Jameson and Postmodernism

So for today you read a very long essay by Fredric Jameson about postmodernism, a condition that I'm sure most of you have heard about, though haven't really taken very seriously. Jameson came up with most of this stuff in the early eighties, and revised it as the decade progressed, during which time more and more critics began to use the term, and look to those who seemed to have invented it--academics--for definition. In the U.S. (and China, where he was treated like a god after being completely misinterpreted) Jameson's work became the standard, go-to account of this phenomenon--which, unlike Modernism, has never been entirely accepted as real.

Why is that? Well, for one thing, the rise of Modernism as an aesthetic movement neatly coincides with the rise of the second industrial revolution--"modernity"--towards the end of the 19th century. Let's consider "modernity" for a second. As we learned yesterday, the invention of the steam engine in the late 18th century led to the development of industrial machinery with greater power than was perhaps comprehensible, and over the 19th century, this power demanded reorganization of labor in and around cities. Particularly towards the end of the century, large factories were built for large machines and work forces, and new neighborhoods had to be built outside traditional city limits to accommodate the influx of machine laborers and sub-industries. The city grew and grew. The factories made their owners predictably very rich, but little of this trickled down to their workers, even as the industrial age grew the middle class. Moreover, the repetitiveness of factory work the inhuman conditions of most factory workplaces had major physical and psychological consequences. Factory work required people to behave like machines. Those who did not work in the factories were lucky but still found themselves surrounded by growing machines and crowds. More than that, the rise of modern science and Darwinism shook the traditional beliefs that had provided solid existential grounding for centuries. One can more clearly imagine the alienation of caused by modern life with these images in mind. It is a bit too obvious a contrast, perhaps, but the life and work of Van Gogh's peasant was never far from the earth or its rhythms. Whatever she made, it was with her hands, and was paid for her labor accordingly, if even more meagerly than the factory worker. Her life, which we now call "simple," perhaps seems so because all of its economic components are readily visible in plain sight--earth, peasant, harvest, trader. The larger and more numerous the corporations, the skyscrapers, and the machines became, the farther away people became from the end-products of their labor, and from clear understanding of their function in society. Consider the fact that office life, as we know it, is impossible to imagine in the 19th century. The office worker was equally alienated not just from the end-result of his labor but from the social site of transaction--few saw customers. Those who worked in traditional street-level stores saw themselves competing with larger and larger faceless corporations who sold a grander and cheaper shopping experience. Even the cities themselves were being rapidly transformed to accommodate trains and streetcars and crowds--long before the skyscraper. Most European cities, built for pedestrian and horse traffic, had to be redesigned to economically accommodate the new suburbanites and rural laborers into the city center. The new, giant shopping arenas (department stores, which eventually morphed into shopping malls) supported a brand new mode of life: shopping as entertainment. Back in the day, you never "browsed"--you'd always as a salesperson at a front desk for what you wanted, and he or she would get it from the back. Anyway, the United States, for its part, didn't have to worry about redesigning much, since its most of its east coast cities were already set up for the new capitalism, and anything west was still in its formative stages.

As a playful illustration of this change during the 19th century, look at these two pictures. Look what happens to Friedrich's monk during the course of the century. In 1804 Friedrich paints the monk in a private moment of reverential solitude and communion. We sense the sublime magnitude of the rising storm and its commiseration with the treacherous black water, but the monk holds steady, perhaps in prayer.

At the end of the century, someone that looks a lot like Friedrich's monk is freaking out.  Note that there is no established historical connection between the two paintings; it's merely a playful coincidence.  Nevertheless, the nominal subject of Munch's painting--an isolated scream, rippling through the paint of sea and air--wouldn't have made any sense in 1806.

French painters resisted these aspects of modern life at first. Many of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists came to Paris from other parts of France, only to flee the city to work in the idylls of the country. Van Gogh decided to live in Arles towards the end of his life and tried to have a commune there with another painter, Paul Gauguin. Paul Cezanne hated the city. Pissarro painted distant street scenes but is best known for his landscapes, which often contained peasants. The trend in painting in the mid-late 1800s, as I mentioned yesterday, had been towards the subjective depiction of the objective world, the way it appeared as if in a glance or a memory, and to learn from the scientific discoveries that had been made in that era about the action of light on surfaces, such as refraction and additive luminescence. But despite the fact that most of these painters maintained studios in Paris, they seldom depicted the modernity transforming their city. Monet's Gare de St. Lazare from 1877 is a notable exception, not least because it is on loan from Paris right now (along with so many other period masterworks) at SF's De Young Museum. Paper topic, anyone?

By the end of the 19th century, however, most painters who went to Paris, and who had grown up with the realities of modern life already, began to wonder if painting didn't have to be about a prior objective or subjective vision at all--that is, about something the painter either saw, or something the viewer was supposed to pretend to see "through" the painting. What they seem to have learned from the Impressionist experiment was not that painting was good at representing subjective states, but that the material of paint, and the surface on which paint was used, were an untapped expressive medium unto themselves. The very goal of constructing objects in space with paint was to be made as challenging as possible.

