The dominant position on the issue of postmodernity is clearly that there is a radical disjuncture between modernity and postmodernity. However, there are some postmodern theorists who argue that while postmodernity has important differences from modernity, there are also continuities between them. The best known of these arguments is made by Fredric Jameson in an essay entitled “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1991).
Frederic Jameson sees postmodernism as an extension of modernity. In his view, capitalism still dominates social life. Jameson makes the claim that while there have been significant cultural changes, these are still the expression of the same sort of economic structures discussed by Karl Marx. Thus, despite attempts by the postmodern social theorists to use Marx as an archetype of modernist grand narratives, Jameson uses Marx’s theory to help explain postmodernity. These cultural changes represent capitalism’s expansion into the last uncommodified are as of life that is typical of “late capitalism.” Late capitalism follows Marx’s market capitalism and V. I. Lenin’s (1870-1924) imperalist stage of capitalism. He also identifies cultures with specific economic structures, such as postmodern culture in multinational capitalism.
Fredric Jameson characterizes postmodern society with four elements:
1. Superficiality and lack of depth:
Its cultural products are satisfied with surface images and do not delve deeply into the underlying meanings. A good example is Andy Warhol’s famous painting of Campbell soup cans that appear to be nothing more than perfect representations of those cans. To use a key term associated with postmodern theory, a picture is a simulacrum in which one cannot distinguish between the original and the copy.
Andy Warhol: Campbell’s Soup Cans
Source: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1517
A simulacrum is also a copy of a copy; Warhol was reputed to have painted his soup cans not from the cans themselves but from a photograph of the cans. Jameson describes a simulacrum as “the identical copy for which no original ever existed” (1991:18). A simulacrum is, by definition, superficial, lacking in depth. (You can do further reading on Simulacrum on Jean Baudrillard “Simulation and Simulacra”)
2. The waning of emotion or affect:
Second, postmodernism is characterized by a waning of emotion or affect. As his example, Jameson contrasts another of Warhol’s paintings, another near-photographic representation, this time of Marilyn Monroe to a classic modernist piece of art Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The Scream is a surreal painting of a person expressing the depth of despair, or in sociological terms, anomie or alienation. Warhol’s painting of Marilyn Monroe is superficial and expresses no genuine emotion. This reflects the fact that to the postmodernists, the alienation and anomie that caused the kind of reaction depicted by Munch is part of the now-past modern world. In the postmodern world alienation has been replaced by fragmentation. Since the world and the people in it have become fragmented, the affect that remains is “free-floating and impersonal” (Jameson, 1991:16). There is a peculiar kind of euphoria associated with these postmodern feelings, or what Jameson prefers to call “intensities.” He gives as an example a photorealist cityscape “where even automobile wrecks gleam with some new hallucinatory splendour” (Jameson, 1991:32-33).
Andy Warhol—Marilyn Monroe (1967)
Source: https://www.lecadeauartistique.com/en/posters/592-andy-warhol-marilyn-monroe-on-red-ground.html
Edvard Munch’s The Scream
3. A loss of historicity:
Third, there is a loss of historicity. We cannot know the past. All we have access to are texts about the past, and all we can do is produce yet other texts about that topic. This loss of historicity has led to the “random cannibalization of all styles of the past” (Jameson, 1991:18). The result leads us to another key term in postmodern thinking pastiche. Because it is impossible for historians to find the truth about the past, or even to put together a coherent story about it, they are satisfied with creating pastiches, or hodgepodges of ideas, sometimes contradictory and confused, about the past. Further, there is no clear sense of historical development, of time passing. Past and present are inextricably intertwined. For example, in historical novels such as E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, we see the “disappearance of the historical referent. This historical novel can no longer set out to represent historical past; it can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about that past” (Jameson, 1991:25). Another example is the movie Body Heat, which, while clearly about the present, creates an atmosphere reminiscent of the 1930s.
A movie like Body Heat or a novel like Ragtime is “an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity” (Jameson, 1991:21). This loss of temporality, this inability to distinguish between past, present, and future, is manifested at the individual level in a kind of schizophrenia. For the postmodern individual, events are fragmented and discontinuous.
4. New technologies:
Fourth, there is a new technology associated with postmodern society. Instead of productive technologies such as the automobile assembly line, we have the domi- nance of reproductive technologies, especially electronic media such as the television set and the computer. Rather than the “exciting” technology of the Industrial Revolution, we have technologies such as television, “which articulates nothing but rather implodes, carrying its flattened image surface within itself” (Jameson, 1991:37). The implosive, flattening technologies of the postmodern era give birth to very different cultural products than the explosive, expanding technologies of the modern era did.
In sum, Jameson presents us with an image of postmodernity in which people are adrift and unable to comprehend the multinational capitalist system or the explosively growing culture in which they live. As a paradigm of this world, and of one’s place in it, Jameson offers the example of Los Angeles’s Hotel Bonaventure, designed by a famous postmodern architect, John Portman. One of the points Jameson makes about the hotel is that one is unable to get one’s bearings in the lobby. The lobby is an example of what Jameson means by hyperspace, (Jameson, 1991:43-44, 115-118) an area where modern conceptions of space are useless in helping us orient ourselves. In this case, the lobby is surrounded by four absolutely symmetrical towers that contain the rooms. In fact, the hotel had to add color coding and directional signals to help people find their way. But the key point is that, as it was designed, people had great difficulty getting their bearings in the hotel lobby.
Hotel Bonaventure, designed by John Portman
This situation in the lobby of the Hotel Bonaventure is a metaphor for our inability to get our bearings in the multinational economy and cultural explosion of late capitalism. Unlike many postmodernists, Jameson as a Marxist is unwilling to leave it at that and comes up with at least a partial solution to the problem of living in a postmodern society. What we need, he says, are cognitive maps in order to find our way around (Jagtenberg and McKie, 1997).
These cognitive maps can come from various sources—social theorists (including Jameson himself, who can be seen as providing such a map in his work), novelists, and people on an everyday basis who can map their own spaces. Of course, the maps are not ends in themselves to a Marxist like Jameson but are to be used as the basis for radical political action in postmodern society.
The need for maps is linked to Jameson’s view that we have moved from a world that is defined temporally to one that is defined spatially. Indeed, the idea of hyperspace and the example of the lobby of the Hotel Bonaventure reflect the dominance of space in the postmodern world.
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