Ross Abbinnett - The Neoliberal Imagination: Politics, Aesthetics, and Economics in the Evolution of Hyper-Industrial Capitalism

It is now over 30 years since the publication of Fredric Jamesons Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Famously, he argued that the French tradition of critical thought (embodied in the work of Derrida, Baudrillard, and Lyotard) was essentially a reflection of the overheated play of images that resulted from the influence of media and communications technologies on the process of capitalization . In Jamesons analysis, the reign of contingency in social relationships, the fracturing of the self, and the destruction of collective life are conceived as practical outcomes of the media-technological expansion of global economy. The presentation of such effects in the language of deconstruction, simulation, and libidinal economy is conceived as the ideological reflex of a highly flexible mode of capitalization that constantly extends its influence over human culture and desire (Jameson, 1995: xii). According to Jameson, this relationship between capital and popular aesthetics lies at the heart of the postmodernist movement: for it is only insofar as the life of the schizoid consumer is validated by the ideology of aesthetic self-invention, that the constant expansion of markets and economic growth can be driven forward (Jameson, 1995: x). Capital and aesthetics have become so closely entwined that to study the global economy without reference to the media-technological staging of culture is to miss something fundamental about the psychical reproduction of the commodity form itself. Postmodern capitalism, in other words, is a mutual solicitation of money, aesthetics, and desire that has been engineered by the state and dominant economic corporations; it is a way of constantly re-engaging the individual with a worldview in which everything seems possible, and where the material limitations of life melt away into the realm of simulation. This idea of an overarching ideology, or worldview, through which the economic contingencies of global capitalism are mediated is the starting point of my account of the neoliberal imagination. For what Jameson sets out in Postmodernism is, in fact, the impossibility of understanding the contradictory reality of neoliberalism (its economy of stasis and mobilization, progress and reaction, life and death, past and future) without giving a coherent account of the cultural-aesthetic forms through which it reconfigures the desires of the atomistic individual (Jameson, 1995: 16).