The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 by Fredric Jameson

The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 Reviews

• 
  Jimmy Cline

  Michel Foucault (a thinker who personally rejected both the postmodernist and poststructuralist labels commonly attached to his writings) was once asked "what is postmodernism?" Sure enough, he answered that somewhat silly question with yet another regressive sort of question. He said that before we begin to concern ourselves with the question of what is meant by postmodernity, we need to adequately understand exactly what was meant by the classification of modernity, that cultural specter that continues to haunt most contemporary theory. It's a simple enough idea, not to mention logical. Regardless of what words, symbols, or labels we use to identify historical movements, it is important to be aware of certain historical movements as cultural conditions, ones that influence art, economics, social life, and politics. More importantly, we should be able to describe the characteristic features of these rather unique movements. The problem is that postmodernism has the reputation of being to contemporary theory what the Kantian antinomy is to western philosophy; which more or less means that people tend to view it as an evasive style of thinking that skeptically deconstructs itself on purpose. While that idea is somewhat postmodern in itself, it isn't necessarily true. Fredric Jameson, a thinker who was one of the foremost pioneers of postmodern theory, makes it clear (for the most part) that it isn't all bullshit, but that it still sounds like it.
  
  The Cultural Turn is a collection of Jameson's most popular essays on the subject of postmodernism (connecting the most eclectic array of subjects and examples; architecture, television, film, painting, Marxism, Hegelianism, urban planning, literature, etc.). The book almost functions as a light introduction to his rather daunting masterpiece, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, a text that I've heard fucking horror stories about. The first two essays (Postmodernism and Consumer Society, and Theories of the Postmodern) stand out as the most lucid and readable. They also contain most of his explanation of the transition from modernism to postmodernism, the most notable aspect of this being Jameson's notion of the "death of the subject", by which he means that the struggling "individual" of the traditional modernist piece of art becomes replaced by the object against which, or within which they are struggling. Thomas Pynchon describes this pretty well in his introduction in Slow Learner when he says, "Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with fiction...". Of course he follows with, "...when the truth, as everyone knows, is directly the opposite". It shows though because the characters in Pynchon's novels may resemble him autobiographically (honestly, who knows?), but their respective struggles seem to mirror something more powerful and profound than individualistic, existential despair. Pastiche is also important to Jameson, being what he calls the most common example of postmodern, artistic expression. He distinguishes it from parody because he feels that pastiche does not mock or satirize the original, but replicates it to the point where the pastiche becomes a creation unto itself. Through the replicative work of art we find an originality that is inevitable. This was a technique that William Gaddis used in the Recognitions several times. Especially in the way the main character Wyatt Gwyon creates faithful replicas of Flemish masterpieces that are such accurate reproductions that they almost look better than the originals.
  
  In the chapter entitled Antinomies of Postmodernism, Jameson goes on at length about the way in which perpetual change becomes cyclical through its attachment to fashion and media change. This is something that Jameson refers to as a temporal paradox; absolute change equals stasis. I think that this, to some degree, explains the nature of the cliches about postmodern theory. Naturally, most people have a problem with negativist deconstruction in the sense that it makes everything seem fucking impossible. The postmodern buzzword entropy comes up, and everyone rolls their eyes in reaction to a thought process that seems to arrive at no functional conclusion. Not that I don't find that to be a reasonable response. I simply think that this particular version of stasis makes sense in a culture so saturated with closed systems, simulacra, and revisions of revisions. It all does seem somewhat cyclical.
  
  Transformation of the Image was the one essay that I almost found completely unreadable. I remember something about Debord's image-driven spectacle being synthesized with phenomenology and aesthetics in an attempt to explain the commodity fetishism of the image in popular culture. See! Even my explanation doesn't make that much sense (or any). Along with the End of Art History (in which Jameson goes on and on, utilizing Hegelian dialectics to come to some crazy-ass anti-conclusion that I hardly understood as an intelligeble idea), and the Brick and the Balloon, the essays that close out the book are the most trying. Honestly, Jameson's writing can occasionally make Derrida seem lucid in comparison. Culture and Finance Capital was a piece that I found prescient and profound enough. I like the idea that capital as a concept in late capitalist markets has become a paper or symbolic abstraction. Therefore, even Marxian concepts such as use-value and commodity fetishism become blurry ideas. To an extent, money itself has become a commodity, etc.
  
