Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism Research Articles

Jameson e o pós-modernismo

O presente artigo visa expor, de maneira panorâmica, a interpretação de Fredric Jameson sobre o pós-modernismo. O objetivo central é retraçar como este conceito foi usado pelo autor nos anos 1980 em seu esforço de periodizar o capitalismo contemporâneo e mapear uma série de redefinições sistêmicas e mutações significativas na vida cultural, social e subjetiva, cada vez mais centradas em experiências fragmentadas e “presentificadas”. Para tanto, serão analisados, sobretudo, dois ensaios que condensam os diagnósticos do autor: Periodizando os anos 60e Pós-modernismo, a lógica cultural do capitalismo tardio, ambos escritos em 1984. Com isso, pretende-se apurar como a obra de Jameson, em seu esforço próprio de atualizar a teoria marxista, levanta elementos originais para se pensar a sociedade capitalista contemporânea e seus principais sintomas sociais.

The Postmodern Gene: Does Post-Capitalism Mean Post-Postmodernism?

The article examines a problem besetting social theory and theory of culture: the problem of using postmodernism as a language for describing the 21st century. The author resorts to the umbrella term “post-postmodernism” to indicate the more complex theories that focus mainly on the analysis of the latest forms of capitalism rather than the concepts that other themselves as direct alternatives to postmodernism even though they ignore the link between postmodernism and capitalism. The author takes up the idea, first argued for by the American Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson, that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism and then uses Jameson’s approach in an attempt to retrace the continuity of new concepts of capitalism. The discussion begins with the theory of capitalist realism developed by leftist British thinker Mark Fisher. Fisher recognizes Jameson’s merits but takes exception to the term “postmodernism,” although the entire philosophical apparatus that Fisher uses is borrowed from Jameson’s work. The article then bridges the gap between capitalist realism and the latest left-wing theories such as accelerationism and post-capitalism. After tracing the close connection between the work of Mark Fisher and Nick Land, who worked together in the 1990’s at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) and the ideas of Nick Srnicek, the author asks why Srnicek and his colleagues are put off by Fredric Jameson’s postmodern theory. The answer is that postmodernism does not permit contemporary leftists to speculate about the future. However, as the author points out, Jameson’s ideas about postmodernism at the “genetic level” are implicit in Srnicek’s concept of post-capitalism, which makes Srnicek’s theory “post-postmodernist,” although as a negative variation (in contrast to Mark Fisher’s positive one).

Postfascism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Postfascism is very much a cultural phenomenon. And the conflicts of today occur less as class struggle than as cultural battles. Why is that? I propose to use Fredric Jameson’s classic text on postmodernism (as the cultural logic of late capitalism) as a framework for considering the new postfascist tendencies that have emerged during the last few years in the USA and Europe (Trump, Brexit, Alternative for Germany, Pegida, Le Pen, Wilders’s Party for Freedom, the Danish People’s Party etc). Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism supplies us with a ‘take’ with which we can start mapping these reactionary or postfascist phenomena and embed them in an analysis of changes in late capitalism.

M.-A. Hamelin’s composing and performing style in the context of postmodern aesthetics

M.-A. Hamelin’s composing and performing style in the context of postmodern aesthetics

The Automedial Zaniness of Ryan Trecartin

The Automedial Zaniness of Ryan Trecartin

The Pedagogy and Politics of Twenty-First-Century Luso-Hispanic Urban Cultural Studies

