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Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Outline. 1. Backgrounds 2. Postmodernism in historical context 3. Major Features: (1). Flatness, desubjectivization , waning of affect :

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Fredric Jameson

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  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 (物質決定論); reification (物化); commodity fetishism （商品拜物）, 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 解嚴，哈山Hassan and 詹明信訪台) 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

  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. Jameson’s 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 (感情消失). 2. the end of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal e.g. Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Boots” vs. Andy Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes” Chinese text: pp. 192- 221

  10. Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Boots” -- a desperate Utopian compensation for capitalist division of labor; --evoke a whole world which is semi-autonomous.

  11. Andy Warhol’s “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. Jameson’s comments & Munch’s diary • The figure without ears or hair, hearing a scream or emitting one? The scream’s 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 Munch’s 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 Siqueiros“Echo of a Scream”(1937 source)

  16. Picasso’s “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. "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) Andy Warhol as an “artist”

  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) 後現代大眾文化中歷史的風靡 1. 懷舊風retro chic: 服飾、裝潢（Pop Art 的流行）、電影（《人間四月天》、《夜奔》、Back to Future, Blue Velvet, Hot Shot） 2. 虛擬歷史︰《阿甘正傳》、Blade Runner 3. 歷史快速呈現︰SNG, 歷史上的今天﹐各種20 世紀的回顧﹐當代的歷史敘述． 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 depthof inside and outside, essence and appearance (e.g. New Criticism) 2. Freudian'sstructure 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. Jameson’s example: The Bonaventure Hotel in LA a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city.  Like 京華城

  26. Jameson’s 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 Article’s online version: (complete E-Text [with pictures] ; another E-Text excerpt; a multimedia text from MMT) B. Books: 1. 詹明信 (Fredric Jameson)﹒《後現代主義與文化理論》，唐小兵譯，台北：合志， 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.

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