post class 11/7

This week was a shortened week so we only had class on Tuesday. We discussed Jameson’s reading titled “The Culture Logic of Late Capitalism.” We talked about many aspects of this reading and how it related to past texts. One quote that can be related to Marx and Althusser and ideology when Jameson says that society is “at one with the official culture” (Jameson). When ideas from the super class (like consumerism) are seen as the views of society, we become one with it and see it as the way we live our everyday lives. In that sense, our culture has been institutionalized.

Another concept we talked about that related to past readings when Jameson talks about culture and the simulacra. Baudrillard was talking more about art when he was talking about the idea of the simulacra. Jameson talks about the simulacra in terms of culture but both of them talk about it being the notion of imitation. Culture here is argued as imitation because once the culture is imitated, it then becomes society’s ideology.

Another idea that the class discussed was how goods are made to look like a newer product when it really is not. This idea related to Habermas’ idea of the “the cult of the new.” A quote that Jameson says that can be related to this is “frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods” (Jameson, 485). What we talked about for examples of this is when food products change their packaging saying something like “New look, same great taste.” People are attracted to something they have never seen before. They are attracted because people like new things, which relates back to the “cult of the new” and the idea of out with the old and in with the new.

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