Website review: Presidential Lectures: Fredric Jame...
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laodan discovered 20 months ago- Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in Stanford Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities and Arts by Frederic Jameson Mandel's intervention in the Postindustrial debate involves the proposition that late or multinational or consumer capitalism, far from being inconsistent with Marx's great nineteenth-century analysis, constitutes, on the contrary, the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas. ... I want to avoid the implication that technology is in any way the "ultimately determining instance" either of our present-day social life or of our cultural production: such a thesis is, of course, ultimately at one with the post-Marxist notion of a postindustrial society. Rather, I want to suggest that our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism. The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new de-centered global network of the third stage of capital itself. URL: Pos tmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
I tried hard to follow the thread of Jameson's thinking. What I understand is... that Jameson tries linking economics, culture, art, psychology in order to understand our present. The reference to Ernest Mandel's late capitalism seems determining all the rest . What Mandel says, in substance, is that capitalism needed to find new roads to expand profits. One road was to expand the presence of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas (water, music, and so on and eventually soon the air we breathe...). The other road was to expand the geographical area where capital could impose its hegemony. This is what is now called globalization. The radical push in science and technology of these last decades can be analysed at the light of this expansion of capital to all remaining enclaves of freedom and the ensueing drastic reduction of freedoms for all of us on this earth, for sure, have an impact on our psyche (schizophreny) but it is a far shot to say that this ultimately leads to the "disappearance of the individual subject". This last conclusion could only be reached from a cultural isolated standpoint. What I mean is that history is not, and will not in the future, be following such a straight line projection out of an exclusively Western perception of reality. This late stage of capitalism will be brutal and devastating. It is not as if big capital, the actor of this capitalistic expansion, were one and unified. Western big capital holders (to make it short, the thousand families) will indeed be confronted to Chinese state capital and the Indian alliance between state and private capital and eventually "Muslim" capital... The least we can say is that the outcome here is not so sure. See for exemple my post US Banking System Collapse in 2008?. Furthermore, whatever our belief in the myth of scientific absolute prowess, the fact is that ressources are finite and that the impact of our poisoning our environment is becoming uncontrolable and so on. Now a last remark. Late capitalism corresponds to late-modernity which can't be confused with post-modernity. Postmodernity is what comes after all the world has integrated modernity. In other words the expansion of the logic of capital to the four corners of the world shall conduct us directly into obliged structural changes. What Marx termed socialism will be imposed upon all of us not through the will of some of us (Leninism) but rather through the urgent necessity to find solutions in order to make possible our survival as a specie? But this is too long a subject for a SU comment. I spent 308 pages writing about all that in artsense
- Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in Stanford Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities and Arts by Frederic Jameson Mandel's intervention in the Postindustrial debate involves the proposition that late or multinational or consumer capitalism, far from being inconsistent with Marx's great nineteenth-century analysis, constitutes, on the contrary, the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas. ... I want to avoid the implication that technology is in any way the "ultimately determining instance" either of our present-day social life or of our cultural production: such a thesis is, of course, ultimately at one with the post-Marxist notion of a postindustrial society. Rather, I want to suggest that our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism. The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new de-centered global network of the third stage of capital itself. URL: Pos tmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
