Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism Research Articles

Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America (review)

If asked to reduce Peter Knight's edited collection to an implied coherence, one might say that it boils down to a conversation with Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and, by extension, Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984). Organized into four sections—"Theories of Conspiracy Theory" (chapters 1 through 3), which challenges some popular academic theories of conspiracy, "Alien Nation" (chapters 4 and 5), which analyzes alien abduction narratives, "The Enemy Within" (chapters 6 through 8), which focuses on internal conspiracies and elements of popular culture, and "The Ends of Conspiracy" (chapters 9 through 11), which examines the positive potentials of conspiracy as a theoretical and narrative idiom—almost every author attempts to articulate the relationship between the conspiratorial imagination and postmodernity. Understood as either a gradual globalism and post-Fordist stage of trans/multinational capitalism on the one hand, or as a radical break from modernity in terms of an "incredulity toward metanarratives" on the other (Lyotard, xxiv), almost every chapter situates the postmodern condition as a bewildering experience that is best captured by the concept of paranoia.

Jamming at Work

Jamming at Work

Postmodern Puma

Postmodern Puma

Alternative Spiritualities and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Some practices in Alternative Spiritualities have been criticised by social commentators for their ‘appropriation’ of indigenous cultures. This article will argue that ‘appropriation’ is not limited to these cultures but is part of a larger phenomenon, that of cultural consumption of selective parts of history. Furthermore, this cultural consumption is not restricted to history alone, but is extended to contemporary popular culture, such as people and groups who find inspiration for their spirituality from the fictions of H.P. Lovecraft, vampire stories and the Star Wars mythos. Following Fredric Jameson's work on Postmodernism, this article will provide an insight into how the cultural consumption of history and popular culture by people involved in Alternative Spiritualities has become part of the cultural logic of late capitalism.

The Work of Consumption

The Work of Consumption

'[S]he was Convicted and Condemned'

This paper traces an archaeology of single motherhood, using the disparate examples of the prosecution of infanticide in early seventeenth-century London and the vilification of welfare-dependent single mothers in contemporary western societies, as presented in SlavojŽižek's analysis of the cultural logic of late Capitalism. The paper addresses the issues of media representations, the medicalisation of birth, and the defining and containing of the single procreative female before the law. These demonised representations are set against the problematic conservative notions of legitimate maternity and 'the family'. It is argued that contemporary stereotypical assumptions around single motherhood in examples from countries that have inherited their codes of justice from the Westminster system have their bases in early modern English culture and law.

'[S]he was Convicted and Condemned'

This paper traces an archaeology of single motherhood, using the disparate examples of the prosecution of infanticide in early seventeenth-century London and the vilification of welfare-dependent single mothers in contemporary western societies, as presented in SlavojŽižek's analysis of the cultural logic of late Capitalism. The paper addresses the issues of media representations, the medicalisation of birth, and the defining and containing of the single procreative female before the law. These demonised representations are set against the problematic conservative notions of legitimate maternity and 'the family'. It is argued that contemporary stereotypical assumptions around single motherhood in examples from countries that have inherited their codes of justice from the Westminster system have their bases in early modern English culture and law.

Speed

Speed

SACRED NOISE IN DON DELILLO'S FICTION

SACRED NOISE IN DON DELILLO'S FICTION

A postmodern theory of general economy: The contribution of georges bataille

One of the most important views concerning the post-industrial society is the return of the marketplace as the central economic institution. Although postmodernism has been viewed as “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” the work of Georges Bataille (1879–1962) sheds light on the idea of postmodern business in terms of a cultural shift concerning the motive of business venturing. While his contributions to political economy and business ethics still remain unknown to many of the advocates of postmodern business in the United States, Canada and Europe, Bataille formulated “a Copernican transformation” of capitalism, changing the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of “general economy.”

