Article Review: Post Modernism and Consumer Society- Fredric Jameson

Jameson tries to lay the frame work for gaining a deeper understanding of postmodernism and it’s implications in architecture…

The specifics of post modernism and their implications:

1) Reaction against the established forms of high modernism:

-in the 1960’s referenced the moment when modernism became official academia, thereby losing face with a whole new arena of artists.

2)‘Kitsch’:the erosion of traditional distinctions between high culture and mass culture.

-Implicated within the latter is that it poses a threat to the establishment, to academia which have a vested interest in the preservation of the elite and high culture. (Or maybe it poses a threat to the public by further disenfranchising the lower classes by appropriating mass culture, repackaging it and selling it back to the public for a high price as ‘high culture’?)

3) The dissolution of professional philosophy and theory

-is there such a thing as ‘post-modernist theory’ or does the very nature of the movement as a fragmented re-appropriation of the past make theoretical discourse futile and irrelevant to architectural practice?

-earlier theoretical discourse weas distinguishable between academic disciplines, where now theory “can be anything and everything at once or nothing at all”.

4) A periodizing concept that correlates new formal features in culture with a new type of socio-economic ordering (late capitalism)

5) The rise of ‘pastiche’ and ‘schizophrenia’

-not to be confused with parody, pastiche involves the mimicry and imitation of other styles without seizing on their idiosyncrasies or making any sort of comment on the original (missing the point completely): “speech in a dead language”; pastiche a ‘blank parody’.

-Resulting from a schizophrenic consumer capitalist social arena where collectively we have begun to lose our sense of history; we are in perpetual motion and have lost all points of reference.

6) Death of the ‘subject or the end of individualism

-global awareness, demographic explosion and the age of corporate capitalism where the individual subject becomes subservient to the collective, ‘face-less’ subject competing for capital, resources and space.
-Artists and writers work is no longer of relevance to society: Is this actually the case? I think not. They are here to push societal awareness past their own noses.

-Jameson states rather apocalyptically, that everything has been invented and only a limited amount of potentialities exist…Can this be proved? I hardly think that this is the case. As long as there is a necessity for change, invention will exist.

The imperative of new architecture

-to extend new organs and expand our senses to (as yet) unimaginable dimensions (hyperspace).
Example: the Bonaventure hotel (John Portman) aspires to become a total space (hyper-locality) to accommodate the new collective (hyper-crowd).
-busyness of space, repression of depth cues immerses the individual eliminating distance to repress perspective or perception of volume… Is this the future of architectural practice?