Fredric Jameson
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Fredric Jameson
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Postmodernism and Consumer Society.
Essay in "Movies and Mass Culture", ed by John Belton,
LCCN PN 1995.9.S6.M68.1996, DDN 302.23.43.0973-dc20,
ISBN 0.8135.2228.5 (Rutgers, New Brunswick, 1996),
Pp. 185-204, (1983).
BEGIN BLOCK QUOTE
The concept of postmodernism is not widely accepted or even
understood today. Some of the resistance to it may come
from the un-familiarity of the works it covers, which cna
be found in all the arts [!]: The poetry of John Ashbery,
for instance, but also the much simpler talk poetry that came
out of the reacation against complex, ironic, academic
modernist poetry in the 1960's; the reaction against modern
architecture and in particular against the monumental
buildings of the International Style, the pop buildings
and decoroated sheds celebrated by Robert Venturi in his
manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas; Andy Warhol and pop part,
but also more recent photo-realism; in music, the moment
of John Cage, but also the later synthesis of classical and
"popular" styles found in composers such as Philip Glass
and Terry Riley and also punk
and new-wave rock with such groups as Clash, the
Talking Heads, and the Gang of Four; in film everything
that comes out of Godard -- contemporary vanguard film and video
-- but also a whole new style of commericial or ficion films,
which has its equivalent in contemporary novels as well, in
which the works of William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, or
Ishmael Reed on the one hand, and the French new novel on
the other are also to be numbered among the varieties of
what can be called post-modernism.
This list would seem to make two things clear at once: First,
most of the postmoderisms metnoioned a bove as specific
reactions against the established forms of high modernism,
against this or that [P.185/187] dominant high modernism that
conquered the university, the museum, the art gallery network,
and the foundations. Those formerly subversive ad embattled
styles -- AbEx; the great modernist poetry of Pound, Eliot or
Wallace Stevens; the International Style (Le Coubusier,
Frank Lloyd Wrigt, Miese); Starvinsky; Joyce;
Proust, and Mann -- felt to be scandalous or shocking by
our grandparents are, for the generation that arrives at
the gate in the 1960's, felt to be the establishment and
the enemy -- dead, stifling, canonical, the reified
monuments one has to destroy to do anything new. This means
that there will be as many differrent forms of post-modernism
as there were of high modernisms in place, because the
former models. That obviously does not make the job of
describing post-modernism as coherent thing any easier,
because the unity of this new impulse -- if it has one --
is given not in iteslef bu in the very modernism that
it seeks to displace.
The second feature of this loist of post-modernisms is the
effacement in it of some key boundaries or separations, most
notably the erosion of the older distinction between high
culture and so-called mass or popular culture. This is
perhaps the most distressing developmetn of all from an
academic stand-point, which has traditionally had a
vested interest in preserving a realm of high or elite
culture against the surrounding environment of philsitinism,
of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest
culture, and in transmitting difficult and complex skills of
reading, listening, and seeing to its initiates. But many of
the newer post-modernisms have been fascinated precisesly
by that whole landscpae of advertising and motesls, of the
Las Vegas strip, of the late show and paperback categories
of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the
murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel.
They no longer "quote" such "texts" as a Joyce might have
or a Mahler; they incorporate them, to the point where the
line between high art and commecrial forms seems increasingly
difficult to draw.
END BLOCK QUOTE
NOTES (this section only)
[1]
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Essay in "Movies and Mass Culture", ed by John Belton,
LCCN PN 1995.9.S6.M68.1996, DDN 302.23.43.0973-dc20,
ISBN 0.8135.2228.5 (Rutgers, New Brunswick, 1996),
Pp. 185-204.