Essay on Fredric Jameson

On philosophy, it bred a new era of philosophers that may have had a different view of the world and the changes that were currently taking effect, compared to the old generation philosophers. They however had or operated on the same principles and sought to explain and give meaning to the changes that were being witnessed. Fredric Jameson and Marxism Fredric Jameson is an American philosopher that was born on April 14, 1934. He is best known for analyzing the contemporary cultural trends of the postmodern world. He greatly focused on postmodernity and capitalism. In his view, there was just a new form of well-organized corporate capitalism due to the colonization of the cultural sphere, which had maintained part autonomy with the preceding modern era.

Jameson proceeds to pinpoint a number of signs that he associates with the postmodern condition from his economic base of thinking about postmodernity. Signs of Postmoderninity The weakening of historicity Jameson argues that the American history we learn from schoolbooks and classes no longer appears to have any organic relationship to the lived experience of the current, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life. He suggests that we suffer from some sort of historical deafness and that the postmodernist theories are just a weak and desperate attempt to make sense of the new era but in a way that refuses to acknowledge the traditional forms of understanding modernity or more specifically postmodernity. He sees postmodernity as a new or just another system modification of capitalism rather than some sort of new social order.

New Technology Marked by the better and faster computer and communication systems, and a new digital culture. Jameson sees new technology as a path to a new world economic system. However, such technologies are more concerned with reproduction rather than with the industrial production of material goods. Jameson versus Marx As stated earlier, Jameson based his work on Marxism, and the work of Karl Marx on capitalism. Jameson, on his work on ‘late capitalism’ he views it as a pervasive condition of postmodernism and according to him, this condition seeks to create both economic and cultural structures. To him the real world does not exist but is actively created depending on how we act in and towards the world. This is in sharp contrast with the suggestions of Jameson who thinks that people have dissociated from the real world and are living in an imitation of reality.