Introduction
"It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place. In that case, it either "expresses" some deeper irrepressible historical impulse (in however distorted a fashion) or effectively "represses" and diverts it, depending on the side of the ambiguity you happen to favor."
- Jameson could be passively referencing the effects of media on us, in societies that have experienced late capitalism. so developed societies are bombarded by media of all kinds constantly, effecting our semiotic nature, and so designers and creatives will react to this.
"Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable "second nature."
- Advertising in America was at it's peak preceding the second world war, and the media was everywhere, permeating everyday lives. Without realising, people would take this mass media culture as 'second nature' as Jameson describes for the way they acted and the way they began to create and design.
Introduction x
"in postmodern culture, "culture" has become a product in it's own right; the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself: modernism was still minimally and tendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to transcend itself."
- A difficult quote to decipher in it's entirety, Jameson suggests that culture is a commodity. An example could be Andy Warhol, who started to display this symptom, where mass culture would become re-produced for a second time, in a different way, using pastiche. A re-representation or imitation without mockery. 'Blank pastiche'.
"Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process."
1 Culture
"As the word itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to it;s ideological or aesthetic repudiation)."
"The enumeration of what follows, then, at once becomes empirical, chaotic, and heterogenous."
p. 6
"The exposition will take up in turn the following constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary "theory" and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality"
p. 7
"In Van Gogh that content, those initial raw materials, are, I will suggest, to be grasped simply as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state."
p. 8
"Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh's footgear; indeed I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all"
p. 9
"The first and most evident is the emergence of of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms to which we will have occasion to return in a number of other contexts"
p. 17
"In this situation parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived, and that strange new thing pastiche slowly comes to take it's place Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists."
- 'Parody without a vocation' so to reiterate what pastiche is, this is as Jameson describes it 'speech in a dead language' that describes pastiche so accurately, and works to explain how a designer, creative or architect could be using this new postmodern language of pastiche with or without knowing where the aesthetic, or conceptual value originated. This could apply to many contemporary designers, that do not know the value of the aesthetic they use, or where it may have come from in the first place.
p. 17,18
"For with the collapse of the high-modernist ideology of style - what is as unique and unmistakable as yout own fingerprints, as incomparible as your own body (the very source, for an early Roland Barthes, of stylistic invention and innovation) - the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture."
- Mass culture is Jameson's main focus, and his comments on how mass culture has resulted in postmodernism is partly explained by 'imitating dead styles' and how the 'producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past', and so this negative standpoint on postmodernism could mean that Jameson is biased toward modernism, and it's ideology of creating something new.
p. 18
"This situation evidently determines what the architecture historians call "historicism", namely, the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of stylistic allusion."
- Again Jameson applies a negative connotation to his statement on 'historicism', where architects have been using the term for many years prior to postmodernism to create hybrid styles of architecture. He describes postmodernism as random here too, suggesting that it has no trajectory. Imitation, more over is pastiche when it is not aiming to poke fun at or mock past styles.
p. 55
"The problem of postmodernism - how it's fundamental characteristics are to be described, whether it even exists in the first place, whether the very concept is of any use, or is, on the contrary, a mystification - this problem is at one and the same time an aesthetic and a political one."
- Does this suggest that Jameson does not see postmodernism as a movement as modernism was considered?
p. 60
On Lyotard's theory:
"The ingenious twist , or swerve, in his own proposal involves the proposition that something called postmodernism does not follow high modernism proper, as the latter's waste product, but rather very precisely precedes and prepares it, so that the contemporary postmodernisms all around us may be seen as the promise of the return and the reinvention, the triumphant reappearance, of some new high modernism endowed with all it's older power and with fresh life."
p. 64
"it seems at least possible that what wears the mask and makes the gestures of "populism" in the various postmodernist apologias and manifestos is in reality a mere reflex and symptom of a (to be sure momentous) cultural mutation, in which what used to be stigmatized as mass or commercial culture is now received into the precincts of a new and enlarged cultural realm."
"Postmodernism theory seems indeed to be a ceaseless process of internal rollover in which the position of the observer is turned inside out and the tabulation recontinued on some larger scale. The postmodern thus invites us to indulge a somber mockery of historicity in general."
p. 67
"Capitalism, and the modern age, is a period in which, with the extinction of the sacred and the "spiritual," the deep underlying materiality of all things has finally risen dripping and convulsive into the light of day; and it is clear that culture itself is one evident but quite inescapable."
- This may be a comment on America exclusively, as Jameson is an American himself, may intrinsically feel that capitalism is the same everywhere, though American modernism is far different to that of European. America was built on capitalism, as it is a new country in comparison to Europe.
"culture has become material that we are now in a position to understand that it always was material, or materialistic, in it's structures and functions. We postcontemporary people have a word for that discovery - a word that has tended to displace the older language of genres and forms - and this is, of course, the word medium, and in particular its plural, media."
No comments:
Post a Comment