The Cultural Logic of "Postmodernism"

"The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" by Jameson clearly is a piece that is intended to draw on the differences between modern and postmodern. Of interest is how Jameson decides to proceed in differentiating both terms, a difference that comes about culturally, aesthetically, mechanically, and politically. It is clear Jameson is not interested in typically defining the difference between two things in the traditional sense, “A” is larger than “B” for example, but Jameson instead thinks of this “break” as the “waning or extinction of the hundred year old modern movement.”

What I believe to be Jameson’s main argument is to prove to his readers through speaking about “postmodernism” culturally, aesthetically, as a means of production, and politically, that it is essentially a dominant form indicative of late capitalism. Dominant because of its gaining popularity and acceptance, and a “form” simply because it is a simulacrum that takes different shapes and can be seen across society in different situations. It is important to focus on Jameson’s terminology and his reference to “late capitalism”, not “modern”, “postmodern”, or “contemporary” capitalism.

If Jameson could propose one motivating question at the end of his piece I believe Jameson would desperately ask what exactly is the defining line between “modern” and “postmodern”. Or at what precise moment do we look at architecture, art, sculptures, and say that is “postmodern” when the “modern” period is so recent and fresh in everyone’s minds. The problem Jameson identifies is essentially how “postmodernism” has become a dominant form of late capitalism in which “form” takes the shape of culture, art, means of production, and politics. It is essentially a problem because it is redefining capitalism in every sense of the word without necessarily giving a glimpse of what the end result will be.

Question 1: If Jameson is not an art historian but instead a literary critique why is that he comes off as being anti-American in a piece that should solely center around a critique of postmodernism: “Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that 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.

Question 2: What would Jameson call today’s “modern” art if he was to think of “postmodernism” as only a short phase?

Postmodernism

Jameson's chapter starts off by basically arguing for how he sees "postmodernism" and it's place in history. He suggests that it be thought of as a period of "cultural dominance" where the basic features of postmodernism were widespread, and not as simply the "end of modernism" or a style devient of it. His main support for this is the way society accepted and embraced postmodernism, while modernism was at it's time not accepted or well liked at all. Jameson also mentions a point that he says is just a preview for a later chapter, but it seemed relevent anyway. He says that any position on postmodernism (and by this I assumed he meant how you see it's place in society) is also a political "stance" on mulinational capitalism. He also reminds us that postmodernism is largely due to the industrialization and "mass production" of american society, and that this would not have been possible if America hd not been so politically and militarily powerful.

Question 1: I was reading on page 2, "The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by.....or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply "quote" as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporte into their very substance" and I was confused what/who the "they" refers to. I think the sentence meant that instead of simply witnessing the consumer socitey, the artists used these new characteristics as part of their art. But then I also thought that maybe it meantinstead of "quoteing" this characteristic of society, it's been overwhelmed by it and is no longer outside, but rather nothing but simply a product. If I knew who Joyce or Mahler were and what they were known for, this would have helped...

Question 2: My second problem while reading was that i don't know much about Marx or Freud or the other great thinkers of decades past. Freud is mentioned a few times in ways equivalent to saying "as freud would have said, '.......', except that he doesn't say how freud would have evaluated the situation, Jameson just assumes we know. Marx is mentioned in the same way, and even quoted but I can't understand the significance of the quote. Jameson even says the quote was in a different context without giving us that contxt, and so how can I possibly figure out why he put that quote there?

The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

In this article, Jameson emphasizes the differences and changes between the modern and postmodern art movements. He argues that postmodern art lacks depth and originality, being a product of capitalism and technology. The art in this era is characterized by an “utter absence of ‘personality’” (p 97) as the use of photography and film increases. Jameson compares relatively unemotional postmodern photography (using Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes) with an example of a modernist painting (Van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots). There is a big difference in the expressivity of the latter; Van Gogh is able to portray the powerful emotions of peasant toil in his recognizable strokes, whereas Warhol’s piece “does not really speak to us at all” (p 87).

In reference to the postmodern attempt at “historicism,” Jameson calls this “’nostaligia’ art” the “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past” (p 96), claiming that these artists’ allusions to history are often inaccurate and inappropriate. Jameson then explains the idea of “pastiche,” the neutral, but experimental fragmentation that we see in many postmodern art forms, such as schizophrenic writing.

Jameson argues that the depthlessness and superficiality characterized by postmodern art stems from increasing capitalism and materialism. Just as mass production and consumerism lead to increasing anonymity and ambiguity, this consequently decreases the ability for personal expressivity and originality. His motivating question is to identify when these art forms become completely meaningless and cease to act as art. At what point does the depthlessness and superficiality become so prominent that a piece is considered futile?

Q1: What does Jameson mean when he discusses “cognitive mapping” near the end of the article? What does that even mean? This part was very confusing to me, as it seemed more conceptual.

Q2: The diagram on p 88 that compares Van Gogh and Warhol’s connection to “Magic Realism” and “The Realism of Old Age.” What exactly is magic realism? Is it like surrealism, such as in Magritte’s “Le modele rouge”?

