Annotations for Fredric Jameson Reading

Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism:
Everything is seen as waning and has already reached their maximum whatever that may be pertaining to each object individually. Postmodernism in culture takes a posistion on multinational capitalism whether it means to or not. It holds a dominant posistion in our culture with many features comprising it. Postmodernism helped form modernism and can be seen in it. Modern art, which is the precedent to postmodernism, during its time was seen as ugly because of the post victorian era that had just ended. Now because of education we see modern art for what it is and accept it. What was once seen as obscure and explicit is now welcomed with hardly any controversy. Today the aesthetic and commodity are now hand in hand with the aesthetic being overpowered by the idea of commodity and capitalism. With postmodernism we leave the past and don't integrate it, and postmodernism is the pinnacle that all culture must reach.
I) In "Peasent Shoes" its message has been demoralized and most see it as a pretty piece of art now. The viewer must look at the piece in terms of context and how it was made. The painting expresses hardworking unpleasent peasent life. It's a part of a capitalist society. Art rises not from how it physically is aesthetically pleasing, but rather from its social and historical meaning of the time. Since the painting is now mass produced it is seen as a material object seen for nothing more then visual pleasure. In "Diamond Dust Shoes" the object is there to represent something bigger and greater occuring during the time. A problem with postmodernism is the question of trying to find the political statements critical in art. Postmodernism is seen as more superficial and face based compared to modernism. Appearance is lost through photographs and becomes mutated. With the Waning of Affect the newer image has lost some affect due to frivolity, but not all is gone. The aesthetic becomes lost in high modernism to make way for social meaning. Inward emotions are conveyed through outward appearance. There are four models to measure depth in art: the dialectal, Freudian model, existential model, and great semiotic opposition. Surface appearance replaces depth in these models. Loss of depth can be physical and literal such as a building that gives the illusion of being unsupported. The postmodern world does not know anxiety and allienation, but rather the opposite effect occurs causing the subject to break. The subject conveys outwardly the inward emotion being felt. The downfall of this monad-like subject is that the subject becomes self-sufficient and its shut off from all other things. With postmodernism comes the end of the bourgeois style, such as individual brushstroke. With the loss of subject feelings are left up for interpretation and not defined for you by the artwork.
II) Individual subject has disappeared with its personal style. Dialect is also affected by the change in social life and speech is reduced and many jargons are formed. Leaving the old modernist style of speech and enter the postmodern redifined jargon. Because no longer a ruling class in capitalistic societies styles are heterogenous, because not one hierarchy is imposing its beliefs which causes a loss of collectivness. The pastiche then arises which imitates parody found in modernism and is a void mimicry of it. With the collapse of the ideology of style, uniqueness is lost and people who produce culture have to look to the past. Historicism is the random compiling of past styles to create an allusion of the past. Simulacrum then occurs with the idea that there was never an authentic and everything is a copy of something else. In the Nostalgia mode our addiction to the photograph is seen as historicism. Ideology of generations emerged through an attempt to understanding the past. Many look to the 1950's as the desired lost era and we can continually surround ourselves with past generations.