Horst & Pynchon & late capital

[Indel Icate]

There is no cultural logic of late capitalism.  Are you, fully, braindead?

Are you fully, utterly, ...gone?

The logic?


On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 4:55 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>wrote:

> Pynchon is an artist. His business is to produce beautiful books and sells
> them. He is married to a famous book agent, so the family is in the
> business of producing and publishing and marketing fiction and poetry and
> so on. It seems a good marriage, a successful business. But as artist, as
> agent of things beautiful, the family has to live in the wold we live in
> where aesthetic production is fully integrated into commodity production
> generally: "the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever
> more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater
> rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural
> function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation"
> (Jameson).
>
> Jameson gos on to say:
>
> Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of
> institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and
> grants to museums and other forms of patronage. Of all the arts,
> architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in
> the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated
> relationship. It will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary
> flowering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of
> multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly
> contemporaneous with it. Later I will suggest that these two new phenomena
> have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple
> one-to-one financing of this or that individual project. Yet this is the
> point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this
> whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and
> superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and
> economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout
> class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and
> terror.
>
> *Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism*
>
> This famous excerpt from Jameson seems to fit our recent discussion.
>
> I can see how Windust and Maxine are entangled in postmodern late
> capitalism, in  Neo-Liberalism and its co-dependent late late Leftism, and
> Maxine falls into the architectural themes, the towers, but Pynchon and
> Horst are Flatirons, and remain, as much as that is possible, producers of
> raw and rare commodities.  While both move closer to the towers, to the
> chip makers and whiz kids of science tech and their murdering allies, both
> slothfully withdraw, preferring the comic mask and the humor of boyz.
>
>
>
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