Capital, Class & Technology in Contemporary American Culture: Projecting Post-Fordism

by Nick Heffernan

Overview

In the tradition of Mike Davis and Fredric Jameson, Nick Heffernan engages in a series of meditations on capital, class and technology in contemporary America. He turns to the stories we generate and tell ourselves – via fiction, film journalism, theory – to see how change is registered. By investigating a variety of texts, he observes how structural change affects the way people organise their lives economically, socially and culturally. Case studies include Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, William Gibson’s cyberspace trilogy, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World.Using the links between narrative cultural forms and the process of historical understanding, he brings together debates that have so far been conducted largely within the separate domains of political economy, social theory and cultural criticism to provide a compelling analysis of contemporary cultural change. By relocating postmodernism in the context of changing modes of capitalism, Heffernan puts the question of class and class agency back at the centre of the critical agenda.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745311043
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	12/20/2000
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Nick Heffernan teaches American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University College Northampton.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Postmodernism and Late Capitalism

The usefulness of the terms postmodernism and postmodernity as descriptions of cultural change consists in their remarkably broad range of reference. Applied to cultural and aesthetic styles, to philosophical and political positions, as well as to modes of social and economic organisation, these terms both suggest and demand that change in any one of these areas be understood in relation to the others. Among theorists of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson has been the most insistent on the necessity of taking such a holistic or totalising view of the question. For Jameson postmodernism is much more than 'a purely cultural affair'; the question must refer to the whole mode of production and to the possibilities for understanding the nature of contemporary capitalism. Thus 'every position on postmodernism in culture – whether apologia or stigmatisation – is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today' (Jameson, 1991: p. 3, author's emphasis).

However, as Jameson's critics have not been slow to point out, the developed account of contemporary capitalism implicitly demanded by his framing of the postmodernism question is largely absent from his writing on the subject. The burden of explanation in this area falls upon Ernest Mandel's landmark work of modern Marxist political economy, Late Capitalism (first published in German in 1972), which Jameson uses to underpin his more culturalist description of postmodernism. To employ a stock metaphor of Marxist social theory, Mandel's work provides a base upon which Jameson's more 'superstructural' reading of contemporary history rests. In many respects, then, the relationship between the emergence of what Jameson calls a new 'cultural dominant' out of the ruins of aesthetic high modernism on the one hand and the structural transformation of Western capitalism since 1940 described by Mandel on the other is left largely untheorised. I want to begin by exploring this gap with a view to sketching a provisional economic–historical framework in which questions about some of the social, cultural and political changes implied by postmodernism might be better situated.

Periodisation and the 'Break'

As we saw in the introduction, Jameson explicitly formulates his notion of postmodernism in terms of an historically identifiable break situated around 1960. Not only does this break inaugurate a new mode of cultural production brought about by a massive shift in the relationship between economic 'base' and socio-cultural 'superstructure' which calls that traditional Marxian dualism into question, it also signifies the onset of 'a whole new type of society' (Jameson, 1991: p. 3). Rejecting both conservative and liberal narratives of the end of modernity which terminate in the arrival of a pluralistic, post-industrial information society which is no longer consonant with Marx's theory of the laws of capitalist development and hence immune to its critique, Jameson invokes Mandel's Late Capitalism as the only attempt within the Marxist tradition both to accept the 'historic originality' of this new society and to seek to account for it in terms of Marx's founding theory of the historical development of the capitalist mode of production.

One question that Jameson's use of Mandel raises is: How far does his notion of the postmodern break accord with Mandel's version of the development of post-1940 capitalism? To what extent do Jameson's cultural and Mandel's economic logics mesh? While this is not a matter of seeking out neat or mechanical correspondences between the two accounts, the difficulty of establishing a convincing 'fit' between postmodernism and late capitalism has been forcefully raised in objection to certain aspects of Jameson's thesis and offers a useful way into the gap referred to above.

In one of the earliest challenges to Jameson on his own ground (that is, in terms of a broadly Marxist historical understanding of the political economy of the United States and Western Europe since the Second World War), Mike Davis proposed that any break in Mandel's account of late capitalism should be located around the point of the economic slump of 1973–4 and not, as Jameson would have it, in the boom years of the late 1950s or early 1960s. Thus the 1960s cannot be characterised as the 'opening of a new epoch' in which the new cultural dominant of postmodernism expresses the arrival of 'third stage' capitalism in its highest and purest incarnation. Rather, for Davis, the 1960s is a 'fin-de-siècle decade' marking the summit of the postwar economic boom and still dominated by the functional aesthetic of high modernism, particularly in the realm of architecture which Jameson himself takes to be the key indicator of cultural–economic shifts (Davis, 1985: pp. 107–8).

