Pastiche and Historicity: How Postmodernism is the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Fredric Jameson says that Postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism; the postmodern elements of pastiche and historicity, in particular, support this claim. Pastiche is the "blank parody" of postmodern literature. Blank because the self-reflexivity and intertextuality of the postmodern era no longer seems tied to historical content. It is a jumble of parodies of different styles and voices reflecting the shift from the universalizing meta-narrative to the multiplicity of micro-narratives. Pastiche is a literary technique that also reproduces a political phenomenon--that of micro-politics. Jameson in his book, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, explains “if the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today -- are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm” (Postmodernism 18). Literature and the society it springs from is still dominated and determined by capitalist ideology but as capitalism has evolved and progressed so too has literary theory, moving from modernism to postmodernism. Jameson continues, “Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself (18). Jameson criticizes the omnipresence of pastiche, “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general what Henri Lefebvre has called the increasing primacy of the ‘neo.’” (18). However he finds it an appropriate method in some respects, compatible with today’s culture of late capitalism: “with a whole historically original consumers' appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for pseudoevents and ‘spectacles’” (18). Jameson again connects the evolution in theory to the analogous shift in economics--“Appropriately enough, the culture of the simulacrum comes to life in a society where exchange value has been Generalized to the point at which the very memory of use value is effaced” (18). (Simulacrum is a reference to Plato’s concept of an identical copy for which no original has ever existed).
In examining postmodern historicity, Jameson looks back to “the pain of a properly modernist nostalgia with a past beyond all but aesthetic retrieval” and compares to the “so-called nostalgia” of post-modernism that reminisces of the past because it is a socially and commercially en-vogue thing to do. According to Jameson, “Nostalgia films restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a collective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation....Faced with these ultimate objects -- our social, historical, and existential present, and the past as "referent" -- the incompatibility of a postmodernist "nostalgia" art language with genuine historicity becomes dramatically apparent” (18). Rather than genuine historicity, a representation relating to actual historical content, postmodern art seems more concerned with conveying “pastness…through stylistic connotation” (18). Jameson terms this trend of aiming for an ideological conception of the past through the glossy look of an image or the use of fashion representative of an era to recall the era rather than actual historical content “a crisis in historicity” (18). The literary elements of pastiche and historicity that characterize postmodern work in particular epitomize Fredric Jameson’s claim that Postmodernism is the logic of late capitalism

Works Cited
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.