Fredric Jameson Quotes

• It is now easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

  Fredric Jameson

  Political, World, Imagine

  54 Copy quote

• The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.

  Fredric Jameson

  Heart, Clothes, Culture

  Fredric Jameson (2009). “Valences of the Dialectic”, Verso Books

  63 Copy quote

• In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles... Contemporary or postmodernist art... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.

  Fredric Jameson

  Art, Past, Innovation

  Fredric Jameson (1998). “The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998”, p.7, Verso

  20 Copy quote

• If everything were transparent, there would be no ideologies.

  Fredric Jameson

  Would Be, Ideology, Transparent

  18 Copy quote

• It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.

  Fredric Jameson

  Thinking, Age, Firsts

  Fredric Jameson (1991). “Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, p.9, Duke University Press

  18 Copy quote

• The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.

  Fredric Jameson

  Fascination, Ends, Mindless

  Fredric Jameson (2013). “Signatures of the Visible”, p.1, Routledge

  19 Copy quote

• Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation.

  Fredric Jameson

  Reality, Ontology, Utopia

  13 Copy quote

• Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.

  Fredric Jameson

  Winning, Degrees, Machines

  21 Copy quote

• For when we talk about the spreading power and influence of globalization, arent we really referring to the spreading economic and military might of the US?

  Fredric Jameson

  Military, Economic Globalization, Might

  Fredric Jameson (2009). “Valences of the Dialectic”, Verso Books

  17 Copy quote

• So is it always nationalist to resist US globalization? The US thinks it is, and wants you to agree; and, moreover, to consider US interests as being universal ones.

  Fredric Jameson

  Thinking, Aggravation, Want

  Fredric Jameson (2009). “Valences of the Dialectic”, Verso Books

  8 Copy quote

• If it is, in reality, capitalism that is the motor force behind the destructive forms of globalization, then it must be in their capacity to neutralize or transform this particular mode of exploitation that one can best test these various forms of resistance to the West.

  Fredric Jameson

  Reality, Resistance, West

  Fredric Jameson (2009). “Valences of the Dialectic”, Verso Books

  11 Copy quote

• A further point is that, little by little, in the current universe, everything is slowly being named; nor does this have anything to do with the older Aristotelian universals in which the idea of a chair subsumes all its individual manifestations.

  Fredric Jameson

  Ideas, Doe, Littles

  7 Copy quote

• The more worrying feature of the new global corporate structures is their capacity to devastate national labour markets by transferring their operations to cheaper locations overseas.

  Fredric Jameson

  Worry, Location, Structure

  9 Copy quote

• Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.

  Fredric Jameson

  Mass Culture, Games, Reassuring

  Fredric Jameson (2009). “Valences of the Dialectic”, Verso Books

  9 Copy quote

• The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.

  Fredric Jameson

  War, Home, Writing

  Fredric Jameson (2009). “Valences of the Dialectic”, Verso Books

  20 Copy quote

• In most of the European countries - France stands out in its resistance to this particular form of American cultural imperialism - the national film industries were forced onto the defensive after the war by such binding agreements.

  Fredric Jameson

  Country, War, Agreement

  Fredric Jameson (2009). “Valences of the Dialectic”, Verso Books

  8 Copy quote

• And this fear that US models are replacing everything else now spills over from the sphere of culture into our two remaining categories: for this process is clearly, at one level, the result of economic domination - of local cultural industries closed down by American rivals.

  Fredric Jameson

  Two, Culture, Levels

  Fredric Jameson (2009). “Valences of the Dialectic”, Verso Books

  52 Copy quote

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