Davis's objection is not simply that Jameson has misread Mandel and therefore misunderstood the meaning of the 1960s, but that his conflation of postmodernism with the onset of a purer, fully global stage of capitalism concedes too much. In 'subsuming' and 'homogenising' the disparate and contradictory features of contemporary culture under the master concept of postmodernism, Jameson virtually announces the triumph of capitalism and effectively abandons the possibility of meaningful agency for social and political change. For Davis, the transformation in sensibility that postmodernism undoubtedly represents can better be read as a symptom of the crisis of contemporary capitalism, specific to the period following the slump of 1973–4, and expressive of the inherent instability and 'morbidity' of the structures of capitalist accumulation, rather than of their unassailable expansion. Thus the architectural postmodernism of the late 1970s and 1980s should be read as nothing more than the crystallisation of the limited zeitgeist of Reaganomics, the playfully commodified fantasy of its forms being the objective correlative of the speculative adventurism then accompanying the decline of productive capital investment in the face of a 'hypertrophic expansion of the financial services sector' (Davis, 1985: pp. 107, 109).

While this rush of capitals from the productive to the speculative sphere is a symptom of the instability of capitalist accumulation in the United States and globally since the oil crisis and slump of the mid-1970s, Davis warned that this should give little cause for political optimism on the left as the American labour movement occupied an increasingly enfeebled position within this process. Consequently, the restructuring of the relations of production that has accompanied this massive disinvestment in the manufacturing base of American capitalism has so far been largely carried out on capital's terms. This includes, Davis suggested, a partial regression to precapitalist models of productive relations. Postmodernism therefore signifies 'not some new stage in capitalist production, but a return to a sort of primitive accumulation' (the return of domestic production and sweatshop conditions, for example) based on the super-exploitation of a new urban proletariat (Davis, 1985: p. 110). This group finds itself inhabiting an increasingly class-polarised and degraded cityscape, the abandonment of modernist ideals of urban reform being another key component in Davis's notion of the postmodern condition, one that he subsequently explored in his brilliant study of Los Angeles, City of Quartz (1989).

Davis's emphasis on the human costs of restructuring and his situating of postmodernism within a debate about the importance of crises within the capitalist accumulation process counterbalances the tendency of Jameson's writing to suggest an inexorably smooth extension of capitalist commodity relations without either resistance or highly differentiated and locally specific effects. The notion of crisis is particularly important and will be returned to below. However, in other respects, Davis's reading of the formal significance of postmodernism, its architecture in particular, out-Jamesons Jameson. The claim that such buildings as Philip Johnson's AT&T in New York enact, in their apotheosis of the commodity form, the final eclipse of both use value and the principles of capitalist productivism (Davis, 1985: p. 108) takes Jameson's argument about commodification to levels that even post-Marxist proponents of 'hyperreality' such as Jean Baudrillard might not shrink from endorsing. In resisting Jameson's epochal reading of postmodernism for conceding too much to the spontaneous coherence of capitalism, Davis, despite a concern to confine postmodernism to the play of purely conjunctural forces, produces in fact an epochal reading of his own in which deeper shifts in the relations of production appear to be leading in pre- and post-capitalist directions simultaneously.

I dwell on this debate between two of the most prominent Marxist critics currently engaged in the attempt to describe and theorise the nature of contemporary social and cultural change to illustrate the fact that the terms of the relationship between a theory of postmodernism and postmodernity and a posited new stage of capitalism are of some political importance and by no means easily resolved. In order to pursue more effectively the implications of this debate it is necessary to return to the ground of the disagreement between Jameson and Davis, Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism, and examine its claims about the distinctive nature of post-Second World War economy and society in the West.

Late Capitalism: A New Stage of Capital?

Late Capitalism is a massively ambitious attempt to provide the first integrated historical and theoretical account of the development of the capitalist mode of production since Marx's Capital itself. Its focus is on twentieth-century capitalism and on the period since 1940 in particular. Mandel's purpose is to demonstrate that, despite the huge scope and rapid pace of change which revolutionised the organisation of social and economic life in that century, the history of the development of capitalism in that period nevertheless conforms to the fundamental laws of motion of this mode of production as outlined by Marx.

Mandel is therefore keen to emphasise the continued validity of Marxism for any analysis and understanding of the contemporary period. In this sense, he claims, 'the era of late capitalism is not a new epoch of capitalist development. It is merely a further development of the monopoly capitalist epoch' (Mandel, 1978: p. 9). However, in practice Mandel applies a tripartite schema to the history of the capitalist mode of production which implies the existence of distinct stages of capitalist development, of which late capitalism, dating roughly from 1940, is the third and latest. (The previous two are the stage of 'freely competitive capitalism' described by Marx, and the age of 'classical imperialism' proposed by Lenin.) Moreover, his characterisation of capitalism as a form based on 'an inherent tendency towards ruptures', and his application of Soviet economist N. D. Kondratieff's theory of 'long waves' of capitalist development to this tendency, suggests an historical dynamic dominated by breaks, crises and structural transformations (Mandel, 1978: p. 27). As the theory of long waves is central to Mandel's definition and periodisation of late capitalism as a distinct phase of the capitalist mode of production, and therefore to the historical reading of the postmodern break, I will focus first on this aspect of his work.

