While Fredric Jameson’s concept of the cultural logic of late capitalism is complex, social theorists are increasingly focused on whether society—and the theories surrounding it—has dramatically changed as we entered the 21st century. According to Jürgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens, we still live in modern society, so to study it, we should stick to the old ways.
On the other hand, some theorists believe that society has changed significantly. They argue that the quality of society is now different, calling it a postmodern society. Postmodern life brings new consumption patterns and allows people, or consumers, to enjoy whatever they want in this era. With this shift, work becomes central to human identity. Our position in society determines our existence, which has led to the development of schools of thought, particularly in modernism and postmodernism.
Barry Smart identifies three perspectives on postmodernism:
- The extreme view claims that modern society has been completely replaced by postmodern culture.
- The view that, although there have been changes, postmodernism has emerged as an extension of modernism, with thinkers like Fredric Jameson, Chantal Mouffe, and modern feminist theorists exploring how things have changed during the late capitalism era.
- Smart’s stance, where he sees modernism and postmodernism as two periods engaged in a long-term relationship. However, he believes postmodernism highlights the limitations of modernism.
Meanwhile, Jameson’s engagement with capitalism started with Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism. His ideas on Marxism reflect this influence. While Karl Marx is well-known in American social science, Jameson’s influence mainly comes from European intellectuals who were seeking refuge during World War II.
Jameson began analyzing capitalism in the early 1960s. At that time, criticism of Western Marxism was not very popular among American academics. His critique of capitalism was influenced by Frankfurt School thinkers like Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Kenneth Burke, who saw social and cultural criticism as an essential part of Marxist theory.
Jameson argues that the failure of historicity—our ability to trace the past, present, and future—stems from the modern subject. In today’s world, everything is moving so quickly, and people are living simpler lives. In this context, issues cannot keep up with the evolution of the objects around them. Hyperproduction and hyperconsumption trap the subject in a kind of space, mutating into a “hyperspace.”
In this space, the issue keeps spinning endlessly, as the subject remains confused about the development of the world under capitalism. Drawing on Hegel and Marx, Jameson tried to find a way to understand the possible condition of historicity. It, in turn, leads to the idea that the subject’s death is a precursor to the effects of late capitalism.
Jameson and other Marxists believed that the world is not just what we see—it is not just a collection of facts. Instead, the world is a process of interpretation. This process depends on the dominant ideology in society. People want to understand how things work and the doctrine behind the way things are interpreted. Jameson made a crucial contribution to the interpretation project by developing a metacritical approach to questioning the politics of interpretation.
Jameson’s meta-critique is basically a criticism of criticism. He believed that all forms of performance, or critique, have a political dimension. They are shaped by social and economic realities, which in turn define the relationships we have with others.
The politics of interpretation are closely tied to history. Jameson believed that our understanding of history shapes how we see the world. It is important to approach the different narratives in history carefully. However, interpretations are also influenced by past histories. The high relativity and interconnection between historical facts and interpretations raise questions about which narrative is the most accurate.
Deconstructionism argues that there is no absolute truth. Marx, for his part, always tied everything back to the economic aspect, focusing on interpretations of the industrial proletariat. Unlike many other Marxists, Jameson ties all forms of performance to history, using history as a basis to judge the struggle for interpretation. History, in specific contexts, is not just a natural progression but a horizon that encompasses all arrangements.
Jameson’s merging of Marxist dialectics and psychoanalysis is thorough, especially in his book The Political Unconscious. In it, Jameson explores the methodological implications, trends, and key concepts in his analysis. He focuses on the idea of mediation—how a narrative can bridge individual experiences and their social totality through a process called transcoding.
Mediation is a classical dialectical term referring to the relationship between the formal analysis of art and its social foundations. In the early 1960s, Daniel Bell argued that a new social structure was emerging—post-industrial society, which includes consumerism, media, information, electronics, and other organizations. This birth of a new reality is where postmodernism complements modernism. While some argue that postmodernism failed to elevate human dignity, others see it as a paradox in relation to modernism.
Finally, Fredric Jameson, one of the most influential cultural critics, presented his views on Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In this work, he examines postmodernism in culture by highlighting its key elements.
One sign of postmodernism is what is called the “waning of affect,” or pretense. This phenomenon brings about fundamental changes, both in the world of archetypes and in the realm of subjectivity. In the world of the subject, or simulacrum, there is a loss of individual existence. Personal expression, style, and authentic feelings of individualism are fading away.
