The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

This is a lengthy text so my summary is suitably lengthy too I'm afraid. 

First published in New Left Review (no. 146, 1984: 59-92), this is a much-quoted essay, and was later published as part of Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). This later full title explains something about Jameson's intentions to investigate the condition of postmodernity - as he puts it 'to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place' (1991: ix). Rather like the distinction between analogue and digital processes, he makes apparent the varying conceptions of cultural change: within Modernism expressed as an interest in things 'new' (rather like 'time-lapse' photography) and with an outcome firmly in mind (utopian in that sense), whereas the Postmodernism looks for breaks, and what he calls 'the tell-tale instant' (what we might see as digitisation) to the point where culture (aesthetic production, innovation and experimentation too) has in itself become commodified. The period towards the end of the millennium is marked by 'introversion' and the sense of the 'end of this or that' rather than premonitions of the future. (1991: 1) Is the beginning of the next millennium any different? 

This leaves us in a distinctly uncertain and unstable time - unable to imagine or characterise an '"age" or zeitgeist or "system" or "current situation" any longer' (1991: xi). He claims it has the merit of being dialectical in so far as it makes claims to uncertainty (I was reminded here of Richard Wright's talk where he said that allegory is called for in times of instability). Jameson also points to the contradictory nature of some of postmodernism's claims: from Lyotard's notion of the end of grand narratives that is itself presented in narrative form, and that any so-called distinct break from what went before or an end of history, contains residual traces from modernism itself ('shreds of older avatars' xii - you could look at Habermas 'Modernity: an incomplete project' in the reading list for more on this if you like). He concludes that postmodernism is 'only a reflex and a concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself' (1991: xii) - 'late capitalism' in other words (a term allegedly taken from Adorno and the Frankfurt School - and no doubt consistent with Marx's view of 'capitalism' as a world system, some time later, merely more pronounced). 

Its 'late-ness' (or its poor time-keeping) is opposed to any perceived breakdown or distinct end of any previous system - in turn, suggesting that things have changed, and that things are different, but only in relative terms. He thus talks of a 'return of narrative of the end of narratives, this return of history in the midst of the prognosis of the demise of historical telos... [and] the way in which virtually any observation about the present can be mobilised in the very search for the present itself and pressed into service as a system and an index of the deeper logic of the postmodern' (1991: xii). Of course, this is part of the cultural logic of the title of the essay itself. 

Elsewhere (in the book), he discusses the concept of utopia as 'the crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all' and what he calls 'returns of the repressed of historicity' (drawing on the Freudian model of latent and manifest data - if you repress the existence of something it will return anyway at unexpected moments) (1991: xv-xvi). He sees video as emblematic of postmodernism's claim to be a new form but also reflects centrally on architecture because of its close links with the economy - indeed, you might find some useful references here on space for the notion of 'invisible architectures' - especially section V, pp. 38-45.) For our purposes, we would add certainly offer digital technology as demonstrating a more suitable correspondence because of its aesthetic mutability as well as economic determinacy. In fact, even Jameson acknowledges the allegorical power of network technologies (more on this later) despite the computer's dull outward appearance and lack of surface dynamism. He points to the comparison with the Futurists delight in speed and the workings of machines - clearly not evident at all in merely looking at the grey box and wires of the motion-less computer processing unit. Its outward appearance expresses nothing of its inward operations apart from a whirring noise.

First, what is postmodernism? It is not an autonomous theory, but a self-conscious, contradictory and contested set of ideas and beliefs. It is over-used, mis-understood, yet despite the difficulty in defining it (itself a contradictory exercise), arguably revolves around the following issues: (1). That ideas of progress, rationality and scientific objectivity which legitimated western modernity are no longer acceptable in large part because they take no account of cultural differences; (2). that there is no longer any confidence that 'high' or avant-garde art and culture has more value than 'low' or popular; (3). and that it is no longer possible to securely separate the 'real' from the 'copy', 'fact' from 'fiction', or the 'natural' from the 'artificial', in a historical situation where (information and image) technologies have so much control and reach. 
 
