ABSTRACT
The idea that primitive humans lived at one with each other and with nature, with a shared consciousness, arose in late nineteenth-century Anthropology and is perhaps best known in Durkheim. Fredric Jameson sets the imagined point of total social closeness far back in the past as a point of social origin: history itself becomes the product of a great force that began splitting people up. The route to the postmodern runs through Jameson's seminal 1970's writings on Lukacs and Adorno, and the difficulties he encountered using a prior term, "postindustrial". In Jameson's account the transition from monopoly to late capitalism was roughly pegged to the 1970s. Under the name of postmodernity Jameson offers an account of a recent present in which economy and culture, including high culture, have become disturbingly intermingled.
