aesthetics

capitalism

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death drive

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fragment

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hyperspace

hysterical sublime

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intensity

inverted millenarianism

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modernism

morality

name-of-the-father

nostalgia for the present

parody

pastiche

philosophy

political unconscious

postmodern archicture

postmodernity

prison-house of language

schizophrenia

semiotics of modality

simulacrum

singular modernity

style

subjectivity

sublime

theory

theory - practice

transcoding

truth

vanishing mediator

waning of affect

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Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

The Prison-House of Language

is a cult of hedonism and technique which fetishizes style and surface much like voices of ghosts returning from the past.

in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) he argues that the 'art in the 'postmoddern' age has lost its emancipatory potential, and that aesthetic has come to represent either the agent oflat capitalism characterized by a 'fetishism of style and surface' and a 'cult of hedonism and technique' or the echo chamber of the voices of ghosts returning from the past armed with a 'panoply of myths, symbols, and orgiastic spectacles' (Between the technique of the living an Endless routine. . . ' (Yukiko Iida. . . Positions 2000).

is a necessary stage of a historical trajectory, thus having the paradoxical distinction of being at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.

We are, somehow, to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.' (Jameson 1984:86)

is the explosion into everything in our social life from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself.

culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself can be said to have become 'cultural' in some original and as yet untheorized sense.' (Jameson 1984:87)

is our species-being which lives inside us (or rather through us) and offers us an 'impossible' jouissance (which is far more than us) in contrast to the satisfaction of our own small humdrum desires.

The death drive is what lives inside us by virtue of our existence as living organisms, a fate that has little enough to do with our biographical destinies or even our existential experience : the Thanatos lives through us ('in us what is more than us') ... it is our species-being ... and this is why it is preferable (following the later Lacan) to call it a drive and to distinguish the impossible jouissance it dangles before us from the humdrum desires and velleities we constantly invent and then either satisfy or substitute. (Jameson 2006 : pdf. )

is a thing having nothing to do with death at all. Its horror lies in its embodiment as life itself, sheer life, indeed, as immortality, and as a curse from which only death mercifully relieves us.

for here the Thanatos has nothing to do with death at all. Its horror lies in its embodiment as life itself, sheer life, indeed, as immortality, and as a curse from which only death mercifully relieves us (all the operatic overtones of The Flying Dutchman are relevant here, all the mythic connotations of the Wandering Jew, or indeed the vampire, the undead, those condemned to live for ever). (Jameson 2006 : pdf)

is just that inveterate, infuriating perversity whereby a commonsense empiricist view of reality is repudiated and undermined.

Or perhaps we might rather say : this is not a paradox, this is perversity. And indeed, the dialectic is just that inveterate, infuriating perversity whereby a commonsense empiricist view of reality is repudiated and undermined. But it is undermined together with its own accompanying interpretations of that reality, which look so much more astute and ingenious than the commonsense empiricist reality itself, until we understand that the interpretations are themselves also part of precisely that 'first impression'. (Jameson 2006 : pdf. )

is not a paradox but a perversity whereby a commonsense empiricist view of reality is repudiated and undermined, until we understand that the interpretations are in fact part of the 'first impression'.

is quite simply a tripartite movement in thought and history whereby some fixed notion is revealed to be a stupid stereotype, upon which, its interrogation leads to an ingenious correction, which surprisingly comes to confirm the original stereotype but in a more profound and complex way.

The old stereotype is that Hegel works according to a cut-and-dried progression from thesis, through antithesis, to synthesis. This, Zizek explains, is completely erroneous : there are no real syntheses in Hegel and the dialectical operation is to be seen in an utterly different way ... a variety of examples are adduced. Still, that stupid stereotype was not altogether wrong. There is a tripartite movement in the Hegelian dialectic, and in fact, Zizek goes on, he has just illustrated it : stupid stereotype, or the 'appearance' ... ingenious correction, the underlying reality or 'essence' ... finally, after all, the return to the reality of the appearance, so that it was the appearance that was 'true' after all. (Jameson 2006 : pdf. )

is not a piece of a former work of art but a term or neologism which sprays out like shrapnel and becomes lodged in this or that discourse.

Fragments' in theoretical discourse are not, in any case, such pieces of a former work of art but rather the terms themselves, the neologisms, which, having become ideological logos, then spray out into the social world like so much shrapnel, passing into general usage and describing their parabola with diminishing force until they end up lodging in this or that immovable obstacle which may, of course, end up simply being the media in its own right' (Jameson 1991:103)

is an institution between a writer and a public specifying proper use of a cultural artifact.

Genres are essentially literary institutions, or socal contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a cultural artifact' (The politcal unconscious 1981:106)

is an immense enlargement of world communication and a world market.

The concept of globalization reflects the sense of an immense enlargement of world communication, as well as of the horizon of a world market, both of which seem far more tangible and immediate than in earlier stages of modernity.' (jameson)

is not the naive imagining of a kind of uniform cultural homogeneity. Rather, hegemony describes how a 'cultural dominant' goes about incorporating resistance and heterogeneity.

In this sense postmodernism is 'merely' a cultural dominant. To describe it in terms of cultural hegemony is not to suggest some massive and uniform cultural homogeneity of the social field but very precisely to imply its coexistence with other resistant and heterogeneous forces which it has a vocation to subdue and incorporate' (Jameson 1991:159)

is a mutation in built space in which the mutation of the human subject has not kept pace with the evolution of a mutation in the object. It carries the requirement that we must grow new organs.

I am proposing the motion that we are here in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution... there has been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject... we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism. The newer architecture therefore like many of the other cultural products I have evoked in the preceding remarks stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions.' (Jameson 1984:80)

is the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes.

Jameson described the ideologeme, or 'the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes.'[9] (The term 'ideologeme' was.. ' (wiki)

is a feeling in the postmodern era which are not devoid of feeling but is better described as a domain of impersonal, hovering free-floating euphoria.

This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings which it may be better and more accurate to call 'intensities' are now free-floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria to which I will want to return at the end of this essay' (Jameson 1984:64).

is a form of millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that.

Fredric Jameson describes an 'Inverted millenarianism, in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that'

is the postmodern replacement of ideas of a single catastrophic or redemptive future with the sense of the end of this or that.

premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class... the 'crisis' of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.) (Jameson Postmodernism p1)

is a relational concept rather than some isolated determining instance or named force.

But to grasp the implications it is best to see jouissance as a relational concept rather than some isolated 'ultimately determining instance' or named force. (Jameson 2006 : pdf.)

is a political ideology which presupposes some ultimate collective harmony in contrast with utopianism which presupposes a violent rupture with the current social system.

All these ideals presuppose the possibility of some ultimate collective harmony and reconciliation as the operative goal or end of political action. It would be wrong to identify these ultimate aims with utopian thinking, which on the contrary presupposes a violent rupture with the current social system. (Jameson 2006 : pdf.)

is called upon to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of the city's structure as a whole.

There is, for one thing, a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as 'the representation of the subject's Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence'. Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do, in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of the city's structure as a whole' (Jameson 1984:90).

Fredric Jameson

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