Nothing New!
Jameson suggests two significant ideas:
1) Modern media creates nothing new; it simply recycles old ideas, old images, old texts, old brands, old styles, through a process of…
- Intertextuality
- pastiche and parody
- quotation
To put it another way, the media is simply a copy of a previous text, which itself was a copy from an earlier text and so on… and so on…
“a copy of a copy of a copy…” until it became better known as ‘Meta!’
He didn’t much like Postmodernism. He said it was, ‘a new kind of flatness, a depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense.’
2)He also lamented the loss of historical understanding and even the knowledge that it is a loss!
As we exist within a, “fascination with the present,’ a simulacra.” (Jameson using Baudrillard’s ideas)
Jameson suggested that we are losing our understanding of history.
All our ‘understanding’ of history is merely a series of recycled images, narratives, tropes, references, quotes…lifted from a previous text.
What wins out is capitalism and consumerism!
What we are left with is, in the grim words of Jameson, a “New and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra.”
Additional Stuff
![](https://i0.wp.com/literariness.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/marxism.jpg?resize=700%2C465&ssl=1)
Literary Critic and Marxist Political Theorist
Significant work: ‘Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ 1991, USA
If you didn’t read any of the above properly or didn’t get it, watch this. For an alternative explanation…
Some Case Studies:
You have to be really culturally competent to get all the references below. However for the purposes of this exam, you need only need to get two or three…