Maya response week 2 reading 1

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society

Notes and thoughts on reading:

This article attempts define and situate Post Modernism with in our contemporary pastiche capitalistic time. He explores Post Modern era with in two recurrent themes of “the transformation of reality into images, and the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents (179).” By this he means that there is no real individualistic search for style or new identity. Our current times have just appropriated a pastiche, bland understanding of the past partly because we are stifled by the limited combination of possible styles explored by the modernist eras and mostly because we live a space lacking an understanding of time and our defining history. We must then consider the very essence of existence and if we are a living society “incapable of dealing with time and history” then what trace, or memory do we end of leaving for the generations to come? Jameson says that the latest mutation in space-postmodern hyperspace-has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.” Does that mean we are actually no longer aware of our position? Or is it really that we are no longer in complete control of that position because we are moving at a speed that does not allow us to slow down and think about the state we are in? Who then is in control of this new space? Where is our avant-garde?