Postmodernism, then allegedly emanates from the late 1950s or early 1960s and is generally understood as a break with modernist tradition. It is a neologism (a new phrase linked to new thinking), likened to a best-selling novel or to a corporate merger that became popular over alternative terms like post-structuralism, and late-modernism, in parallel to post-colonialism - precisely because of its lack of philosophic, political or economic focus perhaps. This might well be one of its unfortunate outcomes in serving to distract attention from economic issues whilst simultaneously supporting innovations in the field (whilst no one noticed). Evidently, it has an ideological or 'active function' (1991: xiv) in re-working, re-writing and re-defining existing structures of an older system to appear new and distinctly different; thus granting 'new' perspectives on the production of objects and the formation of subjectivity (think of virtual objects in a posthuman world). Jameson goes on to describe the dynamics of these new structures in terms of '"cultural revolution" on the scale of the mode of production itself' and explains that 'the interrelationship of culture and the economic here is not a one-way street but a continuous reciprocal interaction and feedback loop' (1991: xiv-xv) [By the way, the reference here between culture and economics is drawing upon the idea in Marxist theory that the superstructure (including culture) responds to changes in the (economic) base or infrastructure]. 

Slightly differently, he is keen to emphasise that culture and economics are intricately linked as 'they collapse back on one another and say the same thing in an eclipse of the distinction between base and superstructure... [and further suggests] that the base, in the third stage of capitalism, generates its superstructures with a new kind of dynamic' (1991: xxi). This line of thinking appears to be validated by the Western governments belief in the importance of culture and the cultural industries - as for example, expressed in policy documents, lottery schemes and regeneration programmes. The relationship of economics to culture is in itself dialectical. Nevertheless like any good Marxist, Jameson is also keen to point out the danger of any 'disembodied cultural logic' (1991: xviii) that ignores human agency as the power to change things. Herein lies what he calls the 'Sartrean irony' wherein the totalising system is described so effectively that the subject feels powerless to effect any change (why bother voting when a single vote makes no difference and the whole system a charade!). Although currently out of favour, totalising thinking (any consensus but including class politics, for instance) is not all bad, and may simply be a strategic means of making a convincing enough case for change (rather like representational politics). On the other hand, the most obvious example of totalisation on a global scale is globalisation itself - and there is little evidence to suggest that this is of benefit on across the very globe it purports to serve. However the danger of dismissing big ideas, is that ideology is missed altogether. From time to time, thinking about issues at a general level is useful in leading to actions operating at a particular level. Totalisation, then, is 'most plausibly decoded as a systematic repudiation of notions and ideals of praxis as such, or of the collective project' (Jameson, 1991: 333). Postmodern theory serves to trap subjects into a similar feeling of hopeless impotency (evoking the image of a monkey chattering in icy water I have quoted previously). At the superstructural level of postmodernism itself, various dubious practices thrive in the name of progress as mere extensions of older systems of dominance. This serves to highlight the difficulty in identifying 'a new systematic cultural norm and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics' (1991: 6). Any new critical analysis must take account of the need to render old theory obsolescent: 'As with any other economy or logic, to the mechanisms that drive the process forward must be added mechanisms that prevent it from slackening or lapsing back into habits or procedures of the past' (Jameson, 1991: 397), Newness of approach is presented here as a reworking. 

Rather than a distinct paradigm shift, Jameson argues for the use of the term 'late-capitalism' to counter the popular phrase that Daniel Bell called 'postindustrial society'. This serves to dispute that new social formations no longer obey the laws of industrial production and reiterates the importance of class relations (1991: 3). Here he is drawing upon the work of the economist Ernest Mandel in Late Capitalism (1978) who argued that in fact this third stage of capital was in fact capitalism in a purer form - usually described as Multinational Capitalism with its relentlessly expanding global markets and mobile to guarantee the cheapest work-force. Yet the visibility of 'totalising' global politics is increasingly invisible. Closely related to this, technology 'may well serve as a adequate shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural [alienated] power of dead human labour stored up in our machinery' (1991: 35). I am reminded here of a quote I used in another essay: '[...] universal language operates, like universal space and time, by exclusion.... Ironically, it is the very people whose labour is so carefully hidden inside the hygienic white boxes on the desks on the wired world... who will be left outside in the world their work creates. In this way, the production of the material infrastructure for the internet is itself erased under the sign of the universality of its language, its claim to speak for all and with every voice.... representation, in both the democratic and the semiotic senses, is in question in cybernetic technologies of communication.' (Sean Cubitt, 'Orbis Tertius', in Third Text 47, Summer, 1999: 6). Importantly, technology does not determine change but reflects the development of capital still interested in profit above human suffrage.   