MAPPING CULTURAL/POLITICAL DEBATES IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The theorization of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism has generated a number of debates among Latinos in the US and among Latin American critics in particular. This article examines a number of writings published between 1989 and 1994 by Latin American critics focusing on the viability of seeing Latin America as postmodern. We argue that in the rush to accept First World theoretical frameworks, there has been much confusion and a collapsing of economic, political and cultural categories. Conflating market growth and shifts with social change and the availability of a plurality of consumer goods with the distribution of goods and services, some critics have been quick to label cultural production in Latin America as ‘postmodern’. What is needed is a delimitation of the categories used, an examination of the cultural debate in relation to other debates on development, social movements, democratization and alliance politics, as well as an examination of local intellectual debates within the global context of restructuring and transnational capital.

A City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema as Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Emerging as a newly industrialized city-state, Hong Kong, one of the Asian tigers, has become a leading finance-capital center of the world and functions as a commercial center for Southeast Asia and Southern China. A postmodern city with an international airport, skyscrapers, traffic jams, and cellular phones, Hong Kong has been at the forefront of neo-liberal free trade policies. Today, successful business people dot what has become one of the world's capitalist showcases (1). Indeed, a mapping of the territory reveals high walled private homes, neon signs advertising designer goods from every continent, and blocks of luxury hotels and indoor malls. Another dimension of the landscape, however, is its sweatshops, storefronts, urban pollution, and shantytowns of unrelieved squalor, with too many people for too little land. Poor laborers, sole proprietors, and street people inhabit this terrain.

Transcoding the World: Haraway's Postmodernism

Previous articleNext article No AccessTranscoding the World: Haraway's PostmodernismJonathan CreweJonathan Crewe Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 22, Number 4Summer, 1997 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/495213 Views: 16Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1997 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Benjamin Lipp, Sascha Dickel Interfacing the human/machine, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 3 (Jan 2022): 1–19.https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.2012709Ansgar Nünning H, (Jan 2008): 270–300.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05225-4_8Lisa Cosgrove Feminism, Postmodernism, and Psychological Research, Hypatia 18, no.33 (Mar 2020): 85–112.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2003.tb00823.xSteven D. Brown Electronic Networks and Subjectivity, (Jan 1999): 146–165.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27667-7_9

Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (review)

Reviewed by: Staging Place: The Geography Of Modern Drama Jeanne Colleran Staging Place: The Geography Of Modern Drama. By Una Chaudhuri. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. pp. xv + 300. $30.00 cloth. Fredric Jameson has suggested that a “detour through the modern” is needed to “grasp what is historically original in the postmodern and its spatialisms” (Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991], 156). Una Chaudhuri, in the erudite, elegant, and subtle analyses of both canonical and contemporary dramatic works offered in Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, provides one such detour. Like Jameson, Edward Soja, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and others, Chaudhuri argues the necessity of a spatialized discourse to offset or to supplement now-familiar historicized ones. To this end, she theorizes a geography of theatre, foregrounding the notion of “platiality” as a more strenuous recognition of “the signifying power and political potential of specific places” (5). Staging Place vigorously refuses sterile conceptions of space as fixed or undialectical, offering instead an effective framework for thinking through issues of space in more vital and productive terms. Staging Place begins with a discussion of the family home as the privileged setting of modern drama. To examine the trope of home in its various manifestations is to interrogate issues of affiliation and rejection, claim and dispossession, and to recognize that the representation of these issues is always negotiated within the parameters of place. Chaudhuri’s ambitious project complicates notions of place as deterministic and exile as emancipatory—ideas derived from the naturalistic and realistic drama of earlier modern playwrights—in order to encourage a semiotics of space that can accommodate heterotopic accounts of the constructive interrelationship of place, identity, and subjectivity. Staging Place moves from the release sounded by Nora’s slamming door as a liberatory act dependent upon a faith in the individualism of liberal humanism to considerations of the postmodern diasporic condition, in which the abrasive force of history strips the concept of exile of its literary status, to an investigation of the refiguration of the concept of home within the discourse of multiculturalism. Chaudhuri recognizes that the century-long struggle over the problem of place she is tracing is a continual attempt by theatre as a mode of cultural criticism to reveal something about the impact of environment—social, cultural, geopolitical place—on the formation of identity. She also recognizes that the persistent tendency to elide the recurrent motifs of home, home-leaving, and homecoming indicates a desire to obviate any assessment of the historical and cultural determinants that constitute place—that the elision, in short, represents a resistance to ideological readings of space. One of the book’s most engrossing discussions considers, as a demonstration of this resistance, the relationship of the naturalistic stage, which operates by enacting a connection between performance and spectator through a contract of total visibility, to the environmental stage, which assaults traditional boundaries and enacts an undifferentiated space based on a contract of shared participation. Chaudhuri argues that naturalism and realism, often discussed as opposites, in fact form “a continuum that has been disguised as a rupture, and the motivations behind the disguise [. . .] derive from its occlusive ideology” (27). Against either logic—that of the naturalism of Miss Julie or of the various stagings of environmentalism—Chaudhuri sets the critique offered by Jim Cartwright’s Road (1986). Road gestures toward environmental stagings through performances outside the theatre building and within the lobby; and it invokes naturalistic practices such as reading the contents of the house as emblems of identity. But the play ultimately demystifies the erasure of otherness that is practiced in both the naturalistic theatre of visibility and the environmental theatre of participation. “The theatre’s investment in presence, visibility and display is revealed in Road to be [End Page 237] an illusion,” Chaudhuri writes, a “fantasy of anthropological dimensions that seeks to vanquish otherness without the pain of being othered oneself” (53). The discussion I have just described is one of many compelling readings Chaudhuri offers, including a particularly perspicacious discussion of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest. But her singular accomplishment in Staging Place is...

