The Recursive Mode: Space, Time and the Hypercommodification of Culture

Abstract

This article argues that “evolution” in the production of mass cultural forms has become stalled in our postmodern, networked, and neoliberalized society. Popular cultural forms have historically developed and evolved in dialectical relationship with capitalism. This produced forms that although increasingly reflecting the prime dynamics of industrialization, were also authentically “new” and “diverse” in that they could gestate in spaces and times not already colonized and commodified by capital. Since at least the late 1970s, these spaces and times have been capitalized; indeed capital has also created immense “virtual” spatio-temporalities based on the Internet that are almost wholly comm..