Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism Research Articles

The Postmodern Transformation of Language through Social Media, Memes, Emojis, and GIFs: A Study Among Selected North Indian University Students

This study explores how digital communication technologies—a consequence of late capitalism—have changed language usage. The study looks at how GIFs, memes, emojis, and social media language have evolved and how postmodern cultural logic is embodied in these forms of communication. Based on Fredric Jameson's theory that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, the study highlights the digital forms' inherent fragmentation, intertextuality, and pastiche. It focuses on how language has evolved to reflect postmodern society's hyperreal and dispersed structure by becoming more context-dependent, expressive, and visual. The study employs a mixed-methods approach to examine how social media content is analyzed and to obtain perspectives on various communicative forms from 300 university students in Delhi, Punjab, and Haryana. The findings imply that, in addition to changing language, digital communication technologies have also introduced new forms of expression that combine text, image, and emotion, challenging established linguistic theories. This study advances our knowledge of language in the digital era and has implications for the larger cultural shifts these developments signify.

Italo-Soviet Architectural Exchanges and Postmodernism under Late Socialism

A global movement, architectural postmodernism cannot be reduced simply to the cultural logic of late capitalism, nor should its analysis be restricted, as in recent revisionist histories, to the geo- graphical confines of the Eastern Bloc. By revealing that the ideas, design strategies and images that make up postmodern architecture did not belong squarely to either side of the Cold War geopolitical divide, this paper argues that a full understanding of the movement requires an inquiry going beyond the scope of a single ideological context. The emergence of architectural postmodernism is to be located in the interstitial space between the 'capitalist West' and the 'socialist East'. Yet familiar narratives of knowledge transfer from the former to the latter are reductive and fail to capture historical reality in all its complexity and ambiguity. For instance, Aldo Rossi's work was known and may have been consciously replicated by Soviet architects. Less acknowledged is the fact that, in the Italian context, the rise of architectural postmodernism went hand in hand with the consolidation of a 'tradition of study of Soviet architecture'. Rossi was just one among many Italian architects —  such as Paolo Portoghesi, Carlo Aymonino or Vittorio Gregotti —  who, undertaking a critique of modernism, drew crucial inspiration from Soviet architecture, particularly Socialist Realist theory and practice.

Rhythm in Genre Cinema and Cinematic Avant-Garde

The article attempts to outline certain principles and prerequisites for the study of the role of rhythm as the fundamental moment of any film and various approaches (avant-garde and mass cinema) to overcoming, or vice versa, fixation in the film of a given rhythm of the social whole, often associated with and expressed through aspects of industrial production rhythm. General connections between Fordism and classic Hollywood cinema are outlined, as well as between post-Fordism as an economic expression of postmodernism (the cultural logic of late capitalism) and the “cinema of nostalgia” of the 1970s. A comparative study of the approach to the issue of rhythm in the field of the cinematic avant-garde (using the example of the German avant-garde movement of the 1920s (“absolute film”)) and classic genre American cinema is offered. An attempt was made to connect the approach to the rhythm of the cinematic narrative in the film La Palisiada (1923, directed by Philip Sotnychenko) with the above-mentioned moments of the history of cinema, understanding La Palisiada as, at the same time, a study of rhythm and a study of modes of perception of the 1990s years in the current Ukrainian society. It is argued that the research in the realm of rhythm and the nostalgic orientation of films (including La Palisiada) can be closely related manifestations of the same deeply-rooted process — nostalgia for a different rhythm of the social whole, given in this particular case as the 1990s of Ukrainian history

