ChittyChittyBangBang Jameson

In "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", Jameson comments on the importance of aesthetic production. "It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated..." (483). In the postmodern age Jameson talks about progressing into a "high modernism" style.

"High modernism is thus credited with the destruction of the fabric of the traditional city and its older neighbourhood culture (by the way of radical disjunction of the new Utopian high-modernist building from its surrounding context)..." (483). The way I translated this was enforcing a radical change to Jencks’s Urbane Urbanism which is new but appears old and has urban context but acknowledges new technologies as well. Jameson talks about disconnecting this old, "traditional" style city and moving it into "high culture". Aesthetics are extremely important in commercial culture and updating architecture is a dramatic route. The newer architecture according to Jameson, "...stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions" (508).

This could also be connected to Eco's article, "The City of Robots". Jameson mentions Venturi's influential manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas. Eco talks about cities such as Vegas and Disney which imitate others and also concentrate on aesthetics. Is Jameson saying we could learn from Las Vegas and its modern architecture and lifestyle? Would this improve our consumer, media, information, and electronic society?