Jameson and Miyoshi, as editors, give the reader by far one of the best text on the cultures of globalization, from media to environment, from feminism to the university, from perspectives drawn from the first world to perspectives from the third world. The work of almost all the contributors is very interesting and it will be impossible to write something on each one. However, and you must believe me, I never thought how good this book going to be. Once I read it, I could not believe its quality of contents. It is a book that anyone interested on globalization should read.

This book is one of the best book I have read. Its streat forword to get your information you need from it and also not too complecated.

My question is the form of view the problem with the globalizacion

This work by Jameson is perhaps the first serious attempt since Benjamin, to interpret the methodology of one of the more important playwrights and formal experimenters of our century. Jameson's seminars and work at Duke University are captured here in an elegant and intricate map of the Aesthetic which revolutionized theatre and, subsequently film and new media. Jameson understands how important the notion "Brecht" is outside of the man whose personal life remains controversial and open for debate. An excellent piece.

Hardt and Weeks have compiled an excellent overview of Jameson's impressive volume of work. The excerpts from Jameson will prove thought-provoking to any student or activist who wants to maintain the critical praxis of Marxism, but wants to move away from its historic economic focus. Consequently, by expanding Marx's concept of the mode of production, and through insightful analyses of history, art, film, music, and architecture Jameson provides an insight into the value of Marxism for what Wendy Brown (and others) have called these postmodern times.

Karatani Kojin, probably one of Japan's most important contemporary theoretician/philosophers gives a great introduction to Modern (with a capital M) Japanese literary theory. He clearly explains the Modernization of Japanese artistic philosophy, and illustrates each with references to some classic Japanese literature.

Of course, a book on this subject wouldn't be complete without reference to Natsume Soseki. Karatani discusses much of Soseki's literary and theoritical work, nicely putting it into perspective against the overall backdrop of Modern trends in Japanese literature.

This book should definitely be on the bookshelf of every serious student of Japanese Modern literature.

I'm surprised with the fact that nobody wrote the review on this book.
As far as I've read on structuralism, this is the best, easy, succinct overview of structuralism. yep. the part 2 of this book is on the formalism. but my major is not literature. so I have no sufficient knowledge to assess the quality of that part. but as far as I 've read Jameson's books, it won't be the second to none. It's amazing how he could manage to write in such short volume to be understandable to layman. Jamesons's theoretical position is not that sympathetic to the tenet of structuralism. his orientation is Marxist. His assessment of structuralism betrays the title, 'The prison-house of langauge. his point is not that simple or vulgar as Terry Eagleton's. Jameson tried to syntehsize the point of Marxism's political approach, hermeneutics, and formalist approach of structuralism in his master piece, 'Political Unconsciuousness'. and his evaluation of structuralism does not lose intellectual fairness.

and good on conceptual over-reaching of the dialectical drive as well.

Jameson's groundbreaking literary criticism and sociological analysis underscore the release of the sublimated repressed desires in realist representation (realism) and orientates itself toward a relax of political unconscious.It mediates the symbolic narrative and its mirrored ideological interpellations. As a Marxist, he foresees the fuse of the super/infrastructure and a utopian sense of humanism that isolates from alienation and reification.

I read "The Political Unconscious" in college and was quite dazzled with it at the time. The book is quite difficult, and I approached it after reading another work of Marxist criticism, Terry Eagleton's "Literary Theory: An Introduction," which contains a footnoted reference to Jameson. The key thing about Jameson's book is that he forgoes a formalistic close-reading approach to works of narrative literature in favor of a historicist, totalizing vision. After I read the book, I recommended it to a graduate student in philosophy, who found it a brilliant synthesis, but no more. It is true that Jameson isn't a philosophical pathbreaker, but the fact that he has read and can convincingly use the work of German Hegelian Marxists like Theodor Adorno and especially George Lukacs is quite amazing. And his readings of authors like Gissing, Hofmannsthal, and Conrad are nothing if not supple. If "Marxist criticism" seems to you the recipe for disaster (or ignorance), this entrancing book is definitely the corrective for you!

