literature – American Postmodernism

Week #1 – The Commodification of Aesthetics: A High-Tech Capitalist Conspiracy or a Protest by the Other?

[Note: “Hereticsnail” is an anagram of “Christina Lee.”]

The two authors we read this week-Fredric Jameson and Andreas Huyssen-both agree that aesthetics has undergone a process of commodification; however, each author cites different causes for why this has happened.

Jameson believes that postmodernism is a widespread paradigm shift that grew out of late capitalism. He says: “this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and super-structural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world” (23). Therefore, according to Jameson, “every position on postmodernism in culture…is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today” (22).

The commodification of aesthetics is, for Jameson, a terrible reflection of the postmodern condition. Late capitalism has produced a culture marked by depthlessness and a death of the self. Thus, postmodern art is dominated by pastiche: it’s all surface and no center.

Huyssen, on the other hand, focuses on postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon rather than a paradigm shift. He believes that postmodernism started a protest in the 1960s against the authority that modernists had placed in so-called “high art.” Early postmodernists used “pop avante-garde” as their weapon of protest, attempting “to validate popular culture as a challenge to the canon of high art” (63).

Huyssen believes that the recent insurgence of minority movements has contributed to postmodernism by “undermin[ing] the modernist belief that high and low culture have to be categorically kept apart” (64). The result is “a new creative relationship between high art and certain forms of mass culture” (64).

Whereas Jameson believes that the commodified postmodern aesthetic is empty and damaged, a sign of how messed up our late capitalist culture has become, Huyssen argues that the new postmodern cultural aesthetic is more inclusive and less elitist, a result of positive social change. Who’s right?

Both authors seem to me to be writing about different kinds of art altogether. Jameson might be talking about the darker forms of postmodern art that discuss the fragmentation of our lives. His description of the lack of depth and waning affect remind me of the stories by Amy Hempel who weaves together bits of mundane conversations to form her haunting narratives.

Huyssen seems to be talking about “Other” art, art produced by nontraditional artists who might not otherwise have gained any institutional prestige. For example, black American artists are often not included in the canon of high literature, but my 20^th century African American Norton literature anthology includes the lyrics to the song “Things Done Changed” by Biggie Smalls and “RESPECT” written by Otis Redding and sung by Aretha Franklin. I’m not really sure how the two types of “postmodern art” discussed by Jameson and Huyssen can be compared.

Ruminations

Several particular aspects of postmodernism and Western culture, primarily from our class discussions but also from the readings, have been ruminating in my mind since we last met.

I have found the discussion of the “real” vs. simulation–the question of authenticity–most troubling. What exactly are the implications of redefining our concept of what is “real”? Jameson, it would seem, believes that in a postmodern society, an original and real object distinguishable from its substitute or reproduction would essentially not exist. “This omnipresence of pastiche is not incompatible with a certain humor, however, nor is it innocent of all passion: it is at least compatible with addiction–with a whole historically original consumers’ appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for psuedoevents and ‘spectacles‘ (the term of the situationists). It is for such objects that we may reserve Plato’s conception of the ‘simulacrum,’ the identical copy for which no original has ever existed.” (pp.27-28) This brought to mind an essay I recently read by the decidedly UNpostmodern author C.S. Lewis, in which he quite insightfully discusses the question of distinguishing the real from from the substitute (or the simulation). Even at the time in which he was writing (the late forties and fifties, primarily), this question was one wrestled with by the society. Although his discussion addresses primarily the concept of religion as a reality or a substitute, he makes several points that came to mind as I contemplated the possibility of our society coming to a point when we can no longer determine any difference between the original and its imitation. Lewis first notes that our initial conclusions, when based upon whether something feels or seems reality or original is often deceptive and must be further scrutinized before we make a final analysis. But he also suggests that a copy or substitution for something real (“real,” as we are assuming this is in question) is ultimately always distinguishable as exactly that: “Authority, reason, and experience; on these three all our knowledge depends…I am not now saying that no one’s reason and no one’s experience produce different results. I am only trying to put the whole problem right way round, to make it clear that the value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, no our whole philosophy on a feeling.” (p.41) Granted, Lewis was not addressing the exact same questions of authenticity which we now face, but it made me wonder if indeed we would come to similar results in our determining the real from the simulation if we employed those three tools to test the things in question. However, perhaps it isn’t even a matter of social anxiety at all. Perhaps the reason alarmists such as Jameson bring the issue of originality up in the first place is because they believe that in a postmodern society, those questions would be irrelevant or at least that no one would care or think it mattered much.

Pastiche, which, according to Jameson is directly linked to the loss of originality, could indeed have a lot to do with a loss of historicity which Jameson seems to fear. A YouTube video I saw recently (don’t worry, it’s short, and, I think, quite absurdly amusing, and you’ll need to watch it to understand the following discussion) is an excellent example of verbal pastiche. The creator of the film used clips from an actual interview with Salvador Dali to create a cartoon “interview” that, while ridiculous and funny, entirely lacks a real historical context, at least for me. I have never heard the interview itself, nor have I recently seen a picture of Dali. In watching this video, I found that I constructed a sort of vague structure of Dali as a person, in which he says utterly absurd things (which is, given what I DO know about him, perfectly plausible) and takes on a cartoonlike appearance in my head. And really, in watching and laughing at the video, I’m really not thinking all that much about the actual historically real person of Dali. He is a foil for entertainment. I was actually a little surprised at the ubiquitousness of pastiche in the world around me, and it does cause one to question how much we as a society may indeed have lost a sense of context and meaningful history. I am not saying I agree entirely with Jameson’s “doomsday” theorizing, but I think he raises some valid questions.

Welcome to ENGL 414: American Postmodernism

Welcome to the class blog for the Fall 2008 English Honors Seminar “American Postmodernism.” If you are a student in ENGL 414, you can register for the blog, something you’ll need to do before the first week of classes is over.

Even if you don’t want to register yet, you can still browse this site, which will play an essential role in our course this semester. Of particular interest will be the course guidelines and the day-to-day class calendar.