In terms of method, Jameson adopts Mandel's 'periodising hypothesis' of expanding and stagnating economic cycles. He quotes Mandel on the 'quantum leaps in the evolution of machinery under capital' directly:
'The fundamental revolutions in power technology - the technology of the production of motive machines by machines - thus appears as the determinant moment in revolutions of technology as a whole. Machine production of steam-driven motors since 1848; machine production of electric and combustion motors since the 90s of the 19th century; machine production of electronic and nuclear-powered apparatuses since the 40s of the 20th century - these are the three general revolutions in technology engendered by the capitalist mode of production since the 'original' industrial revolution of the later 18th century.' (1991: 35; in Mandel 1978: 119). 
Thus, like cheese, capitalism is cast as early, mature, late or advanced - and one might presuppose that that the later stages contain elements of mould.

These periods are dialectical in that their expansion is in parallel to the previous period's stagnation. Jameson describes them in other familiar terms as: (1) market capitalism; (2) monopoly capitalism, or the stage of imperialism; (3) multinational capitalism, or what some people wrongly call the postindustrial period (1991: 35). These periods expand capital's reach and further enhance commodification and cheap labour. Jameson relates these economic stages directly to cultural production, as follows: (1) realism - worldview of realist art; (2) modernism - abstraction of high modernist art; and (3) postmodernism - pastiche (as distinct from parody). [Note: There's often a confusion over parody and pastiche, as both involve imitation and mimickry. Parody mimicks style which mocks the original (as satire) to cast ridicule and is more associated with the modern period. Pastiche similarly imitates a particular style but does so without an ulterior motive. 'It is speech in a dead language', a neutral practice, 'amputated of the satiric impulse' (1991:17). Jameson, in another essay 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society', says 'Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humour... blank irony']. Evidently, culture advances in loops or screw-turns, or in a spiral-like fashion through a combination of vertical and horizontal axes (both social-synchronic and historical-diachronic axes). 

These developments are uneven and layered, without clean breaks as such. Jameson is keen to stress that this is not a mechanistic model despite appearances, and is fully aware of the irony of the situation in using a model largely discredited by the concept of postmodernism itself. He remains confident that 'all isolated or discrete cultural analysis always involves a buried or repressed theory of historical periodisation' (1991: 3). What lies hidden or buried here is ideology perhaps (and even false consciousness) if the dialectical model of essence and appearance is acknowledged in the method. In recent cultural theory, Jameson argues that depth models such as this have been largely superceded by multiple surface models (as if the world was flat after all - I wonder whether networks are flat too, certainly computers appear to flatten experience to a screen - even VRML is flat, isn't it?). 

In this way, what was once theorised as the alienated subject is now the fragmented or decentred subject rather like a screen, viewed in parallel to networks, decentred narratives and non-linearity. Post-structualist theory has rendered the subject decentered, distributed and no longer autonomous (a classic example of this line of thinking would be Roland Barthes 'The Death of the Author', in Image-Music-Text, London: Fontana 1977 (first written 1968), pp. 142-148; whereas a more recent counter-argument would be Slavoj Zizek in The Ticklish Subject, 1999, arguing for a recentring of the subject under particular conditions - I think I mentioned this in an earlier summary). With the end of the belief in the autonomous subject, other ideas of originality, and individualism all similarly fragment. This is clearly no bad thing, but also threatened are shared political ideals and any sense of viable collective action against common power structures (the ruling class enemy, for instance), to be replaced by 'stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm' (1991: 17) and this is what Zizek expand upon. Linked to this decentred condition is what Jameson refers to as the 'waning of affect' (1991: 16) - a certain lack of feeling but also of the linear logic of cause and effect, once conceived of as operating within established conventions of time. Now 'faceless masters' rule in ways that are harder to perceive, and therefore resist.
 
