“Whatever is referred to, must exist.”
John Searle’s Speech Acts
Whenever we engage in argument of the whatness of what is postmodern, it is almost impossible to drop Jameson’s theories out of the discussion. Fredric Jameson is highly recognizable name in contemporary literary and philosophical studies. He qualified for a doctoral degree from Yale University, where he studied under Erich Auerbach. The literary and philosophical critic, whose mimetic approach towards the representation of reality in modern western literature is highly praised theoretical work, proved to be a lasting influence on Jameson’s thought. In his early works Jameson has been concerned, along with other Marxist cultural critics such as Terry Eagleton, to articulate Marxism’s relevance in respect to the current philosophical and literary trends. His book - “Marxism and form” published in 1971 turned out to be a pioneering book from which dialectical criticism emerges as a radical alternative to the kind of humanistic thinking habitual to the English-speaking academy. Jameson established history as the only pertinent factor in his analysis, synthesizing some of the key Hegelian formulas. It is important to be mentioned that he brought back history and politics after the New Criticism rather linguistic approach.
Following Adorno and Horkheime’s analysis of the culture industry, Jameson discussed postmodernism. Jameson map this landscape of drastic "dedifferentiation" in a succession of books, beginning with Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), which collects his earlier essays on the topic. The volume's title chapter is one of Jameson's first and may still be his most famous formulation of postmodernism as the cultural representation of multinational or finance capitalism. Analyzing examples of contemporary art, architecture, and film, he here identifies postmodernism's principal features. These include: the disappearance of the individual subject with a corollary waning of personal feeling and style; the emergence of schizophrenic consciousness that conflates past and future into a perpetual present; a crisis in historicity which reduces the collective human record to empty images of nostalgia; the stylistic triumph of pastiche, which randomly cannibalizes past cultures, processing their substance into sheer simulation; and the rise of the hysterical sublime, where technology images the otherwise inconceivable, all pervasive - and menacing - world economic system.
In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1998)Jameson once again asserts some of his best-known claims - pastiche and crisis in history to explain and provide with a definition the postmodern art and way of thinking. His eclectic method and the way the text lists different examples of postmodern works illuminates the vastness and complexity of the problem. The text outlines the main issues that arose in understanding the concept of postmodernism - the unfamiliarity of the works it covers, the rebellion nature of it that conquered the very foundations of modern art, the impulse to erase the distinguishing line between high culture and mass culture. The article observes that the different indications of genre and discourse boundaries are obscured or rather fused. The interpretation of the problems introduces new concepts of thinking of postmodern but rely as well on other critical texts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti - Oedipus”.
The text is divided into different key aspects of interpretation that introduce various features of definite answers meant to give definite conclusions to the questions that it itself arose. For example, the explanation of pastiche acknowledges its crucial part when parody is impossible because of the lost validation of linguistic norm affecting the style. With the blank parody and its neutral mimicry of style, the uniqueness of the individuality is no longer possible. This logically leads to the point where the text supplies us with the so called “death of the subject” theory component - “in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles”(Jameson). And if there is death case the mechanism of compensation is always turned on. Such compensatory mechanism in Jameson’s work is “the nostalgia mode” that exposes the longing of the postmodern author for the imaginary, exaggerated image of the Golden Age, situated in the past. The troubled relation, the peculiar way with time that postmodernists experience is analyzed throughout the concept of schizophrenia. The usage of the term “is meant to be descriptive and not diagnostic”(Jameson), it is treated as a figure of postmodern phenomena in texts, as a discourse.
Jameson’s theory is fundamental in understanding postmodernism. It marshals significant concepts that are useful to various fields of research - film theory, literary, philosophical, sociological, anthropological analyses and many others. All the cultural phenomena of the present could be interpreted with the help of Jameson’s postulates. However his theory meets opposed argumentation in the face of the critic Linda Hutcheon who have argued that postmodern artists show greater historical sophistication, by analyzing the discursive means by which historical narratives are constructed, than Jameson's account would allow.
Undoubtedly Fr. Jameson is recognized as the pioneer of the critical platform of postmodernism. It would have been extremely difficult to read and understand postmodern texts such as Dvorianova’s “Passion or the death of Alice” that lacks in adequate genre form without the conception of the pastiche. Or to enjoy Douglas Adams in that matter. We would not have been able to fully comprehend Jean Michel Jerre’s musical shows without the idea of schizophrenia. I would not have been able to fully perceive the aesthetic conotations in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” if I was unaware of Jameson’s “nostalgia mode”.
