Fredric Jameson
American literary and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) is one of the key
theorists of postmodernism. Jameson addresses the question of cultural theory from the
perspective of Marxism and the New Left, and under the strong influences of Adorno and
Lukacs. He is concerned with the possibility for effective social action in transforming
Western societies, against the backdrop of a seemingly all-consuming capitalism.
Jameson looks to culture both as a means of understanding the postmodern condition,
and as a potential mechanism to mediate against that condition. For Jameson the
contemporary age is dominated by capitalism. There is no space outside exchange
society. Within postmodern culture everything is immediately coopted into commodities
and images. Jameson focuses on aesthetics as a response to this condition. What is
required is a cognitively viable aesthetics that reinserts the individual in the community.
Architecture assumes a pivotal role in Jameson’s thought. For it is here that
‘modifications in the aesthetic production are most dramatically visible’. Within the
postmodern urban environment, Jameson is concerned to develop a viable form of
cognitive mapping to resist the otherwise totally homogenizing space of global multi-
nationalism. For Jameson the problem of today is how to live in postmodern space
productively, and how to develop a new art to deal with new forms of being.
In the very opening chapter of his highly influential work, Postmodernism, or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson undertakes an analysis of the Bonaventure
Hotel in Los Angeles—a commercial development overlooked by mainstream
architectural discourse. Several major themes of Jameson’s project come together here in
what proved to be a seminal account, which spawned many responses, including one by
Baudrillard also included in this volume. The mirror glass exterior embodies the glazed
superficiality of the commodity in late capitalism, while the disorientating interior
exemplifies problems of cognitive mapping in such an environment.
Jameson further pursues the theme of the all-consuming nature of multinational
capitalism in ‘The Constraints of Postmodernism’, a critique of Kenneth Frampton’s
‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’, itself a canonical work of architectural theory. In a
study of sustained rigour and penetrating insight, Jameson challenges Frampton on a
number of issues, and ends with the provocative suggestion that the call for ‘difference’
which underpins Frampton’s position might itself be a product of the very multi-national
capitalism that it attempts to oppose.
Jameson pursues similar themes in ‘Is Space Political?’, where he argues that calls for
the ‘chaotic’ and ‘organic’ can be seen as the products of neo-Fordist, postmodern
marketing. He challenges many accepted tenets within architecture, highlighting the
reactionary utopianism of phenomenology and questioning the capacity for architecture
to be ‘critical’. Jameson argues that political ‘content’ in architecture, no less than in art,
is merely allegorical. Architecture in itself is inert. The political may be read as apolitical,
while that which is decorative may be rewritten as political ‘with energetic
interpretation’.