Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism

Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism

Language: English

Pages: 248

ISBN: 0804781451

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Post-Postmodernism begins with a simple premise: we no longer live in the world of "postmodernism," famously dubbed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" by Fredric Jameson in 1984. Far from charting any simple move "beyond" postmodernism since the 1980s, though, this book argues that we've experienced an intensification of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life. If "fragmentation" was the preferred watchword of postmodern America, "intensification" is the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary era.

Post-Postmodernism surveys a wide variety of cultural texts in pursuing its analyses—everything from the classic rock of Black Sabbath to the post-Marxism of Antonio Negri, from considerations of the corporate university to the fare at the cineplex, from reading experimental literature to gambling in Las Vegas, from Badiou to the undergraduate classroom. Insofar as cultural realms of all kinds have increasingly been overcoded by the languages and practices of economics, Nealon aims to construct a genealogy of the American present, and to build a vocabulary for understanding the relations between economic production and cultural production today—when American-style capitalism, despite its recent battering, seems nowhere near the point of obsolescence. Post-postmodern capitalism is seldom late but always just in time. As such, it requires an updated conceptual vocabulary for diagnosing and responding to our changed situation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

hang on to the moniker “post-postmodernism” might be that it has its own Wikipedia entry and that the term has been popping up everywhere from the New York Times to literary criticism journals, though it has been used in architectural circles for at least fifteen years.1 Indeed, postmodernism has seemingly been lingering at death’s door, refusing to pass definitively, for quite some time: John McGowan, author of Postmodernism and Its Critics (1991), jokingly suggested to me in the early 1990s

function as a Spartacus (1960) for the new millennium; and like Stanley Kubrick’s film, Scott’s Gladiator offers—among other things—a historical allegory by which we might come to understand, and maybe even resist, the sinister powers of our own day. The most obvious target of Kubrick’s film—and the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo’s script— was the anticommunist hysteria of 1950s America. The (in)famous scene where dozens, then hundreds, of slaves stand up and pronounce “I am Spartacus!” functions as a

University    produce and sell, how many books you publish, or degrees you grant, but the excellence of those widgets, publications, degree candidates—hence, the cash value of cultural theorists, who are flexibly specialized symbolic analysts par excellence. University degrees have long derived their value from brand-name recognition, or what Pierre Bourdieu more portentously calls “symbolic capital” (1987). Decades before ad agencies and corporate governance gurus became obsessed by building

working without some sense of linguistic meaning, if only negatively; so perhaps, as I suggest throughout, the practice of something like Conceptual Writing is less “other than   t h e o r y g o i n g f o r w a r d postmodern” (wholly foreign to it or simply beyond it) than it is postpostmodern—intensifying certain strains within postmodernism in order to render it not so much a “new” postmodernism, but a kind of intense, hyper-postmodernism of positive usage—a power of the false not derived

modes of creative effort (“the text itself” and “close reading”) as the skeleton keys to a “make it new” modernism. In short, New Criticism portends our own era of neoliberal biopower, wherein a mode of consumption (reading) becomes intensified to the point where it becomes a mode of production (interpretation). Look again at the theoretical texts of New Criticism: while their native historical moment (amid the 1940s–60s manufacturing boom in the US) is positively soaking in the postwar

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