Overcoming the apocalypse in the pluralistic space of poetics and politics

In the shift toward the Early Modern era, the end-centric temporality of the Middle Ages underwent a critical reevaluation, which spawned four distinct historical paradigms in the interplay between eschatology and politics. This article delineates these paradigms as follows: the revolutionary, where political constructs undergo a metamorphosis toward the eschatological, culminating in their complete dissolution within it; the progressive, in which political elements evolve in the direction of eschatological thought while retaining their distinct existence; the conservative, where political structures act to curtail the influence of eschatological expectations; and the post-apocalyptic, wherein both political and eschatological spheres merge into the economic, exemplifying the cultural logic of late capitalism. Utilizing process tracing as a methodological tool within the framework of critical realism, the study investigates the dynamic processes through which societies confront and potentially overcome apocalyptic scenarios. It reveals that poetic and political pluralism serves as a transformative mechanism, facilitating the potential overcoming of apocalyptic threats. However, this overcoming is only achieved in the progressive model, which is marked by the adoption of a polytheistic political myth and a clear separation between the domains of politics and ethics. In contrast, the post-apocalyptic model is characterized by a radical proliferation of apocalyptic narratives, which leads to the normalization and institutionalization of a metaphorical ‘worldly hell.' In this context, the political and eschatological are reconstituted within the economic domain, signaling a shift to a new cultural and ideological paradigm dominated by capitalist ideology.

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This paper aims to identify the relationship between cybernetics and the post-war French philosophies or theories known and embraced as structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. Recent research has shown that cybernetics was closely associated with Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, which was the cool of the new French theory, and that poststructuralism or postmodernism was a response to the technologies of control represented by cybernetics. From this perspective, the misconceptions and prejudices surrounding French theory must be confronted with an understanding of the historical context that gave rise to the phenomenon of postmodernism. This paper looks at French theory as an intellectual movement that emerged out of the reflection on cybernetic technologies in the post-war period centred on the Maginot Line and revisits its theoretical context through the keyword cybernetics. This new examination will allow us to rewrite the genealogy of French theories that emerged after 1950 as a response to cybernetics, whether postmodernism is interpreted as a cultural logic of late capitalism, as an extension of modernism, or as a new epistemology inevitably resulting from the decline of modernity. From this perspective, this paper argues that French theory and its effect, postmodernism, should not be buried in the annals of history as relics of a bygone era but should be recognized as a historical legacy shaping our present reality and should be re-examined.

Hybridity and the Unifying Space of Painting: Larry Abramson in Conversation with Theolonius Marx

Abstract While the drive toward homogeneous and pure visual languages was at the foundation of early twentieth-century utopian modernist art systems, the Dadaist and Surrealist reaction to this utopianism took the form of extreme and often violent hybridity. Marcel Duchamp's 1913 “readymade” of a bicycle wheel placed atop a kitchen stool is a paradigmatic manifestation of the linguistic hybridity characteristic of post-utopian twentieth-century art. In the 1920s Francis Picabia made paintings constructed of separate and discrete layers of images, which, when viewed together, produced an unsettling visual “monster.” Picabia's practice of superimposition was a significant forerunner of prevailing contemporary practices in postmodern painting. In his essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” philosopher Fredric Jameson (1991) identifies pastiche as one of the main characteristics of cultural production in the age of postmodernism. Pastiche is defined as a work of art consisting of motifs borrowed from one or more sources, an incongruous hodgepodge of materials, forms, and images. In this age of pastiche, what are the options open to artists—to endlessly quote, imitate, or parody existing images and styles, or to construct a new and significant system of meaning? To discuss the centrality of the principle of hybridity in postmodern art—and in my own artistic practice of the past fifty years—I summoned Theolonius Marx, a fiction of my imagination who helped me handle the dilemmas of conceptual art in the 1970s. In this “conversation,” Theolonius and I ponder how hybridity has placed a challenge to utopian modernist concepts, and what the conditions are for it to thrive today as a relevant and sustainable medium.

Snow globes and instant coffee: transparent commodities and the global infrastructures of late capitalism in contemporary fiction

ABSTRACT Fredric Jameson’s 1984 essay ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ famously calls for new forms of representation that can provide a better notion of the sublime world space of multinational capital. Jameson states that such aesthetic scale models are yet unrealised, but this essay argues that a number of contemporary novels, including Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, Ben Lerner's 10:04 and works by Matias Faldbakken, Sally Rooney and William Gibson, present us with global figurations that are both more banal and more sublime than Jameson could have imagined. These novels all contain scenes where ordinary commodities are turned inside out in staggering leaps of scale, which constitute original figurations of the global infrastructures of late capitalism. Drawing on Bill Brown’s thing theory, Jennifer Wenzel’s notion of commodity biographies, and different theories of scale in the Anthropocene, I analyse different examples of this figure, which I term transparent commodities. In the concluding section, I show how these figurations prefigure the current global supply chain crisis, and I return to Jameson’s original demand for representations of the global totality, which I discuss in dialogue with my analyses as well as theories of planetarity by Gayatri Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty.

