In the tradition of Mike Davis and Fredric Jameson, Nick Heffernan engages in a series of meditations on capital, class and technology in contemporary America. He turns to the stories we generate and tell ourselves – via fiction, film journalism, theory – to see how change is registered. By investigating a variety of texts, he observes how structural change affects the way people organise their lives economically, socially and culturally. Case studies include Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, William Gibson’s cyberspace trilogy, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World.Using the links between narrative cultural forms and the process of historical understanding, he brings together debates that have so far been conducted largely within the separate domains of political economy, social theory and cultural criticism to provide a compelling analysis of contemporary cultural change. By relocating postmodernism in the context of changing modes of capitalism, Heffernan puts the question of class and class agency back at the centre of the critical agenda. Nick Heffernan teaches American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University College Northampton. Capital, Class and Technology in Contemporary American Culture Projecting Post-Fordism By Nick Heffernan Pluto Press Copyright © 2000 Nick Heffernan All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-7453-1105-0 Contents Introduction, 1, Part 1 Late Capitalism, Fordism, Post-Fordism, 1. Postmodernism and Late Capitalism, 13, 2. Class and Consensus, Ideology and Technology, 29, Part 2 Putting 'IT' to Work: Post-Fordism, Information Technology and the Eclipse of Production, 3. Making 'IT': The Soul of a New Machine, 39, 4. Faking 'IT': True Stories, 72, 5. Playing with 'IT': Microserfs, 88, Part 3 Impotence and Omnipotence: The Cybernetic Discourse of Capitalism, 6. Cybernetics, Systems Theory and the End of Ideology, 105, 7. Imaginary Resolutions: William Gibson's Cyberspace Trilogy, 119, 8. Artificial Intelligence and Class Consciousness: Blade Runner, 148, Part 4 Capital, Class, Cosmopolitanism, 9. Fordism, Post-Fordism and the Production of World Space, 165, 10. National Allegory and the Romance of Uneven Development: The Names, 179, 11. Blindness and Insight in the World System: Until the End of the World, 205, Conclusion: Questioning Fordism and Post-Fordism, 212, Notes, 216, Bibliography, 230, Index, 245, CHAPTER 1 Postmodernism and Late Capitalism The usefulness of the terms postmodernism and postmodernity as descriptions of cultural change consists in their remarkably broad range of reference. Applied to cultural and aesthetic styles, to philosophical and political positions, as well as to modes of social and economic organisation, these terms both suggest and demand that change in any one of these areas be understood in relation to the others. Among theorists of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson has been the most insistent on the necessity of taking such a holistic or totalising view of the question. For Jameson postmodernism is much more than 'a purely cultural affair'; the question must refer to the whole mode of production and to the possibilities for understanding the nature of contemporary capitalism. Thus 'every position on postmodernism in culture – whether apologia or stigmatisation – is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today' (Jameson, 1991: p. 3, author's emphasis). However, as Jameson's critics have not been slow to point out, the developed account of contemporary capitalism implicitly demanded by his framing of the postmodernism question is largely absent from his writing on the subject. The burden of explanation in this area falls upon Ernest Mandel's landmark work of modern Marxist political economy, Late Capitalism (first published in German in 1972), which Jameson uses to underpin his more culturalist description of postmodernism. To employ a stock metaphor of Marxist social theory, Mandel's work provides a base upon which Jameson's more 'superstructural' reading of contemporary history rests. In many respects, then, the relationship between the emergence of what Jameson calls a new 'cultural dominant' out of the ruins of aesthetic high modernism on the one hand and the structural transformation of Western capitalism since 1940 described by Mandel on the other is left largely untheorised. I want to begin by exploring this gap with a view to sketching a provisional economic–historical framework in which questions about some of the social, cultural and political changes implied by postmodernism might be better situated. Periodisation and the 'Break' As we saw in the introduction, Jameson explicitly formulates his notion of postmodernism in terms of an historically identifiable break situated around 1960. Not only does this break inaugurate a new mode of cu