Anamnesis _Jameson

Jameson is aware that postmodernism has been conceived stylistically and historically, and he feels it is important to capture it instead as a 'cultural dominant.' Under such a heading the eclecticism characteristic of postmodernism can be more objectively taken in to account without tending to "obliterate difference." Jameson doesn't base his distinction of postmodernism around its constitutive features, but charges late capitalism with its periodization versus modernism. Echoing Benjamin, Jameson says that "Aesthetic production has become integrated into commodity production generally." The cult of the new revels in this collaboration and pervades all modes of production. In the arts, architecture bears this relationship most succinctly, being necessarily dependent on market forces in its very act. Jameson then points out the features: a new depthlessness in theory and in culture, a weakening of historicity, and a new emotional ground tone.


This last description of postmodernism is a relief. I like Jameson's careful approach rather than Lyotard's indictments and vindications, and the assertion that postmodernism is marked by a disregard for grand narratives. How, for instance, is the grand narrative of Christianity in any way threatened by postmodernism? Isn't it instead enhanced by media relations and and the privatization so inherent in captitalism? In what other time could evangelical companies set up shop in Africa and convert millions? A weakening of historicity-that sounds more reasonable. An decentering of the artist's psyche-yes, much more reasonable.

In his tracking of the points of dissolution in modernism, Jameson launches into a brilliant discussion of Van Gogh's painting "Peasant Shoes." I think it is appropriate and poignant that he reminds us to try to mentally restore the historical conditions of the painting (this is again an echo of Benjamin's "Work of Art..."). This is so we may have an idea of the symbolic nature of the shoes, and to set us up for understanding the Heideggerian "gap" from which such a painting must have emergerged. The heading of this section "The Deconstruction of Expression" then becomes evident--"Diamond Dust Shoes" leaves no avenue for the viewer or the artist to wedge themselves in between the "Earth" and the "World."

Munch's "The Scream" is also taken into account. Another highly expressionist work, Jameson points out that its very composition precludes its expression. The scream "subtly but elaborately deconstructs its own aesthetic of expression, all the while remaining imprisoned within it. It reminds me of the post-structuralist concept "Sous Rature," a term which Derrida will apply to all signifiers but which was in a different context used by Heidegger in regard to "dasein" or being. That is, being is that which no signifier can encompass and which we cannot comprehend, and yet we cannot exist without it. Therefore the word "being" is X'd out, and in effect put under erasure, because it is both indefinable and necessary.