Pre-class post - Jameson

The quote that stuck out most to me throughout this reading was towards the beginning where Fredric Jameson says, “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.” (485) I related it to Benjamin Walter and what he says concerning ‘political art’ and ‘authenticity’. ‘Novel-seeming goods’ are always being reproduced and reproduced and reproduced to be newer, better, faster, stronger … then the previously produced. Jameson recognizes this already back in 1984 already that this reproduction of ‘everything’ is happening at ‘ever greater rates of turnover’. Reproduction of such then causes a chain reaction of other things, such as that they find recognition in the institutional support. Zizek would call this ‘urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods’ as products deprived of their malignant properties. Everything keeps being reinvented and taken further from its reality and we don’t remember where it came from…Jameson says that ‘the past is (thereby) itself modified because ‘the new spatial logic of the simulacrum can now be expected to have a momentous effect on what used to be historical time.’ (494) He also argues that “…the culture of the simulacrum comes to life in a society where exchange-value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use-value is effaced…” (494) Baudrillard agrees with Jameson here and would say ‘postmodern condition’ has pulled us away from what is real and that we have reached this hyperreal space. Jameson believes in our postmodern age that history to us has become foggy, and the “prehistory” of a society bereft of all historicity. I like the metaphor that Jameson uses: ‘a set of dusty spectacles’ is what our past has become.

AHC – Geena Krueger