The Third World in Jameson's Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Abstract

The Third World performs a paradoxical double function in Fredric Jameson's theory of postmodernism. It is both space whose final elimination by inexorable logic of capitalist development consolidates social moment late capitalism whose cultural dominant is postmodernism, and space that remains somehow untainted by and oppositional to those repressive social processes which have homogenized real and imaginative terrain of First World subject. The latter function then secretly makes possible that subject's attempts to gain a historical foothold through which to recall past out of which seemingly etqjnal, postmodern, present emerged; that is, to think present historically and thus to think possibility of transforming it. I want in this essay to focus on this characteristic of Jameson's theory. It should be said, in light of this apparently rather narrow focus, that Jameson's various interventions in postmodernism debate (some of which are collected most with revisions in this volume,2 along with four additional pieces) have already occasioned extensive review and critique.3 These responses have more often been specifically directed toward more well known features of his description: his analysis of Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, of nostalgia mode in fiction and film, of schizophrenia, intensities and postmodern sublime, of waning of affect, and so on. Nevertheless, I have elected to look specifically at function of Third World in theory. Why? Because I believe it is at heart of Jameson's pathbreaking assertion that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism. For late capitalism itself only comes into being with disappearance of Third World. From this link between cultural processes and transformations within a mode of production follow Jameson's thoroughgoing analyses of various cultural artifacts in his canon of postmodern culture. On other end of theory, Jameson predicates his vision of possibility of a transformative politics in postmodernism hinging on double imperative that present be thought historically and that utopia remain an operative category on continued existence of Third World as a space recalling our own, First World, history. Thus, it is my contention that neither Jameson's description of postmoder-