The Pedagogy and Politics of Twenty-First-Century Luso-Hispanic Urban Cultural Studies Susan Larson Keywords capitalism/capitalismo, cultural studies/estudios culturales, pedagogy/pedagogía, space/espacio, urban studies/estudios urbanos Response to "The City as Organizing Principle in Twenty-First-Century Luso-Hispanic Studies" Since the 1980s Anglo-American scholars in the field of Luso-Hispanic Studies have had plenty of time to think through the so-called "spatial turn" that built disciplinary bridges between the Humanities and the Social Sciences. It took approximately 20 years for key texts written in French (those of Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, for example) to be translated into English and work their way into the field. One example of such a text is "Of Other Spaces," (a 1967 lecture of Foucault's that was not published in English until 1984) on the everyday experience of space, where he explains that [t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. (22) Foucault's ideas about space had such an impact on academics in many disciplines because he explained that space was neither a mere empty container nor a backdrop for events and actions (see Tally). Rather, as Benjamin Fraser reminds us in his essay above and in much of his work on Henri Lefebvre, space is at the same time a product and a creative process. It produces each one of us, in fact, through a complex network of economic, political, social and cultural forces. Fredric Jameson (2001) subsequently took this concept of the spatial and used it to better explain the culture of late modernism, calling on cultural critics to rethink these specialized geographical and cartographic issues in terms of social space, in terms, for example, of social class and national or international context, in terms of the ways in which we all necessarily also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national and international class realities. (585–86) If Jameson wasn't exactly celebrating the postmodern in his The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, he acknowledges that its combination of high and low culture forced us to stop thinking of art as autonomous like many of the artists and cultural critics of the Modern period tended to do. Jameson encouraged us to get our hands dirty—to "abolish all sort of critical distance" (580). Jameson called this an "aesthetic of cognitive mapping—a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system" (586, emphasis mine). Much of the recent history and future potential of urban and spatial directions in Luso-Hispanic scholarship that Benjamin Fraser outlines in his essay [End Page 143] is the inevitable outcome of this spatial turn. These philosophies of space from decades ago and this call of Jameson's to a "pedagogical political culture" are at the heart of how many of us now think about how language, image, sound and all other possible systems of meaning can and should be understood in our scholarship and should be taught in our classrooms. Urban studies and the broader spatial turn have given literary critics, film scholars and linguists in Luso-Hispanic Studies the tools to better connect the complex workings of written, visual and spoken systems of meaning to social life. It's given us the inspiration to get our hands dirty. I strongly suspect that this has happened in no small part as a response to some of the pedagogical realities we currently face. We can't ignore that our students themselves are inherently interdisciplinary. In Luso-Hispanic studies the vast majority of our students are double-majors or minors with no intent to pursue their studies in the Humanities. As professors we've had to let go of aesthetic practices and values elaborated on the basis of historical situations and elitist dilemmas which are no longer ours (if they ever were). Cognitive mapping forces us to consider the real world in which we and our students...

The Aesthetics of Stagnation: Ashley McKenzie's <em>Werewolf</em> and the Separated Society

The Aesthetics of Stagnation:Ashley McKenzie's Werewolf and the Separated Society Sean O'Brien (bio) Separated from his product, man himself produces all the details of his world with ever increasing power, and thus finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life. —Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle The development of large-scale industry expresses itself, finally, in the extrusion of workers from the factory—deindustrialisation. Beyond the factory gates, workers find themselves wandering in an immense infrastructure, that of modern life, which reflects back to them not their growing power, but rather, their impotence. They see not a world of their making, but rather a runaway world, a world beyond their control, perhaps beyond anyone's control. —Endnotes, "A History of Separation" [End Page 208] Ashley McKenzie's bleak and beautiful film Werewolf (2016) would appear to tell a story about opioid addiction.1 The film's protagonists, Vanessa (Bhreagh MacNeil) and Blaise (Andrew Gillis), are both recovering addicts on a methadone treatment program, frequenting pharmacies for their medicine and conversing with government bureaucrats and clinic doctors about their progress and mental health. And yet McKenzie's feature debut avoids the tragic excess of conventional junkie movies. There are no thrilling scenes of the characters getting high, stealing, or performing sex work, as one might typically expect to find in a film about drug addiction. As McKenzie says in an interview, "I talked to different people in the methadone program, but I'm not trying to make some sort of exposé."2 In fact, Werewolf is hardly a story at all, at least not in the generic sense of a conventionally defined narrative arc. And while the departure from linear narrative has long been an avant-garde mainstay, the film's recursive structure and oblique close-ups suggest a suffocating constriction instead of some sense of freedom from the dictates of a commercial film industry that we might associate with earlier avant-garde cinema such as the French nouvelle vague. This is because Werewolf, as I hope to show, is first and foremost a cinematic meditation on precarity as a social experience of economic stagnation, one that attends to the gendered forms that precarity assumes in an era of deindustrialization. Werewolf dwells in the everyday reality of recovery and its banal routines, but the opioid epidemic—which has spread throughout both rural and deindustrialized regions across North America—appears in the film not as the primary cause of the characters' suffering but instead as a tragic symptom of their precarity. Viewers might be forgiven for not recognizing the film's setting in present-day Cape Breton, an island in the Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia that was once a hub of industrial activity. While Cape Breton Island has come to be known for its natural beauty through the promotional work of its tourism industry in an attempt to fill the considerable gap left by the flight of manufacture and extractive trades, Werewolf captures the hardscrabble existence of life in the postindustrial region in its depiction of two homeless addicts scraping by with a rusty lawn mower in the former mining town of New Waterford. United in their isolation, Blaise and Nessa (as she's known) seem to have little left to do but wander the blasted waste-lands of capitalist ruin, mowing lawns and killing time between methadone doses, until the tensions of the couple form push them apart. Drawing out the consequences of economic stagnation for the aesthetics of cinematic realism, this essay explores the [End Page 209] relationships between precarity and deindustrialization in McKenzie's film through a Marxian account of the figure of separation. In the conclusion to Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson writes that "Marx's fundamental figure for social development and dynamics (a figure that runs through the Grundrisse, connecting the 1844 manuscripts in an unbroken line to Capital itself) . . . is the fundamental notion of separation (as when Marx describes the production of the proletariat in terms of their separation from the means of production—i.e., enclosure, the exclusion of...

