Jameson Cultural Theory Exploration To Be

The concept of '"cultural critique", to many Chinese readers, relates a lot to a famous American Marxist Fredric Jameson. In a board sense of "cultural texts', culture has always acted as the central role of Jameson's theories.In this dissertation, we select three dimensions of language, ideology and postmodernism to investigate the main thoughts of Jameson's theory of culture. First of all, we discuss the relationship between culture and language in the perspective ofJameson. That is, there is the implicit logic of "thoughts------the modes of thoughts?-the modes of language" in Jameson's cultural theory. So, here the language is not the language in general, but refers to the linguistic modes proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, especially binary oppositions such as diachronic versus synchronic etc. More important, Jameson studied the Russian formalism and French structuralism based on the linguistic modes. From such a kind of study, Jameson's conclusions have two aspects as follow. On the one hand, the linguistic modes are really very helpful to our analyss and research of cultural texts. We can say that it is the modes of language and especially the famous French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser's thoughts that have enlightened Jameson on his own idea. That is to say, the metaphor of "base and superstructure" advanced by Karl Marx is the most essential "problematic'" for our cultural discussions. On the other hand, however, these linguistic modes have some disadvantages and deficiency, namely, they were immersed in the formalist "prison" and ignored the historical contents of cultural texts.In fact, as to Jameson, ideology is the deep meanings of the language. Therefore, our cultural perspective should be turned from language into ideology to open the "prison" of language. Here, Marxism becomes an "untranscendable horizon" of semantics. Above all, we introduce Jameson's various descriptions and analyses of ideology and seven basic ideological modes. Then, we review Jameson's well-known concept "the political unconscious" which origins from Sigmund Freud. Jameson's idea of unconscious means it has been turned from psychic analyses to political interpretation. Furthermore, this idea means our reading of cultural texts should be political and our interpretation of these texts also are involved in the invisible ideologies. In Jameson's view, only Marxism can transcend the other interpretive modes by the leading code of "modes of production". Thus, Jameson put these categories of the whole society as culture, ideology and so on into the concrete modes of production to understand them. Through this kind of understanding, Jameson alsoput forward his issues of "cultural revolution" and cultural intellectuals.The further investigation of culture and ideology based on modes of production is not only involved with new fields as architecture but also followed to open Jameson' views of postmodernism. If we can agree to the fact that Jameson's spearhead of cultural critique always points to his "our age", then actually this "age' in Jameson's speaking means "the late capitalism" which refers directly to the contemporary American society Jameson himself is living in. And it is in this sense that Jameson names his postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism". In order to understand the above clearly, first we try to understand Jameson's multi-dimensional theory of postmodernism in a board theoretical background. And from this background we can find that Jameson's cultural theory of postmodernism is on the basis of the theory of the "stages" of capitalism. So, Jameson's idea of "postmodernism" corresponds to the stage of late capitalism. In addition, Jameson expounds the cultural logic of late capitalism and particularizes several typical characters of this logic. And his special analyses about postmodern cultural texts of video and spatial arts as well have embodied these postmodern characters vividly and concretely,...