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April 20, 2010
Benjamin Kunkel in his Into the Big Tent at the London Review of Books refers to Frederic Jameson’s description of the mood and texture of postmodern life:
the erosion of the distinction between high and pop culture; the reign of stylistic pastiche and miscellany; the dominance of the visual image and corresponding eclipse of the written word; a new depthlessness – ‘surrealism without the unconscious’ – in the dream-like jumble of images; and the strange alliance of a pervasive cultural nostalgia (as in the costume drama or historical novel) with a cultural amnesia serving to fragment ‘time into a series of perpetual presents’. If all that now sounds familiar, this owes something to the durability of Jameson’s account of postmodernism
Kunkel says that this account was premised on the book by Ernest Mandel, the Belgian Trotskyist, which provided the base, as it were, to his own cultural superstructure. Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972) had offered a magnificently confident and pugnacious argument about the nature of postwar capitalism, but he regretted ‘not being able to propose a better term for this historical era than “late capitalism”’. In Mandel’s usage, ‘late’ simply meant ‘recent’, but the term naturally also suggests obsolescence.--hat capitalism was on its last legs.
Kunkel adds that Jameson Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism did not imply that capitalism was on its last legs:
His actual claim was more like the opposite: with the postwar elimination of pre-capitalist agriculture in the Third World and the last residue of feudal social relations in Europe, with the full commodification of culture (no more Rilke and Yeats and their noble patrons) and the infiltration of the old family-haunted unconscious by mass-disseminated images, humankind had only now embarked, for the first time, on a universally capitalist history. Late capitalism was the dawn, not the dusk, of a thoroughgoing capitalism. It constituted a ‘process in which the last surviving internal and external zones of precapitalism … are now ultimately penetrated and colonised in their turn’. This thesis can only have been reinforced by the advent of China as the workshop of the world and the channelling of so much of intimate life by the internet. My shoes are sewn under the supervision of the CCP, and Gmail fills the margins of my private correspondence with ads.
Jameson produced an imposing account of the culture we all still inhabit---the recruitment of the entire world into the same big story, namely the development of global capitalism.
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