Response to Jamerson and Postmodernism

Jamerson’s article on culture and capitalism proved to be a challenging read with a great number of terms filling up each of his sentence. It gets clearer when the author starts to describe examples. In earlier parts of his article, Jamerson argues for the distinctiveness of postmodernism as a period in culture. He talked about the problems with historical periodization and explains why he objects to it. Examples of Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Boots” and later Walker Evans’s “Floyd Burroughs’ Work Shoes” are compared and contrasted with Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes” and later Magritte’s “Le modele rouge”. In particular, Magritte’s work feels like it belongs to the fantastic realm, giving off an eerie mood, even more so than the surrealism paintings that we are familiar with like Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory”. Jamerson then goes on to talk about postmodernism codify the styles of modernism. (17) He used Plato’s cave to describe how “we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach” (25). The argument here is that postmodernism reaches for symbols, mannerism and etc of the modernist period but lacks the social specification to make them work.

Q1) “Meaning is not a one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified, between the materiality of language, between a word or a name, and its referent or concept.” (26) What exactly is a material signifier? How does this relate to the psyche of schizophrenic?

Q2) Does the periodization of Mandel’s tripartite scheme of market capitalism, the monopoly stage and multinational capital correlates to Jamerson’s three stages of realism, modernism and postmodernism respectively?