Frederic Jameson, author of Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism gave a lecture in Wellington yesterday about Representations of Globalisation.
Jameson’s project can perhaps be summed up as a critique of postmodern thought. He describes the emergence of new socio-cultural and political forms as a process of cognitive mapping, tracing the spatio-temporal explosion of globalization as an aesthetic abstraction, providing a comprehensive (though somewhat unstable) vision of how multiple contradictory representations and cultural forms co-exist through simultaneous processes.
Globalization has been well understood in terms of labour and production but underlying many of these discussions is an often unacknowledged central theme—one that Jameson himself looped and twisted around in his lecture without ever addressing directly. That is, the process of contradiction that underlies the construction and destruction of the individual in (post)modern social thought.
The primacy of the individual is one of the guiding forces of Western political philosophy but the onset of late capitalism, globalization, and the cyborg tendency in economics has schizophrenically split the individual into conflicting and often contradictory representations.
Though often mistaken, identity is surely not a substitute for individuality. This of course folds back into the long running debate about the very foundations of social theory.
In the mid-20th Century, while sociologists grappled with the dialectic of agency versus structure, the postwar American military-industrial-complex was able to transform and shape the discipline of economics, leading to the spread of dominant ideas about the logical equivalence between human agents as information processors and computers. It’s no small irony that economists seeking to understand the limits of individual rationality were in large part responsible for the aforementioned conceptual destruction of the individual, a process that can only be accelerating today with the onrush of globalization and capitalism.
If Jameson is right, the whole project of social theory is founded on the cognitive style of the terminally paranoid. The problem for economists and extant critical research cultures alike is that trying to represent the individual in a singular objective terminology is the very process that leads to the destruction of the individual. Cultural critics like Jameson who are trying to explain this problem of representation of the individual inevitably run into the problem of representation itself in their own words.
That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.
This quote from one of the most influential logical philosophers of the 19th century sums up a great deal of my distaste for present incarnations of cultural studies whose critique of Western civilisation and rationality is well meaning but suffers from the same totalising problems of reducing all logic and rationality to the form of impressions rather than instruments.
If we consider social and cultural processes and forms in terms of expressions of language rather than representations, we can shift the discussion towards more concrete concerns of human agency and power relations, and thus view the conspiracies of groups against groups and political machinations in terms of an underlying process whereby these dominant actors are using language and logic to actively shape and build realities that conform to and reinforce their goals. The paranoid tendency shifts towards explanations of behaviour rather than overtheorising structures of feeling.
Until social theorists and philosophers expand their conceptions of logic and explanations of the individual to effectively admit processes of contradiction, they’ll remain trapped in the endless aesthetic strange loop of postmodern multiplicity.