Fredric Jameson’s classic description of Postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism is now well over twenty years old. Jameson’s analysis is crucial for understanding late twentieth century thinking, but in the intervening years, culture has changed radically. As part of my Networked Publics fellowship at the Annenberg Center for Communication, I am preparing a series of documents about the cultural dominant that succeeds postmodernism. This material was developed over the last four years with new media architecture collaborative AUDC. Instead of a theoretical piece, I’ll open this discussion with a table outlining some empirical observations about this new condition which we can term "Network Culture," or perhaps "Transcontemporaneity."
Fredric Jameson’s classic description of Postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism is now well over twenty years old. Jameson’s analysis is crucial for understanding late twentieth century thinking, but in the intervening years, culture has changed radically. As part of my Networked Publics fellowship at the Annenberg Center for Communication, I am preparing a series of documents about the cultural dominant that succeeds postmodernism. This material was developed over the last four years with new media architecture collaborative AUDC. Instead of a theoretical piece, I’ll open this discussion with a table outlining some empirical observations about this new condition which we can term "Network Culture," or perhaps "Transcontemporaneity."
Modernism | Postmodernism | Network Culture | |
---|---|---|---|
Political Economy | |||
economy | production | service | debt |
capital | monopoly | multinational | transnational |
regime of accumulation | Fordism | Post-Fordism | Empire |
forms of consumption | scarcity | affluence | luxury and clustering |
enemy | revolutionary communism | soviet communism | islamic terrorism |
Culture | |||
settlement | suburbia | postsuburbia | exurbia |
space | abstract | hyperspace | network space |
subjectivity | autonomous | schizophrenic/fragemented | subsumed into the object |
media | mass media | niche | long tail |
dominant mode of art | rupture | critical appropriation | smooth aggregates |
authorship | author | discursive field | network |
narratives | Hegelian narratives | end of the grand narrative | neo-Hegelianism |
music | records | cassette tape, compact disc | file sharing or itunes |
portable music | transistor radio | cassette walkman | ipod |
sci-fi fantasy | metropolis | star wars | the matrix |
past reference | antiquity | 19th c.-1930s modernism | 1960s contemporaneity |
disease | TB | AIDS | Ebola, Anthrax, Avian Flu |
war | World War I, II | Vietnam | 9/11 |
computing | mainframe | personal computer | ubiquitous computing |
screen-based media | Television | GUI | Web 2.0 |
urban détournement | the dérive | skateboarding | le parkour |
Representative Figures | |||
psychology | Freud | Lacan | Zizek |
philosophy | Sartre/Heidegger/Wittgenstein | Derrida | Deleuze |
architecture | Le Corbusier/Mies | Venturi/Eisenman | Gehry/Koolhaas |