Following Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry, Jameson discussed this phenomenon in his critical discussion of architecture, film, narrative, and visual arts, as well as in his strictly philosophical work. And since postmodernism — as was mentioned above — represents the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than the production of goods,
Relatedly, Jameson argues that the postmodern era suffers from a crisis in historicity: "there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the [...] history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current, multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life".
Jameson's analysis of postmodernism attempts to view it as historically grounded; he therefore explicitly rejects any moralistic opposition to postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon. Instead, Jameson insists upon a Hegelian immanent critique that would "think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together". (adapted from Kevin A. Lynch; a form of class consciousness mediated by popular culture that corresponds to the era of capitalist globalization), the "vanishing mediator", totality as conspiracy, "alternate modernity" (the postcolonial notion of distinct regional pathways of capitalism, linked to the political project of BRICS), and antagonism as the principle of totalisation.
Later work
Several of Jameson's later works, along with Postmodernism, are part of what he called both a "sequence" and "project" entitled The Poetics of Social Forms. While the individual works are formally named on the flyleaf of Inventions of a Present, its more nuanced structure—six volumes comprising seven publications grouped into three subdivisions—can be gleaned from mentions in the books themselves.
A memorial piece published by the editorial team of the Marxist journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory described Jameson as an "intellectual giant" responsible for an "enduring legacy that has inspired generations of thinkers, activists and scholars".