POSTMODERNISM IN POSTMARXIST INTERPRETATION BY FREDRIC JAMESON

Abstract

The article deals with Fredric Jameson’s work “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. The author of the article has figured out the main features of the postmodernist cultural dominant. In particular, it has been emphasized that postmodernist aesthetics is an inseparable from a new type of society, baptized as “postindustrial” or “the third machine age”. F. Jameson has paid the main attention to the historic originality of postmodernism. He has proposed to call postmodernism not a style but rather a cultural dominant. It allows to argue that postmodernism is not homogeneous, but embraces different features sometimes completely different as well as allows coexistence of opposing aesthetics. Comparing modernism and postmodernism Jameson underlines that although they share some stylistic features the social function of these two movements is different. Therefore the cultural production of postmodernism is defined by the economic logic of late capitalist system. Unlike modernist culture postmodernist is institutionalized from the very beginning. Aesthetic production today has been integrated by commodity production. This fact constitutes, according to Jameson, the main aspect of postmodernism, and determines its nature. Positioning postmodernism in the economic system of late capitalism explains its dominant feature — the waning of affect. That is the end of style (in modernist sense), the end of persona and what is the most important the end of a centered subject. Moreover it is also the end of modernist conceptions of time that have been substituted by the categories of space. The time crisis has caused the crisis of individual existential memory, expressed in fiction through fragmented narratives and impossibility of temporal unification of past and future with one’s present. Discontinuities of the work of art and schizophrenic disjunctions are the main characteristics of postmodernist representation. Besides the impossible totality of the contemporary world system and the breakdown of grand narratives provoke a new aesthetic expression as well as a new empirical position of the subject.