"Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" by Fredric Jameson - Summary

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Postmodernism is the sensing of the end of movements, particularly the modern movement. Modernism is characterized by the abstract in art for example, and by technology elsewhere. Postmodernism is characterized by the integration of commercialism, advertising, and cheap culture into people's character. 

Fredric Jameson



Other names for post-modernism are the "electronic" age or the postindustrial age. This suggests that the social system of postmodernism no longer obeys the laws of capitalism.

Another argument is that postmodernism is simply more advanced modernism.

Postmodernism has generally criticized the hermeneutical model of inside and outside, ideology and metaphysics. Other modern theories are that are disputed in postmodernism are:

1.       Essence and appearance
2.       The Freudian model of latent and manifest/repression
3.       The existential model of authenticity/inauthenticity, alienation/inalienation
4.       The semiotic opposition between signifier and signified


In modernism, emphasis was placed on the individual. Postmodernism attempts to decenter the individual. A side effect of this attempted deemphasizing of the individual is the fall of the "high modernist conception of unique style".
We now live in the synchronic (everything happening together) as opposed to the diachronic (chronological order) which dominated in early modernism. Our consciousness is dominated by space rather than time and this can be proven empirically.

Modernism has seen a proliferation of unique styles and the preference of quality over quantity. The multitude of styles causes fragmentation so that social norms are no longer definable. The contradiction of this by postmodernism results in bland, impersonal language whose roots are untraceable. Culture is global. Thus when new creators attempt to draw upon the past they cannot because historicality is irrelevant with so much fragmentation ongoing.

Schizophrenia (symbolically rather than medically), according to Lacan, is when the continuity between signifiers that construct our language breaks down. The signifier no longer points to the correct signified and confusion ensues. All this happens in the schizophrenic brain. Through this view of illness we can reach the characteristics of the workings of the healthy mind:















Schizophrenics' temporal organization is damaged. Similarly, postmodern literature is disjointed and from all sorts of different sources. Postmodern theory has to do with finding differences rather than unifying them.

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