The Political Unconscious is a prodigious crical enterprise that unveils in a stimulating protean verve, the relationship between the political structure and the narrative enterprises of a variety of literary movements and/or individual authors. A model work of Marxist Criticism that sharpens our sensitivity and awareness in relation to the confines and intransigence of political schemas, for these affect and filter, construct and deflect the interpretation of artistic ouvres, while also creating the space for them within the tension provided. A treasure as is all of Jameson's criticism, his reading of Conrad's fiction is exceptional and vibrant in tone and exposition, to the extent that one rushes to re-read "Lord Jim" and plunge into a dialogue with Jameson while at it. Fredric Jameson is an artist and a cultural critic whose philosophy is Deluzian and whose literary analysis is Derridian. The Political Unconscious is a fable, an historical approach that disseminates, and disrupts the fixed political schemas in a valient and elegant attempt at rousing readers from the slumber in which we are , however unconsciously, shrouded. A very important work indeed; It is with refreshing vigour that he reminds us of the importance of reading and writing. Yet he does so without the ascendancy of negative theology, such as is done by Blanchot and Agamben, although they also deserve our respect and gratitude. It is just that Jameson's texts are not mired in a restless solitude that asserts itself as feigned indifference. As was the case with Adorno and Allon White, a passionate surge is provoked, and the tragedy of being human(and all the more one of those doomed creatures known as scholars)is evoked in a confessed ambiguity that laments and hates the fact that it loves and believes in this, our life.

The term, Postmodernism refers to the cultural and ideological configuration that is taken to have replaced or be replacing Modernity. New movements in architecture and the arts as well as social theories indicate a change from modernity to postmodernity.
Frederic Jameson, an American Marxist social theorist and the author of the book, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, draws the attentions to the differences in culture between the modern and postmodern periods. In order to explain his arguments, Jameson is specially interested in the fields of architecture, art and other cultural forms. He places the heaviest emphasis on architecture. In his article, Jameson's basic argument is that postmodernism is a dominant cultural form and that is indicative of late capitalism.
Jameson's article begins with the comparison of Van Gogh's painting to Warhol's. Jameson contrasts Van Gogh's painting with Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes," He refers to the former as the symptom of a typical "modernist" work and the latter as a prime example of a "postmodernist" one. His main assertion here is that cultures and production has experienced important changes and these changes must be accounted by even more significant changes in history . He focuses on these changes on the individual level in postmodern society and his main concern was the cultural expressions and aesthetics that is associated with the different systems of production.
Jameson suggests that postmodernism is differed from other cultural forms by its emphasis on fragmentation. He specially emphasizes on the term, fragmentation. For Jameson, the fragmentation of the subject replaces the alienation of the subject which characterized modernism. Postmodernism always deals with surface, not substance. There is no center, rather everything tends to be decentralized in postmodernism. Postmodernist works are often characterized by a lack of depth. According to Jameson, individuals are no longer anomic and anxious, because there is nothing from which an individual could cut his or her ties. The liberation from the anxiety that characterized anomie may also mean a liberation from other kind of feeling as well. For him, this is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodernism are devoid of feelings, but rather such feelings are now free-floating and impersonal.
Jameson defines the late capitalist age as a distinct period, which focuses on commodification and the recycling of old images and commodities. Jameson provides an example of Warhol's work, (Diamonds Dust Shoes) as well as Warhol himself. Jameson refers to this cultural recycling as historicism (the random cannibalization of all styles of the past.) It is an increasing primacy of the 'neo'(new) and a world was transformed into sheer images of itself. the actual organic tie of history to past events is being lost.
All of these cultural forms in art and architecture are indicative of postmodernism, late capitalism, or what Jameson calls present-day multinational capitalism. Jameson claims that there has been a radical shift in our surrounding material world and the ways, in which it works. He refers to an architectural example, a postmodern building Symbolic of the multinational world space which people function in daily. Jameson suggests that the human subjects who occupy this new space have not kept pace with the evolution which produced it. There has been a mutation in the object, yet we do not possesses the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace. Therein lies the source of our fragmentation as individuals.
Jameson also suggests that this latest mutation in space, postmodern hyperspace, (he provides the Bonaventura hotel as an example) has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. This is the symbol and analogue of our inability at present to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which people find themselves caught as individual subjects. He continues, we now live in a world where our daily life, our experiences, our cultural languages are dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, which was dominant in past eras. For Jameson, late capitalism aspires to a total space and a vastness of scale.
Jameson's argument in this article is that postmodernism is a dominant cultural form, not simply a style, and Jameson considers this dominant cultural form (postmodernism) as a sign of late capitalism. In explaining postmodernism as a dominant cultural form, he is specially concerned with the field of architecture, art and other cultural forms. Yet, as far as I have seen in this article, Jameson seems to emphases much more on the field of art and architecture than on social and political aspects of postmodernism. For example, he does not explicitly give much attention or interest to social theories such as poststructuralism, which is highly associated with postmodernism. Secondly, although the term, "Late-Capitalism" implies multinational capitalism, media-capitalism, the modern world system and postindustrial society, in the article he only talks about multinational capitalism and he neither explicitly touches nor sufficiently explains the terms like; modern world system and postindustrial society.
I would also like to commend on Jameson's style of writing, in the article, he produces sentences that sometimes can run more than half a page, I think this makes the article a little bit harder to read. Nevertheless, Jameson's article is worth to read since it stands as one of the best written books on postmodernism, besides it also offers detailed analyses of postmodernism and late capitalist age.
In conclusion, by his article -The cultural logic of late capitalism"- Jameson tries to argue that all of the characteristics of contemporary art, architecture and cultural forms reflect the structure of late capitalism as well as contemporary society - (i.e. domination by multinational corporations, the decline of national sovereignty). Moreover he argues that postmodernity is a part of the cultural logic of late capitalism and this is what brings about cultural fragmentation. Although, in this article, social, political and other aspects of postmodernism have not been emphasized as much as art, architecture, and cultural aspects of postmodern age have been, this article clearly explains the connection and relation between postmodernism as dominant cultural form and late capitalist age.

