Theory and Practice

Postmodernism is a late 20s-century style of the arts which represents the departure of modernism and earlier styles and conventions.

What Jameson defines as Postmodernism

• Random cannibalisation - not being able to create new styles but picking out things from other styles to make something new
• Over-stimlation - confusion
• Desperate attempt to make sense of the age - no grand narrative
• Recycled culture/reusing cultures that have long since gone - recycling dead styles
• Resignation
• Dystopia
• Depthlessness
• Technology replaces human productivity and skill
• Weakening of historicity

Quotes from Pastiche by Jameson

• 'The increasing unavailability of personal style, engender the well-high universal practise today of what may be called pastiche' pg. 16
• 'The norm itself is eclipsed: reduced to a neutral and reified media speech' pg. 17
• 'Parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived, and that strange new thing pastiche slowly comes to take it's place' pg. 17
• 'A neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of any laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs' pg. 17
• 'Lends the text an extraordinary sense of deja vu and a peculiar familiarity one is tempted to associate with Freud's "return of the repressed"' pg. 24

Parody (Hutcheon)

• Postmodernism is the 'process of its own production and reception, as well as in its own parodic relation to the art of the past' pg. 179
• 'Its art forms (and theory) use and abuse, install and then subvert conventions in parodic ways, self-conciously pointing both to their own inherent paradoxes and provisionality and, of course, to their critical or ironic re-reading of the art of the past' pg. 180
• 'Postmodern art offers a new model for mapping the borderline between art and the world, a model that works in position within both and yet within neither, a model that is profoundly implicated in, yet  still capable of criticizing, that which it seeks to describe' pg. 180
• 'The paradox of postmodernist parody is that it is not essentially depthless, trivial kitsch, as Eagleton and Jameson both believe' pg. 182
• 'The pluralist, provisional, contradictory nature of the postmodern enterprise challenges not just aesthetics unities, but also homogenizing social notions of the monolithic (male, Anglo, white, Western) in our culture' pg. 183-184

Examples
- Pastiche - Andy Warhol
- Sex Pistols - God Save the Queen
- Supreme logo