Dot, Jameson

In his piece, Frederic Jameson discusses the many different facets of what he describes as postmodernism and how they affect the culture we live in today. In reading of of Jameson's first arguments on postmodernism as being culturally dominant, I was reminded of something that Dick Hebdige said in his analysis of hegemony. Hebdige discusses ways in which our culture deals with the other, stating that the main culture either trivializes, or naturalized, or domesticates the other and in doing so reduces the otherness to sameness (157). Jameson argues something very similar about culture in his article. He states that "obscurity and sexually explicit material ... psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance ... no longer scandalize anymore and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalized" (485). In this, he is saying that all of the aspects of our society that at one time shocked people have now become normalized and are accepted as part of the mainstream. for example, open displays of homosexuality were at one time deemed extremely socially unacceptable, but in today's culture they are accepted more and will continue to be more normalized in years to come. Jameson and Hebdige both see eye to eye on this point, and I am sure have many other similar views concerning our culture's function.

Going along with the idea of our culture normalizing absurdities, Jameson states that "aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally" and that "the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation" (485). If everything that was once seen as being the other in our society is now seen as being normal, it is hard to create products that are aesthetically pleasing and that grab consumer attention in new ways. As Jameson states in this passage, companies are being forced to quickly create new and exciting aesthetically pleasing products in other to make more money and sell products, were as several years ago the creation of aesthetically pleasing products was seen as significant because it was not necessarily the norm. In reading this passage, I was also reminded of the way in which our society is largely consumer driven and through Jameson's remarks could see how this has both been created and perpetuated through postmodernism.