Fredric Jameson

1
Fredric Jameson

• Postmodernism
  or, The Cultural Logic of Late
  Capitalism

2
Outline

• 1. Backgrounds
• 2. Postmodernism in historical context
• 3. Major Features
• (1). Flatness, desubjectivization, waning of
  affect
• e.g. Van Gogh vs. Andy Warhol,
• Scream Guernica vs Andy Warhol
• (2). lack of history e.g. Forrest Gump
  (nostalgia film)
• (3). depth vs. depthlessness poststructuralism
• (4). Postmodern Styles pastiche
• (5). Postmodern Space hyperspace
• 4. Jameson in perspective

3
Backgrounds

• 1. Jameson as a Marxist
• -- "Always historicize" Insists on a "real
  sense of history" or cognitive mapping.
• -- dialectical materialism (?????)
  reification (??) commodity fetishism
  (????),
• 2. Jameson's importance in his theory on
  Postmodernism, and Postmodernism vs. Third-World
  national allegory.
• 3. Jameson's influence on Taiwan and mainland
  China. (1987 ??,??Hassan and ?????)
• 4. His role in our class 1. His usage of
  poststructuralist concepts 2. Postmodernism
  historicized 3. Interpretation of postmodern
  styles. (References)

4
Three stages of capitalism

• (Ernest Mandel Late Capitalism)
• 1. Market capitalism 1700 1850
• (industrial capital in national markets)
• 2. Monopoly capitalism
• (age of imperialism world markets monopolized by
  a few nation-states.)
• 3. Multinational capitalism
• (international corporations expand to transcend
  national boundaries reach hitherto
  uncommodified areas.) (Chinese text pp. 169-75)

5
Postmodernism in historical context

• From differentiation to de-differentiation
• 1. Differentiation Separation of capital from
  labor, exchange-value from use-value, and sign
  from its referent.
• 2. Differentiation Separation of culture from
  social and economic life to allow critique and
  utopian aspiration (modernism).
• 3. De-differentiaion Expansion of the power of
  capital into the realm of the sign, of culture
  and representation. Overall commodification
• (ref. Postmodernism and the Video-Text )

6
Postmodernism in the third stages of capitalism
capitalism cultural dominant cultural logic
competitive capitalism realism
monopolist modernism Utopian
multinational/ post-industrial postmodernism overall commodification (loss of critical distance, cognitive mapping)

• 
  

7
post-industrial society

• -- as defined by Daniel Bell
• 1. a switch from goods - producing industry to
  service economy
• 2. pre-eminence of professional and technical
  class (PMC-professorial-managerial class)
• 3. theoretical knowledge, technology and
  information as the major mode of commodity.

8
Jamesons views of modernism postmodernism

• High modernism a symptom of alienation and
  reification and utopian compensation for it
  utopian a struggle to present another reality
  with language.
• Postmodernism flat, playful, pastiche of
  history, commodified (no critical distance from
  the commercial)

9
Major Feature 1 flatness desubjectivization

• 1. the waning of affect (????).
• 2. the end of style, in the sense of the
  unique and the personal
• e.g. Van Goghs A Pair of Boots vs.
• Andy Warhols Diamond Dust Shoes

Chinese text pp. 192- 221
10
Van Goghs A Pair of Boots

• -- a desperate Utopian compensation for
  capitalist division of labor
• --evoke a whole world which is semi-autonomous.

11
Andy Warhols Diamond Dust Shoes

• 1. Flat images of some shoes on a negative,
  separated from their context.
• 2. fetishes

12
The Scream paintings analyzed by Jameson

• 1. Edvard Munch's
• The Scream, 1893 (1937 source)

13
Jamesons comments Munchs diary

1. The figure without ears or hair, hearing a scream
   or emitting one? The screams wave-like echo
   envelopes the whole world (the red sky and
   swirling, menacing sea.) 2. The priest-like
   figures are of no help. The bridge leads to
   nowhere.

• In Munchs literary diary, the entry for 22
  January 1892 reads "I was walking along the
  road with two friends. The sun was setting. I
  felt a breath of melancholy - Suddenly the sky
  turned blood-red. I stopped, and leaned against
  the railing, deathly tired - looking out across
  the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a
  sword over the blue-black fjord and town. My
  friends walked on - I stood there, trembling with
  fear. And I sensed a great, infinite scream pass
  through nature.

