Context of Practise: Essay Research

Frederic Jameson, an American Marxist cultural critic, believes that postmodernism developed from the remix of culture emerging in the post-war years, especially starting to creep in within the sixties. It was this new ‘super-culture’ which encouraged the growth of Reality TV, media overload, 24/7 news, activism, hyper-entertainment, and everything else which became ‘the mainstream’ - the traditional target of maverick artists. Those of which, whom he saw to be longing for the destabilisation of order and convention, and to usher in the new. The postmodern embraces, reproduces, and even reinforces this culture, drawing inspiration from it; and allowing it to grow alongside. But Jameson claims that every defining, primary characteristic of postmodernism was once an auxiliary, subordinate trait of modernism.

On the other side to the argument, there is Linda Hutcheon, almost directly opposing Jameson. She takes a positive approach, helping to build a more complex understanding of the growing culture alongside post-modernism and also through the criticism of Jameson for only giving it a chance as a dependent feature of modernism. She refers to modernism as an elitist style for elitist people, snobbery for the snobs. But all of this changed with postmodernism's populist cry - it not only challenged this intellectual snobbery, but everything: our perceptions, pride, language, sexuality, institutions, and the limitations of all these things. According to her, the period acknowledges limits, then discards them, integrating other mediums into one another (like literature and film, poetry and music).

Jameson characterises postmodern parody as "blank parody" without any political bite. According to Jameson, parody has, in the postmodern age, been replaced by pastiche: "Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter". Jameson sees this turn to "blank parody" as a falling off from modernism, where individual authors were particularly characterised by their individual, "inimitable" styles.

In postmodern pastiche, by contrast, "Modernist styles... become postmodernist codes", leaving us with nothing but "a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm". Postmodern cultural productions therefore amount to "the cannibalisation of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion."

In such a world of pastiche, we lose our connection to history, which gets turned into a series of styles and superseded genres, or simulacra: "The new spatial logic of the simulacrum can now be expected to have a momentous effect on what used to be historical time". In such a situation, "the past as 'referent' finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts"

Jameson points to a number of examples:
1) the way that postmodern architecture "randomly and without principle but with gusto cannibalises all the architectural styles of the past and combines them in overstimulating ensembles".

2) the way nostalgia film or la mode rétro represents the past for us in hyperstylized ways (the 50s in George Lucas's American Griffitti; the Italian 1930s in Roman Polanski's Chinatown); in such works we approach "the 'past' through stylistic connotation, conveying 'pastness' by the glossy qualities of the image, and '1930s-ness' or '1950s-ness' by the attributes of fashion". The "history of aesthetic styles" thus "displaces 'real' history".

According to Hutcheon, one of the main features that distinguishes postmodernism from modernism is the fact that it "takes the form of self-conscious, self-contradictory, self-undermining statements"; and one way of creating this double or contradictory stance on any statement is through the use of parody: an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.

As Hutcheon explains, “Parody - often called ironic quotation, pastiche, or appropriation - is usually considered central to postmodernism, both by its detractors and its defenders… Parody signals how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference".

It is clear how this postmodern mindset to parody allows us to actively be inspired by what has come before us, allowing us to approach this in a reflexive nature but at the same time with a new twist on things.