An Ontological Turn

An Ontological Turn Kieran Smith (bio) After Critique: Twenty-First Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age Mitchum Huehls Oxford University Press www.global.oup.com/academic/product/ 240 Pages; Print, $65.00 In a recent essay on the "contemporaneity"of contemporary literature, James F. English contrasts his "small-scale approach" of statistical analysis to Fredric Jameson's famous "large scale explanation" in Postmodernism (1991), stating that "[o]ne is tempted at every little step to take the familiar shortcut of appealing to 'larger social forces,' to 'the cultural logic of late capitalism,' to 'contemporary society' as a whole. But at this stage in the evolution of literary studies, that shortcut has begun to look like a dead end." English accurately summarises the burgeoning concern for many current literary scholars—that "large scale explanations" often oversimplify the complexities and aporias of contemporary life. Instead, in an attempt to illuminate how fiction can credibly engage with current political issues, recent publications have adopted similarly downsized approaches to literary analysis, despite them being "more laborious" and "less certain of arriving at any terminus." Mitchum Huehls's "ontological approach to literature" in his recent study, After Critique: Twenty-First-Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age, exemplifies this "smaller" scale. "Reject[ing] the representational logic of critique" that configures neoliberalism as an ideological manipulation through the representation of norms, Huehls contends that neoliberal power primarily functions ontologically, charting the autonomous individual's actions inside of "a regulated social sphere committed to efficient profit maximization." As this non-representational form nullifies critique's interpretative methods, Huehls wagers that to find "meaning" and "value" alternative to profit, we must first "become neoliberal," that is, approach neoliberalism ontologically. This eliminates English's "familiar shortcuts": Huehls enters politics into a Latourian world of "actants" (everything that "has an effect," human or not) that continuously move and collide to create new networks and configurations. This is "politics in perpetual motion" in which nothing is completely explained, but "requires constant negotiation." Huehls's wager hinges upon tracing an "ontological turn" across a wide-range of literary forms and genres, which he argues is an "organic" product of the growing scepticism towards the political affects of largescale ideological critique. Inspired by the theories of Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault, Huehls claims that neoliberalism nullifies critique through a "totalizing grasp on normative representation." Relying on exposing hegemonic political systems that manipulate and control our "ways of seeing the world," critique opposes neoliberalism by illuminating the "values and practices" it embeds in social institutions. By accepting an antithetical relationship between object and subject positions, however, this interpretative method traps critique within what Huehls calls a "neoliberal circle;" normative neoliberalism functions by bifurcating the subject and object, and then, when appropriate, "vacillating" between both, irrespective of their incompatibility. As neoliberalism is then able to represent individuals as "subjects replete with entrepreneurial agency or as systematically aggregated objects," critique cannot propose a viable alternative that has not already been assimilated into the logic of neoliberalism. In the end neoliberalism "wins either way." Borrowing a term from Mark McGurl's "The New Cultural Geology," Huehls proposes that an "exomodernist" strain of "post-critical' and "posthumanist" contemporary literature has attempted to move beyond the "representational impasses" that impeded both postmodernism and post-postmodernism by accepting our neoliberal hybrid subject-object ontology. By doing so "exomodernism" ostensibly risks complicity with neoliberalism's treatment of individuals as the "free ontology homo œconomicus, the simultaneous subject-objects of laissez-faire." As neoliberalism is yet to codify all modes of being, however, Huehls postulates that authors can harness literature's stylistic and formal attributes to produce new meanings and values. In chapter 1, Huehls analyses Uzodinma Iweala's Beast of No Nation (2005) as complicating the victim-perpetrator dichotomy that conventionally structures the rhetoric of human rights through simile, which allows his protagonist to simultaneously be "like" something and "not," thus representing a "contingent person" who "remains too enmeshed in the given configuration to be exclusively subject or object." Following on from this, the formal configurations of Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange (1997) and Helena Maria Viramontes's Their Dogs Came with...