14
Parodies of The Scream

American Scream by Jeremy Campbell Parody also
of Grant Wood's American Gothic (1930)
Sources (left to right) 1 2 3
15
The Scream paintings analyzed by Jameson

• 2. David Alfaro SiqueirosEcho of a Scream
  (1937 source)

16
Picassos Guernica (1937)

Chinese text 176- 86 Cubism, offering new
perspectives, attempting to present symbolic
meanings (e.g. the cow, the horse, against
perspectivism, eliminate the boundaries between
inside and outside.
17
Andy Warhol as an artist

• "If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look
  at the surface of my paintings and films and me,
  and there I am. There's nothing behind it.
• "I don't want it to be essentially the same--I
  want it to be exactly the same. Because the more
  you look at the same exact thing, the more the
  meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you
  feel." (qtd in Foster in MacCabe 118-19)

18
Possible interpretations of Warhol

• His use of kitsch, commodities and celebrities
• 1. Underneath the glamorous surface of commodity
  fetishes and media stars is 'the reality of
  suffering and death.
• 2. Superficial embrace of commercialism
  (fetishism)
• 3. Traumatic realism repetition of flat images
  to show the traumatic real loss of meaning.

19
Feature 2 Loss of history

• . . . we are now, in other words, in
  intertextuality as a deliberate, built-in
  feature of the aesthetic effect and as the
  operator of a new connotation of pastness and
  pseudohistorical depth, in which the history of
  aesthetic styles displaces "real" history.
• --e.g. nostalgia films the past becomes a
  composite of stereotypes, spectacles no stars
  (with 'personality' in the older sense),
• --e.g. historical novels of the pastiche of the
  stereotypical past loss of Radical Past (e.g. E.
  L. Doctorow)

20
Forrest Gump (1994) pastiche of history

Vietnam war
Anti-war rally Ping-pong diplomacy
21
Another view Co-existence multiple histories

• 1) ?????????????
• 1. ???retro chic ?????(Pop Art
  ???)???(?????????Back to Future, Blue Velvet,
  Hot Shot )
• 2. ??????????Blade Runner
• 3. ???????SNG, ?????????20 ?????????????.
• 2) Postmodernism problematizes official history
  and historical knowledge, and opens history to
  multiple narration.

22
3. depth vs. depthlessness (pp. 213-216)

• 1. interpretive/hermeneutic depth of inside and
  outside, essence and appearance (e.g. New
  Criticism) 
• 2. Freudian's  structure of consciousness (the
  latent and the manifest)
• 3. Existentialism authenticity vs. inauthenticity
• 4. Hegelian Dialectics of History
  -reconciliation, synthesis
• 5. structualism's opposition between the
  signifier and the signified 

lack of subjective depth
Identity as collage or provisional
History as archive discontinuous
breaking the signifying chain (schizophrenia)
textual play
23
4. Pastiche Eclipses Parody

• Both involve imitation or mimicry--particularly
  the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other
  styles.
• Parody capitalizes on the uniqueness of these
  styles. Behind all parody is the feeling that
  there is a linguistic norm in contrast to which
  the styles of the great modernists can be
  marked.
• Pastiche appears at the moment when parody has
  become impossible, i.e., it is the imitation of a
  peculiar or unique style, but it lacks the
  satirical impulse. Pastiche is blank
  parody--parody with no sense of humor.
• e.g. Hot Shot and Moulin Rouge.

24
5. Hyperspace

• Normal space is . . . organized by things. . .
  in a situation where subjects and objects have
  been dissolved, hyperspace is the ultimate of the
  object pole . . . We lose the ability to
  position ourselves within this space and
  cognitively map it. (Jameson in Kellner 47-48)

25
Jamesons example The Bonaventure Hotel in LA

a total space, a complete world, a kind of
miniature city. ? Like ???
26
Jamesons example The Bonaventure Hotel in LA

• three a-typical entrances
• 2) the covering (skin) sets it apart from the
  buildings around it.
• 3) The escalators and the elevators--they are
  "gigantic kinetic sculpture" as it were--convey a
  sense of spectacle and excitement.
• 4) Passive mutation in space lose sense of
  location.

27
Jameson in perspective

• For
• -- Insights into the connections between
  postmodernism and postmodernity (multinational
  capitalism)
• -- incisive critique of some postmodern symptoms
  (e.g. the transformation of reality into images
  and the fragmentation of time into a series of
  perpetual presents.)

28
Jameson in perspective (2)

• Against
• 2. poststructuralism has reconceived of the
  depth of thought and of culture as radically
  unstable. (Kellner 200)
• 2. Pre-suppose a totalized view of history.
• 3. Ignore the various kinds of postmodern arts
  and their critical intent.
• 4. Ignore the different practices of postmodern
  cultures. e.g. The shoppers can find their ways
  in a maze-like mall.

29
References

• A. internet
• 1. Outline and links
• 2. Jameson Articles online version (complete
  E-Text with pictures another E-Text excerpt
  a multimedia text from MMT)
• B. Books
• 1. ??? (Fredric Jameson)???????????,????,????,
  19906
• 2. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
  Capitalism. New Left Review (1984). Also in
  version in Docherty, Thomas, ed. Postmodernism A
  Reader. New York Harvester, 1993
• 3. Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique. Ed. Douglas
  Kellner,. Maisonneuve P, 1989.
• 4. MacCabe, Colin, et al, eds. Who Is Andy
  Warhol? Pittsburgh, PA The British Film
  Institute and The Andy Warhol Museum, 1997.