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Fredric
Jameson Postmodernism;
the cultural logic of late capitalism postmodernism Adorno, Sartre,
One of the leading North American cultural Marxists - is professor of Literature at Duke university same place as Hardt. |
In Jameson’s article “Actually
Existing Marxism” he identifies Marxism as a certain complex of problematics,
rather than positions within existing problematisations.(19)
Surplus value is most often
thought of as a problem within economics, crises within Marxism often arise at
the point where the characteristics of capital appear to change – often leading
to perception that Marxism is not longer valid. Hence post-Marxism is compared
to Bernstein’s revisionism, where the ‘revolution’ and the Hegelian dialectic
were discredited.
However the drive to profit maximisation and the structural needs of capital to expand suggest it is axiomatic that capitalism has fundamentally changed (pp 23). Compare this to Baudrillard’s Mirror of Production, where exploitation and profit are relegated to only a stage in capitalism the dynamic of which is the process of the instantiation of the code over life.
For Jameson the first
post-Marxist is Bernstein appearing at the beginning of the modern itself. All
the various revisions are more transparent within the new age. Changes in the
nature of social life are viewed dialectically, as the product of deeper
continuities (over and above the discontinuity and breaks) that the structure
enlarges at each stage.
Post-marxism has as its centrepiece
the critique of revolution. Jameson assumes ‘perhaps unjustly’ that ‘political
reasons most often motivate the philosophical debates’ around ideas like ‘totality
and telos’ e.t.c. though this doesn’t not preclude investigation of these
notions within philosophy itself. When discussing revolution, need to do without
image and representation, as they are often pernicious social ideological
imaginary. At the bottom of the quarrel about the term is violent imagery
of armed insurrection.
Jameson is important to contrast with other positive post-modernisms, like Negri for instance in his recognition of the defeat of a certain left project based around the proletariat.
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Reading
notes: Warren Montag - postmodernism and its discontents (ed. E
Kaplan) |
Short
and useful |
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Bibliography Books Articles |
Sartre: The Origins of a
Style (1961) The Political unconsciuous The prison house of language Marxism and Form The seeds of Time
Brecht and Method (2000), The Cultural Turn (1998) The Ideologies of Theory:
vol. 1, Situations of Theory, vol. 2, Syntax of History (1988) Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the
Persistence of the Dialectic (1990) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism Actually Existing Marxism” ( in Marxism beyond Marxism eds.
Makdisi, Casarino, Karl , Routledge New York, 1996 "Totality as
conspiracy," in The
Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinemas and Space in the world system -
Bloomingtin: Indiana University Press 1992 pp 9-84. |
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