Possible Futures

Possible Futures

Between Propaganda and Dissent: Postmodern Architecture in Pinochet’s Chile

Postmodern forms and tendencies that appeared in Chilean architecture in the 1970s not only overlapped with Augusto Pinochet’s neoliberal dictatorship that lasted from 1973 to 1990 but also are closely connected to the political and economic vision fostered by the dictatorship. Postmodern forms found in banks, hotels, and other commercial buildings and spaces populating Chilean cities in the seventies and eighties aided the government’s political agenda as they helped to normalize painful neoliberal reforms and create an image of prosperity and progress. Moreover, in projects such as the Plaza de la Constitución in Santiago de Chile (1980–1982) and the Congreso Nacional de Chile in Valparaíso (1988–1990), postmodern aesthetics and philosophy were used to project an image of an open democratic country. In these realizations, postmodern tropes such as the symbolic potential of architectural form and references to architectural tradition were used to fabricate a vision of history and society desired by the Pinochet government. Simultaneously, the same architectural currents embraced by Pinochet for propagandistic purposes were utilized by Chilean architects who considered themselves opposed to the dictatorship. This can be seen in the work of CEDLA (Centro de Estudios de la Arquitectura, Center for Architectural Studies), an independent collective of Chilean architects established in 1977 in Santiago de Chile. The members of CEDLA promoted a version of a politically and socially engaged postmodernism that could counter the neoliberal agenda of Pinochet. This paper discusses both ways in which postmodernism was interpreted in Chile during the dictatorship. Investigating Chilean postmodernism helps us rethink the dominant portrayal of postmodernism as politically indifferent or conservative and as part of Jameson’s ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’.

Metamodern Enthusiasm and Neoromanticism in BBC's Sherlock

The Journal of Popular CultureEarly View Original Article Metamodern Enthusiasm and Neoromanticism in BBC's Sherlock Pouria Torkamaneh, Corresponding Author Pouria Torkamaneh [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0001-7195-9575 Search for more papers by this author Pouria Torkamaneh, Corresponding Author Pouria Torkamaneh [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0001-7195-9575 Search for more papers by this author First published: 19 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.13211Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Works Cited Abramson, Seth. “What is Metamodernism.” Huffpost, 9 Jan. 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-ismetamodernism_b_586e7075e4b0a5e600a788cd/ Adams, Rachel. “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism.” Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 53, no. 3, 2007, pp. 248– 72. Ader, Bas Jan. In Search of the Miraculous. Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angles, 1975. “ A Scandal in Belgravia.” Sherlock, written by Steven Moffat, directed by Paul McGuigan, BBC One, 2012. Basu, Balaka. “ Sherlock and the (Re)Invention of Modernity.” Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom, edited by Louisa Ellen Stein, and Kristina Busse, McFarland and Company, 2012, pp. 196– 209. Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism, edited by Henry Hardy, Princeton UP, 2001. Blue Velvet. Directed by David Lynch, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986. Broken Fall (Geometric). Directed by Bas Jan Ader, 1971, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liMCML6hGbg Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Complete and Unabridged. Longmeadow Press, 1984. Gatiss, Mark, Steven Moffat, and Stephen Thompson, creators. Sherlock. BBC, 2010–2017. “ The Great Game.” Sherlock, written by Mark Gatiss, directed by Paul McGuigan, BBC One, 2010. “ His Last Vow.” Sherlock, written by Steven Moffat, directed by Nick Hurran, BBC One, 2014. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. Routledge, 2004. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991. Jencson, Linda. “ Chosen Families, TV and Tradition: Queering Relations in the BBC's Sherlock.” Who Is Sherlock? Essays on Identity in Modern Holmes Adaptations, edited by Lynnette Porter, McFarland and Company, 2016, pp. 140– 55. Kirby, Alan. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. Continuum, 2009. “ The Lying Detective.” Sherlock, written by Steven Moffat, directed by Nick Hurran, BBC One, 2017. Mayshark, Jesse Fox. Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film. Praeger, 2007. MacDowell, James. “ The Metamodern, the Quirky and Film Criticism.” Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism, edited by Robin Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen, Roman and Littlefield International, 2017, pp. 25– 40. McClellan, Ann. “ ‘All that Matters Is the Work’: Text and Adaptation in Sherlock.” Sherlock Holmes in Context, edited by Sam Naidu, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 7– 38. McGowan, John. “From Pater to Wilde to Joyce: Modernist Epiphany and the Soulful Self.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 32, no. 3, 1990, pp. 417– 45. Porter, Lynnette. “ Modernizing Victorian Sherlock Holmes for Mr. Holmes and the BBC's Sherlock Special.” Who Is Sherlock? Essays on Identity in Modern Holmes Adaptations, edited by Lynnette Porter, McFarland and Company, 2016, pp. 18– 32. “ The Reichenbach Fall.” Sherlock, written by Stephen Thompson, directed by Toby Haynes, BBC One, 2012. Rubsamen, Glenn. I've Decided To Say Nothing. 2006, Robert Miller Gallery, New York. Schlegel, Friedrich. Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments. Translated by Peter Firchow, U of Minnesota P, 1971. Sidore, David. “ ‘Spectacularly Ignorant’: The Conflicted Representation of Genius.” Genius on Television: Essays on Small Screen Depictions of Big Minds, edited by Ashley Lynn Carlson, McFarland and Company, 2015, pp. 12– 31. “ The Six Thatchers.” Sherlock, written by Mark Gatiss, directed by Rachel Talalay, BBC One, 2017. Toth, Josh, and Neil Brooks. “ Introduction: A Wake and Renewed.” The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism, edited by Josh Toth, and Neil Brooks, Rodopi, 2007, pp. 1– 14. Van Gogh, Vincent. A Pair of Boots. The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1887. Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010, pp. 2– 14. Warhol, Andy. Diamond Dust Shoes. Museum Brandhorst, 1980. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

