Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Notes

• On page 1 Jameson introduces many artists and musicians that contribute to postmodernism.
• Page 2 has Jameson talking about postmodernism in architecture and states that it is a kind of aesthetic populism.
• Jameson talks about postmodernism in culture as being associated with a political stance on multinational capitalism on page 3.
• Jameson brings up the importance to think about postmodernism not as a style but instead as a cultural dominant that allows coexistence on page 4.
• On page 5 Jameson says that thet more powerful the vision of something logical the more powerless the reader starts to feel.
• Jameson analyzes Van Gogh and a Utopian outlook on page 7.
• On page 8 Van Gogh is compared to Andy Warhol.
• Page 9 is where Jameson talks about Warhol and new postmodernism represented by flatness or depthlessness.
• Jameson talks about how in postmodernism depth is replaced by surface or multiple surfaces on page 12.
• Jameson talks about how fragmentation replaces alienation in postmodernism with the shift in cultural dynamics of pathology on page 14.
• On page 16 Jameson describes how our psychic experiences today are dominated by categories of space rather than categories of time, which differs from modernism.

I wasn't able to draw a very distinct line on modernism to postmodernism after the reading, although I didn't really spend a lot of time trying to do so. Class was helpful because we ended up making categories on the chalkboard with aspects of both postmodernism and modernism and how they differed with each other based on what Jameson discussed in the reading. We learned that there was a high end of modernism which was characterized by Van Gosh, and compared that to postmodernism which was characterized in Jameson by Andy Warhol. Modernism was then described to be about detail, depth and richness, to be significant to social aspects of the time, having importance in content and meaning, and to be very contextualized. Postmodernism was thought to be more abstract, flat and containing depthlessness, to be more of a commodity, more about form and style, and to be very decontextualized. This drawing on the differences was beneficial because I wasn't so sure how the paintings Jameson showed from Van Gogh and Warhol were that much different of each other, but then after drawing this list it was easy to see all of these differences portrayed in just two paintings.