WESTERN WORLD & THE INDIVIDUAL
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In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson outlines the features of contemporary capitalism: besides multinational and transnational business organisation, its characteristic features include the following:
the new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt), new forms of media interrelationship (very much including transportation systems such as containerization), computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced Third World areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences, including the crisis of traditional labor, the emergence of yuppies, and gentrification on a now-global scale. (xix)
Jameson notes what he calls the "Americanocentricism" (the word itself US-centric) of his representation when he writes, "Add to this... that there is no "late capitalism in general" but only this or that specific form of the thng, and non-North American readers will inevitably deplore the Americanocentricism of my own particular account..." (xx) For this reason, I prefer "global economies" as more inclusive of those countries that don’t "own" late capitalism, have no "specific form of the thing", but are still part of the system in supplying exploited labour forces or raw materials.
The institutions of this economy no longer surprise us, he says; they have become part of our landscape: "No one particularly notices the expansion of the state sector and bureaucratization any longer: it seems a simple, "natural" fact of life." (xviii) His choice of words recalls Roland Barthes’s right-wing myth: myth gives things "a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact." (Barthes, 1973: 143) Late capitalism, it seems, is entrenched not just economically but in our myth-system, part of "how the world works". In our minds, it corresponds perhaps to the Father archetype - Lacan’s "name of the Father", and Orwell’s "Big Brother". We may deplore its authority and rebel against it, but it is largely an accepted fact of life. (The other conscious contents with which we fill out this Father archetype, such as stern pragmatism, rather than benevolent wisdom, illustrate how we tailor each archetype to our current world-view.)
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