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Contemporary Cultural Theory

impressive in his writing on postmodernism. Here he applies
a double hermeneutic of his own to postmodernism, understood
as something very close to an ideologeme. Jameson posited a
historical periodisation, deriving in part from Ernest Mandel’s
Late Capitalism (Mandel, 1975), according to which there were
three main stages in the history of capitalism, each accompanied
by a characteristic ‘cultural dominant’: aesthetic realism was the
cultural dominant of nineteenth-century ‘market capitalism’,
modernism of early twentieth-century ‘monopoly capitalism’ and
postmodernism of contemporary multinational ‘late capitalism’
(Jameson, 1991, pp. 35–6). For Jameson, class consciousness
presupposed the ‘narrative figurability’ of class inequalities, their
representability ‘in tangible form’ (Jameson, 1992, pp. 37–8). But
the capacity for such representation becomes progressively atten-
uated, he would conclude, as monopoly capitalism evolved into
global capitalism, modernism into postmodernism: ‘In our own
postmodern world there is no longer a bourgeois or class-specific
culture . . . but rather a system-specific phenomenon: the various
forms which reification and commodification and the corporate
standardizations of media society imprint on human subjectiv-
ity and existential experience’ (Jameson, 1992a, p. 131).
If late capitalism is ‘the purest form of capital yet to have
emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncom-
modified areas’ (Jameson, 1991, p. 36), then art itself is one of these
hitherto largely uncommodified areas, postmodernism the form
of its commodification. ‘What has happened’, Jameson wrote, ‘is
that aesthetic production... has become integrated into commod-
ity production generally’ (p. 4). Postmodernism is thus inherently
a commodity culture, distinguishable from earlier modernisms
as much by its ‘resonant affirmation...of the market’ as by any
distinctive style (p. 305). Hence its aesthetic populism: one of its
most fundamental features, he argued, is an ‘effacement...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
ideologues of the Modern’. Postmodernist art is thus ‘fascinated
by this whole “degraded” landscape of schlock and kitsch, of

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