“Jameson contends that the past thirty years or so have witnessed the arrival of a new wave of capitalism which he calls ‘late capitalism’. The distinction of late capitalism is the scale of its reach, its hitherto unsurpassed infiltration of every area of life. For Jameson (and, indeed, for Žižek, who loosely draws upon this model), postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, or the response of culture to its colonization by the commodity. Some of the main features of postmodernism identified by Jameson are the integration of previously separate cultural genres (the mixing of high and low art, as well as the combination of distinct styles, such as Westerns and science-fiction films), the loss of a sense of history (manifest in a desire for nostalgia), and a euphoric attachment to surfaces or depthlessness (such as can be found in the predominance of the image over the word).”
From Tony Myers’ excellent book, Slavoj Žižek (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 48.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Regarding the loss of a sense of history and its replacement by nostalgia, some of the posts on this site seem to suggest to me the Western academia's nostalgia for the Soviet times! Do not repeat the mistake (of the Frankfurt School and others) and neglect to confront the horrors and the bleakness of Soviet Union, especially under Stalin.
ReplyDelete