Mapping the Landscape in Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination"

Mapping the Landscape in Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination" Anne F. Widmayer University of Michigan In "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Fredric Jameson coins the term "cognitive mapping" to express the need for individuals in a postmodern society to position themselves in regard to seemingly chaotic social and political structures. A cognitive map enables "a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole" (51). An individual's cognitive map can provide a reassuringly stable physical definition of self in a rapidly changing society, such as that of the twentieth century, or that of England in the eighteenth century. Joseph Addison's use of the trope of landscape and landscape gardening in his "Pleasures ofthe Imagination," I will argue, serves as a cognitive map of the social , political, and cultural attributes of the landed aristocracy that the primarily merchant class readers of the Spectator were attempting to acquire. The rage for landscape painting and landscape gardening was in full force during June and July of 1712, when the Spectator published Addison's essays on the sublime. As Edward Malins notes, the types of landscape gardening most favored during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century in England were closely tied to the origins of the monarchs on the throne at the time. Thus, following the Restoration of Charles II, who had spent most of his life at the French court at Versailles, the French taste for geometric parterres featuring magnificent fountains and separated by radiating walkways was in vogue throughout England (5-6). William and Mary brought with them the even more formal Dutch style of landscape gardening. Closely clipped hedges, fantastical topiary, and groves of trees planted in the quincunx layout, affording ordered prospects from any point of view, were modeled at Hampton Court for the rest of the country (14-15). Under Anne, the native Englishwoman, the finicky attention paid to the royal gardens waned, and she is said to have "parsimoniously neglected [them]" (15), though she was careful to root out the distinctly Dutch box parterres upon the death of William (Clifford 98). Landscape gardening in England was never a politically neutral pursuit, for the previous style was quickly discarded in favor of the present monarch's taste. 19 20Rocky Mountain Review Painting manuals during the eighteenth century mirror the importance royal and aristocratic taste in landscapes had upon landscape painting. William Salmon's widely influential Polygraphice, which went through eight editions from 1672 to 1701, instructs a gentleman-painter to create landscapes that, like the French and Dutch parterres favored by Charles II and William and Mary, are meant to be viewed from above: "Make your Landskip to shoot (as it were) away, one part lower than another, making the nearest hill or place highest, and those that are farther off, to shoot away under that, that the Landskip may appear to be taken from the top of an hill" (35). Jonathan Richardson, the most important portrait painter of the early eighteenth century after Sir Godfrey Kneller's death, in his Theory ofPainting (1715) describes the pleasure a gentleman derives from simultaneously appreciating a painting and his own highly cultivated taste in approving it: "The pleasure that painting, as a dumb art, gives us, is like what we have from musick. . . in both we are delighted in observing the skill of the artist in proportion to it, and our own judgment to discover it. It is this. . . which gives us so much pleasure at the sight of natural pictures, a prospect, a fine sky, a garden, &c. . . ." (3). The aristocratic taste of the viewer is mapped upon the physical, whether it be a painting, a prospect, or a garden. As Addison notes in his earlier essay on taste, Number 409, natural aristocratic taste must be educated in order to be useful: "But notwithstanding this Faculty [taste] must in some measure be born with us, there are several Methods for Cultivating and Improving it, and without which it will be very uncertain, and of little use to the Person that possesses it." Late in the century, William...

