The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 by Fredric Jameson

Author:Fredric Jameson [Jameson, Fredric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sociology, Art, Social Science, Postmodernism (Literature), Philosophy, Political, General, Literary Criticism, Modern, Semiotics & Theory, History & Surveys, Postmodernism
ISBN: 9781844673490
Google: oBaVWr2tb10C
Amazon: 1844673499
Publisher: Verso
Published: 1998-12-14T23:00:00+00:00

Culture and Finance Capital

I want here to report on a book which has not yet received the attention it deserves, partly no doubt because it is substantial and difficult to digest, but also I think, because it purports to be a history of capitalism, whereas, I think, its secret originality is to have given us a new structural understanding of features of capitalism not yet fully elucidated. Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century1 is remarkable, among many other things, for producing a problem we did not know we had, in the very process of crystallizing a solution to it: the problem of finance capital. No doubt it swarmed around our heads in the form of vague perplexities, quizzicalities that never paused long enough to become real questions: Why monetarism? Why are investment and the stock market getting more attention than an industrial production that seems on the point of disappearing anyway? How can you have profit without production in the first place? Where does all this excessive speculation come from? Does the new form of the city (including postmodern architecture) have anything to do with a mutation in the very dynamic of land values (ground rent)? Why should land speculation and the stock market come to the fore as dominant sectors in advanced societies, where ‘advanced’ certainly has something to do with technology but presumably ought to have something to do with production as well? All of these nagging questions were also secret doubts, about the Marxian model of production, as well as about the turn of history in the 1980s, stimulated by the Reaganiteffhatcherite tax cuts. We seemed to be returning to the most fundamental form of class struggle, one so basic that it spelled the end of all those Western-Marxist and theoretical subtleties that the Cold War had called forth.

Indeed, during the long period of the Cold War and of Western Marxism - a period one really needs to date from 1917 - a complex analysis of ideology needed to be developed in order to unmask the persistent substitutions of incommensurate dimensions, the passing off of political arguments in the place of economic ones, the appeal to alleged traditions - freedom and democracy, God, manichaeism, the values of the West and of the Judaeo-Christian or Roman-Christian heritage - as answers to new and unpredictable social experiments; in order, as well, to accommodate the new conceptions of the operations of the unconscious discovered by Freud and presumably also at work in the layering of social ideology. •

In those days, the theory of ideology constituted the better mousetrap: and every self-respecting theorist felt the obligation to invent a new one, to ephemeral acclaim and momentarily attracting a horde of curious spectators always ready to move on to the next model at a moment’s notice, even when that next model meant revamping the very name of ideology itself and substituting episteme, metaphysics, practices, or whatever.

But today many of these complexities seem to have disappeared, and, faced with the Reagan-Kemp and Thatcher

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.