DJ Freddy J Spins the Phat Trax

[Brad DeLong]

>Fred started off with a precis
>of his concept of postmodernism, as the cultural logic of multinational
>capitalism, then turned to globalization, "the latest face of
>postmodernity", as he called it, and the point where "culture has become
>the economic and the economy has become the cultural". This led to a segue
>on synchrony and diachrony and some of the basic terms of Marxist
>analysis, going back to the trope of identity vs. difference (a nod in the
>direction of Adorno, though he didn't actually say non-identity). Then he
>postdated this apposition in terms of the cybernetic technologies of the
>present (the productive forces) and global finance capital (relations of
>production). This then  led to a series of intriguing observations on
>modernism and time, specifically, the mutations of lived experience, how
>capitalism grinds down, pulverizes and colonizes time, transforming the
>temporal into visual networks, lived time into labor-time.
>
>Nothing terribly new, you'd think. But Fred had a dialectical trick up his
>sleeve: after critiquing the "ideologies of communication" endemic to late
>capitalism, he paused and invoked the "negativity of thought" (Adorno
>again, the ghost from the Eurostate's future, as it were) and quoted
>Hegel's comment that the object is not identical to its concept (a.k.a.
>non-identity). He then tied this back to Sartre, and the existential
>experience of time -- a profound moment of self-critique, really, because
>this is where he started his career as a dialectician. After demolishing
>Deleuze' notion of virtuality and the postmodern fetishization of the body
>faster than Serious Sam taking out a scorpion, he ended with an analysis
>of "Speed", tying in all the above categories, outlining the thing as an
>allegory of the Bubble subject (the kinetic energies of modernism accessed
>by the new information networks, which are the story-within-the-story of
>the flick).
>
>DJ Freddy J delivered, Seattle to Cornell, coast to coast. Yow!
>
>-- Dennis

You do realize that I understand barely a word of the above? I mean, 
I don't understand in what sense "postmodernism is the cultural logic 
of multinational capitalism." And I also do not understand how 
"globalization"--which started in a serious way with the steamship 
and the telegraph--is merely one face of "postmodernity." And 
thereafter my confusion deepens...

Brad DeLong