  All in all, these essays were engaging enough. Jameson demands a lot of attention though. And his writing style is just so fucking convoluted. He seems to be taking his cue from the Frankfurt School, and is obviously a stalwart admirer of Theodor Adorno, whose influence permeates this collection of writings. For anyone interested in Marxist critical theory in this particular vein, I might suggest reading Zizek or Eagleton instead. I find both of them far more comprehensible than Jameson.
• 
  Dan

  Jameson is always a challenging thinker, as much for his capacity for dialectical thought as for his authoritative grasp of the different fields of knowledge—history, philosophy, French theory,
  Marxism, architecture, finance capital—to which he makes reference in the construction of his arguments. In this book, as in
  Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson deploys a Marxist analysis of postmodern culture, arguing that this latter supplies an approach to a reading of the contemporary historical moment which he characterizes, following
  Ernest Mandel, as “late capitalist.”
  
  The book begins with the much-anthologized essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” which first appeared in
  New Left Review and introduced readers to Jameson’s thought on postmodernism. Later expanded and appearing in its revised form as the first chapter of Postmodernism, the essay is a kind of overview of postmodern culture, exploring among other things what postmodern literature suggests about the blurring of high and low culture in the contemporary moment, what films like
  Star Wars or
  Chinatown suggest about our sense of our history, and what contemporary architecture might reflect of our experience of postmodern space. The second essay, “Theories of the Postmodern,” was also revised and expanded for Postmodernism; here, Jameson supplies an instance of what he has elsewhere termed “metacommentary,” discussing not postmodernism itself but rather analyzing how this has been theorized by other thinkers such as
  Jurgen Habermas,
  Jean-Francois Lyotard, and
  Manfredo Tafuri. A third essay that was subsequently expanded (appearing in its revised form in
  The Seeds of Time) is “The Antinomies of Postmodernity,” an analysis of transformations in the categories of space and time through the modern and postmodern moments.
  
  Because of the challenging forms Jameson employs to express his ideas in the later versions of these essays, I find it extremely useful to have these earlier versions, in which his thought seems more accessible, because it is in a comparatively rudimentary form.
  
  The essay “Marxism and Postmodernism” is sort of like a break after the rigors of the first three essays: while it, too, is a theoretical work, exploring the relations between the two topics mentioned in the title, it is as personal an essay as I have ever seen from Jameson, who writes here in response to those commentators who had assumed, incorrectly, that Jameson’s beginning his work on postmodernism signified his movement away from Marxist thought.
  
  Following this, we return to the rarefied heights of postmodern theory. I can but scratch the surface of “‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History’?“ in describing it as an essay in which Jameson adds another level of complexity to his analysis of postmodernism by deploying not only Marxist but
  Hegelian thought as well in an exploration of two ideas associated with postmodernism, i.e. the “end of art” (see, for instance,
  Arthur Danto’s
  book) and the “end of history,” a phrase most closely associated in the postmodern moment with
  Francis Fukuyama. Moreover, here Jameson employs a reading of the contemporary moment as a comment on Hegel, noting which of the philosopher’s predictions with respect to history turned out to be correct, which turned out to be wrong, and what may have been the causes of Hegel’s mistakes in the latter instances.
  
  “Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity” is another dense, complex and highly theoretical essay. One passage in particular, in which Jameson employs
  Jean-Paul Sartre,
  Michel Foucault,
  Alain Robbe-Grillet and a number of other writers in an analysis of “image culture” I found particularly entertaining.
  
  In the last two essays, Jameson employs the notion of finance capital as a term with which to mediate postmodern culture with capitalism. “Culture and Finance Capital” is the more general of the two, while “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation” is an exploration of what contemporary architecture reflects of the postmodern moment.
  
