Autumn 1997
Volume 24, Number 1

For the problem of abstraction--of which this one of finance capital is a part--must also be grasped in its cultural expressions. Real abstractions in an older period-the effects of money and number in the big cities of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism the very phenomena analyzed by Hilferding and culturally diagnosed by Georg Simmel in his pathbreaking essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life"--had as one significant offshoot the emergence of what we call modernism in all the arts. In this sense, modernism faithfully--even "realistically"--reproduced and represented the increasing abstraction and deterritorialization of Lenin's "imperialist stage." Today, what is called postmodernity articulates the symptomatology of yet another stage of abstraction, qualitatively and structurally distinct from the previous one, which I have drawn on Arrighi to characterize as our own moment of finance capitalism: the finance capital moment of globalized society the abstractions brought with it by cybernetic technology (which it is a misnomer to call postindustrial except as a way of distinguishing its dynamic from the older, "productive" moment). Thus any comprehensive new theory of finance capitalism will need to reach out into the expanded realm of cultural production to map its effects; indeed mass cultural production and consumption itself--at one with globalization and the new information technology--are as profoundly economic as the other productive areas of late capitalism and as fully a part of the latter's generalized commodity system.

Fredric Jameson is professor of French and comparative literature at Duke University. His latest book is entitled The Seeds of Time (1994).