Contemporary Art

1 The Postmodern Art of The 1980s

Fredric Jameson's concept of pastiche is usefully contrasted to Linda Hutcheon's understanding of postmodern parody. Whereas Hutcheon sees much to value in postmodern literature's stance of parodic self-reflexivity, seeing an implicit political critique and historical awareness in such parodic works, Jameson characterizes postmodern parody as blank parody without any political bite (Chomsky, 29-35).

According to Jameson, parody has, in the postmodern age, been replaced by pastiche: Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.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 characterized by their individual, inimitable styles: the Faulknerian long sentence, for example, with its breathless gerundives; Lawrentian nature imagery punctuated by testy colloquialism; Wallace Stevens's inveterate hypostasis of nonsubstantive parts of speech ('the intricate evasions of as'); etc.. 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 cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general what Henri Lefebvre has called the increasing primacy of the 'neo (Chomsky, 29-35). In such a world of pastiche, we lose our connection to history, which gets turned into a series of styles and superseded genres, or simulacra: The new spatial logic of the simulacrum can now be expected to have a momentous effect on what used to be historical time.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. We can no longer understand the past except as a repository of genres, styles, and codes ready for commoditization (Chomsky, 29-35).

Jameson points to a number of examples:

1) The way that postmodern architecture randomly and without principle but with gusto cannibalizes all the architectural styles of the past and combines them in over stimulating ensembles (Postmodernism 19);

In contemporary discussions of art, literature, and culture, there is evidently a tendency to question the efficacy of language, meaning, expression, and communication, and the questioning of such basic notions in human life and human sciences may be said to constitute the central theoretical project in the discourse of postmodernism. Although the impossibility of a fixed and clear meaning, the slippage of the signifier from the signified, and the feudality of language that cuts across the entire process of verbal expression are not really new themes in philosophical reflections on the negativity of language, they do form a major proposition of postmodernist theory, which at the same time tells the story of a radical break from traditional culture, a met narrative about the decline of classical met narratives of legitimating, or the breakdown of the Western ...