  Acquired Nov 15, 2005
  Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR
• 
  Julia

  I'm a Jameson fan, and I don't find his writing to be at all difficult. Perhaps that's because I read in a mainly Marxist/Marxian vein right now (but I do find Adorno 'tricky'). This collection of essays allows for a concise analysis of Jameson's views on postmodernism and its cultural manifestations. I wish I had read this BEFORE Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, as it provides a veritable cheat sheet (in terms of his key points/opinions) and is beautifully subdivided among topics (hooray, many about the arts!). A fun read.
• 
  G

  Muy buen libro. Se trata de un compilado de textos de Fredric Jameson sobre posmodernismo publicados entre 1983 y 1998. Esta ventana temporal permite ver el arco conceptual en el que Jameson ubica al posmodernismo. No es un estudio histórico, es más bien parte de lo que se conoce como estudios culturales. Sobre la base de una lectura siempre renovada de Hegel y Marx, Jameson propone abordar la posmodernidad no sólo como cultura, sino como una producción de criterios múltiples de pensamiento que cobran sentido cuando se sitúan en el contexto histórico y material del que surgen. Es decir, la cultura es vista como un producto más del capitalismo tardío, al igual que las corporaciones, la globalización o la bolsa de valores. La erudición y lucidez de Jameson le permiten pasar revista no sólo a la economía política, sino también a la arquitectura, la literatura, el cine, la música, todo entendido sobre la base de la ficción del dinero -en el sentido marxista del dinero como abstracción-. Creo que un aporte interesante de este libro es la distinción que introduce Jameson entre parodia y pastiche. La parodia sería moderna y normada, es decir que implica un juicio moral. El pastiche, en cambio, sería posmoderno y vacío, un ensamble que no deriva en juicio moral de ninguna clase. Creo que Jameson toma a la arquitectura como clave para entender los tiempos. Es genial su discusión sobre el Rockefeller Center. También se destaca su agudeza respecto de la literatura y el cine. Si bien este libro es algo difícil de leer sin tener presentes algunos conceptos de Hegel, Marx, Freud, Smith, Godard y Habermas, entre otros, lo que Jameson recupera de cada autor aparece explicado de manera breve, directa y claramente inteligible. Por momentos, la seguridad de Jameson abruma al lector. Ya sea a favor o en contra, pienso que el lector atento debe hacer un esfuerzo por tomar distancia crítica de la prosa fuertemente centrípeta, escurridiza pero hipnótica de Jameson. Este es un atributo positivo, evidencia de la potencia retórica de uno de los más importantes marxistas actuales que se ha dedicado a extender en varias direcciones el pensamiento de Karl Marx. Opino que se trata de un libro muy recomendable para intentar comprender el mundo actual.
• 
  no

  Very few theorists can claim to have pinned down so accurately late capitalism or postmodernism, the cultural production of the late capitalist economy. Yet, the paradox of Frederic Jameson: if you read him and agree with him, don't you feel a moral injunction to not be reading him? This is most glaring in the last two essays of the volume, where Jameson is not economist or urbanist enough to turn in satisfying analyses of finance capital or the Rockefeller Center. Instead, Jameson speaks the language of post-structuralism with that same winking belletrism of Foucault and Derrida, yet he deploys this language for Marxist analyses of the post-Fordian capitalist funhouse. If you're interested in these things, in late capitalism and postmodernity, you want to read Jameson, and when you read him, you come away with an opinion of postmodernist culture that's as expansive and accurate as it is, well, low and disapproving. Jameson, of course, is right about that. His best moments—among which I count the first five essays in this volume—are essential reading to understand our present, and although it turns out postmodernity is substantially more stupid than Jameson could have anticipated, he's still fairly prophetic about the state of aesthetics these days and their relation to a distorting, alienated capitalist system unmoored from local industry. And occasionally, between the cold bars of the iron Latinate hyper-referential abstract prose, you see a sterling description of an idea you've had and fumbled to put into words, and you remember that Jameson was a French lit professor, and that he's also grasping for something never before put into words, and he gets at something beautiful. I thought I was clever for thinking that theory and continental philosophy have come to absorb the hermeneutic energies of English lit departments that were formerly reserved for poetry and literature, and Jameson articulates that idea wonderfully in "'End of Art' or 'End of History'?," the most surprising essay here.
  
