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General Definitions -- Postmodernism
is seen as
making a radical
break from High Modernism (abstract expressionism in painting,
existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in
the novel). p. 62
quotes: "The
case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break
or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early
1960s" (62)
a cultural dominant, but not a style.
Aesthetic Populism
-- Jameson comments on the breaking of the boundaries between
high art and popular culture in a critical way. Pay attention
to the negative terms he uses.
quotes:
"The
postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole
"degraded" landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and
Reader's Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show
and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its
airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular
biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel:
materials they no longer simply "quote;' as a Joyce or a Mahler
might have done, but incorporate into their very substance."
(63)
A Cultural Dominant -- Jameson
here gives a good example of our historicity by showing the
different receptions of modernism/postmodernism by people of different
periods in history.
quotes: ". . . the
social position of the older modernism, or better still, its passionate
repudiation by an older Victorian and post- Victorian bourgeoisie, for
whom its forms and ethos are recieved as being variously ugly, dissonant,
obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive and generally anti-social.
It will be argued here that a mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered
such attitudes archaic. . . . [Picasso and Joyce . . .now strike
us . . . as rather 'realistic'; and this is the result of canonization
and an academic institutionalization of the modern movement generally"
(64-65).
I.
From the Waning of Affect
to The Deconstruction of Expression
quotes: "The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end
of the psychopathologies of that ego--what I have been calling the waning
of affect. But it means the end of much more--the end, for example,
of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the
end of the distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbolized by
the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction). As for expression
and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from
the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely
a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind
of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do
the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern
era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings--which
it may be better and more accurate, following J.-F. Lyotard, to call
"intensities"--are now free-floating and impersonal and tend to be
dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria, a matter to which we will
want to return later on."
(72)
five models of depth
vs. three kinds of depthlessness p. 70
1. interpretive/hermeneutic depth
of inside and outside, essence and appearance
¡@
2. Freudian's structure
of consciousness (the latent and the manifest)
lack of subjective depth
3. Existentialism
authenticity vs. inauthenticity
visual collage; simulacra
4. Hegelian Dialectics of History
--reconciliation, synthesis
5. structualism's
opposition between the signifier and
the signified
poststructuralism's breaking the
signifying chain (schizophrenia); textual play
Modern -- individualist, symbolic, talent/auteur-centered, dominant sentiments: anxiety and alienation
Postmodern-- playfulness, pastiche and lack of critical distance;
fragmentation of the subject
quotes: "I would like...to
characterize the postmodernist experience of form with what will seem,
I hope, a paradoxical slogan: namely the proposition that difference relates.
Our own recent criticism, from Macherey on, has been concerned to stress
the heterogeneity and profound discontinuities of the work of art, no
longer unified or organic, but now virtual grab-bag
or lumber room of disjointed sub-systems and random raw materials and
impulses of all kinds. The former work of art, in other words,
has now turned out to be a text, whose reading proceeds by differentiation
rather than by unification.
Theories of difference, however, have tended to stress disjuntion to the
point at which the materials of the text, including
its words and sentences, tend to fall apart into random and inert passivity,
into a set of elements which entertain purely external separations from
one another.
quotes: "In the most interesting postmodernist works, however,
one can detect a more positive conception of relationship which restores
its proper tension to the notion of difference itself. This new mode
of relationship through difference may sometimes be an achieved new
and original way of thinking and perceiving; more often it takes the
form of an impossible imperative to achieve that new mutation in what
can perhaps no longer by called consciousness." (Jameson 1984: 75)
4. Late Capitalism & High-Tech Paranoia
(Anti-Utopianism) quotes: Such machines are indeed machines
of reproduction rather than of production, and they make very different
demands on our capacity for aesthetic representation than did the relatively
mimetic idolatry of the older machinery of the futurist moment, of some
older speed-and-energy sculpture. Here we have less to do with kinetic
energy than with all kinds of new reproductive processes; and in the
weaker productions of postmodernism the aesthetic embodiment of such
processes often tends to slip back more comfortably into a mere thematic
representation of content-into narratives which are about the processes
of reproduction and include movie cameras, video, tape recorders, the
whole technology of the production and reproduction of the simulacrum.
5. Postmodernism and the City --
Bonadventure as a complete world,
a mini city with no obvious entry; glass skin
quotes: "this disjunction from the surrounding city
is different from that of the monuments of the International Style, in
which the act of disjunction was violent, visible, and had a very real
symbolic significance."
glass skin -- "the glass
skin achieves a peculiar and placeless dissociation of the Bonaventure
from its neighborhood: it is not even an exterior, inasmuch as when
you seek to look at the hotel’s outer walls you cannot see the hotel
itself but only the distorted images of everything that surrounds
it. "
the escalators and elevators --
"Here the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbolized, reified,
and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes the allegorical
signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct
on our own: and this is a dialectical intensification of the autoreferentiality
of all modern culture, which tends to turn upon itself and designate
its own cultural production as its content. . . .
But even this vertical movement
is contained: the elevator lifts you to one of those revolving cocktail
lounges, in which, seated, you are again passively rotated about and
offered a contemplative spectacle of the city itself, now transformed
into its own images by the glass windows through which you view it.
" (pp. 82-83) ". . .this latest mutation in space--postmodern
hyperspace--has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of
the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate
surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in
a mappable external world" (83).
¡@
6. The Abolition of Critical Distance
quotes: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism,
that is to say, to its fundamental object-the world space of multinational
capital--at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to
some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which
we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective
subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present
neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political
form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation
the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social
as well as a spatial scale.
(made according to the version in Docherty, Thomas, ed. Postmodernism:
A Reader. New York: Harvester, 1993.)