In postmodernism, the individual subject tends to be fragmented and divided into personal emotions. Compared to the modern era, the commodification of influencers, content creators, and celebrities on social media has led to self-branding. For Jameson, this is just a spectacle and does not necessarily reflect the influencer’s true personality.
This phenomenon creates a strange sense of euphoria when people interact with electronic media. On social media, each individual presents a pretense or image, distorting reality. It impacts mental health as people begin to reject their true selves in favor of a public persona.
Jameson also points out that postmodernism’s excessiveness leads to a cannibalization or random imitation of past styles. This results in the public embracing a concept in postmodernism known as pastiche: a raw imitation of original works lacking deeper meaning, crucial explanations, or any sense of humor or parody. This phenomenon signals the collapse of historicity—a break from history—and reflects our inability to represent the present experience.
The pastiche phenomenon often appears in contemporary films, where artificial images are presented as if they were real. In reality, this cultural consumption has little to do with the actual context. People just “accept” these imitative stories as a way to escape the histories that define their place in society.
Besides pastiche, Jameson also uses the term schizophrenia to describe a postmodern society that constantly consumes the cultural logic of late capitalism to satisfy individual tastes and desires. Postmodernism, while offering traps and co-opting certain subjects, also provides two strategies for cultural resistance to counter its logic.
The first is the homeopathic strategy, which creates cultural disruptions, making practices meaningful by rejecting the values of commodification. The second is the cognitive mapping strategy, which encourages individuals and society to create a new political culture by understanding postmodernism’s true nature. Postmodernism indirectly invites people to understand their positions, hold on to their life principles, and maintain their identities so the fast currents of postmodernism do not sweep them away.
Ultimately, Jameson challenges the essence of consumerist society’s reality.
Explaining the relationship between cultural production and social life, especially in the United States today, is a big challenge for postmodernism. None of the things we are talking about here are new—they are actually abundant in modernism, or what’s often called high modernism. One question that comes up about whether we really need the concept of postmodernism is about periodicity—how a historian determines the radical separation between two distinct periods.
Things that were not dominant in the previous period or system are less important now. So, everything we have described can also be found in earlier periods, especially modernism. If we look at the link between cultural production and social life, old or classical modernism was oppositional art; it appeared in commercial society as scandalous and offensive to the middle class.
It was an insult to good taste and common sense—or, as Freud and Marcuse might say, a provocative challenge to the principles of reality and performance that were dominant in middle-class society in the early 20th century. Modernism did not fit into Victorian furnishings, traditional moral taboos, or the conventions of polite society. In other words, high modernism’s political content was mostly implicit in its usual forms; it was always dangerous, explosive, and subversive to the established order.
In short, both modern society and contemporary society see the form and content of art as unacceptable and embarrassing. The most offensive forms of this art, like explicit sexual content, are now taken for granted and commercially successful, unlike the old high modernism works. It means that while contemporary art has the same characteristics as old modernism, it still does notneeds to have a firm position in society’s culture.
What is more, in one sense, the production of commodities—mainly clothing, furniture, buildings, and other artifacts—is now closely linked to the stylistic changes brought about by artistic experimentation. When modernism was at its peak and aesthetically dominant, it was firmly established in academia, so it was considered academic by a whole new generation of poets, painters, and musicians.
To wrap up, the two features of postmodernism—transforming reality into images and the fragmentation of time into an eternal present—are extremely consistent with this process. It raises the question about the value of new art. There is a kind of agreement that old modernism functions against society in various ways: critical, hostile, competitive, subversive, and oppositional.
Can postmodernism and its social moment be the same? Postmodernism may replicate or reinforce the logic of consumer capitalism, but it also offers many ways to counter this logic. However, if left unchecked, it could make people forget how to be agents of change, contributing to our historical amnesia.
References
- Bell, D. (1973). The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. Basic Books.
- Bloch, E., Benjamin, W., & Burke, K. (Eds.). (1989). Critical Theory: Selected Essays. Continuum.
- Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford University Press.
- Habermas, J. (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve lectures. MIT Press.
- Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press.
- Jameson, F. (1981). The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell University Press.
- Mouffe, C. (1993). The Return of the Political. Verso.
- Sartre, J. P. (2007). Existentialism is a Humanism. Yale University Press.
- Smart, B. (1993). Postmodernism and After: An Introduction. Routledge.
