Jameson's cultural critique/ Encyclopedia entry excerpt

Roberts, A. (2010). Jameson, Fredric. In The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, M. Ryan (Ed.). doi:10.1002/9781444337839.wbelctv2j001

Jameson's cultural critique is an interrogation of what he calls “late capitalism,” borrowing the term from Marxist philosopher Enrst Mandel. Marx argued that the conflict inherent in capitalism would inevitably bring about its destruction; and the persistence, and indeed global dominance, of capitalism, might be thought to contradict this view. Mandel refined Marx's analysis into a three‐part narrative: first, market capitalism, which dominated the West in the 1800s and early 1900s evolved at the end of the nineteenth century, into, second, monopoly capitalism, which was characterized by the quasi‐imperial domination by capital of international markets. The third phase, late capitalism, is taken by Mandel (and Jameson) as beginning after World War II, and witnesses the complete interpenetration of global culture by the logic of capitalism: multinational companies, mass consumption, and the com‐modification of culture – the features of what is now often called “globalization.” Jameson's particular kind of Marxist analysis is less concerned with “surface” diagnosis of the ills of society (although he does, of course, engage with these), and more interested in the dialectical method, and the force with which a properly Marxist analysis can unearth otherwise buried features of culture.

This is the case in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), which describes “the prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm,” such that “everything in our social life – from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and as yet untheorized sense” (48).

It is this that Jameson calls “postmodernism”; and the various and often enormously influential concepts that he identifies as characteristic of this cultural logic – the flattening of “affect” or emotional resonance; the dominance of irony; the replacement of grounded “parody” by aflat, depthless, promiscuous “pastiche”; the interpenetration of “high” and “popular” culture, and especially erasure of historical perspective – are actually precisely attempts to theorize this logic. Jameson also ascribes to contemporary postmodern culture a “skepticism towards metanarratives”; which is to say, a sense that in contemporary culture the grand stories that used to structure existence (humanism, scientific progress, and so on; “metanarrative” means roughly “stories about stories”) have crumbled away, and moreover that we now, generally speaking, no longer believe any such single overarching narrative.

Postmodernism is also characterized by the disorientations of contemporary urban space (most famously, an account of the postmodern architectural logic of the Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles). Jameson sees postmodern culture as neither “immoral, frivolous or reprehensible because of its lack of high seriousness, nor as good in the McLuhanist, celebratory sense of the emergence of some wonderful new utopia” (Stephanson 1986–7: 70).