Presentation Paper

I failed several times writing a response to Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” because I had taken everything that Jameson posits to heart. That is to say that whether or not I agreed with Jameson, I did not question what he wrote, hence my writing stagnated on each attempt. But as I kept this paper and more importantly Jameson’s article on the back burner, I realized that my lack of skepticism was incredibly naïve as Jameson seems to implicitly define fundamental terms, for example, what art is. In other words, Jameson defines Postmodernism as reactionary against modernism and as a tradition (perhaps the better words is condition) of a cultural, sociological, and technological age, but undercurrent to all this lies what I think his definition of art is: that art arises out of opposition to popular or institutionalized aesthetics. For the sake of argument and sounding unlike a book report, I intend to focus this paper on the question that Jameson poses in closing: “We have seen that there is a way in which postmodernism replicates or reproduces—reinforces—the logic of consumer capitalism, the more significant question is whether there is a way in which it resists that logic” (125). Barring my interpretation of Jameson is incorrect, given his definition of art and the postmodern, postmodern art seems to marry the dominant aesthetic as it ceases to oppose; thus it cannot even be considered art, as Jameson seems to define art.

The most logical place to start in all this is how Jameson defines postmodernism. Although complicated, this task is not that difficult. He starts by saying that postmodernism arises as opposition to the acceptance of modernism into academia. In other words, modernism opposed the institution—the university, high society—but as the 60’s roll around, universities begin teaching modernism, thus institutionalizing it. As well, Jameson posits that postmodernism arises because of consumer society. Jameson describes postmodernism as reliant upon the cultural production of consumer society, which also means the boundary erodes between high art and pop art. A cliché yet fitting examples of this is Andy Warhol’s work, where icons from popular culture, like the Campbell’s Soup Cans, become art. To finish outlining Jameson’s article, he lists two characteristics of postmodernism: the pastiche, which means that no new genres are created, merely artists mix old genres together, and schizophrenic ahistoricism, where there is a disconnect between past and present to the extent that art remains perpetually present.


To focus, it does not matter whether or not Jameson defines postmodernism correctly because I am not concerned with his fundamental definition of art. It seems that Jameson defines art as motion. In other words, Jameson defines modernism as an art movement that actively subverted high culture. Also, he defines postmodernism as reactionary against modernism inclusion in the high culture that it initially opposed. So, the constant, the key characteristic that Jameson bestows on art is that art arises out of opposition. If we take this logic a step further, it is possible to say that once an art form cease to resist—to innovate—culture it stagnates and loses what makes it art. I chance to say that art that does not oppose is kitsch.


If my interpretation is correct, then how can Jameson consider postmodern art to be art as he says “there is very little in either the form or content of contemporary art that contemporary society finds intolerable” (124)? In other words, because postmodernism is so tied to mass culture in which it “reinforces…the logic of consumer capitalism,” it seems to cease to resist or subvert. If art as Jameson posits arises out of opposition, then how can postmodern art exist as art if it not only does not resist consumer culture but also reinforces it. Jameson raises this question in closing, and to answer, tentatively, it seems that works like Warhol’s celebrate mass media.