Answering to a problem by a name is an act of intensified mythological implications as Giambattista Vico suggests. The name I’m tend to give to the focus of my interpretation is “Chronus disease” named after the Greek god of time. The symptoms of the sickness are total dissatisfaction with the temporal boundaries of the present. This state has nothing in common with the idealized representation of the past found in Romantic Age, for example. It defies the notion of time itself. In “Penelopiad” Margaret Atwood resurrects the heroine of the myth in order to give her a voice that will reconsider the “myth truths” that time established. Time is a category to be diminished. Thus, this makes possible Penelope’s tale to be told in 21st century with her new found voice. Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” tells yet another fable of the search of the genuine voice and of the Chronus sickness. So I claim that this 2011 movie is a nostalgia film. Why?
The writer Gil is constantly dreaming of the thrilling period of the 20s when Fitzgerald, Hemingway and many others lived and worked in Paris. In midnight - the 12th hour (direct reproduction of the fairytales symbolism that plays on the sentimental chord of our hearts and leads us to the idealized memory of childhood forces us to participate in this metonymically, as Jameson calls it, brought back past - and this is only a hint of the way that the movie is an actual pastiche narrative) - time disappear as valid dividing category and Gil is teleported into a virtual past where he meets all of his idols. Retrospective styling, specific generational moment of the past - yes, indeed. The 20s are shown with the typical clothing, with the recognizable sounds and music, with the significant places that trigger the nostalgia of the past, where everything was different from now. The want-to-be author Gil thinks that if he can get Hemingway’s opinion on his novel he would be able to feel himself as a legitimate writer. Every intellectual is tempted to meet their idols, they commensurate with them and quote their words and thoughts. The movie tricks us exactly because of this our hidden desires of resemblance. Reinvents our desire in the form of a pastiche. There is no point to a parody of such longing. At some point we, alongside Gil, realize that past is not trustworthy category. Simply because the intellectuals of the 20s think that the Golden Age is not theirs but the Belle Epoche.
The constant temporal jumps in the movie, the mixed realities of past and present shows a case of schizophrenia described by Jameson as oscillation of time. Gil is a man of the present who falls in love with a girl from the past but still remains engaged in modern times. He shares doubled experience when the places he visited in midnight Paris appear to be also a décor of his present. He is either “there” - the magical past where Gertrude Stain is reading and analyzing his book, or in the present where the woman he is about to share his life with is annoyingly ignorant to his dreams. His experience in the past constantly emerges into the present - the Cole Porter’s old record that he hears at small flea market or the book by his past-time lover he buys in the street. So the past is also a present and the other way around. The definition of time is blurred. Gil is not able to separate his experience in the past and in the present. The fact that he finds out in the past that his future wife of the present is not faithful to him buttresses up the argument that the schizophrenic experience of temporality is incoherent sequence of events. It becomes even more perplex when he discovers the betrayal because of the similar experience of his own book character. The breakdown of the signifiers.
If schizophrenia is unique feeling of time then pastiche is universal representation of postmodern experiments with genre and form. It has been already mentioned that Woody Allen’s movie toy with our nostalgic visage of the lost childhood years. A thematic fabulous carriage is brought to the scene to take Gil to his dreamed past. And this is yet another metonymical mechanism to remind us of Cinderella’s story. At the same time the shy, beautiful girl working at the flea market is just waiting to be acknowledged by Gil - the enchanted prince. All of Gil’s happenings are designed somehow to represent possible events of our current experience.
“Midnight in Paris” opens with slideshow of different images of Paris. The collage shows us typical views of the French capital, it provides images of Paris the way we imagine the city - the idealized version according to which in Paris is still poetical to die out of hunger. It pursues us to feel like we are immured in the set, to believe that we are part of the proceeding action. We are in Gil’s shoes - contaminated with Chronus disease, overwhelmed by nostalgia rush. But are not these the significant features that Jameson calls “a chance to sense the specificity of the postmodernism experience of space and time” - pastiche and schizophrenia?
