Jameson

I was just getting used to the straightforward talk of our theorists, and then Jameson came along. I felt like Jameson definitely relates back to the hyper-stimulated activity of Habermas, but with Marxism built in. When Jameson talks about how we are so obsessed with consumerism. Much like Althusser upset me in his soapbox of ideology, Jameson upset me too. I feel like he's right though... there is an obvious abundance of consumption and while we're consuming the industry, they're consuming us too. It's a scary thought, but it's so embedded into our ideology that I don't think that it's going to stop- and what does that say about our culture?

A quote that stood out to me was one that I actually am still having trouble understanding ... "The first point to be made about the conception of periodization in dominance, therefore, is that even if all the constitutive features of postmodernism were identical and continuous with those of an older modernism-- a position I feel to be demonstrably erroneous but which only an even lengthier analysis of modernism proper could dispel- the two phenomena would still remain utterly distinct in their meaning and social function, owing to the very different positioning of postmodernism in the economic system of late capital, and beyond that, to the transformation of the very sphere of cultural contemporary society". (485) The quote's long and takes a few minutes to unpack, but what I think it's saying that in dominance, it's not true that older modernism and the new postmodernism aren't identical (but he can't explain it right now) but both ways of thinking are able to easily be identified in their own definition very easily-- and both of these change the way we live, from our culture to our capital economy.

On page 491 when Jameson talks about The Scream it related to Visual Rhetoric, since we talked about Munch's work. I've never really liked the painting before learning how to think critically, but the relation between the two classes made me think of what else the Scream is saying. The disconnect is so obvious between how the painting is put together in its medium and what it's actually portraying. That disconnect is what I feel like Jameson is talking about when he talks about how we are reacting to our culture of consumption- an obvious separation.