understanding, as very near to the Derrida’s

Deconstruction. Deconstruction theory is about the displacement of the idealist signified and that

leads to indeterminacies, plurality and relativism. Postmodern ambiguity and vagueness take

their birth from the concept of deconstruction. Ihab Hassan in his essay “From Postmodernism to

Post Modernity: the Local /Global Context” writes:

By indeterminacy, or better still, indeterminacies, I mean a combination of trends that

include openness, fragmentation, ambiguity, discontinuity, decentrement, heterodoxy,

and pluralism, deformation, all conducive to indeterminacy or under-determination. The

latter concepts alone, deformation, subsumes a dozen currents like deconstruction,

decreation, disintegration, displacement, difference, discontinuity, disjunction,

disappearance, de-definition, demystification, detotalization, delegitmation,

decolonization. ( POSTmodernISM, 117)

For Hassan, postmodern includes resistance, negation and the unmasking of the silence. It is

more ironic, playful and self reflexive. He sees it as a style manifests in the novels of Franz

Kafka and Thomas Pychon.

The other name in the domain of postmodernism is Jurgen Habermas, German philosopher who

highly thinks of the project of modernity, the culmination of Enlightenment attempts to order

human affairs rationally. He saw the removal of art from realism in the nineteenth century, to

what her terms as ‘an unfinished project’. He stresses to bring art, science and morality together

in the public realm. But he looks at postmodernism with distrust of reason, the demolishing of

the categories of truth, beauty and morality. He thinks the chances of terrible unfolding are not

very good and postmodernism as politically conservative.

Jean Baudrillard is a logical postmodernist that reflects from his various essays on the

postmodern. His theory of postmodern is based on his assumption that media and simulations

have constituted an entirely a new type of experience and society. Baudrillard like Lyotard

implies a break between the postmodern and the previous period. In his essay entitled Nihilism”

he depicts modernity as different by expansion, differentiation, aesthetic project which seek to

represent real. On the contrary, implosion, de-differentiation and hyperreality are the

characteristics of the postmodern. He argues that the revolution of modernity was the revolution

of meaning whereas postmodernity was in reality the destruction of meaning. This new social

system is the disappearance of all the major signs of modernity such as production, power and

reality. He celebrates the end of the modern era and is very curious for the postmodern age,

which he refers as an age of simulation. He repeatedly emphasizes in his essay “Symbolic

Exchange and Death,” he says:

Gone are the referents of production, signification, affect, substance, history, i.e., the

whole equation of the real contents that still gave the sign weight by anchoring it with a

kind of carrying capacity, of gravity--- in short its form as representative equivalent. All

this is surpassed by the other stage of value, that of total relativity, of generalized

commutation, which is combinatory and simulatory. This means simulations in the sense

that from now on signs will exchange among themselves exclusively without interacting

with the real. (Simulations, 125)

This means that reality is constituted by codes and modes of representation. The signs are

gaining importance by the new technologies- the electronic media, cybernetic models and

entertainment industry. He purposes that media are simulations devices that produce images,

signs and codes which in their turn constitute a hyerreality, a reality more real than the real. Thus

in Lyotard and Baudrillard, both do not present any stance for oppositional politics.

But Jameson’s critique of postmodernism brings relevant social and political questions. Jameson

and his theory of postmodern is fully committed to sociopolitical revolution and historical

analysis of the contemporary society. It helps to understand the functioning of late capitalism and
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its expansion. His critique awakens political consciousness to build resistance against the

reifying powers of capitalism.

Fredric Jameson, the founder thinker of postmodernism, considers it as a cultural

dominant of the period known as late capitalism in which socio-economic culture bridges the

boundaries of nations and easily coexists along with multi-nationalism. This late capitalism starts

after the Second World War when the second stage of capitalism, Imperialism/white capitalism

came to an end. Jameson derives the attribution of the term postmodernism “the cultural logic of

late capitalism” from Ernest Mandel’s three stages of capitalism that matches with technological

development. Therefore Modernism goes with monopoly and imperialist stage in the colonial

times and came to an ended by breaking all the boundaries of nations. No doubt, postmodernism,

historically began as a reaction against modernism, in academia and architecture. This

entrenchment was seen oppressive in 1960 and it tried to build a space by repudiating modernist

values.

Along with periodical and cultural difference, Jameson separates it from modernism in

many ways. In Postmodernism and the Cultural Logic of Late capitalism, He argues that ‘every

position on postmodernism in culture- whether apologia and stigmatization – is also at one and

the same time and necessarily, an implicitly and explicitly political stance on the nature of the

nature of multinational capitalism today( Postmodernism,3) . He discusses that transformation in

art, literature and culture have emerged out of the capitalism during the second half of the

twentieth century. Means as the economic organization of the western society has developed; the

culture that surrounds it has changed. Jameson describes the effects of this third stage of

capitalism in some detail at the beginning of the postmodernism. He argues:

Is not merely an emphasis on the emergence of new forms of business organization

(multinationals, transnational) beyond the monopoly stage but, above all, a vision of a

world capitalist system fundamentally distinct from the older imperialism … its feature

include the new international division of labour, a vertiginous new dynamic in

international banking and stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third

World debt), new forms of media interrelationship (very much including transportation

system such as containerization), computers and automation, flight of production to

advanced Third World areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences,

including the crisis of traditional labour, the emergence of yuppies, and gentrification on

a now global scale. ( Postmodernism, xviii-xix)

