# Quote — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

> Postmodernism theory is one of those attempts: the effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an "age,"or zeitgeist or "system" or "current situation"any longer. Postmodernism theory is then dialectical at least insofar as it has the wit to seize on that very uncertainty as its first clue and to hold to its Ariadne's thread on its way through what may not turn out to be a labyrinth at all, but a gulag or perhaps a shopping mall.

- Author: [Fredric Jameson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fredric-jameson.md)
- Book: [Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fredric-jameson/postmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fredric_Jameson#Postmodernism:_Or,_The_Cultural_Logic_of_Late_Capitalism_(1991)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/fredric-jameson/postmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism/postmodernism-theory-is-one

## More from this book

> The problem of postmodernism - how its fundamental characteristics are to be described, whether it even exists in the first place, whether the very concept is of any use, or is, on the contrary, a mystification - this problem is a t one and the same time an aesthetic and political one.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fredric-jameson/postmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism/the-problem-of-postmodernism.md)

> It would seem essential to distinguish the emergent forms of a new commercial culture - beginning with advertisements and spreading on to formal packaging of all kinds, from products to buildings, and not excluding artistic commodities such as television shows (the "logo") and best-sellers and films - from the older kinds of folk and genuinely "popular" culture which flourished when the older social classes of a peasantry and an urban artisanat still existed and which, from the mid-nineteenth century on, has gradually been colonized and extinguished by commodification and the market system.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fredric-jameson/postmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism/it-would-seem.md)

> If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fredric-jameson/postmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism/if-we-are.md)