Carolina Quotes... how works that posit the end of history can offer any usable historical impulses, how works which aim to resolve all political differences can continue to be in any sense political, how texts designed to overcome the needs of the body can remain materialistic, and how visions of the "epoch of rest" (Morris) can energize and compel us to action. There are good reasons for thinking that all these questions are undecidable: which is not necessarily a bad thing provided we continue to try to decide them.
Fredric Jameson Carolinian
Source
p. xiv-xv
- work
- Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2004)
- year
- 2004
Cite this record
“... how works that posit the end of history can offer any us…” Fredric Jameson. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-33D8AAE3F8. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/33d8aae3f8
More from Fredric Jameson
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 norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existence, 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.
This matter of periodization is not , however, altogether alien to the signals given off by the expression "late capitalism," which is by now clearly identified as a kind of leftist logo which is ideologically and politically booby-trapped, so that the very act of using it constitutes tacit agreement about a whole range of essentially Marxian social and economic propositions the other side may be far from wanting to endorse. Capitalist was itself always a funny word in this sense: just using the word - otherwise a neutral enough designation for an economic social system on whose properties all sides agree - seemed to position you in a vaguely critical suspicious, if not outright socialist stance: only committed right wing ideologues and full-throated apologists also use it with the same relish.
The problem of postmodernism - how its fundamental characteristics are to be described, whether it even exists in the first place, whether the very concept is of any use, or is, on the contrary, a mystification - this problem is a t one and the same time an aesthetic and political one.