The Long Twentieth Century & the Cultural Turn: World-historical Origins of the Cultural Economy

In this essay I link Giovanni Arrighi’s world-historical framework in The Long Twentieth Century to debates about the “cultural turn” in global capitalism since the 1970s. I do so primarily through interrogation of the writings of one of the major figures in such debates: Fredric Jameson. In his Jameson’s engagement with Arrighi’s, he emphasizes the determinative influence of finance capital on an expansion in the degree of cultural abstraction and fragmentation that is emblematic of the post-modern condition. Building on this linkage, I extend and elaborate Arrighi’s analysis of historical capitalism’s cycles of accumulation, in which periods of material expansion give way to phases of financial expansion and accelerated restructuring of the organizational and institutional foundations of the world-economy. I conclude that Jameson’s assertion of a link between the financialization of the world economy and post-modern cultural forms is best understand as a correlative rather than a causal relationship, for the growing salience of finance capital and the new forms and degree of cultural abstraction are themselves both dimensions of the more fundamental socio-economic restructuring attending a period of financial expansion.