Symptomologies and Intimations of the Global (1980s–1990s)

The same landmark volume,The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture(1983), that reprints Said’s essay also first publishes a work that signals a dramatic turn in Jameson’s intellectual program. Entitled “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” this short essay, originally presented in 1982 as a Whitney Museum Lecture, represents Jameson’s first explicit foray into issues and questions that he had touched on in passing for more than a decade previously but would only now come to the center of his attention.¹ The labors begun here come to full fruition two years later in what is likely still his most well-known and influential