Introduction

Introduction Katherine Isobel Baxter (bio) and Yael Levin (bio) Conrad scholarship is forever widening its reach. Over the years scholars have turned their attention to questions of biography, composition, and publishing history, geography, politics, identity, sexuality, language, translation, adaptation, medicine, music, food, finance, and more. Among this cornucopia of scholarship certain key issues emerge, notably identity, international and transnational concerns, and the life of the man himself. It is striking that these themes are also those which shape the key publications of one of the field's leading scholars, Robert Hampson. From Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (1992), through Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad's Malay Fiction (2000) to Conrad's Secrets (2012), Hampson's critical work anticipates and shapes these issues in Conrad scholarship. On February 17, 2018, a symposium was held at Senate House in London to celebrate Hampson's work on the occasion of his retirement from Royal Holloway. The symposium brought together colleagues, collaborators, and former doctoral students who worked with Hampson over the years. The articles collected here developed out of that event. Our broad theme was "Space and Geography in Conrad's Fiction" and, in keeping with the variety of approaches noted above, contributors brought to the theme a striking array of perspectives. This critical range notwithstanding, the articles collected here all demonstrate the huge impact of what has commonly come to be designated the "spatial" turn on how we adopt and adapt our approaches to Conrad. This critical turn in literary studies can be traced back to the work of poststructuralists, social theorists, and geographers of the 1970's. Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) follows the shift heralded by such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and David Harvey in articulating the need to attend to this particular critical focus. For Jameson, the transition should be understood as a historical marker of critical change. He [End Page 1] writes: "Our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism" (16). Space emerges as the dominant historical, cultural, and literary trope, superseding time. Moreover, in Jameson's reading, this transition traces a fault line between modernism and postmodernism. The stakes of this critical shift are helpfully unpacked in Robert T. Tally, Jr.'s introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space: Whereas it had once seemed that the nineteenth century had been dominated by a discourse of time, history, and teleological development and a modernist aesthetic of the early twentieth century enshrined the temporal dimension, especially with respect to individual psychology, and—apart from interest in mere setting, regionalism, or local color, perhaps—matters of geography, topography, or spatiality played a subordinate role in critical scholarship and teaching. In the great works of realism and modernism, at least in the most influential scholarship devoted to them, time maintained its supremacy, with both history and temporality dominating the discourse, while geography and a sense of place were in many cases relegated to secondary status. Whereas time represented narrative development and change, space was often viewed as mere background or an empty container in which the unfolding of events over some durée could take place. In recent literary and cultural studies, notably with the advent of postmodernism and postcolonial theory, but also in other interdisciplinary approaches to literature, space has reemerged as a principal concern. (1–2) The significant reconceptualizations of space emerging in the latter half of the twentieth century offer methods to read against the time-centered modernist ethos. They stake out a new critical engagement with a new literary and cultural aesthetic. More recently, scholarly efforts to widen the scope of traditional modernist studies helpfully intervene in what has come to be seen as an artificial epistemic divide between time-bound modernism and space-bound postmodernism. Rather than follow the rule of different methodologies for different literary moments, such studies draw from the insights of current writing on space in order to reconsider canonical modernist texts. Andrew Thacker's Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism proceeds from the premise that "Jameson's distinction between...

Texas-(s)ized Postmodernism; Or, Capitalism without the Dialectic

The programmatic erasure of the concept of capitalism by the state (here paradigmatically represented by the state of Texas) is allied with the waning of Fredric Jameson’s dialectical concept of postmodernism. “Postmodernism” as the critique of the cultural logic of late capitalism is no more, and capitalism, it would seem, is now to be thought without the dialectic. Indeed, the discourses of capitalism and postmodernism have mutated into discourses of the security state and technological innovation. “Postmodernism” was not, however, a panacea; rather, in a way analogous to the state of Texas’s prohibition of the term slavery (in addition to capitalism) in its history textbooks, the conceptualization of postmodernism failed to adequately consider gender and racialization under what Cedric Robinson called racial capitalism.

