Making Sense Out Of No-sense

This thesis Making Sense Out of No-sense is intended to defend Fredrich Jameson's theory of postmodernism, which shows a reconstruction of the Marxist theory and provides the most comprehensive and penetrating theory of postmodernism. Initially the postmodern debate centers around whether or not it is the end of modernity, and the attitudes of most people are primarily oppositional in nature. The epoch of postmodernity is represented mainly by such thinkers as Ihab Hassan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jurgen Habermas and Fredric Jameson. Among the postmodern theorists, no one can be compared with Jameson in the historical reconstruction and in his understanding of history in totality. Jameson's works expand literary analysis to include popular culture, architecture, theory, and other respects, thus they can be seen as part of the movement toward cultural studies as a replacement for canonical literary studies. This paper aspires to give an analysis of Jameson's explanation of postmodernism and his intention to uncover specific cultural objects as a possible location of a cultural politics.In conceptualizing postmodernism, Jameson pays homage to Marxism and develops the Marxist theory. Neither does he sunder the relations between culture and economy as the post-Marxists do, nor blandly reasserts the primacy of economic determination as orthodox Marxism does. He contends that Marxism is not so much a self-consistent, internally coherent philosophical proposition, but rather functions as a corrective to other forms of thought, and as the de-idealization of bourgeois philosophies and theories. As his practice is to analyze specific, local and particular cultural texts, Jameson applies the Marxist theory to these analyses. He attempts to trace the sedimented representations of an unrepresentable social totality梩o dialectically think about both the structural and the fragmentary, the systematic and the reified nature of capitalism. Jameson claims that postmodern culture explodes the distinction between high culture and mass culture, while exhibiting a "new depthlessness" that leads no interpretation;involves "pastiche" and not parody; reduces history to "historicity", to a stereotyped and cliched set of images that pander to nostalgia rather than genuine historical understanding; and ruptures narrative and subjects in a "schizophrenic" dispersal of fragments. This postmodern culture loses its critical distance and is a new "cultural dominant".In an evidently post-Marxist, post-ideological age, Jameson's unremitting commitment to restating the truths of Marxist theory has provided a welcome antidote to some of the more radical claims of poststructuralist and postmodernist theory. He has persuasively argued not just for the continuing relevance of Marxist theory, but for the centrality of such "traditional" philosophic categories as commodification, reification, class struggle, social totality and mode of production in an analysis of contemporary culture and society. With his adoption of the geographic concept of "cognitive mapping", Jameson appears to present the best of both worlds-that of the traditional Marxists with the assertion of history on their side, and that of radical contemporary theorists sensitive to the critique of orthodoxy. However, according to Marxism, the task of philosophy is to change the world through revolution, not merely to understand it. The dissatisfactions that Jameson vents are reasonable, but such dissatisfactions defy any disputation or disagreement. The world may be no more or less baneful than his perception of its bane. It has been Jameson's project to show that his fight with the forces of late capitalism offers the insight into and understanding of the meaning of material, historical reality. It is rather for us to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us-to put our theories into practice, and to adjust the theories to the vicissitude of reality.