Jameson is often able to provide readings of postmodern texts more insightful than those of self-proclaimed postmodernists, and this book is well worth reading for that alone. But his Marxist/historical method is inadequate when he discusses postmodern theory and it forces him to distort and reduce the theory into his own modernist discourse.

Being an engineer, I prefer not to be carried away with my use of words, but this book just makes, channels the reader talk, think, again talk on it in the ways you are not very used to. Nevertheless, this is a good exercise in the broadest sense of the word for everybody. It should be so actively read that I can even recommend it to those who would like to lose weight.

This text was a required reading for a college course I took, and it basically summarizes why college isn't taken as seriously as it once was. This purely indulgent, pretentious work ruins any chance of an actual point with jumbled phrases such as "...neither an autonomous activity nor an automatic indicator of the economic infrastructure..." Personally, this is thoroughly unreadable and unenjoyable; it was much more of a chore to get through than it was worth. Attali needs to quit with the literary masturbation and realize that while having a large vocabulary is admirable, he should perhaps learn to "eschew obfuscation", pun fully intended.

... because it is so outrageous to be brilliantly thought provoking. Sometimes I think he is out to lunch and I am not confident that he understands everything he wrote. (or maybe the translation is not right.) Still, the mythology he presents is detailed and well developed and whether you agree with it or not, is fascinating.

There is a lot of coverage of European classical music in terms of "Who is paying whom" as well as the current recording industry. He also gets some things wrong, such as his coverage of Free Jazz (Carly Bley is black?), to which he nevertheless is sympathetic towards.

Therefore, I don't know how much you can trust his conclusions, but at the same time it gets the reader's mind to consider all sorts of new facets, and that is why this book is great.

Sometimes lazy people like to use phrases like "literary{wind} " to justify their inability to understand difficult topics, or to cover for their own, lacking, vocabularies. The foregoing review did just that. The fact is, sometimes precise thought demands precise language.

Anyway, this book provides valuable insight into the relationship of fringe art/music, and the future of society. Attali postulates that society is founded upon the idea that bad noise must be subverted. Therefore, all forces effecting social change, at some time, have been subverted. Given time though, they find their way into society by way of, here, music, and begin to cause change.

This is a very interesting and well conceived book. A great read for philosophy student and musician alike. It puts a new spin on the effect of music on culture, and the reciprocal relationship between art and society. Good stuff.

In closing, and in response to the previous reviewer, "college isn't taken as seriously as it once was" simply because the hallowed halls are clogged with students who readily dismiss works of sound thought because they don't like having to look up words or work for their own enlightenment.ENDs