Jameson's chapter

Very early in the chapter, Jameson reveals to his readers the motivational question of his essay. On page two of the chapter he asks “This list might be extended indefinitely; but does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style and fashion changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation?” Jameson is trying to determine whether Modernism and Post-modernism should be viewed as two completely different eras or periods of time. Jameson would not denied the fact that Post-modernism does contain its own changes styles and culture, but it seems that he is more comfortable agreeing that Post-modernism is “the more dominant culture” of the period from the start of Modernism to Post-modernism. It seems that Jameson tried to blur this idea into the readers’ mind by saying that all cultural analysis always involves some kind of buried or repressed theory of historical periodization. This seems to suggest that, yes, the branch into postmodernism may be influenced by the same way modernism started off. Modernism began because people were ready for a new way of life. Jameson suggests that the beginning of postmodernism came about because people were striving for something new again, but sadly this “new” falls in a less personalized and more commercial new as he describe with Warhol’s painting of the shoes. He writes that what was once modern was becoming “rather ‘realistic,’ and this is the result of a canonization and academic institutionalization of the modern movement” and that the younger generation now saw the modern movement as a “set of dead classics.”
This supports why he feels that postmodernism is just the more dominant culture. He does not look at the different styles of the two era but looks at more importantly at the reasons for the cultural changes. The phenomenon of postmodernism is do to the fact that modern has become the norm as suggested later on in the chapter when he describe the life of the stars. I think this following quote summarizes the idea of modern becoming norm very will. “Modernist styles thereby become postmodernist codes. And that the stupendous proliferation of social codes today into professional and disciplinary jargons is a political phenomenon.”
Questions: what is the meaning of the four fundamental depth models? And how does it relate to his overall argument of this chapter?
On page 16 he talks about how postmodernism loses it unique style and less personal, and then he starts talking but a parody from this event, what is this parody, or what is he talking about?
.

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?

The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

In Frederic Jameson's article “the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, he makes connections between capitalism and modernism/ postmodernism. He particularly focuses on the point that postmodernism is an expression of deconstruction. He claims that postmodernism lacks the social position part from the older modernism, in a sense that our society switched from a industrial production to a service economy. According to him, “postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expressions 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.” He also points out that another main difference between modernism and postmodernism is that modernism is characterized by a distinction between high and low art, while postmodernism is characterized by a blurring boundary of the two.

Due to this blurriness, Jameson claims that postmodernism lacks a personal style compared with modernism. For example, modernism is closely tied with a style. Modernism had a cultural and an aesthetic norm which helps to develop its personal styles. Postmodernism, however, lacks in a homogeneous culture, therefore it can’t follow the same rule of modernism in term of style developing. So it is in favor of things like form, surface, pastiche, mimicry and nostalgia. Jameson uses Andy Warhol's pop art as the example of postmodernism, the commodification of artistic materials usage.

To me, this article is pretty hard. I think postmodernism is very abstract and ambiguous. I think I would still prefer modernism over it.

Questions: The concept of the 4 fundamental depth models being repudiated? What would be his suggestions of postmodernism? How can we add style into it specifically?

Schizophrenic Postmodernism

In his article, Jameson calls for the deconstruction of analysis in postmodernist art to a method of growingly piece-unique perceptions, which should be contrasted to works of the same period rather than seeking to find a degree of similarity between the two. Jameson urges observers and scholars to diverge from seeking compilation of postmodernist artwork based on similar techniques and overlapping subjects but rather appreciate individual images for their respective aesthetic signifiers and pseudo-factual formulations. Unlike modernist art, as well as that of earlier periods, contemporary art does not “fit neatly” into a particular theme or practice; instead it emerges into an “enormously complex representational dialectic” (54) which requires a digression from the existing approach to artwork analysis which has prevailed since the first observations and studies in Art History.

Given the high volume and scope of art pieces belonging to the postmodernist period, it is understandable that Jameson not expand his argument of fragmentary analysis to every existing painting and photograph; though, he does contrast homogeneity of modernist artwork to that of heterogeneous postmodernist pieces. This writer claims that postmodernism be seen as a cultural dominant rather than an artistic style in order to accede to the coexistence of a wide range of styles, features, and expression. Though at times overwhelming in aesthetic composition, postmodernist artwork embodies parallel dramatization of a society to that of pieces from earlier periods; a realization which observers oftentimes fail to grasp and, also, attribute to the respective image rather than the compilation of works from the postmodernist age. Essentially, Jameson’s argument is summarized in the following “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” (5).

Throughout the article, Jameson makes the claim that art belonging to the modernist period and before, are characterized by hermeneutical interpretations by the vast majority of observers. He reaches this conclusion after providing the example of Van Gogh’s Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, “in the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form is taken aas a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth” (8). Though Jameson argues that Andy Warhol’s works do not generate hermeneutical analysis due to their minimalism in objectivity, he fails to describe why he finds Warhol’s relationship to hermeneutical descriptions as representative to all postmodernist art, especially after he encourages observers to refrain from assimilating artworks within particular artistic periods.