By the late 1980s, Fredric Jameson’s attention shifted from the nineteenth-century novel and modernist experimentation to the cultural condition of his own time. In his landmark book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson proposed that postmodernism was not just another artistic style but the dominant cultural logic of an entire historical era. Modernism, he argued, had been the culture of an industrial world still haunted by depth—by alienation, authenticity, and the struggle for meaning. Postmodernism, by contrast, belongs to a global, computerized, and consumerist age in which history has flattened into spectacle and subjectivity dissolves into surface.
The World of Late Capitalism
Jameson borrowed the term late capitalism from the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel to describe the third and current stage of capitalist development: a world of multinational corporations, global markets, and digital technologies. In such a system, culture no longer stands apart from the economy; it becomes one of its central industries. Advertising, entertainment, and design are now integral to production itself. The old distinction between base and superstructure collapses. Everything — identity, politics, art — is commodified. Postmodernism, therefore, is not a rebellion against capitalism but its purest expression: the aesthetic of a system that has absorbed all opposition and turned it into style.
Pastiche and the Loss of Depth
One of Jameson’s most famous insights is his distinction between parody and pastiche. Parody, he explains, presupposes a sense of norm and deviation; it mocks its model through irony. Pastiche, on the other hand, is “blank parody”: imitation without satire, reproduction without memory. In postmodern culture, where history is consumed as nostalgia and originality is replaced by remix, pastiche becomes the dominant mode. Think of retro fashion, sampled music, or films that endlessly reference older films — these are symptoms of a culture that can only recycle the past because it has lost faith in the possibility of newness.
The Death of Affect and the End of History
In this postmodern condition, even emotion becomes stylized. Jameson speaks of the waning of affect: the replacement of genuine feeling with aestheticized mood. Everything feels like a quotation. The individual subject, once the moral center of modernism, fragments into a dispersed consumer identity, defined by taste rather than conviction. The result is what he calls the “cultural logic of late capitalism” — a system that produces infinite images but no depth, infinite choice but no meaning in what he calls depthlessness.
Cognitive Mapping as a Political Response
Yet Jameson does not merely lament this condition. He insists that the disorientation of postmodern life — its fragmented spaces and dizzying global flows — demands new representational strategies. His concept of cognitive mapping proposes that art and theory should help us orient ourselves within the totality of global capitalism, to regain a sense of collective position and historical direction. Postmodernism may signify the exhaustion of certain forms, but it also challenges us to invent new ones: ways of imagining the world system as a whole, and of reclaiming the power to act within it.
In this sense, Postmodernism is both diagnosis and call to arms. Jameson’s cultural theory reveals how deeply capitalism penetrates our imaginations — but also reminds us that critique itself can become a form of resistance, a first attempt to map the world again.