For Jameson, late capitalism marks a new vision of world capitalism in which the systems that

governed the west’s economies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries develop and

spread throughout the world as borders are broken down and new markets are founded in

previously unpenetrated areas. This process has spread rapidly since the Second World War with

the establishment of institutions as the such as the World Trade Organization, World Bank and

IMF that oversee trade, structure debt repayments by developing countries and impose sanctions

on states that refuse to open their markets to competition. The internationalization of trade has,

as Jameson suggests, also led to a transformation of working life as industrial production has

moved away from its nineteenth century European and American centers to relocate in the

developing world where salaries can be far lower and workers have more limited access to

employment rights and protection, allowing goods to be produced and sold more cheaply and

leading to consumer booms in West.

These changes in the economic and communication structures of the society have gone

hand in hand with changes in the use of images to appeal to consumers, creating that Jameson

identifies as a new postmodern aesthetic:

What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into

commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves

of ever more novel seeming goods (from clothing to air planes), at ever greater rates of

turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to

aesthetic innovation and experimentation.( Postmodrenism, 4)

Jameson identifies increase in the rapidity of changes of fashion that accompanies the

development of advertising and makes consumption a matter not just of useful objects, we now

buy brands and identities in the shape of everything from cosmetics implants to designer ring

tones for our mobile telephones. This, in turn, leads to what he calls a new depthlessness in

which each commodity becomes just another interchangeable image or fashion accessory to be

purchased by the consumer to enhance their choice of lifestyles.

Jameson contrasts two paintings, ‘A Pair of Boots’ by Vincent Van Gogh’ and ‘Diamond

Dust Shoes’ by Andy Warhol. The former depicts a pair of battered boots caked in dust in a

context, that of the agricultural life of the peasant who seemingly owned them, and provides the

viewer with a sense of the rural world from which they came. The latter, in contrast, presents a

collection of women’s shoes floating freely in space, and apparently also free from any social

context whatsoever. According to Jameson, Warhol’s painting

No longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of van Gogh’s footgear; indeed, I am

tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all. Nothing in this painting organizes
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even a minimal place for the viewer… [It marks] a new kind of flatness or depthlessness,

a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature

of all the postmodernism…( Postmodrenism, 8).

Jameson uses this contrast to identify is the transformation of experience in postmodernity. The

objects around us that we might once have experienced in terms of their use values are

commodified to such extent that has come to account for the entirety of our experience of the

world. Warhol’s shoes are infinitely reproducible, interchangeable, superficial, and contextless,

just one commodity from a potentially endless collection in which use value has become entirely

irrelevant. This, Jameson argues, is the basis of the postmodern consumer that we inhabit.

Jameson relates the experience of deathlessness with schizophrenia in terms of anxiety and loss

of reality. This new depthlessness finds it presence both in theory and in the new culture of the

image. It manifests itself through literal flatness (flat skyscrapers) and qualitative superficiality.

In theory it reflects through the postmodern rejection of the belief that no one can ever fully

beyond the surface appearances of ideology or false consciousness to some deeper truth. Then

we are left with multiple layers as our day life, our psychic experiences and our cultural

languages are dominated by space than time.

Jameson sees our historical deafness as one of the symptom of postmodern age which

includes “a series of spasmodic and intermittent”, but desperate, attempts to make sense of the

age but in a way that refuses the traditional form of understanding narrative, history and reality.

It questions any claim to truth, Jameson finds it a pay in the hands of capitalism. He argues,

“Postmodernism is not the cultural dominant of a wholly new social order…, but only the reflex

and concomitant of yet another systematic modification of capitalism itself” (xii). Jameson calls

for returning to history as his slogan is, “Always Historicize”. He finds a weakening of history in
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our relationship to public history and in our private temporality. This loss of historicity, as

Jameson says resembles a schizophrenic position.

Jameson considers pastiche is also one of the major cultural productions in postmodern

time. In modern age, there was an existence of an autonomous subject. It regarded artist as

subject to address his subject as consumer. But with the waning of affect the artist’s unique

individuality has been reduced to objective form. With this fragmentation, subjectivity comes to

a bleak end. Pastiche like parody is the imitation of a unique style, but it is an empty, neutral

which lacks the intension and devoid of satirical impulse. The postmodernist artist has reduced to

pastiche because he cannot create new aesthetic form. He only copies than making something

novel. Pastiche, as Jameson terms a random cannibalization of old styles. This can be seen in

Hollywood culture.

Jameson insists on seeing technology as “itself a figure for a whole new economic world

system. And these technologies are more concerned with reproduction. His example of

Bonaventure hotel attempts to be a total space, a whole world which introduces a new form of

collective behavior. He views this space as an allegory of the new hyper space of global market.

Stepping inside the Bonaventure, Jameson attests, is a disorienting experience, the escalators and

elevators move the subject around. Jameson writes:

I am more at a loss when it comes to conveying the thing itself, the experience of space

you undergo when you step out off such allegorical devices into the lobby or atrium, with

its great central column surrounded by a miniature lake, the whole positioned between the

four symmetrical residential towers… I am tempted to say that such space makes it

impossible for us to use the language of volume or volumes any longer, since these are
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impossible to seize… you are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and body.

(Postmodrenism, 42)