Postmodernism and

Consumer Society
Fredric Jameson
Ctia Vaz, PG27026,
Hugo Machado, PG27024.
Mestrado em Lngua Literatura e Cultura Inglesas

Concept of Postmodernism
Little consensus definition, but there are two things that help to define it.
1st reason:

DISPLACEMENT OF MODERNISM

Postmodernists share a reaction against the established forms of

h i g h m o d e r n i s m . ( 1 6 4 )

Poetry that came out of a reaction against modernists;

Architecture (Robert Venturis pop buildings);

PRESENCE IN ALL ARTS

Andy Warhols Pop Culture, and Photorealism 1 ;

Music;
Film,

1 Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic mediums, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to
reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium.

Concept of Postmodernism
2nd reason:
The effacement of some key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the
older distinctions between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture.(165)
Anthony Easthope)

Po s t m o d e r n i s t s t r i e d t o o v e r t h r o w t h e s e d i s t i n c t i o n s .

(e.g.

Jamesons Definition of Postmodernism

It is a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal
features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social and a new economic
order. (165) consumer society / capitalism
after the WWII transitional period
1960s

SPACE

SCHIZOPHRENIA

TWO STRANDS OF POSTMODERNISM

PASTICHE
TIME

Pastiche Eclipses Parody

An artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period.
(available at: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/pastiche)

Pastiche parody
Both involve imitation and mimicry,
Mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles.
But parody has an ulterior motive, to mock a divergence from the norm,
Pastiche is neutral, only intended to replicate in different ways theres no New in Arts.

Jameson condemns the world of pastiche as a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all
that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the
imaginarymuseum.(169)

The Death of the Subject

The modernists were predicated on the invention of a personal, private style () linked to the
conception of the unique personality andindividuality in order to forge their own style. (167)
The individualist subject is dead; the end of individualism.
Thismodernist precepts -the unique individual
and theoretical basis of individualism mightbe ideological:
1 the older bourgeois no longer exists individual subject a thing of the past;
2 the bourgeois individual subject is a myth and never existed. (168)

The Death of the Subject

Everything has already been invented in all arts:
New styles and worlds have already been invented; only a limited number of combinations
is possible; the unique ones have been thought of already. (168)

Art is about art itself with an essential message: the necessary failure of art and the
aesthetic, the failure of the new , with the imprisonment in the past. (169)

The Nostalgia Film

La Mode Rtro retrospective styling.
Not high cultural, but mass cultural.
it consists merely of films about the past and about specific generational moments of that past
(169)
Lucas American Graffiti (1973) recapture of the stylistic peculiarities of the 1950s USA.
Polanskis Chinatown (1974) does a similar thing for the 1930s.
Bertoluccis The Conformist (Fascist era in Italy),
Star Wars is nostalgic in the way it tries to reproduce the Saturdays afternoons serials of a past
time, in order to relive emotions feelings once again.

The Nostalgia Film

It does not reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality.
Rather, it reinvents the feel and shape of characteristic art objects of an older period.
2

Because there is no individual focus, there is nopersonal identity a sortof Schizophrenia .

Inability in dealing with time and history its all about the present,
Failure to recognize what is real :

2 Wood, Nigel; Lodge, David. Modern Criticism and Theory. Routledge. New York. 3.ed 2008. p 549

(Wood; Lodge. 2008. p 549)

The consumer society has alarming pathological symptoms in relation to the concept of time and
history. It cannot relate to time and build its own history, basing itself only on time to build up a world
view. (171)

POSTMODERNISM AND THE CITY

Bonaventure Hotel
Represents primarily a mutation in built space itself,
And, the mutation in the object (hyperspace) has been unaccompanied by the mutation in the subject
(171),
Hyperspace High-modernism.
Secondarily, two perspectives:
1 it has no pretention to insert a different, and elevated, a new utopian language (172);
2 Anti-elitist vision.
Escalator and elevator metaphor,
Simulacrum of reality, i.e. the artificial becomes the new real.

Bonaventure Hotel

The New Machine

Lyotards idea: Postmodernism as entertainment,
Jamesons: leisure-time space (176),
Michael Herrs Dispatches: helicopter built for war (177),
Modernism represented motion

New machine
Postmodernism can only be represented in motion

The Aesthetic Consumer Society

recalls the notion of periodization,
my point is that until the present day those things have been secondary () they
become the central features of cultural production. (177)

Culture IS economy.
the transformation of reality into images [and] the fragmentation of
time into a series of perpetual presents. (179)

Jamesons Views Today

POSTMODERNISM OR POSTMODERNITY