Research in Professional Writing, Games, and Design

(b. 1934 ¦ Cleveland, OH)

Currently the William A Lane Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University.

His list of publications is downright mind-boggling, officially listing nearly 150 journal articles.

Our reading, published in 1984, would form the basis for Jameson’s 1991 book of the same title.

Here, you’ll find a YouTube video of a keynote lecture that “Fred” gave at Duke in 2008(?). [Would have embedded it, but Duke disabled the option.]

“Postmodernism…”

Where to even begin? The article is encyclopedic in its scope, both in terms of art objects discussed and in terms of the different valences that postmodernism had taken by 1984. To risk VASTLY oversimplifying this, the basic principle Jameson explores is the one most often attributed to postmodernism: namely, that a postmodern culture is one unmoored to any referent beyond itself, or one of its own creation. The results, Jameson suggests, stem from 4 “constitutive features of the postmodern” (p. 487):

1. Depthlessness — a flattening of meaning so that art no longer lends itself to hermeneutical analysis (p. 488) because it rejects the metaphysics of the Cartesian dual subject (p. 490).
2. Weakening of historicity — history is no longer to be found at the base of a work of art, as it is replaced by pastiche, historicity, and nostalgia.
3. Intensities — a replacement for genuine emotion and affect that is driven by quantity rather than quality, detached from concrete situations and context that give rise to real emotional attachment.
4. Technology — the impact that technological innovation has had on the work of art, both as formal and aesthetic artifact, as well as political and economic vehicle.

Jameson states, “The world thereby momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without density. But is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating experience?” (p. 504).

1. Depthlessness

Though Jameson never uses the term, it’s difficult to avoid the implicit presence of Benjamin’s aura as an underlying concept. Jameson states of the origins of the work of art, “Unless that situation — which has vanished into the past — is somehow mentally restored, the [work of art] will remain an inert object, a reified end-product, and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production” (p. 487). Contrasting van Gogh and Warhol, Jameson explores this inertia as the product of art not only as the object of mechanical reproduction, but of mechanical reproduction as a theme within postmodern art.

Peasant Shoes

Diamond Dust Shoes

Jameson argues that “depth is replaced by surface” (p. 490) since Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes” neither care nor attempt any sense of connection beyond the spectacle of the image itself. “Here…we have a random collection of dead objects, hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, short of their earlier life-world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz” (p. 488). By removing the contexts that support some sort of “hermeneutic gesture,” the image evokes nothing more specific than a general melange of disconnected, or “schizophrenic,” perceptions. The image can no longer carry specific meaning because there is no longer a distinction between the internal and external worlds of the perceiving subject.

Hence, fully formed emotional responses, tied to concrete, material experiences, are no longer possible either — what Jameson labels the “waning of affect” (p. 489-490).

2. Weakening of historicity

This disconnect between representation and referent leads to a distancing of historical origin — even to its wholesale dismantling, to be replaced by “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past” (p. 494) so that pastiche is nothing more than a “neutral…mimicry” of parody (p. 493), nostalgia nothing more than the longing for a vaguely defined past that never existed (p. 495). Instead of lying under representation as a subtext injecting context into the work of art, history becomes a co-constructed node within the dynamic relationships that mutate around works of art, the artists, and the audiences. More importantly, the postmodern artist works to highlight that this is the case through increasingly sophisticated meta-textual movements, like intertext or metanarrative.

We need only look as far as Disney films or superhero reboots for examples. At one point, Jameson highlights moments in which nostalgia is mobilized as a form of critique against contemporary society. After looking at the visual style of van Gogh’s “Peasant Shoes,” I couldn’t help but think of Fievel Mousekewitz. An American Tail (1986) was repeatedly shown to me as a kid in school as an example of families pulling together in times of crisis, viewing their challenges as opportunities rather than obstacles. Using the (literal) rich fat-cat image as a symbol of greed and corruption, the film tied together the worst aspects of late 19th century political corruption with the rising mid-80s awareness that corporate corruption was a major issue. We, in rural Eastern Kentucky, identified with a small house trying to survive as an outsider in a world that was largely hostile to his existence. As a nostalgia piece, the film opened itself for us as kids to identify with the Mousekewitz’s as a repressed-yet-optimistic family who could overcome anything with a little faith. (We had a vague idea that they were Russian, itself an interesting concept in the mid-1980s. However, that Fievel and his family were Jewish was never, ever mentioned to us.)

3. Intensities

As stated earlier, intensity replaces emotion as one of the primary responses the subject can have to the postmodern work of art. Intensity is never explicitly defined, but can be vaguely reconstructed as a disbursed and ephemeral set of responses at work because the self is dead. “This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings…are now free-floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria” (p. 492). This euphoria seems a byproduct of mechanical processes that push receptive processes to the point of “schizophrenia.” Quoting Lacan, Jameson describes schizophrenia not as a clinical diagnosis, but as a semiotic meltdown: “a breakdown in the signifying chain” that gives rise to meaning simultaneously arranged sides that mutually co-construct context(s) for each other (p. 500). This fragmentation reduces emotion to intensity by disconnecting perception from the work of art. If the semiotic operations within the work are unintelligible beyond an arbitrary imposition of meaning, then true emotional response is impossible. The audience isn’t responding to the work of art as an object, but to their own internalized perceptions that are only ambiguously and vaguely connected to anything actually represented in the work. Think Transformers or GI Joe as just a mustering of little boys’ fantasies about themselves.

4. Technology

Here is where the “logic of late capitalism” starts to emerge as an economic force that operates alongside postmodern culture. Drawing on Ernest Mandel’s historicization of capitalism into three distinct stages, Jameson ties the demands on the audience as active participant into the economy that sees mechanical reproduction as an end unto itself, rather than a means of supplying necessary goods. Though written well before its introduction to consumer markets, it’s easy to see the internet as the next logical step in the progression of late capitalism from pure production of goods into an information economy that values distributed knowledge production. The products themselves are less and less valued in the face of the [often free] work used to create them as well as the distribution networks that perpetuate their existence.

Thoughts

As seen in the fights about intellectual property that arose in the late 90s/early 2000s, the concept of the “product” has, itself, become a simulacrum. In an information economy, the truly valuable commodities are all either the practice of the audience, or often have a hidden material reality. The digitization of information makes knowledge work (the work of a participatory culture) much easier since the tools of production (computers and software) and the distribution systems (the internet) are far more readily available than the heavy machinery of industrialization could ever be. The tools on the “back end” of information systems are things that most participants are, at best, only vaguely aware of. Overlaying interface systems that simplify the use of these tools means that the truly important aspects of information economies can take place underneath the noses of participants, without them ever catching a whiff of the processes themselves.

In essence, one Jamesonian reading of participatory cultures might see a re-emergence of a duality within postmodern culture. The duality of the ephemeral and the material have reinstated themselves, only now the ephemeral information while the material is the systems (hardware and software) that make work possible. At leas that’s my application of his theory. Take it for what it’s worth.