Jameson’s work on postmodernism is consciously left open. In a matter this is a philosophical concern with social significance. But the most important fact for us is that the critic provides us with essential concept throughout which we could reach the essence of cultural, literary etc. postmodern phenomena. His concept provide us with tools of interpretation. Weather this is the “right” approach in the era of multiple truths is a question we must leave open.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ralica_Luckanova
Works Cited:
Jameson, Frederic - Postmodernism and Consumer Society
The Cultural Turn. Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998. Verso, London, 1998; S.1-20
John Searle’s Speech Acts
Whenever we engage in argument of the whatness of what is postmodern, it is almost impossible to drop Jameson’s theories out of the discussion. Fredric Jameson is highly recognizable name in contemporary literary and philosophical studies. He qualified for a doctoral degree from Yale University, where he studied under Erich Auerbach. The literary and philosophical critic, whose mimetic approach towards the representation of reality in modern western literature is highly praised theoretical work, proved to be a lasting influence on Jameson’s thought. In his early works Jameson has been concerned, along with other Marxist cultural critics such as Terry Eagleton, to articulate Marxism’s relevance in respect to the current philosophical and literary trends. His book - “Marxism and form” published in 1971 turned out to be a pioneering book from which dialectical criticism emerges as a radical alternative to the kind of humanistic thinking habitual to the English-speaking academy. Jameson established history as the only pertinent factor in his analysis, synthesizing some of the key Hegelian formulas. It is important to be mentioned that he brought back history and politics after the New Criticism rather linguistic approach.
Following Adorno and Horkheime’s analysis of the culture industry, Jameson discussed postmodernism. Jameson map this landscape of drastic "dedifferentiation" in a succession of books, beginning with Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), which collects his earlier essays on the topic. The volume's title chapter is one of Jameson's first and may still be his most famous formulation of postmodernism as the cultural representation of multinational or finance capitalism. Analyzing examples of contemporary art, architecture, and film, he here identifies postmodernism's principal features. These include: the disappearance of the individual subject with a corollary waning of personal feeling and style; the emergence of schizophrenic consciousness that conflates past and future into a perpetual present; a crisis in historicity which reduces the collective human record to empty images of nostalgia; the stylistic triumph of pastiche, which randomly cannibalizes past cultures, processing their substance into sheer simulation; and the rise of the hysterical sublime, where technology images the otherwise inconceivable, all pervasive - and menacing - world economic system.
In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1998)Jameson once again asserts some of his best-known claims - pastiche and crisis in history to explain and provide with a definition the postmodern art and way of thinking. His eclectic method and the way the text lists different examples of postmodern works illuminates the vastness and complexity of the problem. The text outlines the main issues that arose in understanding the concept of postmodernism - the unfamiliarity of the works it covers, the rebellion nature of it that conquered the very foundations of modern art, the impulse to erase the distinguishing line between high culture and mass culture. The article observes that the different indications of genre and discourse boundaries are obscured or rather fused. The interpretation of the problems introduces new concepts of thinking of postmodern but rely as well on other critical texts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti - Oedipus”.
The text is divided into different key aspects of interpretation that introduce various features of definite answers meant to give definite conclusions to the questions that it itself arose. For example, the explanation of pastiche acknowledges its crucial part when parody is impossible because of the lost validation of linguistic norm affecting the style. With the blank parody and its neutral mimicry of style, the uniqueness of the individuality is no longer possible. This logically leads to the point where the text supplies us with the so called “death of the subject” theory component - “in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles”(Jameson). And if there is death case the mechanism of compensation is always turned on. Such compensatory mechanism in Jameson’s work is “the nostalgia mode” that exposes the longing of the postmodern author for the imaginary, exaggerated image of the Golden Age, situated in the past. The troubled relation, the peculiar way with time that postmodernists experience is analyzed throughout the concept of schizophrenia. The usage of the term “is meant to be descriptive and not diagnostic”(Jameson), it is treated as a figure of postmodern phenomena in texts, as a discourse.
Jameson’s theory is fundamental in understanding postmodernism. It marshals significant concepts that are useful to various fields of research - film theory, literary, philosophical, sociological, anthropological analyses and many others. All the cultural phenomena of the present could be interpreted with the help of Jameson’s postulates. However his theory meets opposed argumentation in the face of the critic Linda Hutcheon who have argued that postmodern artists show greater historical sophistication, by analyzing the discursive means by which historical narratives are constructed, than Jameson's account would allow.
Undoubtedly Fr. Jameson is recognized as the pioneer of the critical platform of postmodernism. It would have been extremely difficult to read and understand postmodern texts such as Dvorianova’s “Passion or the death of Alice” that lacks in adequate genre form without the conception of the pastiche. Or to enjoy Douglas Adams in that matter. We would not have been able to fully comprehend Jean Michel Jerre’s musical shows without the idea of schizophrenia. I would not have been able to fully perceive the aesthetic conotations in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” if I was unaware of Jameson’s “nostalgia mode”.