Toward a cinematic transtopia

Has Chinese independent cinema begun to foster a discursive space – or what Howard Chiang calls a transtopia – where trans identity, subjectivity, and agency can be debated, discussed, and reconfigured? In this article, I conduct a close analysis of The Rib (Zhang Wei, 2019). Under the current conditions of Chinese independent filmmaking, which have rendered trans self-representation nearly invisible, The Rib presents an option of how a visible space can still be fostered. The Rib can be considered a collaborative creation between a cisgender male director, two cisgender male actors, a gender nonbinary activist, and a community of trans people in a district in Tangshan dominated by Protestant moral conservatism. By representing themselves and their friends on screen, these creators draw our attention not to the way they come face-to-face with those social inscriptions that seek to overdetermine their subjectivization. What emerges in this film, I argue, is a form of care and kinship and a potential space for knowledge coproduction between cis and trans creators and activists. It also puts into question how trans (plural) and their studies are often mapped onto and rewritten by what Fredric Jameson calls the cultural logic of late capitalism.

Cognitive Mapping and Thirdspace in Spatial Literary Pedagogy

Abstract This piece is a reflection on spatiality as critical approach in the classroom. The article focuses on a seminar taught during spring 2019, in which cognitive mapping and thirdspace were used as tools to analyze twentieth-century American literature. Through the elaboration of thirdspace provided by Edward Soja in his seminal work Thirdspace: Journeys through Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places and Fredric Jameson's definition of cognitive mapping found in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, this study offers examples of how literary cartography can be used as a tool in the classroom to reflect on the social and historical conditions that informed specific literary narratives.

More Human Than Human: The Exile in Blade Runner

More Human Than Human: The Exile in <i>Blade Runner</i>

Gained in Translation. Postmodern Architecture in Late Soviet Lithuania

After being widely explored in the historiography of Western architecture, postmodernism has only recently started receiving adequate attention in Eastern and Central Europe. The phenomenon of postmodernism developed beyond the borders of the Soviet world, so the so-called “cultural logic of late capitalism” crossing the boundaries of the Iron Curtain has to be considered a consequence of globalization. On the other hand, this global trend was synchronized with the local expression of architecture: the pursuit of identity, attention to context and continuation of architectural traditions. Soviet publications presented postmodernism as a foreign phenomenon, but simultaneously noted that it could be useful to local architects as well. This did not imply an invitation to imitate Western colleagues, but rather signalled that certain architectural values had become globally significant to both, the capitalist and socialist industrial world. The text aims to uncover the local translations of (post)modernity in Lithuania in the context of the tendency’s peak period: the final decades of Soviet rule.