Revisiting Postmodernism

This interview was conducted with Fredric Jameson on 13 March 2014 in New York City and has been lightly edited for clarity. On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in the New Left Review, Jameson looks back at the essay and considers the current state of capitalism, theory, art, and culture in relation to the concepts he adopted in 1984. Jameson is Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, professor of romance studies (French), and director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University. He is the author of many books, including The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002), and, most recently, The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (2015).

Book Review: Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation by Jeff Scheible

Digital Shift: Cultural Logic of Punctuation. Jeff Scheible. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 160 pp. $70 hbk. $20pbk. $11.99 ebk.!@#$%^&*()_{}:? Punctuation marks all? Produced with the shift key. -=[];',./ produced without it.This book is not what it might seem from its topic, if not its subtitle. This layered, postmodern, critical, cultural, semiotic work aims at nothing less than rethinking and reimagining the scales and scope of humanistic inquiry, and the importance of critical theory, according to one of Scheible's two stated goals. Why, he asks, could not the visual culture of the Internet, of the shift to the digital era, of new media (or perhaps [new] media) be understood by examining the role of the period, the parentheses, and the hashtag? How, as cinema studies professor (at SUNY Purchase) can he weave interpretations of current mainstream and experimental film and television into an examination of as textual How, in what he calls performative dance, can he build case that there has been distinct shift during the electronic era in the role that textuality plays in the construction of meaning; that, in postmodern sense, understanding of meaning has been effectively disconnected from textual inscriptions? Said another way, perhaps after the digital shift is less necessarily contributor to Clarity, clarity, as Strunk and White maintained, and more means of enriching reader and viewer response to textual inscriptions.There is clue about the book's intellectual heritage in the subtitle: The cultural logic of reference to and departure from Jameson's use of the term in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Elsewhere, Scheible assumes, for example, that Barthes's definition of the punctum is probably familiar to the reader. Whether or not the reader is familiar with Barthes's punctum (and studium) might be test of how comfortable text this is to handle. I confess to not being familiar, even though Scheible notes that the concept of the punctum (possibly, a personal detail in photograph that speaks to [one] as spectator) is one of the most common concepts in critical discussions of the visual arts.So what, even, is punctuation-what gets included? Scheible carefully constructs categories of punctuation, notably the equal sign and the hash tag/pound sign/ number sign/octothorpe and strict punctuation, which I take to mean the traditional symbols used in the construction of sentence text. digital shift of the title (also reference to the use of the shift key on keyboard or typewriter) has, he argues, blurred the definitions of what is or is not punctuation. Strict might, for example, be what is included in the Punctuation Guide of the AP Stylebook: apostrophes, brackets, colons, commas, dashes, ellipses, exclamation points, hyphens, parentheses, periods, question marks, quotation marks, and semicolons.For Scheible, is single typographic character that expresses relationship between what precedes and follows it. possibilities for that expression are, he would argue, shifted and enhanced in culture that is less bound by the linear forms of predigital communication.The book's Table of Contents lists only three numbered chapters beyond lengthy Introduction and Coda. These main chapters as noted cover only the period, parentheses, and the hashtag. Of these, the hashtag falls into Scheible's nontraditional loose punctuation category, but again, he argues that the very definition of what is in the digital era is shifting, such that he writes, It seems clear to me that today the # is form of and, moreover, that this is significant. …

Kachurin, Pamela Making Modernism Soviet: The Russian Avant-Garde in the Early Soviet Era, 1918–1928 (review)

