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  • New Literary History after the End of the New
  • Fredric Jameson (bio)

In what follows I want to say something about the cultural production of the future, and any such speculations will inevitably imply something about the histories of that cultural production that we may expect to accompany it (or indeed to follow it and to sum it up). But that is necessarily an exercise in futurology, and so you will not be surprised to find me shifting into a science-fictional mode. For the moment, let’s remain in a sociological one.

Any talk about the future must first confront globalization as its absolute horizon: the term can have any number of synonyms. Marx called it universalization, but also the world market, a term that certainly remains useful for us today. As a stage in capitalism, I call it late, while others call it flexible or informational. And as a cultural formation, I have analyzed it as postmodernity, a term not everyone accepts, and even those who do are not necessarily in agreement—tending to limit its meaning to philosophies of relativism (if you dislike it) or of antiessentialism and antifoundationalism (if you greet it with enthusiasm). I’ll come back to the postmodern later on.

Globalization can know its interpretive revisions as well: some call it, for example, Americanization, a characterization I understand but feel to be slightly misleading, as I’ll try to show. Some think that it is nothing new, going all the way back to the neolithic trade routes. That’s true, too, but I feel that it is more useful to insist on the historic originality of this stage, in which international relations become dominant rather than secondary or incidental. In fact, what we confront today is an immense international division of labor, which has certainly been anticipated at certain moments of the past, but has now become both universal and irreversible, with consequences for culture fully as much as for economics.

I’ve tried elsewhere to show that this new phenomenon must be grasped dialectically, or in other words as a union of opposites, as something that can be celebrated just as much as it can be greeted with dystopian fear and foreboding. Indeed, on the level of culture, globalization mostly has been greeted positively, as when we point to its immense new communicational and informational possibilities, and rejoice in the democratization [End Page 375] of public opinion in a kind of utopia of blogging. The immense expansion of culture all over the world is then an event as momentous as the spreading conquest of literacy at an earlier stage in history. When, however, the question of culture darkens into the issues of whose culture, and of by whom and for whom, then globalization has begun to rotate toward its economic face, and a grimmer picture seems to emerge.1

I will dramatize that picture in terms of a remarkable new theory of the historical origins of state power by the sociologist Michael Mann: he calls the process “encagement,” and it describes the way in which the first small power centers gradually drew their prepower neighbors—villages, tribes, nomads—into their own sphere of gravity. Many devolutions at first: a more egalitarian village seeks the help of the new cities in a military or ecological crisis, and then defects when the crisis has passed by. At length, however, the subsumption of all these “underdeveloped” entities into the more advanced power hierarchy of cities and despots, of priests and armies and laws, becomes irreversible: and it this irreversibility of the new and larger imperial system that Mann describes (following Weber) as the construction of a larger cage, as a more definitive encagement.2

The new global division of labor is a little like that: at first it is useful for certain countries to specialize—monocrops or mineral wealth; countries without oil or sugar or cotton can benefit from these resources, without it being at first apparent that the new systems have been imposed on the colonies in question from the outside, by the imperial powers. Today, however, when self-sufficiency is a thing of the past, and when no single country, no matter what...

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