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

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…

One of our case studies.