Reviews

Alaraways historicise! neoconservatism, postmodernism, and new historicism Harold Bloom. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company. Fredric Jameson. 1991. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New York: Duke University Press. Stephen Greenblatt. 1991. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Oxford: Clarendon Press The pitfalls and pleasures of post‐colonial parallels David Lloyd. 1993. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post‐Colonial Moment. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Terry Eagleton. 1995. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso. Declan Kiberd. 1995. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Jonathan Cape. New literary histories for the new South Africa Michael Chapman. 1996. Southern African Literatures. Harlow: Longman. 533pp. Johannes A Smit, Johan van Wyk and Jean‐Philippe Wade (eds). 1996. Rethinking South African Literary History. Durban: Y Press. 250pp. ‘(An)other story to tell’: locating India among postcolonial dissensions. Breckenridge, Carol and Peter van der Veer (eds). 1994. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Arnold, David and David Hardiman (eds). 1994. Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sexuality and racial power: South African feminist historiography Jeater, D. 1993. Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1894–1930. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 281pp. Marks, S. 1994. Divided Sisterhood: Race, Class and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession. London: St Martins Press. 306pp. McClintock, A. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge. 449pp. Literary history: A thing of the present Erhard Reckwitz, Karin Reittier, and Lucia Vennarini (organisers). 1996. Symposium: “South African Literary History: Totality and/or Fragment”. Institute for Cultural Sciences, University of Essen, Germany (July).1

Mapping the Landscape in Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination"

In Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson coins the term mapping to express the need for individuals in postmodern society to position themselves in regard to seemingly chaotic social and political structures. A cognitive map enables a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as whole (51). An individual's cognitive map can provide reassuringly stable physical definition of self in rapidly changing society, such as that of the twentieth century, or that of England in the eighteenth century. Joseph Addison's use of the trope of landscape and landscape gardening in his Pleasures of the Imagination, I will argue, serves as cognitive map of the social, political, and cultural attributes of the landed aristocracy that the primarily merchant class readers of the Spectator were attempting to acquire. The rage for landscape painting and landscape gardening was in full force during June and July of 1712, when the Spectator published Addison's essays on the sublime. As Edward Malins notes, the types of landscape gardening most favored during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century in England were closely tied to the origins of the monarchs on the throne at the time. Thus, following the Restoration of Charles II, who had spent most of his life at the French court at Versailles, the French taste for geometric parterres featuring magnificent fountains and separated by radiating walkways was in vogue throughout England (5-6). William and Mary brought with them the even more formal Dutch style of landscape gardening. Closely clipped hedges, fantastical topiary, and groves of trees planted in the quincunx layout, affording ordered prospects from any point of view, were modeled at Hampton Court for the rest of the country (14-15). Under Anne, the native Englishwoman, the finicky attention paid to the royal gardens waned, and she is said to have parsimoniously neglected [them] (15), though she was careful to root out the distinctly Dutch box parterres upon the death of William (Clifford 98). Landscape gardening in England was never politically neutral pursuit, for the previous style was quickly discarded in favor of the present monarch's taste.

