aro0823, jameson

“… we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience.”

This sentence, more so than any other we have read, has summarized postmodernism into logical terms. Basic tenets of postmodernism – illogicality, chaos, and irrationality – serve as the framework because we are not (as Lyotard would say) in an era of slackening, but rather an era of utmost confusion and identity crises. In modernism, things made sense. Everything was logical and had an order. Because the world as we currently know it is in such disarray, “the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but the past [to find meaning]” (494). To further complicate the complicated, the cultural producers are almost completely devoid of the ability to express feelings and make that meaning we lack (492). As Adorno says, the culture industry is responsible for mass ideological reproduction. If this industry is in a state of constant chaos and projects that message to the masses who aren’t equipped with the ability to express feelings, we as a society are in deep, deep trouble.
To be honest, I used to have such hope for postmodernism. I agreed whole-heartedly with Lyotard’s “war on totality.” However, the more of the assigned 40+ pages I read of Jameson, the more I was filled with hopelessness. In the postmodern era, we aren’t the crusaders of the war on totality; we are fueling the other side’s totalism with our hopeless addictions to “kitsch… Reader’s Digest culture… the airport paperbacks… and the grade-B Hollywood film (complete with predictable ending)” (483).
How could this happen, this utter disaster of an era? Why can’t we fashion representations of our own current experience? I agree with Jameson and blame the politicization and commodification of every material object that can possibly have profit extracted from it. The shamelessness of the capitalist system has created a universe of empty signifiers – simulacra – in which everything is void of any meaning and assigned an arbitrary material value. I would go so far as to say we turn to nostalgic images because they come from a time when the industry functioned to meet the people’s demands instead of the people falling victim to the globalized, totalized, impersonal, mass producing culture industry.