Postmodernism,

or The Cultural
Logic of Late
Capitalism
(1991)

Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson (born April 14, 1934) is an
American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist
political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of
contemporary cultural trends, particularly his
analysis of postmodernity and capitalism.
 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
• In this magisterial work, Jameson has offered us a particularly
influential analysis of our current postmodern condition. Like Jean
Baudrillard, whose concept of the “simulacrum” (think simulation
or facsimile) he adopts, Jameson is highly critical of our current
historical situation; he paints a rather dystopic picture of the
present, which he associates with a loss of our connection to
history. What we are left with is a fascination with the present.
• According to Jameson, postmodernity has transformed the
historical past into a series of emptied-out stylizations (what
Jameson terms “pastiche”) that can then be commodified and
consumed. The result is the threatened victory of capitalist thinking
over all other forms of thought.
 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
• Jameson contrasts this postmodern situation with modernism. Whereas
modernism still believed in "some residual zones of 'nature' or 'being,' and
still believed that one could "do something to that nature'", postmodernism
has lost a sense of any distinction between the Real and Culture.
• For Jameson, postmodernity amounts to "an immense dilation of [culture's]
sphere (the sphere of commodities)
• Whereas "modernism was still minimally the critique of the commodity
and the effort to make it transcend itself," postmodernism "is the
consumption of sheer commodification as a process.” That apparent victory
of commodification over all spheres of life marks postmodernity's reliance
on the "cultural logic of late capitalism."
 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
• 1) The weakening of historicity. Jameson sees our "historical deafness" as
one of the symptoms of our age
• Postmodern theory itself Jameson sees as a desperate attempt to make sense
of the age but in a way that refuses the traditional forms of understanding
(narrative, history, the reality obscured by ideology). For postmodernists,
there is no outside of ideology or textuality; indeed, postmodern theory
questions any claim to "truth" outside of culture;

• Jameson sees this situation as itself a symptom of the age, which in turn
plays right into the hands of capitalism

”
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism (1991)
Jameson calls instead for the return of history; hence, his mantra: "always historicize!"

Jameson pinpoints a weakening of history, “whose 'schizophrenic' structure” (following

Lacan) will determine new types relationships in the more temporal arts (58).
As Jameson explains, the schizophrenic suffers from a "breakdown of the signifying
chain" in his/her use of language until "the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of
pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in
time" (72). In other words, feelings take precedence over meaning. Our loss of
historicity, according to Jameson, most resembles such a schizophrenic position.
 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
• 2) A breakdown of the distinction between "high" and "low" culture.
• As Jameson puts it, the various forms of postmodernism "have, in
fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole 'degraded' landscape of
schlock and kitsch (55).
• 3) “a new depthlessness,” which can be seen both “in contemporary
'theory' and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum”
(58).
• The depthlessness manifests itself through literal flatness (two
dimensional screens, flat skyscrapers full of reflecting windows) and
qualitative superficiality.
 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
• In theory, this lack of depth manifests itself through the postmodern
rejection of the belief that one can ever fully move beyond the
surface appearances of ideology or “false consciousness” to some
deeper truth; we are left instead with “multiple surfaces” (62).

• One result is “that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural
languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by
categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism”
(64).
 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
• 4) “the waning of affect” (61) and a focus on “intensities” —which can
best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime” (58).
• The general depthlessness and affectlessness of postmodern culture is
countered by outrageous claims for extreme moments of intense
emotion, which Jameson aligns with schizophrenia and a culture of
(drug) addiction.
• With the loss of historicity, the present is experienced by the
schizophrenic subject “with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious
charge of affect” (73), which can be “described in the negative terms of
anxiety and loss of reality,” but which one could just as well imagine in
such positive terms as “euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or
hallucinogenic intensity” (73).
 Postmodernism, or, the
Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991)
• 5) a whole new technology (computers,
digital culture, etc.), though Jameson
insists on seeing such technology as
"itself a figure for a whole new
economic world system" (58).
• Such technologies are more concerned
with reproduction rather than with the
industrial production of material goods.