Page 239 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE MEANING OF NEW TIMES 227

proliferation of difference, and the end of what Lyotard calls the ‘grand
narratives’ of progress, development, Enlightenment, rationality, and truth
which, until recently, were the foundations of western philosophy and
politics.
Jameson, however, argues very persuasively that postmodernism is also
‘the new cultural logic of capital’—‘the purest form of capital yet to have
emerged, a prodigious expansion into hitherto uncommodified areas’
(Jameson, 1984:78). His formulations remind us that the changing cultural
dynamic we are trying to characterize is clearly connected with the
revolutionary energy of modern capital—capital after what we used to call
its ‘highest stages’ (imperialism, organized or corporate capitalism), even
later than ‘late capitalism’.
‘Post-industrialism’, ‘post-Fordism’, ‘postmodernism’ are all different
ways of trying to characterize or explain this dramatic, even brutal,
resumption of the link between modernity and capitalism. Some theorists
argue that, though Marx may have been wrong in his predictions about
class as the motor of revolution, he was right—with a vengeance—about
capital. Its ‘global’ expansion continues, with renewed energy in the 1980s,
to transform everything in its wake, subordinating every society and social
relationship to the law of commodification and exchange value. Others
argue that, with the failures of the stalinist and social-democratic
alternatives, and the transformations and upheavals now taking place
throughout the communist world, capital has acquired a new lease of life.
Some economists argue that we are simply in the early, up-beat half of
the new Kondratiev ‘long wave’ of capitalist expansion (after which the
inevitable downturn or recession will follow). The American social critic
whom we quoted earlier, Marshall Berman, relates ‘New Times’ to ‘the
ever-expanding drastically fluctuating capitalist world markets’ (Berman,
1983:16). Others, with their eye more firmly fixed on the limits and uneven
development of capital on a global scale, emphasize more the ceaseless
rhythm of the international division of labour, redistributing poverty and
wealth, dependency and overdevelopment in new ways across the face of
the earth. One casualty of this process is the old idea of some
homogeneous ‘Third World’. Nowadays, Formosa and Taiwan are
integrated into the advanced capitalist economies, as Hong Kong is with
the new financial markets. Ethiopia or the Sudan or Bangladesh, on the
other hand, belong to a different ‘world’ altogether. It is the new forms and
dynamic of capital as a global force which is marking out these new
divisions across the globe.
However, it seems to be the case that, whichever explanation we finally
settle for, the really startling fact is that these New Times clearly belong to
a time-zone marked by the march of capital simultaneously across the
globe and through the Maginot Lines of our subjectivities.