> verities and classes knew their place. But if, as Jameson argues,
> "postmodernism" is the cultural logic of our phase of capitalism (calling
> it late capitalism is too optimistic for me), then you can't blame the
> theorists for their concerns. As the old guy said, all that's solid melts
> into air.
Yeah, I've got this system down as "multinational capitalism" in my book, some kind of weird intermediary stage between national-monopoly capitalism and the multi-state variety, already beginning to poke its... nose? snout? tentacles?... up above the monetarist frost in the EU, like a daffodil in March. The Goddess only knows what the hell will emerge from the East Asian cauldron, but it's likely to be as carnivorous as Eurocapital is proving itself to be (a neat trick, to out-American the Americans). Possibly it's the very disorientation of space and place which freaks people out; they reject any reminder of how powerless they (and we) really are as worthless, in the same way that the possibility of the historically new is warded off by the comforting belief that nothing has really changed (which is inverted and projected onto the theorist in question: "They have nothing new to say..."). But then, as Jameson said, we've got to know the worst and get over it, and only then, when we realize how distorted, broken up, shattered and mangled the world really is all around us, that we might glimpse, however briefly, what a free society might conceivably be like.
My guess is, we'd sit around and play Quake 2 mods all day.
-- Dennis