SEER, 94, 1, JANUARY 2016 164 Lutzkanova-Vassileva’s study remains inconclusive in regard to the degree of the poets’ agency and undecided whether the artworks are passive records of trauma or radical critiques that succeed in productively sublimating it. Notably, the book is haunted by two radically divergent interpretations of schizophrenia as a prominent trait of both capitalism and postmodern art. When like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN, 1987), Lutzkanova-Vassileva wishestoaffirmtheradicalismofpostmodernschizophrenicart,shenotestheir rhizomatic structures, their desire for social critique, and their propensity to scramble all codes. But when the author leans toward treating her case studies as mere traces, testimonies of trauma, she paradoxically appears to be closer to Fredric Jameson, who declared in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC, 1991) that postmodern culture replicates and reinforces the logic of capitalism. Paradoxically, because it is precisely this assumption about postmodern art’s inefficacy that Lutzkanova-Vassileva’s book intends to target. Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures Julia Vaingurt University of Illinois at Chicago Kachurin, Pamela. Making Modernism Soviet: The Russian Avant-Garde in the Early Soviet Era, 1918–1928. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2013. xxiii + 145 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. It is a well-known fact that in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917 and during the ensuing Civil War, avant-garde artists ran the Art Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Otdel izobrazitel´nykh iskusstv, Narodnyi komissariat prosveshcheniya — IZO Narkompros). Having been neglected and spurned by the tsarist establishment in the pre-war period, these creative figures now took centre stage and became responsible for deciding and implementing artistic policy, organizing art galleries and museums, purchasing works of art, reforming art education and publishing journals. They acted as the creative arm of the Communist Party and the new state, committing themselves to specific approaches and types of activity. But in 1921, they had to adjust to very different circumstances as the government took back control of culture and instituted NEP (the New Economic Policy) which established state capitalism and some degree of free enterprise. Then in 1928–29, artists faced the new challenges of Socialism in one country, Collectivization and the First Five-Year Plan. The story of how the avant-garde responded to the various shifts in official policy, accommodating REVIEWS 165 new demands and beginning to ‘speak Bolshevik’ as Stephen Kotkin puts it (Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation, Berkeley, CA, 1995), forms the fascinating subject of Making Modernism Soviet. Dr Kachurin’s riveting book presents a highly detailed and well researched study of three institutions that were essentially set up by Russian avant-garde artists and acted as strongholds of avant-garde values: Moscow’s Museum of Painterly Culture (Muzei zhivopisnyi kul´tury) directed by Wassilii Kandinskii and Aleksandr Rodchenko among others; the Vitebsk People’s Art School set up by Marc Chagall and the home of Kazimir Malevich’s UNOVIS group (‘Utverditeli novogo iskusstva’ — ‘Champions of the New Art’); and finally the State Institute of Artistic Culture also known as GINKhUK (Gosudarstvennyi institut khudozhestvennoi kul´tury) directed by Malevich in Petrograd (subsequently Leningrad). The avant-garde credentials of all three organizations were impeccable and all three were eventually shut down as Stalin’s regime began to exert total control over all spheres of activity, including art and culture. Kachurin argues that in the 1920s, the avant-garde figures who ran these organizations ‘developed strategies not only to survive but also thrive in the new Soviet context’ (p. xvii). One might quibble that ‘thrive’ is perhaps putting it too strongly, but Kachurin’s study does reveal that many artists managed to adapt effectively to the twists and turns of the new order and did more than merely survive. Malevich, for instance, proved to be extremely adept and politically savvy in developing tactics to ensure that GINKhUK was allotted sufficient funds to maintain an independent existence for four years (1923–27). The quotations from his reports to various official bodies demonstrate his ability to present information in the most favourable light possible. Patronage, as Dr Kachurin emphasizes, also played a crucial...

Maps as geomedial action spaces: considering the shift from logocentric to egocentric engagements

This paper considers some significant questions in geography and cognate fields about the roles of maps in the information age. Most maps are now digital products, offering immersive environments for user involvement. The increasingly networked digital distribution of geographic information in consumer-orientated cartographic representations leads to substantial changes how people individually and collaboratively experience and produce space and place. This article focuses on the ongoing metamorphosis arising through geobrowsing, the media-based flexible production of geographic knowledge through interactive maps. Drawing on work in media studies influenced by the so-called spatial turn—the rediscovering of geography-related questions in the social sciences and humanities, after modernism’s claimed prioritization of time and history (Soja in Postmodern Geographies. The reassertion of space in critical social theory, London, 1989; Jameson in Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham, 1991)—this paper develops a theoretical framework built on the dynamic networked geomedial action spaces concept to understand the changing roles of information age maps as imagined materialist spaces for the experience and production of space—ultimately a medial turn. Following this concept, maps change from offering static and non-interactive frames of geographic reference for the production of space and place and as geomedia support a veritable infinity of interactive and map-based activities. Geobrowsing facilitates some new modes of geographic interactions that move from logocentric engagements with static maps to egocentric dynamic interactions with code-based elements of geomedial action spaces. Google Earth and similar geomedia facilitate maps that become intrinsic to a growing number of social action spaces and alter the experience and production of space and place.

