Jameson rant

I found the reading of Fredric Jameson to be extremely interesting, but pretty difficult to fully grasp…and I’m still not sure that I completely understand all of it 100%! At times, Benjamin’s piece “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” kept popping up in my head (with regards to authenticity and reproduction) and I just can’t get over how we are basically now living in a culture with no more avant gardism. That to me is crazy. We now live in a society where no one can come up with something avant garde. In a sense, it doesn’t exist anymore because it simply does not affect us like it used to. Of course yes it does exist still, it just doesn’t have the impact on us like it used to have on society.

Jameson also talks a great amount about architecture and describes it as a kind of “aesthetic populism.” He states, “It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most drastically visible…” What he is saying here is that postmodernism is extremely noticeable in architecture. This obviously made me think immediately about Jenck’s theologies and how architecture displays a number of postmodern attributes. I had never really thought in depth about how much architecture can truly tell us—now I know why we critically look at it so often J 

Another quote in the reading that I really struggled with but found very interesting once I unpacked it was when Jameson mentions “…let it suffice now to observe that here too depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces…” and I think what he is saying here is that as a society we are driven by want instead of need. Therefore craving the newest and fastest product, which of course relates to the cult of the new.