Pre class Jameson

Jordan, I must agree with you, after reading this I was almost in physical pain. This text is honestly excruciating. He uses so many examples and refers to so many authors, theorists and artists that everything he was saying became very confusing. But anyway, what I understood from this and was still very interesting is that postmodernism is believed to be a coupure from the past and from modernism could in fact just be a change, an innovation, a stage in capitalism. Jameson relates postmodernism with capitalism and claims that aesthetic productions today have become integrated into commodity production. He gives us Andy Warhol work as an example of this. Postmodernism he says is not a style but a cultural dominance. But he also says we have trouble representing are own time and culture therefore we pastiche the past. This blank irony, the neutral representation or imitation of dead styles is now becoming our global culture creating intertextuality. So everything is becoming pop culture as we adapt it to our era. Even history. This was to my mind one of the most interesting part of this essay. When authors, filmmakers, artist attempt to recreate the past, they do so with ideas and stereotypes of the past. These representations therefore become simulacra of history, as Baudrillard would put it. It cannot be truthful because we were not there or if so time distorts memory and becomes more subjective, twisting reality. What we have at work is therefore not historical literature or films but pop history. With this comes one of postmodernisms symptoms: the difficulty to represent our own time.