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I. Introduction
In an interview performed at the end of the 1980s, Fredric Jameson elaborates on his notion of the disappearance of nature and the disappearance of the unconscious in the postmodern:
Today I think one of the characteristics of the postmodern is very precisely this penetration and colonization of the unconscious. Art is commodified, the unconscious is itself commodified by the forces of the media and advertising and so on, and therefore it is also in that sense that one can claim a certain kind of nature is gone.... And I think it's proper to insist on that...there is a certain freedom involved in being no longer constrained by traditional forms of human nature. (Jameson 353-354)
What Jameson means by this suggestion is highly ambiguous: especially, the way in which commodification of the unconscious results in the release of human nature from its traditional limits is not clearly explained. Jameson himself admits that he remains ambivalent on the concept of human nature itself, yet he goes further arguing:
... instead of replacing those [the disappeared form of older, inner-directed personality, the acquisitive individual, the centered subject, etc.] with the rhetoric of psychic fragmentations, schizophrenia, and so on, one should return again to notions of collective relations, but collectivities of new types, not of traditional kinds. That would, it seems to me, be a way of looking at human nature as a social thing that would be in my opinion the most productive socially and culturally, and politically as well. (Jameson 354)
Although still vague, it seems to me that Jameson's conceptualization of a new subjectivity that is both mediatized and emancipated in the postmodern environments can be revealing about the cultures of globalization. That is, to the extent that postmodernism is considered as the cultural logic of late capitalism, which Jameson later relates more specifically to the term globalization,1 his proposal of the disappearance of nature in the postmodern could be also used productively in thinking about our altered subjectivity in the process of globalization.
Besides, I find Jameson's basic theoretical premise in his major projects-that the interrelationship of culture and the economic is "a continuous reciprocal interaction and feedback loop"-still provides a sensible starting point in examining the current cultures of more...