  Takeaway:
  "Indeed, the richness of Hegel's thought – as with any interesting thinker – stems not from the ingenuity or the pertinence or any particular individual concept, but rather from the way in which, in the thinker in question, several distinct systems of concepts coexist and fail to coincide. Imagine models floating above each other as in distinct dimensions: it is not their homologies that prove suggestive or fruitful, but rather the infinitesimal divergences, the imperceptible lack of fit between the levels – extrapolated out into a continuum whose stages range from the pre-choate and the quizzical gap, to the nagging tension and the sharpness of contradiction itself – genuine thinking always taking place within empty spaces, these voids that suddenly appear between the most powerful conceptual schemes. Thinking is thus not the concept, but the breakdown in the relationships between the individual concepts, isolated in their splendour like so many galactic systems, drifting apart in the empty mind of the world."
• 
  Jon

  I am led to believe many of these essays were the source work for Jameson's book, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and cover some of the same material. However, that is not to say these chapters should be skipped, and with the inclusion of several essays that followed the publication of Postmodernism, this book gives deeper insight into Jameson's truly singular contribution to the subject.
• 
  Darío Palacín Melchor

  Sus descripciones estéticas son difíciles de seguir, pero se trata de una serie de 8 conferencias de lo más interesantes para adentrarse en muchos de los problemas que plantea el término "posmoderno". Quizás salgas con más dudas de las que entraste, pero para eso sirve el conocimiento.
• 
  Jorge

  Supero las expectativas que tenía como un libro de introducción a mis intereses por los estudios Culturales, muy amigable la forma en la que escribe el autor, recomendado para introducirse en los estudios culturales.
• 
  Castiel Moore

  Jameson was spraying and a lot of ppl caught bullets.
  
  This is as close to tangible as postmodern writing can be, imo. Yet I am still wavering on it’s practicality. Writers like Jameson are not concerned with applicability, though. So he’s got me there.
• 
  Маx Nestelieiev

  compilations and redundant repetitions of his previous ideas, boring and useless. POTCLOLC is still his best work, pardon my French, but Fred is a tedious leftist with outdated worldview.
• 
  Ted J. Gibbs

  uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
• 
  Skaičiau

  Jei renkate knygas su klaidom, nesnauskite ir susiraskite lietuvišką leidimą. Jis išleistas su gramatine klaida nugarėlėje ir papuoš kiekvieną tokią kolekciją.
• 
  g

  i sometimes get lost in the multiple references that jameson's writing builds upon, ranging from experimental film to hegelian philosophy. i find myself googling the many names that i do not know, trying to develop a deeper understanding of what jameson is actually trying to get at. by the time i have read the book that he is talking about, or the movie that he analyzes, i have already forgotten the main idea that i was looking for, and began putting together a different set of thoughts on the material that i have been exposed to. this perhaps is an indirect way of saying that jameson's writing is always inspirational, but at the same time, difficult to criticize. the potential holes in his argument are filled in so effortlessly by these references.
  
  of the essays in this book, i enjoyed 'culture and finance capital' and 'the brick and the balloon: architecture, idealism and land speculation,' possibly because it may inform my own work. as i close the cultural turn, i'm curious to read arrighi's book [and braudel's and mandel's and worringer's....:].
• 
  Andrea

  Love Fredric Jameson, brilliant writing, brilliant thoughts, immense scope, and for me? A very useful way of thinking about postmodernism...
• 
  David

  Also the best of Jameson.
• 
  Daniel Burton-Rose

  Not as easy to follow on the power dynamics of architecture as, say, Mike Davis, but worth wrestling with.
• 
  Joel

  old man
• 
  Adam

  Slim, provocative volume.
• 
  Summer Reading

  Simon