Postmodernism

The main argument of the James chapter is that “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally” (4). He is tying a knot around postmodern art and capital. He pushes this idea even further when he writes “this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and terror” (5). Slash! Zing!

His motivating question focuses on a definition or description of “modernism” and a repudiation of the idea that it is simply a subset or mere continuation of modernism, or that it is not set apart in a critically significant way. While he approaches this point from many angles his basic focus is on the financial/political backdrop against which the aesthetic forms are glued; specifically the “multinational capital” (6) which underpins postmodernism. He writes that another main differentiating factor is that
modernism is characterized by a distinction between high and low art whereas postmodernism is characterized by a blurring of the two or an abandonment of the distinction altogether.

He then describes some of the signifiers of postmodernism. One such signifier is a lack of a personal style and the adoption of pastiche. He also identifies a nostalgic historicism (Body Heat, American Graffiti). Another theme James focuses on is depthlessness, superficiality or “waning of affect” (10) (Warhol) and goes so far as to claim this is the “supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms” (9).

James highlights the essential clash between these features of postmodernism and their modernist counterparts – again vigorously underlining the fact that modernism constitutes a fundamental break from modernism rather than simply being an extension or component of it. Where postmodernism lacks a personal style, for example, modernism is intricately tied in with the notion of one’s style. It had, he suggests, a cultural/aesthetic norm against which it could develop its personal styles and idiosyncratic voices. Postmodernism, lacking in a homogeneous culture, simply can’t follow that recipe and must abandon it in favor of things like pastiche, surface, mimicry and nostalgia.

Questions 1: What is the “complicated situation” that Munch’s The Scream reflects which is described on page 15?

Question 2: Why are the concepts of anxiety and alienation “no longer appropriate in the world of postmodernism”? (14) Also, why/how have the 4 fundamental depth models been repudiated? (12)