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2024年4月12日发(作者：allocation的意思)
Fredric Jameson
Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism
The last few years have been marked by an inverted millennarianism, in
which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been
replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or
social class; the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state,
etc., etc.): taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly
called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis
of some radical break or coupure,generally traced back to the end of the 1950s
or the early 1960s. As the word itself suggests, this break is most often
related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old
modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus,
abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final
forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs,or the
modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the works
of Wallace Stevens): all these are now seen as the final, extraordinary
flowering of a high modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with
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them. The enumeration of what follows then at once becomes empirical,
chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also
photorealism, and beyond it, the ‘new expressionism’; the moment, in
music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and ‘popular’
styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also
punk and new wave rock (the Beatles and the Stones now standing as
the high-modernist moment of that more recent and rapidly evolving
tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard and experimental cinema and
video, but also a whole new type of commercial film (about which more
below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and
the French nouveau roman and its succession on the other, along with
alarming new kinds of literary criticism, based on some new aesthetic of
textuality or éThe list might be extended indefinitely; but
does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic
style- and fashion-changes determined by an older high-modernist
imperative of stylistic innovation?*.
The Rise of Aesthetic Populism
It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic
production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical
problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed
from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism—
as it will be outlined in the following pages—initially began to emerge.
More decisively than in the other arts or media, postmodernist positions
in architecture have been inseparable from an implacable critique of
architectural high modernism and of the so-called International Style
(Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies), where formal criticism and
analysis (of the high-modernist transformation of the building into a
virtual sculpture, or monumental ‘duck’, as Robert Venturi puts it) are
at one with reconsiderations on the level of urbanism and of the
aesthetic institution. High modernism is thus credited with the destruc-
tion of the fabric of the traditional city and of its older neighbourhood
culture (by way of the radical disjunction of the new Utopian high-
modernist building from its surrounding context); while the prophetic
elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly
denounced in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master.
Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough stage itself as
a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi’s influential
manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas,suggests. However we may ulti-
mately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric, it has at least the merit of
drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmod-
ernisms enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older
(essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called
mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts
infused with the forms, categories and contents of that very Culture
Industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern,
from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno
*The present essay draws on lectures and on material previously published in The Anti-Aesthetic,
edited by Hal Foster, (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press 1983) and in Amerika Studien/American
Studies 29/1(1984).
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