Jameson: lacking depth

Before I decided to write this post I combed Jameson once again to find some idea of what he was talking about and I came to a few conclusions while rereading his work.

First I realized that first I needed to put into context how Jameson saw the emergence of Postmodernism.  He first began talking about the “periodizing hypothesis” in which history works linearly.  However, this idea might lend one to think that it is “massive homogeneity” of one period.  I think that Jameson realizes that this is not totally true; history can be or at least artistic movements can be broken up into periods of time but this does not mean that there was no heterogeneity.  In fact the modernist movement can be identified in many ways and actually went through many stages in that one period.  Which leads me to the next thing that I realized.

Secondly Jameson sees post modernism as a period of “pure” capitalism.  When first reading this portion if the piece of his paper I thought that he was saying that the postmodernist era was an era of good capitalism.  And then I realized that this idea was absolutely absurd.  In fact what Ernest Mandel was saying that this era of capitalism was capitalism most efficient form, in which it had infiltrated all systems of culture  in the search for the “new”.  So in the past when artistic movements went against the social norm the form was ridiculed as not art because it did not work with in the forms of what art was at the time.  However, with post modernism this  did not happen, in fact it was pushed by the consumerist machine as new or “cutting edge”.  So in fact pieces of postmodernist art that should have been seen as a commentary on the present social systems became apart of the very social system and bastardized in the same type of false representation as Marilyn Monroe.  To Jameson post modernism is an entire culture that truly is a tool to mass produce Americanism all over the world, and any artist who works outside of the system is consumed and spat out as some cheap rendition of themselves and those who work with in the system lack “depth”.

The aspect of Jameson that I really had a hard time swallowing in class was the depth that he felt that postmodernism lacked, due to its inability to both reconstruct and respond to history or the present day.  Which I still feel is slightly in accurate.  Jameson argued that in Warhol’s piece “Diamond Dust Shoes” had no depth because there was no concrete place or time that those shoes could have existed, in fact they could have existed anywhere at the time of the production of those shoes and been worn by any number of people.  But I argue that it is part of the postmodernist form to deconstruct the notion of space.  So of course the shoes could have been apart of any number of physical histories, but it is not the space that mattered historically to Warhol, but the time frame of consumer fetishism.  But mostly I realized that in his description of Warhol’s photo versus Van Gogh’s painting the former lacked “truth” or the need for some sort of utopian resolution.  Instead Warhol’s piece just pointed to the nature of the time.

Lastly I think this is truly the depth that Jameson feels that postmodernism is lacking.  That in all of its pointing it gives no answers or hopes of better leaving it vulnerable to be used as society rendition of new and cutting edge art that is working outside of the guidelines made by the canon.  He even rags on postmodernist theory which discounts any truth of any other theory of art because it is very postmodern to see all truths not as absolutes as they see themselves but more so as different forms of socially constructed ideals.  And Jameson’s retort to this postmodernist thought of the death of truth i can only some up in the words of the lines of a song “how can you say there is no truth when you say it like you right?”