So why this turn away from look of the everyday world? Were these canvases supposed to be representations of inner states of mind? All pictures, or all things we call pictures, surely have this quality. A better question to ask might be: what did the move towards more and more abstraction have to do with the realities of modern life? Or was it the case that painters were simply giving the market what it wanted? The second question, though, still in some ways begs the first, and moreover, in Russia and other communist societies abstraction also prevailed. So what made abstraction desirable?

We might have to put off answering this question decisively for a bit, and in fact, it's a question that has no definitive answer anyway. During this time, however--we're now in the early part of the 20th century--photography had become commonplace and movies had become the new rage. Many art historians shudder to think that the aesthetics of painting had been influenced by the popularity and representational power of movies (movies were, we might think, the steam locomotive of depiction), and there is something to this--movies were part of one's public, not private, social life.

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Now, a word about Modernism. What is the Modernist artwork, across all media, against which we can understand Jameson's account of postmodernism? Well, let's start with Jameson. For him, postmodern aesthetics are marked by heterogeneity, fragmentation, pastiche, endless signifiers, schizophrenia, and disunity. (Warhol)

So what about modernism? Modernism, which many like to call Late Romanticism, is, at least by contrast, an aesthetic defined by its internal unity. As modernism reaches its peak in the early parts of the twenties century, right up to its supposed end (at least as far as painting goes) in the 1950s, the imitation of objects in space is completely of another era. Many would describe these works of high modernism as "purely formal," and as such were meant to produce a very complex and irreplaceable inner state; one could argue if this meant they were also supposed to represent this state, or not. In any case, abstraction isn't necessarily the idea--the central idea of modernism is to produce a work that it at its best on its own, without the help of nature, god, or even the likenesses of objects. Not coincidentally, the powerful engines, modern science and warfare, modern capitalism, and the theory of evolution and the psychoanalytic unconscious together dispelled the need in everyday life for nature or god.

In Jameson's eyes, postmodernism is something very, very different--the opposite, perhaps. Aesthetically, as we've heard, it's disunity and pastiche. What is pastiche?

To be sure, postmodernism is the opposite of modernism in one major respect: postmodern works break down what could have been unbroken formal unity or deep feeling in favor of works that quote the forms and contents of other works--as Jameson says at one point, it is postmodern culture tends to turn upon itself and designate its own cultural production as its content. As a result of this relentless quotation or refusal of unity, Jameson argues, postmodern artworks actively reject the notion of deep affect, or else they are unable to get there. How Jameson knows that deep affect has fled the world of the postmodern is beyond me, I must admit--but in any case, Jameson argues rather convincingly that the postmodern mode of production is built not on churning out representations of deep and pure emotion (there's a reason why that sounds silly to us), but on the cultural production of the recent past. Of course, artworks have always referred to other artworks, in the nineteenth century especially, but this, in Jameson's eyes, is different. And the reason why it's different is that we have entered a third stage of capitalism in which representation, the production of cultural objects, no longer occurs in an autonomous sphere of life, a space or time separate from everyday activity. Thanks to photography, but also advancements in the size and cost of printing images in general, representations are now all around us. This isn't such a big deal per se, but it does mean that images play a much more ubiquitous role in our lives than they did in the nineteenth century. This has a number of important consequences. First, it means that the image really has become the final form of the commodity, the thing we fetish even more than the commodity itself, whose ultra-mechanical production process is something we can only begin to fathom. Just think of the caché that the term hand-made has now--it gives a product even more value in our eyes, not because we can know its process of production better, but because it recalls other images of the hand-made--like van Gogh's peasant shoes. (talk more about this). We're so alienated from the hand-made production of things that we don't, actually, know more about the labor that's required to hand-make something, so we don't know the value of the labor that goes into it--we just assume it's higher quality because someone was there to judge their own work, but this is also just an image--it's very difficult, in this era of capitalism, to have enough everyday contact with processes of production to know much at all about the labor that makes commodities. And these days, there are so many commodities that we can't imagine a world without them--each and every advertisement is also a commodity. And to the extent that we trade on images in our economy, our daily lives and memories are filled with more solicitations of aesthetic experience--more pictures--than ever before. What leads to the postmodern condition that Jameson describes is a generation who has grown up in this world, for whom it seems perfectly natural and reasonable to draw on their life experiences, which have been conditioned by pictures, representations, and corporate culture of all kinds. Jameson doesn't mention this last thing. He understands that postmodernism is an historical moment, but doesn't really describe why it happens. Like most Marxists, he assumes that it's because of changes in the modes of capitalist production, and I tend to agree with him. There would not be so many images, so much cultural production, and if this condition didn't produce so many, they wouldn't all have to compete with each other.