The Neoliberal Imagination by Ross Abbinnett

Author:Ross Abbinnett [Abbinnett, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367186913
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Marxism, culture, and nostalgia

Let us talk, for a moment, about ludicrous things. The word itself comes from the Latin ludicrum, which means a stage play, a contrived event that deliberately apes and exaggerates reality in an attempt to amuse the audience. What I have said above about the importance of the 1980s popular culture in the re-formation of liberal ideology, and particularly the aesthetic element of the New Romanic movement, is itself somewhat ludicrous. It is an exaggeration, a hyperbolic device, that requires considerable qualification if we are to understand why its reimagination of work, satisfaction, and desire was such an important moment in the genealogy of neoliberalism. Fredric Jameson, one of the most sophisticated neo-Marxist critics of postmodernism, also talks of ludicrous things. In his estimation, the concept of a ‘postmodern culture’ is ludicrous, primarily because it involves the idea that we have entered a new social era (an idea we first encountered with the ‘post-industrial society’ theses of Touraine and Bell) in which ‘culture’ has attained a radical independence from the processes of capitalization. The postmodernist claim is that the expanding panoply of aesthetic forms offered by new media technologies is such that it constantly outplays the less agile process of capitalization. And so postmodern culture is characterized by a spontaneity that has spread throughout the public sphere: production and consumption are now much more reflexively oriented activities that are no longer determined purely by the metrics of utility and commodification. As a neo-Adornian, Jameson maintains that this putative movement of culture towards the spontaneous promotion of aesthetic self-creativity is, in the final analysis, an intensification of the relationship between the commodity form and the culture industry. As such, his position is that the ludic element of ‘postmodern culture’ – its promotion of self-invention in every sphere of life, its demand for flexible social attachment, its determination of aesthetic ‘style’ as the defining characteristic of individual ‘being’ – is simply ‘the reflex and concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself’ (Jameson, 1995: xii). In order to understand the dynamics of the aesthetic hyper-individualism that is at the core of the neoliberal worldview, therefore, we have to recognize: (1) that new media technologies and the virtual sphere they have created do not constitute the emergence of a post-capitalist, or postmodern, form of society and (2) that we must carefully elucidate the way in which the relationship between capitalism, culture, and individualism has developed into a global-technological system of exploitative production and consumption (Jameson, 1995: 340–356).

According to Jameson, ‘postmodernism theory’ is ludicrous primarily because of its abandonment of the essential connection between culture, capitalism, and technology that is the crux of Adorno’s critical theory. The question of who the proponents of this dangerous tendency are is never fully addressed by Jameson’s work, although it seems fair to assume that they comprise the usual suspects of French poststructuralism (Lyotard, Derrida, and Baudrillard), plus the coterie of ‘readers’ in the United Kingdom and the United States who translated, interpreted, and disseminated their work.

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