William Gaddis’s Aesthetic Economy

William Gaddis’s Aesthetic Economy Angela S. Allan (bio) Early in William Gaddis’s sprawling comic novel, J R (1975), writer Jack Gibbs discusses the origins of art with Major Hyde, who is skeptical of the need for artists. “But without them,” Gibbs asks, “where do you get art?” “Get it?” Major Hyde retorts, “Art? You get it where you get anything you buy it . . . don’t try to tell me in this day and age there isn’t enough around for everybody.”1 Seeing art as an inexhaustible supply, Hyde continues, “who’s heard all the great music there is, you? You read all the great books there are? seen all these great pictures? Records of any symphony you want reproductions you can get them that are almost perfect, the greatest books ever written you can get them at the drugstore” (48). Hyde’s complaint may at first seem to suggest that art “has become integrated into commodity production generally,” which Fredric Jameson identifies as the central condition of postmodernism, but it also seeks to eliminate aesthetic production entirely.2 According to Hyde’s logic, artistic production is irrelevant in comparison to its commoditized consumption. Yet to think of art as defined by its consumption instead of its production called the entire notion of aesthetic value into question under postmodernism. As art critic Harold Rosenberg proclaimed in 1972, “the nature of art has become uncertain. At least, it is ambiguous. No one can say with assurance what a work of art is—or, more important, what is not a work of art.”3 Detached from any intrinsic value, Rosenberg concludes, art in the postmodern age “does not know whether it is a masterpiece or junk.”4 This problem of aesthetic distinction has been the legacy of postmodernism’s uncomfortable relationship with the market. Calling postmodernism “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” Jameson claims that it is merely “the consumption of sheer commodification as a process.”5 Similarly, David Harvey asserts that postmodernism “signals nothing [End Page 219] more than a logical extension of the power of the market over the whole range of cultural production.”6 These accounts, however influential, have nevertheless tended to imagine the discourse of postmodernism as nothing more than a symptom of neoliberalism’s expansion of markets. Under neoliberalism—what Harvey has called “the financialization of everything”—anything and everything could be alchemized into capital, evidenced by the fact that J R’s eponymous 11-year-old arch capitalist amasses and loses a vast financial fortune built from a single share of common stock and a pile of junk mail.7 Turned over to the market, art and culture lose any semblance of their once privileged status. With nothing valued for its own sake, everything becomes a potential work of art within the market, and—as Rosenberg laments—“everyone becomes an artist.”8 But this perceived lack of resistance to the market has resulted in a kind of ambivalence about the aesthetic value of postmodernism and its study. In other words, postmodernism ostensibly signaled the defeat of all other forms of valuation except for the economic. As a result, the tendency in recent years has been for authors and artists to distance themselves from the kind of formal experimentation that has now proven so unpalatable to critics, practitioners, and consumers of the craft. Perhaps most emblematic of this trend is novelist Jonathan Franzen’s 2002 New Yorker editorial on Gaddis—appropriately entitled “Mr. Difficult”—in which Franzen admits that he found little pleasure in reading J R. While hardly unwarranted, given the novel’s infamously tangled dialogic structure, Franzen accuses Gaddis of being a “Status” writer, committed to the belief that “the value of any novel, even a mediocre one, exists independent of how many people are able to appreciate it.”9 Along with many of his postmodern peers, in embracing encyclopedic difficulty as a hallmark of his work, Gaddis has not exactly earned the reputation of a reader-friendly writer. Grown too alienated from “its original owner, the bourgeois reader,” the postmodern novel, Franzen argues, had instead become a grimacing parody of itself in its celebration of difficulty.10 While Franzen contends that the...

The oblique art of shoes: popular culture, aesthetic pleasure, and the humanities

This article addresses popular culture and the humanities. It uses shoes as an object of analysis to interrogate the place and function of aesthetic pleasure in critical thinking and cultural practice in the age of globalization and the neoliberal university. Tracking contemporary articulations of the shoe as a popular cultural object, the discussion begins by recalibrating Judith Halberstam’s concept of the “queer art of failure” in terms of what I call an oblique art of shoes. The discussion also revisits Fredric Jameson’s footwear musings in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism to elucidate a missing link between aesthetics, affect, and materiality in the critique of popular culture. The article accordingly works with obliqueness in two ways. First, my approach is oblique in the sense that I address popular culture and the humanities indirectly via the aesthetics and materiality of the shoe. Second, like many popular objects, I find shoes themselves to have an oblique relationship with art and so-called high culture. My argument – developed in relation to examples from visual art, museum exhibitions, urban space, and advertising billboards – is that analyzing the oblique art of shoes can make newly visible the extent to which aesthetic pleasure can inform, and sometimes even constitute, critical practice.