Exploring the contemporary Moon Under Water through illustration: nostalgia and the power of the image

This article uses images from the visual essays produced for Plume of Feathers, an audio-visual project, to examine the notion of ‘reflective nostalgia’ as an attitude towards meaning-making within image creation, in particular illustration that can counter certain political uses of images that present a restorative–nostalgic world view. The project at the core of the article is concerned with the decline of public houses and their social function in the UK. However, the image of the pub is embroiled within the visual rhetoric related to the UK’s (2016) Brexit referendum. This article explores the ways in which the illustrated image can provide a different view of the pub that reveals the conceptual construction of the notion of ‘pub’ and offers a critical alternative. The constructed nature of the illustrated image is then explored for its potential to visualize the past differently, following Svetlana Boym’s proposal of reflective nostalgia in The Future of Nostalgia (2001) in order to address problems in the present. The article proposes that reflective nostalgia’s utility as a critical tool lies in its consideration of the key role played by the surface of the image, through the material signifiers of age. As illustrators, embracing these nostalgic triggers when making images allows the viewer to reconnect to the past with critical distance, thereby returning politics to the surface of the image, something that Fredric Jameson saw in Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) as recuperated and rendered politically neutral. Illustration is therefore cast as a meaning-making practice that shapes the world it operates within, with the article suggesting that by making nostalgic images, illustrators can exercise their agency as agitators.

Gaming (with) Affect and Trauma: An Introduction

Gaming (with) Affect and Trauma: An Introduction

Modernization noir in Greek cinema of the 1990s and early 2000s: New topographies and temporal tensions

The focus of this article is the examination of the Greek crime film during the 1990s and early 2000s. The main question concerns if and how certain crime narratives from the 1990s and early 2000s responded to ideological discourse of ‘modernization’ that prevailed at the time. The analysis of three films (Apo tin akri tis polis, O hamenos ta perni ola and Sti skia tou Lemmy Kosion) with neo-noir features, unveils a field of representations produced in contrast to the period’s mainstream discourse of uplifting transformation, which was closely linked to Greece’s entry to the Eurozone and to the preparations for the Olympic Games. These films provide a critique of the city’s transformation into a metropolis, and of the subsequent transmutation of its societal tapestry not only within a European environment but also within the cultural logic of late capitalism. The ‘modernization noir’, as named in the article, includes two narrative trends: the first negotiates the arrival of new ethnicities, which transform the city and produce new hierarchies and topographies; the second self-consciously uses the genre in its ‘neo’ phase to comment on the transition between old and new.

Art Addressing Consumerism in the Age of Late Capitalism

The globalized world is still in the phase of late capitalism, signified by the establishment of multinational corporations, globalized markets and work, mass consumerism, and the fluid flow of capital. The question of the criticism of art towards the capitalist system, its ideology and consumerism is therefore still current and is readdressed in this contribution. Considering this issue, the recurrent theoretical reference is American materialist aesthetician Fredric Jameson, who was among the first to define culture and art in the context of late capitalism. In the article the author revises Jameson’s critique of art addressing consumerism and demonstrates that he did not consider the relevance of the means of consumption as regards the cultural logic of late capitalism. She claims that in order to open space to examine contemporary art as being critical towards consumerism, one also needs to consider the ontological changes that have occurred to art and pay attention to performative art, while Jameson was still focused on a representational mode of art. By being performative and also setting out actions outside of spaces that were traditionally designed for art, in the space meant for consumption, art has much a better chance to act politically, which Jameson wished to see from art which addresses consumerism but did not. The author argues that if one is to seek critical or political art in late capitalism, those would be the cases of artistic interventions into the means of consumption.

