Just-in-time Late Capitalism: Why Does Postmodernism Still Remain a Sociocultural Dominant of Our Time?

Abstract

The article attempts to recover the position of the temporal concept of postmodernism that describes our epoch as capitalist. At the end of the 20th century, postmodernism (in Fredric Jameson's interpretation) was not only the leading way to comprehend the social and cultural tendencies of the 'eternal present', but also a condition of 'late capitalism' (as per Ernest Mandel), characterizing our era from the socio-economical standpoint. However, at the beginning of the new millennium, philosophers and social theorists started to assert the exhaustion of postmodernism's heuristic potential as a theory meant to describe our time. Along with that, doubt was cast on all the attempts to understand modernity through the lens of capitalism. However, there was a group of scientists who continued to treat capitalism as a core aspect of modernity. As a result, many other social theories of capitalism, the alternative to postmodernism, have emerged: globalization, hypermodernism, communicative capitalism, metamodernism, postcapitalism, supervisory capitalism, cool capitalism, the capitalocene, and many more. The following analysis challenges the assertion that postmodernism has lost its explicative capacities. There are two pieces of evidence for the applicability of postmodernism. The first is that Jameson himself turned back to elaborating this temporal category, and the second is that other social theoreticians couldn't overcome Jameson's theoretical basis. All these opposite temporal perspectives on capitalism, as we found it, enhance the relevance of postmodernism, rather than refute this concept. Among all the contemporary approaches to the temporalization of capitalism covered by the author, there are only two concepts that speak of this social formation entering the fourth phase. But capitalocene - being one of them - supposes that the fourth stage has not yet begun, while metamodernism has nothing to suggest regarding the reasons for the epochal shift. This allows us to declare that postmodernism/late capitalism is still a viable scheme for the temporal comprehension of the state of current capitalism and modernity per se, while the new temporal schemes of capitalism are only expanding and reinforcing the terminological apparatus of postmodernism/late capitalism