Introduction

1

"Modules on Jameson: On Pastiche."

from Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. By Dino Felluga, Purdue U. Online at:

http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/postmodernism/modules/jamesonpastiche.html .

FREDRIC JAMESON, in his magisterial work, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), has offered us a particularly influential analysis of our current

postmodern condition. Like Jean Baudrillard, whose concept of the simulacrum he adopts,

Jameson is highly critical of our current historical situation; indeed, he paints a rather dystopic

picture of the present, which he associates, in particular, with a loss of our connection to

history. What we are left with is a fascination with the present. According to Jameson,

postmodernity has transformed the historical past into a series of emptied-out stylizations

(what Jameson terms pastiche) that can then be commodified and consumed. (See the next

module on pastiche.) The result is the threatened victory of capitalist thinking over all other

forms of thought.

Jameson contrasts this postmodern situation with the modernist situation that has been

superceded. Whereas modernism still believed in "some residual zones of 'nature' or 'being,'

of the old, the older, the archaic" and still believed that one could "do something to that nature

and work at transforming that 'referent'" (ix), postmodernism has lost a sense of any

distinction between the Real and Culture. For Jameson, postmodernity amounts to "an

immense dilation of [culture's] sphere (the sphere of commodities), an immense and

historically original acculturation of the Real" (x). Whereas "modernism was still minimally

and tendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself,"

postmodernism "is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process" (x). That apparent

victory of commodification over all spheres of life marks postmodernity's reliance on the

"cultural logic of late capitalism." (See Marx: Modules: Jameson: Late Capitalism.)

Following from this economic base for thinking about postmodernity, Jameson proceeds

to pinpoint a number of symptoms that he associates with the postmodern condition:

1) the weakening of historicity. Jameson sees our "historical deafness" (xi) as one of the symptoms of our age, which includes "a series of spasmodic and

intermittent, but desperate, attempts at recuperation (x). Postmodern theory itself Jameson

sees as a desperate attempt to make sense of the age but in a way that refuses the traditional

forms of understanding (narrative, history, the reality obscured by ideology). For

postmodernists, there is no outside of ideology or textuality; indeed, postmodern theory

questions any claim to "truth" outside of culture; Jameson sees this situation as itself a

symptom of the age, which in turn plays right into the hands of capitalism: "postmodernism is

not the cultural dominant of a wholly new social order..., but only the reflex and the

concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself" (xii). Jameson calls

instead for the return of history; hence, his mantra: "always historicize!" Jameson pinpoints a

weakening of history "both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our

private temporality, whose 'schizophrenic' structure (following Lacan) will determine new

types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts" (Postmodernism 6). As

Jameson explains, the schizophrenic suffers from a "breakdown of the signifying chain" in

his/her use of language until "the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material

signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time" (Postmodernism

2

27). Our loss of historicity, according to Jameson, most resembles such a schizophrenic

position.

2) a breakdown of the distinction between "high" and

"low" culture. As Jameson puts it, the various forms of postmodernism "have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole 'degraded' landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV

series and Reader's Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B

Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic

and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or

fantasy novel: materials they no long simply 'quote,' as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done,

but incorporate into their very substance" (Postmodernism 3).

3) "a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary 'theory' and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum" (Postmodernism 6). This

depthlessness is, of course, supported by point # 5. The depthlessness manifests itself through

literal flatness (two dimensional screens, flat skyscrapers full of reflecting windows) and

qualitative superficiality. In theory, it manifests itself through the postmodern rejection of the

belief that one can ever fully move beyond the surface appearances of ideology or "false

consciousness" to some deeper truth; we are left instead with "multiple surfaces"

(Postmodernism 12). One result is "that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural

languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in

the preceding period of high modernism" (Postmodernism 16).

4) "the waning of affect" (Postmodernism 10) and "a whole new type

of emotional ground tone—what I will call 'intensities'—which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime" (Postmodernism 6). The

general depthlessness and affectlessness of postmodern culture is countered by outrageous

claims for extreme moments of intense emotion, which Jameson aligns with schizophrenia

and a culture of (drug) addiction. With the loss of historicity, the present is experienced by the

schizophrenic subject "with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect"

(Postmodernism 28), which can be "described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of

reality, but which one could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an

intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity" (Postmodernism 28-29).

5) a whole new technology (computers, digital culture, etc.), though Jameson insists on seeing such technology as "itself a figure for a whole new economic world

system" (Postmodernism 6). Such technologies are more concerned with reproduction rather

than with the industrial production of material goods.

FREDRIC JAMESON's concept of "pastiche" is usefully contrasted to Linda Hutcheon's understanding of postmodern parody. (See the Hutcheon module on parody.)

Whereas Hutcheon sees much to value in postmodern literature's stance of parodic self-

reflexivity, seeing an implicit political critique and historical awareness in such parodic

works, Jameson characterizes postmodern parody as "blank parody" without any political bite.

According to Jameson, parody has, in the postmodern age, been replaced by pastiche:

"Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing

of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry,

3

without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter"

(Postmodernism 17). Jameson sees this turn to "blank parody" as a falling off from

modernism, where individual authors were particularly characterized by their individual,

"inimitable" styles: "the Faulknerian long sentence, for example, with its breathless

gerundives; Lawrentian nature imagery punctuated by testy colloquialism; Wallace Stevens's

inveterate hypostasis of nonsubstantive parts of speech ('the intricate evasions of as')"; etc.

(Postmodernism 16). In postmodern pastiche, by contrast, "Modernist styles... become

postmodernist codes" (Postmodernism 17), leaving us with nothing but "a field of stylistic and

discursive heterogeneity without a norm" (Postmodernism 17). Postmodern cultural

productions therefore amount to "the cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of

random stylistic allusion, and in general what Henri Lefebvre has called the increasing

primacy of the 'neo'" (Postmodernism 18).

In such a world of pastiche, we lose our connection to history, which gets turned into a

series of styles and superceded genres, or simulacra: "The new spatial logic of the simulacrum

can now be expected to have a momentous effect on what used to be historical time"

(Postmodernism 18). In such a situation, "the past as 'referent' finds itself gradually bracketed,

and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts" (Postmodernism 18). We can

no longer understand the past except as a repository of genres, styles, and codes ready for

commodification.

Jameson points to a number of examples:

1) the way that postmodern architecture "randomly and without principle but with gusto cannibalizes all the architectural styles of the past and combines them in

overstimulating ensembles" (Postmodernism 19);

2) the way nostalgia film or la mode rétro represents the past for us in hyperstylized ways (the 50s in George Lucas's American Griffitti; the Italian 1930s in Roman Polanski's

Chinatown); in such works we approach "the 'past' through stylistic connotation, conveying

'pastness' by the glossy qualities of the image, and '1930s-ness' or '1950s-ness' by the

attributes of fashion" (Postmodernism 19). The "history of aesthetic styles" thus "displaces

'real' history" (Postmodernism 20). Jameson sees this situation as a "symptom of the waning

of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way"

(Postmodernism 21).

3) the way that postmodern historical novels (those works Hutcheon characterizes as "historiographic metafiction") represent the past through pop images of the

past. Jameson gives E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime is a perfect example: "This historical novel can

no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only 'represent' our ideas and

stereotypes about that past (which thereby at once becomes 'pop history')" (Postmodernism

25). In such works, according to Jameson, "we are condemned to seek History by way of our

own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach"

(Postmodernism 25).