Fredric Jameson

Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable "second nature."

Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process.

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.

truly new culture could only emerge through the collective struggle to create a new social system.

The problem of interpretation is raised by the nature of the new textuality itself, which, when mainly visual, seems to leave no room for interpretation of the older kind, or, when mainly temporal in its "total flow," leaves no time for it either.

Utopian representations knew an extraordinary revival in the 1960s; if Postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all.