Among many of the so-called critical thinkers there still lingers a more or less open resentment towards popular culture. The tradition of denouncing its products goes back — in many respects — to the antiquated writings of the Frankfurt School and the Tel Quel group. One of the few contemporary humanists who tries to avoid the high modernist dogmatic disapproval of culture industry — and this paper argues that he does so with a considerable success — is the American literary critic and theoretician of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson. As befits his Marxist heritage, he argues that popular culture — alongside modernism — was induced by the social contradictions of the second stage of capitalism and it has the same subversive potential as modernist art.
However, critical elements within popular culture, unlike in modernism, are unconscious (i.e. repressed) according to the Jamesonian application of Freud’s terminology. Keeping alive the leftist social hope requires that they be brought to the surface.
