I finished Jameson today, running through the big first portion and several other chapters of Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, as well as a skim of the conclusion.
Jameson offers some useful (and occasionally familiar) ideas. One big point is that reification — the conversion of social relations into things — has become second nature to us. This has been a theme of The Baffler since its very first issue (as manifested in the tongue-in-cheek slogan, “Commodify your dissent!”), but it’s also something I need to keep in mind if I’m going to be asking first-year writing students about social class. Other familiar stuff: I really liked the definition of postmodernism as “the consumption of sheer commodification as process” (x).
Jameson also helpfully glosses Marx’s thesis that the market generates its own ideology of freedom and equality (260), with the necessary corollary being that different stages and forms of capitalism will generate their own particular ideologies. Furthermore, these ideologies, “these concepts and values are real and objective, organically generated by the market system itself, and dialectically are indissolubly linked to it” (261). Important stuff here, and while Resnick and Wolff foregrounded the relation in their discussion of capitalism (as well as the point that neoclassical economists would not accept such a relation due to their beliefs that causality is unidirectional), they didn’t seem to spend much time explicitly taking into account how ideologies other than those of neoclassical economists might get generated.
Jameson calls computers “machines of reproduction rather than production” (37) and the word reproduction seems clearly meant in somewhat the same sense as in the title of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay. But part of the implication of Jameson’s argument seems to be that reproduction, particularly in the form of pastiche (Benjamin once remarked that he wanted to compose an essay entirely out of other peoples’ words: what would writing teachers say about such a text?), is actually a form of cultural production, and so the distinction doesn’t quite hold up, especially since Jameson’s talking about the increasing overlap between the economic and cultural spheres.
Most amazing to me, though, and most helpful in my thoughts about what a computer might be other than a tool, is Jameson’s argument that “The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself” (38). Jameson is suggesting that the figure of the computer itself serves as a sort of metonymic representation of global capital, and so functions not just as a device that helps that capital to circulate, but as a circulating part and representation of capital.
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