Frederic Jameson - Criticism of Postmodernism

Jameson sees postmodernism as vacuous and trapped in circular references - nothing more than a series of self referential 'jokes' that have no deeper meaning or purpose.
(Ironically, postmodernists don't disagree but use his criticism as their purpose).

For Jameson, literary and cultural output is more purposeful than this and he, therefore, remains a modernist in a world increasingly dominated by postmodern culture.

Jameson also sees reason for the present generations to express themselves through postmodernity as they are the product of such a heavily globalised, multinational dominated economy, which carries the multinational media industry as one of its main branches. The omnipresence of media output helps explain postmodernists' merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole, "there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the American history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current, multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life." (p.22 Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1991.)