Jameson produced what remains the most imposing account of the culture we all still inhabit. Postmodernism, he argued, did not spell the end of ‘metanarratives’, as Lyotard had claimed. It was better understood as the recruitment of the entire world into the same big story, namely the development of global capitalism.
As for the self-referential quality of so much postmodern culture – language about language, images of images – it is hard to deny the intimate relationship of culture to the heavy machinery of material production. The self-reflective idiom of postmodernism merely showed that specialisation and the division of labour had seized the arts just as much as anything else; if culture increasingly talked about itself, this was because it talked increasingly to itself.
For Jameson, modernity, like postmodernity, was just another name for an evolving capitalism. (Marx himself had of course observed in Capital ‘how division of labour seizes upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere of society’.) So did every weightless postmodern artefact in fact testify to the specific gravity of the fully capitalist planet it only appeared to float free of? What do you think?
‘So the economic could be observed to have become cultural (just as the culture could be observed to become economic and commodified. Think of dance forms - the authenticity of dance forms, many of which have been commodified for the international arts market, to please the tourists, and so on and on...
As for the self-referential quality of so much postmodern culture – language about language, images of images – it is hard to deny the intimate relationship of culture to the heavy machinery of material production. The self-reflective idiom of postmodernism merely showed that specialisation and the division of labour had seized the arts just as much as anything else; if culture increasingly talked about itself, this was because it talked increasingly to itself.
For Jameson, modernity, like postmodernity, was just another name for an evolving capitalism. (Marx himself had of course observed in Capital ‘how division of labour seizes upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere of society’.) So did every weightless postmodern artefact in fact testify to the specific gravity of the fully capitalist planet it only appeared to float free of? What do you think?
‘So the economic could be observed to have become cultural (just as the culture could be observed to become economic and commodified. Think of dance forms - the authenticity of dance forms, many of which have been commodified for the international arts market, to please the tourists, and so on and on...
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