The Seeds of Time

Reviewed by: The Seeds of Time Walter Kalaidjian Fredric Jameson. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. xviii + 192 pp. $22.95 cloth. The Seeds of Time is an expanded version of Fredric Jameson’s 1991 Wellek Library Lecture series at the University of California, Irvine. In it, he takes current discussions of postmodernity to the cutting edge. Moving on from his definitive study Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson in this next book surveys the limits in our current thinking about what Utopia, totality, innovation, feasible socialism, Second-World culture, architectural incommensurability, and Critical Regionalism might mean in the 1990s and beyond. Part one, or “The Antinomies of Postmodernity,” gives us a cognitive map of the fin de siècle: one that charts the trend in semiotics, poststructuralism, and certain tendencies in cultural analysis away from the dynamic dialectics of contradiction and toward the paralyzing logic of antinomy. The impasse in our present attempts to work through the antinomies of postmodernism, in Jameson’s reading, is itself symptomatic of just how widespread late capitalism’s colonization of everyday life has become in its so-called Third Wave. Indeed, “it seems to be easier for us today,” Jameson concludes, “to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.” Circumscribing the a priori antinomies of postmodernity (time and space, heterogeneity and homogeneity, anti-essentialism and naturalism, Utopia and conservatism), Jameson would further the discursive possibilities for a future breaching of our collective “incapacity to imagine change”: a breaching that, in contradiction to our moment’s “conceptual freezeframe,” is yet to come in the “missing next tick of the clock, the absent first step of renewed praxis.” Some of the social complexity of that future praxis, however, may well elude the theoretical laboratory in which The Seeds of Time would detect and plot its material emergence. For, in linking cultural postmodernity [End Page 410] to the built environment of the First World, Jameson pays limited attention to what cultural critics such as Homi K. Bhaba foreground in the specific, discursive strategies of performative agency through which postcolonial subjects resist and transcode the cultural dominant of late capitalism. Part two, or “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” follows a different strategy in mounting a post-capitalist project. Here Jameson gleans the seedlings of Utopia in Second World literature, specifically Andrei Platonov’s Soviet novel Chevengur (1972, 1978, 1988). Written during 1927–28, this recently recovered masterpiece depicts the period of heroic Communism in the USSR, focusing on the years between the 1917 Revolution and the New Economic Policies of 1923. Part of Platonov’s value, for Jameson, lies in Chevengur’s version of social modernization that offers a kind of anticipatory, back-to-the-future glimpse of what a socialist culture-one released from the spectacle of advertising and relentless profiteering-might look like after the fall of socialist institutions in the late twentieth century. Utopia, as you find it here, betokens a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, its postindividualist leveling of bourgeois social distinction offers anonymity as “an intensely positive force, as the most fundamental fact of life of the democratic community.” On the other hand, in eradicating the cultural logic of capitalism as such, this radical anonymity “in our non- or pre-Utopian world goes under the name and characterization of death.” Jameson’s masterful, close readings of Chevengur consider the internal contradictions Utopia negotiates in the novel’s modernist ironies, in its handling of sexuality, and in Platonov’s fascinating portraits of the Revolution’s “miscellaneous” peasants: those marginal, “home-made people . . . on vacation from imperialism.” Unfettered by the constraints of possessive individualism, bourgeois social distinction, and middle-class conformity, these Utopian misfits, as Jameson characterizes them, “grow wild like plants . . . [and] blossom into the neurotics, compulsives, obsessives, paranoids, and schizophrenics, whom our society considers sick but who, in a world of true freedom, may make up the flora and fauna of ‘human nature’ itself.” Not insignificantly, these “seeds from some nameless weedpatch,” as Platonov characterizes them, might well be transcoded as Second-World forerunners of a certain renegade subjectivity that we recognize today in the “queer” identity...

