"Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" - Fredric Jameson

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I've just begun reading Fredric Jameson's masterpiece and was struck by this excerpt (page 4):

"As for the postmodern revolt against all that [i.e. modernism], however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism—no longer scandalize anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalized and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society.

What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.

Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage. Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.

It will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it. Later I will suggest that these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project.

Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror. "

Postmodernism is surely a liberal project. Jonathan Haidt (Moral Foundations Theory) has highlighted liberal blindness to the moral dimensions of sanctity, respect for due authority and sexual/social propriety. Pussy Riot are rightly postmodernist icons.

Jameson here nails the moral selectiveness of fashionable liberal opinion.

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Jameson is undeniably brilliant - his work suffused in the culture of Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School. I'm debating whether to get his later (2005) review, "Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions".

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"This is a brilliant study of utopia and science fiction, from Thomas More to Philip K. Dick, by the master literary critic. "Archaeologies of the Future", Jameson's most substantial work since "Postmodernism", investigates the development of the Utopian form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of Utopian thinking in a post-Communist age.

The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness...alien life and alien worlds...and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more."      [From the Amazon page].