According to Marx, the course of capitalist accumulation is cyclical. Competition between independent firms, far from guaranteeing a smooth and even pace of accumulation, allows only a pattern of successive expansions and contractions of production. A period of expansion in which the conditions for capitalist production are propitious (availability of relatively cheap labour power and raw materials, effective technologies, and hungry markets are among the conditions required here) will typically lead to a crisis of overproduction in which it becomes increasingly difficult for firms to realise (that is, transform into money payment and, hence, profit) the surplus value embodied in their commodities by selling them on the market. Frequently, such a crisis is expressed in terms of a disequilibrium between what Marx defined as the two fundamental sites of capitalist production: Department I (the sphere of production of capital goods or means of production), and Department II (the sphere of production of wage goods or means of consumption).

The feverish intensity of production in both departments, driven by the prospect of high profits and the competitive urge to beggar-thy-neighbour, comes to outstrip the capacity of the market to absorb and socially validate this production. The capitalists of Department II, unable to shift their commodities, reduce output. They decrease their demand for new means of production from the capitalists of Department I who, however, are still geared to producing for an expanding market. A crisis of overproduction ensues in which the limits of capitalist production are expressed in terms of mounting inventories of unsold capital goods and commodities. The period of expansion peaks and becomes a downward spiral as the prospects for profitable investment of already accumulated capital become increasingly bleak. The crisis of overproduction becomes a crisis of overaccumulation when a falling rate of profit signals that the mass of accumulated capital cannot be valorised or reproduce itself on an expanded scale. Acceleration in the tempo of accumulation gives way to deceleration and underinvestment, and the only way the process can be turned around (given that capitalist production takes place exclusively for profitable exchange rather than for use or need) is for a massive devaluation of overaccumulated capitals to occur, in order that the decks may be cleared and the rate of profit revitalised.

Traditionally, it has been the function of the slump or recession (in the absence of war and/or the rapid penetration of capital into hitherto inaccessible regions or spheres) to provide this crucial cleansing service. Marx saw this process occurring every seven to ten years, and the validity of the classical industrial or business cycle as he described it is generally accepted even by orthodox economists (hence the obsession of free-marketeers and Keynesians alike with the problem of equilibrium). Mandel's innovation, however, is to situate the classical cycle within an expanded cyclical framework of accumulation which conforms roughly to a 50-year span. For Mandel, this is 'no metaphysical superimposition' but an historically verifiable pattern which, he claims, can be traced by observing the long-term fluctuations of the rate of profit and the corresponding transformations in the rhythms of capital accumulation: 'The history of capitalism on the international plane thus appears not only as a succession of cyclical movements every seven to ten years, but also as a succession of longer periods, of approximately fifty years, of which we have experienced four up till now' (Mandel, 1978: p. 120).

While denying that there is any 'built-in periodicity' to his notion of the long wave, Mandel argues that, over seven- to ten-year cycles, repeated periods of underinvestment will set free a large pool of idle (in productive terms) capital – what he calls a 'historical reserve fund of capital' – which at a certain point will be injected into the production process on such a scale as to provide for a fundamental renewal of productive technology. Such a 'revolution in technology as a whole' stands at the beginning and sets the terms of each new long wave of accumulation, and the vast infusion of capital which precipitates it is triggered by 'a sudden increase in the rate of profit' (Mandel, 1978: p. 114, author's emphasis). Among the factors likely to cause such an increase are: a rapid fall in the cost of the elements of production; a massive penetration of capital into regions and spheres previously beyond its reach; an abbreviation of the turnover time of capital (that is, the period from initial investment to the realisation of money profits on that investment) due to new methods of distribution and marketing; and, perhaps most importantly, a radical defeat of the working class which drastically improves the conditions for the exploitation of labour power and the extraction of surplus value.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1. Late Capitalism, Fordism, Post-Fordism
1. Postmodernism and Late Capitalism
2. Class and Consensus, Ideology and Technology

Part 2. Putting 'IT' to Work: Post-Fordism, Information Technology and the Eclipse of Production
3. Making 'IT': The Soul of a New Machine
4. Faking 'IT': True Stories
5. Playing with 'IT': Microserfs

Part 3. Impotence and Omnipotence: The Cybernetic Discourse of Capitalism
6. Cybernetics, Systems Theory and the End of Ideology
7. Imaginary Resolutions: William Gibson's Cyberspace Trilogy
8. Artificial Intelligence and Class Consciousness: Blade Runner

Part 4. Capital, Class, Cosmopolitanism
9. Fordism, Post-Fordism and the Production of World Space
10. National Allegory and the Romance of Uneven Development: The Names
11. Blindness and Insight in the Global System: Until the End of the World

Conclusion: Questioning Fordism and Post-Fordism
Notes
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Heffernan explores the ways in which narratives generated through literary fiction, film, journalism, and social and cultural theory register and represent contemporary social and cultural shape. He draws on and impressive breadth of texts. This compelling and thought-provoking book is highly recommended for graduate students and above with interests in postmodernism and contemporary cultural, class, and technology studies.

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