Jameson Flashcards
Jameson essay
Postmodernism and Consumer Society
From The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: depthlessness
“Assimilation to glossy advertising images”
Possesses no political quality: “turns centrally around commodification”
A new type of social life and economic order. Superstructure ie art expresses conditions of underlying economic base
No deep distinctions
Blurring of high art and mass culture. Art and entertainment blur. Only consideration is commercial value as commodities
“The line between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly difficult to draw”
Postmodernism=consumer society=the society of the media
“To correlate the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order”
Pastiche eclipses parody
No longer any norm to against which an idiosyncratic style is mocked. Blank parody; mimicry without humour
Nostalgia film: No reality against which to judge our conception of it; we can only appeal to our own images and so the past is lost
“No satirical impulse, no latent feeling that there is a norm compared to which what is imitated is comic”
The death of the subject
The death of individuality; we are too superficial, the incomparable personal styles and conceptions of a unique self that the modernists lived for are not relevant to us. It is the age of corporate capitalism; we only care as long as we can sell it
A world of pastiche
Stylistic innovation is no longer possible
We can only imitate dead styles
On simulacra basics
“The past itself remains out of reach; we seek it through our own pop images and stereotypes”
We do not deal with real things or even their representations: nostalgia film
“An alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history”
Fetishisation of surface
Severs real connection beyond the image. Modernist originality is dead and so, too, is political art: we have no capacity to say something compelling about reality instead of our images of it
Architecture (less optimistic than Lyotard)
Surface over depth
Do not care about altering their surroundings and creating a utopia
Function follows form WE ARE SO SUPERFICIAL
Relationship between social life and cultural production dramatically different from modernism
Very little that contemporary society finds shocking: even the furthest edge of what is portrayed as acceptable must still remain commercially successful