Fredric Jameson: the project of dialectical criticism

Series Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Jameson as Educator 1. the dialectic requires you to say everything simultaneously ... 2 The Task of the Translator 3 The Untranscendable Horizon 4 The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 5 Cognitive Mapping and Globalization 6 The Thing about Modernity 7 Other Spaces are Possible Conclusion: Reading Jameson Notes Index

New age spirituality and cultural logic of late capitalism

Starting with the interrelated notions of globalization, postmodernism and neoliberalism, relying on their theoretical overlap, we suggest possible directions of inquiry that would clarify some aspects of the specific and today omnipresent 'New Age' spirituality. Individualistic and eclectic, New Age spirituality arose in the context of countercultural movements of the sixties. It includes various kinds of metaphysical syncretisms combined with elements of modern science and humanistic psychology. We will try to show how this type of spirituality corresponds with the dominant cultural logic of the late capitalism (which we understand as global, postmodern, neoliberal, multicultural, multinational, etc). We proceed from the assumption that there is a number of points of correspondence and that it is possible to create a New Age genealogy that would clarify them. That would create prerequisites for the analysis of transposition of countercultural legacy in the neo-liberal narratives, and enable us to address the role of spirituality as a mediator in this process and as a specific mechanism of interpellation. In this way, we will deal with the reproduction and social functions of specific ideological forms in the dominant motifs of contemporary spirituality. Distributed across the growing market of the mind-body-spirit literature, the New Age worldview appears as a specific technology of the self and as an ideological aggregation point. In this point, the boundaries between market ideology and conception of reality as a hidden order/conscious self-organizing equilibrium disappear. The deification of being as 'a market ontology' results in theodicy and produces self-accusing subjectivity. This opens the door to engaging in political neoliberalism theology within an already wideranging discussion that replaces the secularization theory with the idea of history of political societies as a succession of different forms of sacralization.

“A New Concept of Egoism”: The Late Modernism of Ayn Rand

stood on the edge of the Boston Post Road, two small structures of glass and concrete forming a semicircle among the trees: the cylinder of the office and the long, low oval of the diner, with gasoline pumps as the colonnade of a forecourt between them. 1 The narrator goes on to describe this modernist petrol station in terms that recall the rapture of Marinetti recounting the car crash that launched Futurism, or of Le Corbusier en- countering the titanic reawakening of Parisian traffic that led him to develop his Voisin Plan, a new approach to urban planning formulated specifically in order to facilitate the free movement of automobiles. looked like a cluster of bubbles hanging low over the ground, not quite touching it, to be swept aside in an instant on a wind of speed; it looked gay, with the hard, bracing gaiety of efficiency, like a powerful airplane engine (F, 156). But this building is designed by neither Mies van der Rohe nor Arne Jacobsen. It is the creation of Howard Roark, hero of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead (1943), and it is worth un- derlining how strange this ought to seem. A declared romantic who favored Victor Hugo over the sort of innovators who never used capitals, never used commas, and wrote poems that neither rhymed nor scanned, Rand must appear an unlikely champion of modernism in architecture. Indeed, Rand's philosophy pres- ents a perfect example of that mistrust of grand narrative now recognized to be central to the cultural logic of late capitalism, postmodernism. In place of all the variants of modern collectiv- ism (communist, fascist, Nazi, etc.), which preserve the religious- altruist ethics in full and merely substitute 'society' for God as the beneficiary of man's self-immolation, Rand proposes a new

The Presence of Postmodernism in Contemporary American Literature

The year 2014 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Fredric Jameson’s seminal essays “Periodizing the 60s” and “Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” and the twenty-fifth anniversary of David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity. More generally, the works that form the cornerstones of our understanding of postmodernism and its periodization, including seminal works by Linda Hutcheon, Ihab Hassan, Andreas Huyssen, John Barth, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, are by now on average 30–40 years old. Most of these macrotheoretical models of postmodernism that continue to influence analyses of contemporary literature mainly base their insights on cultural artifacts dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. Given the changes American literature has undergone over the course of the past five decades or so, this begs the question: can the term postmodernism and its associated concepts and debates offer us a relevant set of tools for the analysis of recent literary production? What might we stand to gain from talking about postmodernism now? Or, to put this question more awkwardly (though fittingly, as will become clear, for this essay will deal with a range of awkward terms and temporal and logical propositions): what is the time of postmodernism’s presence? Already in 1993 Raymond Federman proclaimed the end of postmodernism in his book Critifiction, and since the 1990s discussions of postmodernism’s possible exhaustion and its aftermath have become increasingly frequent. Still, as Andrew Hoberek argues, citing Jeremy Green, in his introduction to the 2007 special issue of