We Have Never Been Modern

Reviewed by: We Have Never Been Modern T. Hugh Crawford (bio) Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993. 157 pp. $29.95. In “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”—an essay that has become the touchstone for discussions of contemporary cultural periodization—Fredric Jameson argues that the “last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism, in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that” (Postmodernism [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991], p. 1). The attempt to formulate some break with the immediate past is a characteristic of much contemporary theory, and, given the emergence of various theories of the postmodern at the end of our century, this impulse can be tied to anticipation, however inverted, of the coming millennium. One can approach such an ending with joy, trepidation, or downright cynicism, seeking in the new era either a complete rupture with the past or some lines of continuity. Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern takes the latter strategy, arguing that we are not moving into a radically new age configured by the trappings of postmodern techno-gadgetry and the philosophy of the simulacrum, nor do we have need to remain trapped in the hegemonic structures of the modern era. Instead, this state of affairs can be avoided through the simple recognition that, indeed, we have never been modern: the repertoire of modern critical analysis has always been internally inconsistent if not outright contradictory, and, more importantly, we have always been at home in the nonmodern world, living comfortably with hybrid combinations of natural and social objects/subjects. Latour developed the basis of this argument through his empirical laboratory studies (Laboratory Life, The Pasteurization of France), where he discovered that nothing particularly different from everyday life takes place within the laboratory. He argues that if there has never been such a thing as scientific reasoning (characterized by the production of sleek, ahuman technological systems and universal natural truths), then we have never actually attained modernity—let alone postmodernity, a concept Latour regards with disdain, noting that it is “a symptom, not a fresh solution” (p. 46) because the postmoderns “accept the total division between the material and technological world on the one hand and the linguistic play of speaking subjects on the other” (p. 61). His position regarding scientific reasoning finds partial support from the strong programme of the Edinburgh school. The principle of symmetry—that scientific successes as well as failures must have social explanations—helped demystify scientific knowledge; however, Latour advocates a generalized principle of symmetry, which requires both a natural and a social explanation for laboratory successes and failures. Indeed, if one were to follow out his program to its conclusion, those distinctions would become impossible to maintain, and we would recognize that we have never been modern. Latour’s definition of modernity is both simple and profound. He locates its roots in the time of Hobbes and Boyle, using Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump as his primary example of (almost successful) [End Page 578] anthropology of science. The modern world emerged when the domain of knowledge was split between knowledge of people (Hobbes and politics) and knowledge of things (Boyle and science): “[The moderns] have cut the Gordian knot with a well-honed sword. The shaft is broken: on the left, they have put knowledge things; on the right, power and human politics” (p. 3). Latour argues that this is an impoverished model: neither natural objects nor social subjects have ever been simply real, social, or discursive. Instead, they are hybrids circulating in networks of translation and mediation while the moderns busily attempt to purify them of their hybrid qualities and locate them on one end or the other of the subject/object pole. From this perspective, current disciplines are both the cause and the symptom of the modern mind, and Latour has written the manifesto for the interdisciplinarians who must stop worrying over metaphysics and practice “infraphysics” (p. 128). In one swift move, the realist/constructivist debate is rendered uninteresting, the...

Postmodernism: Decentering, Simulacrum, and Parody

THE CONCEPT OF POSTMODERNISM HAS BEEN ENORMOUSLY IMPORTANT for literary critics and art historians in recent years. Yet within American studies, it has been an underused resource, perhaps because it marks a point of rupture in a field characterized by studies that stress continuity. Yet scholars of U.S. culture cannot afford to isolate themselves from the important currents of cultural criticism generated by the idea of postmodernity. In his recent exemplary rumination on cultural change, David Harvey reminds us that modernism is not a finite and discrete category, that there have been many modernisms serving many different purposes.' Similarly, postmodernism is no monolith, as evidenced by the different approaches taken in two now classical critical works on postmodernity: Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism, History, Theory, Fiction.