GeekinthePink

“…every position on postmodernism in culture . . . [is] an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today.” The issue of the post modern and position of capitalism is like the issue of terrorism in the media. If the media did not exist in the second age media Poster and Baudrillard describe, would America be suffering from terrorism in the same degree as we have been in the past 5 years? The reason, you see, for postmodern culture has to be the invent of capitalism. Accordingly, a position on postmodernity is a stance of mulitinational capitalism. To me, it's hard to tell how some of these theorists feel about capitalism. They speak of the breakdown of it, and they show the derogatory effects, but hard to tell if they would change it if they could. Except for Marx and Benjamin. I should think that was quite obvious.

Looking at the slides in class, the idea kind of struck me that Jameson would be on team Habermas were he to have to make a choice between Habermas or Lyotard. Habermas blames society (even though he does not agree it is a postmodern society but modernity that is an incomplete project) and calls it a hedonistic culture, desiring a revival via neoconservatism. With the slides, it is easy to see the desensitized society and what is deemed inappropriate. I would imagine Habermas nodding his head up and down to this. And then, we see him state one of Habermas' favorite phrases (in a more verbose way of course): "frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods” In other words, we see the disease of the cult of the new: we always need the newer solutions, the better, the different. And through this viewpoint, sometimes we get real art and sometimes we get a toilet seat. Unfortunately, when we are in the "cult of the new mentality," we have to go with what the ruling class says is the new edge. Hopefully, though, that new edge doesn't reveal too much of the underbelly of culture. If it were to get to this point, we would find out the true meat behind the driver seat of culture--the ugliness of it, the "blood, torture, death, & horror"--which I think just translates to the superficiality of it; that actually, nothing of significance subsists behind it, just the inherent need for money and perversion to get it.