Answering to a problem by a name is an act of intensified mythological implications as Giambattista Vico suggests. The name I’m tend to give to the focus of my interpretation is “Chronus disease” named after the Greek god of time. The symptoms of the sickness are total dissatisfaction with the temporal boundaries of the present. This state has nothing in common with the idealized representation of the past found in Romantic Age, for example. It defies the notion of time itself. In “Penelopiad” Margaret Atwood resurrects the heroine of the myth in order to give her a voice that will reconsider the “myth truths” that time established. Time is a category to be diminished. Thus, this makes possible Penelope’s tale to be told in 21st century with her new found voice. Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” tells yet another fable of the search of the genuine voice and of the Chronus sickness. So I claim that this 2011 movie is a nostalgia film. Why?
The writer Gil is constantly dreaming of the thrilling period of the 20s when Fitzgerald, Hemingway and many others lived and worked in Paris. In midnight - the 12th hour (direct reproduction of the fairytales symbolism that plays on the sentimental chord of our hearts and leads us to the idealized memory of childhood forces us to participate in this metonymically, as Jameson calls it, brought back past - and this is only a hint of the way that the movie is an actual pastiche narrative) - time disappear as valid dividing category and Gil is teleported into a virtual past where he meets all of his idols. Retrospective styling, specific generational moment of the past - yes, indeed. The 20s are shown with the typical clothing, with the recognizable sounds and music, with the significant places that trigger the nostalgia of the past, where everything was different from now. The want-to-be author Gil thinks that if he can get Hemingway’s opinion on his novel he would be able to feel himself as a legitimate writer. Every intellectual is tempted to meet their idols, they commensurate with them and quote their words and thoughts. The movie tricks us exactly because of this our hidden desires of resemblance. Reinvents our desire in the form of a pastiche. There is no point to a parody of such longing. At some point we, alongside Gil, realize that past is not trustworthy category. Simply because the intellectuals of the 20s think that the Golden Age is not theirs but the Belle Epoche.
The constant temporal jumps in the movie, the mixed realities of past and present shows a case of schizophrenia described by Jameson as oscillation of time. Gil is a man of the present who falls in love with a girl from the past but still remains engaged in modern times. He shares doubled experience when the places he visited in midnight Paris appear to be also a décor of his present. He is either “there” - the magical past where Gertrude Stain is reading and analyzing his book, or in the present where the woman he is about to share his life with is annoyingly ignorant to his dreams. His experience in the past constantly emerges into the present - the Cole Porter’s old record that he hears at small flea market or the book by his past-time lover he buys in the street. So the past is also a present and the other way around. The definition of time is blurred. Gil is not able to separate his experience in the past and in the present. The fact that he finds out in the past that his future wife of the present is not faithful to him buttresses up the argument that the schizophrenic experience of temporality is incoherent sequence of events. It becomes even more perplex when he discovers the betrayal because of the similar experience of his own book character. The breakdown of the signifiers.
If schizophrenia is unique feeling of time then pastiche is universal representation of postmodern experiments with genre and form. It has been already mentioned that Woody Allen’s movie toy with our nostalgic visage of the lost childhood years. A thematic fabulous carriage is brought to the scene to take Gil to his dreamed past. And this is yet another metonymical mechanism to remind us of Cinderella’s story. At the same time the shy, beautiful girl working at the flea market is just waiting to be acknowledged by Gil - the enchanted prince. All of Gil’s happenings are designed somehow to represent possible events of our current experience.
“Midnight in Paris” opens with slideshow of different images of Paris. The collage shows us typical views of the French capital, it provides images of Paris the way we imagine the city - the idealized version according to which in Paris is still poetical to die out of hunger. It pursues us to feel like we are immured in the set, to believe that we are part of the proceeding action. We are in Gil’s shoes - contaminated with Chronus disease, overwhelmed by nostalgia rush. But are not these the significant features that Jameson calls “a chance to sense the specificity of the postmodernism experience of space and time” - pastiche and schizophrenia?
Jameson’s work on postmodernism is consciously left open. In a matter this is a philosophical concern with social significance. But the most important fact for us is that the critic provides us with essential concept throughout which we could reach the essence of cultural, literary etc. postmodern phenomena. His concept provide us with tools of interpretation. Weather this is the “right” approach in the era of multiple truths is a question we must leave open.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ralica_Luckanova
Works Cited:
Jameson, Frederic - Postmodernism and Consumer Society
The Cultural Turn. Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998. Verso, London, 1998; S.1-20
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