Post Class Blog Jameson

Jameson interprets postmodernity not as a style or a movement rather as a cultural dominant of late capitalism. Jameson is looking through the Marxist lens to critique the development of class society and how capitalism begets class struggles in social and economic systems. Jameson describes postmodernity as a cultural dominant as "...the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and terror." He says that other scholars have defined postmodernity as a break from modernity but says that this idea of a "break" is an example of how we have lost touch with understanding the past, through crisis in historicity and pastiche. Jameson says that parody was replaced with pastiche. Here adopts Baudrillard's simulacrum, a representation or imitation of a thing that replaces reality. Parody implies that there is a moral judgement or comparison to norms while pastiche is a bricolage without a grounding in societal norms. Pastiche celebrates rather than critiques the work is imitates. This results in the bracketing of history into the understanding of eras with generative and commodified attributes 1930s-ness or 1960s-ness. Jameson says that Postmodernity superseded modernity in a part of a continuum not as a clear and steady break that we are taught to believe through the upholding of pastiche through Hollywood nostalgia film and the addictive need to create newer and more unique products for consumption.  Examples of nostalgia films that bracket history into a generative and therefore replicated and digestible images include: Midnight in Paris, Dazed and Confused, Woodstock, and Hugo. All films set in imaginary representations of imagined periods separate from reality and beyond history to invoke nostalgia for an ideal history we never experienced.