Murphy, Jameson

Fredrick Jameson's notion of postmodernism and how it should be defined in relation to culture seems to change throughout his essay. He seems to leave the idea up in the air and point out many different viewpoints and ideas on the subject. Towards the very end of his essay Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, he describes two radically different views of postmodernism. The first indicates that postmodernism is one style among many others available, and that it is created through moral judgments. While the second point of view sees postmodernism as the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism, and can be described as "a dialectical attempt to think of our present of time in history". If there can be two such dramatically different points of view on an era stemming form modernism, how can one be right? Jameson would lean toward the side that suggests postmodernism is not a style, but a cultural dominant.
Earlier in the article we read,"Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly; they now strike us, on a whole, as rather "realistic"; and this is the result of a canonization and an academic institutionalization of the modern movement generally, which can be traced to the late 1950's" (Jameson 485). To me this sums up every fad, phase, cultural phenomena, media craze, and popular movement. If a piece of art, fashion trend, music genre, architectural structure, or any other aesthetic item seems radical at one moment in time, it will soon be normalized. Our culture takes in what the media puts out and we resist the initial form because it seems "strange" and within a short period of time it is the new popular thing to watch, wear, follow, or be a part of. Picasso was defined as abstract, and now, as Jameson points out, we see it as realistic. All of this stemming from the 1950's when American culture, as well as other cultures around the world, began to dramatically go against dominant ideologies and rebel.