The Violence of Autonomy

The Violence of Autonomy Jenny Gunn (bio) Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism by Nicholas Brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2019. 232 pages. $99.95 cloth, $25.95 paperback. What makes a work of art? How does the work of art resist the status of the mere commodity, one like any other, exchangeable and substitutable? Answering these are key concerns of Nicholas Brown's Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism. From a certain perspective these questions may seem negligible nearly a half century on from Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes and Campbell's soup cans, which equally insist that art is indeed a commodity like any other (not to mention a century on from Marcel Duchamp's readymades), but Brown revisits them as the thirtieth anniversary of Frederic Jameson's watermark analysis, Post-Modernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991) nears. In the introduction, Brown examines how the supposition of the restricted field of production for the fine arts (both as genus and species) has become increasingly untenable. The high modernist preoccupation with questions of medium specificity marked a crisis point in which to maintain a restricted field, for any aesthetic form, such as painting, necessitates greater and greater limitations on what defines it as a field of production. For Brown, the hemming in of the restricted field nearly to the point of its disappearance is in large part a response to the intensification of commodification and [End Page 464] its fated invasion of the fine arts. Consequently, today, as Brown asserts, the notional exploration of any artistic medium must necessarily address "the commodity character of the work" (22). There are many moments in the history of modern art that would seem to lead to this eventual crisis point and the rise of the art commodity, perhaps particularly the invention of the reproductive arts: lithography, photography, and cinema. As an acolyte of art historian and critic Michael Fried, however, Brown locates the commodification of the visual arts in an aesthetic development parallel to Pop art, that is, Minimalism, or as Fried preferred to call it, literalism. Fried is clearly identifiable as a key interlocutor for Brown's project, invoked directly by name in places but more frequently through the adaptation of his well-worn terminology (e.g., "absorption," "theatricality," and "conviction").1 Whereas Fried's 1967 work of art criticism "Art and Objecthood" reflects an anxiety regarding the infiltration of the visual arts by the literal objects of Minimalism, one of the more interesting observations of Brown's Autonomy is that what Fried was in fact fearfully witnessing was the descent of the fine arts into the status of a commodity like any other. As Brown explains, "Fried's 'formalist' account of the distinction between art and recent nonart is also a historicist one fully derivable from the Marxist problematic of the 'real subsumption of labor under capital" (7). The theatricality that Fried ascribes to the Minimalist art installation asserts a certain confrontational situation involving the spectator. The Minimalist object beckons and thereby for Fried rebounds in an uncomfortable if then novel mode of self-awareness of himself as its audience or, as Brown implies more aptly, its consumer. When revisited through the lens of Brown's study, Minimalist theatricality is indicative of art succumbing to the status of the commodity, a commodity that delivers variable and unstable values (experiences) to its viewers but as such inherently lacks the ability to produce conviction, in other words to assert its autonomy as a work of art (7). Indeed, within the industrial manufactured and serial geometries of Minimalist artworks, such autonomy is explicitly rejected. What Fried, writing in 1967, merely senses as representing a crisis point in the history of the visual arts, Brown fully accepts as a fait accompli, that is, the exacerbation of the art commodity as general condition. In such a context, in which no viable alternative to capitalism exists, he argues the former politics of something like Warhol's Campbell's soup cans is evacuated. Asserting art as commodity in the context of the twenty-first century represents in Brown's view a simple acquiescence to the...

Catatonic Futures and Post-Apocalyptic Capital

What does late capitalism’s mode of temporality reveal about the logic linked to its mode of production? This article establishes a dialogue between theoretical works concerned with this question and Jeff Noon’s speculative fiction novel Falling out of Cars. By drawing on Marxist criticism in the works of Fredric Jameson and Gilles Deleuzeand Felix Guattari, it argues that Falling out of Cars develops a catatonic mode of temporality that critically challenges these authors’ diagnosis of schizophrenia as the cultural logic of late capitalism. Noon’s novel offers a dystopian version of the future in which catatonic subjects function as the norm for the system’s optimal operation. The catatonic temporality of the novel emerges as the logic underlying this transformation, namely, as the passive assimilation of the individual to the system’s economic rationale, which no longer needs human agency in order to operate. Falling out of Cars does not only deploy these narrative techniques on a purely aesthetic basis, but explicitly links them to the objective conditions of the world they aim to represent. In this sense, Noon’s novel suggests catatonia as the dominant logic leading to capitalism’s terminal stage in which individuals no longer possess agency to take control of their lives.