In the age of postmodernism, 'parody finds itself without vocation' replaced by pastiche because parody is no longer possible (1991:17). Cultural production is left resigned to making empty reference to the past in a retro-culture or nostalgia of repackaged ideas and surface images - following Debord's description of 'the society of the spectacle' (1967) to its logical extreme in the 'simulacra' of Baudrillard. The past is reduced to a vast database of images without referents that can reassigned for commodification and indiscriminate use. 

Jameson says that the present is colonised by 'pastness' displacing 'real' history (1991: 20), and proceeds to cite many examples of the simulacra of history and this 'crisis of historicity'. Ultimately this leads to the diagnosis of a schizophrenic condition, where the loss of reality becomes a new aesthetic form. For example, Jameson describes David Bowie multi-tasking in The Man Who Fell To Earth watching fifty-seven television screens simultaneously (1991: 31) - a schizophrenic couch potato later entirely commodified as a url: www.davidbowie.com (even pop stars, these days, resort to spatial logic over temporality).

Crucially for his purposes, he describes technology as 'a figure for something else' to legitimise his adoption of the three economic and cultural periodisations. Clearly technology in the third machine age can be said to indicate some of the same decentred and fragmented tendencies described (1991: 35). Machines are no longer machines for production but rather machines designed for reproducibility (using Benjamin's phrase) or even for transformation - evoking quite different set of processes and metaphors of fragmenting and distorting screens. Moreover, like cyberpunk fiction but without advocating it as particularly effective (William Gibson's Neuromancer etc), power is expressed as autonomous and conspiratorial systems, circuits and networks that are notoriously difficult to perceive. Whilst acknowledging quite different conditions for historical development and change, he says:
'The technology of contemporary society is mesmerising 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 decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself' (1991: 37-8).

Jameson is keen to map this (postmodern) space in which we drift, rather like Benjamin did for the experience of emerging modernism and technology at the turn of the last century in his work on Baudelaire and flanerie set against a increasingly automised street culture - put simply walking or travelling by car. Recent work around cyber-geography might attempt to map these spaces but usually does so without revealing the inherent contradictions and thus remains rather pedestrian. 'Critical distance' (1991: 48) is impossible in a situation where opposition is incorporated and commodified into the dominant system as a matter of course. Yet, distance remains a suitable dialectical concept for communications technology (as it did for Benjamin in the 1930s) as it remains impossible under a system that requires everything to be positioned too close and too far away simultaneously. For Jameson, spatial issues are of fundamental importance, leading him to suggest the 'aesthetic of cognitive mapping' (1991: 51). He proposes a situation and practice where people map in their minds their position or the urban totality in which they are positioned enabling an understanding of a seemingly un-representational social structure. Perhaps this accounts for the recent interest in cyber-geographies, as well as cartography as a whole. For Jameson, this is an answer to false-consciousness (as an imagined reality) and reveals ideological detail left off many maps whilst of course being implicitly embedded in the very practice of map-making. If you're not convinced, think of the very practice of translating a three-dimensional world into a flat surface - making it flat despite evidence to the contrary. I am left wondering if the writing of code could be thought of in a similar way, organised in such a fashion as to reveal its hidden processes and operations (this is my research interest if it wasn't already apparent). How could this begin to acknowledge multinational capital and new social formations? 

In conclusion, the dialectical imperative, according to Jameson, is to conceive of the present phase of capitalism like Marx did 150 years before as both the best and the worst thing that ever happened - to view it simultaneously in terms of catastrophe and progress (1991: 47) - evoking the angel of history. This means to inscribe the possibility of change into the very model of change offered up as unchangeable - or something suitably contradictory like that. This is (arguably) the purpose of cultural production and a project to which computers might be suitably deployed.