FILM 3660 1nd Edition Lecture 6 Outline of Last Lecture I Blade Runner Movie Review a Labor b Control vs Freedom c Finitude v Obsolescence d Time e Cityscape Housing f The Human g A Utopian Moment Outline of Current Lecture I Recitation Notes for Cognitive Mapping II Other Jameson Notes Current Lecture NOTE This is an edited version of the professor s outline with my personal notes in yellow Questions for COGNITIVE MAPPING 45 54 Jameson The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism I Moral Judgments vs Genuine Dialectical Thinking Why is important for Jameson that the postmodern NOT understood as one optional style among many but rather as the cultural dominant of our times Students may wish to relate the term dominant to such related terms as periodization totality and hegemonic norm 5 6 There is something about the postmodern that you cannot ignore because it is over where It is not going away and global capitalism is inescapable the art form doesn t come out of this but These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor s lecture GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes not as a substitute instead is forced by it it is a postmodern condition not a postmodern choice This is not a western modern or central condition because it reaches everywhere Is this true NO There is no nature or outside that we can escape to Yes we have wilderness spaces but everything is zoned state parks etc so is this on a scale It is never completely escapable but there is a scale certain art forms help us escape a little more see question 2 1 Correlatively why is moral judgment even moral cont a mistaken response to the postmodern especially when the latter is considered again mistakenly in Jameson s opinion to be just one style among others Why and how does moral judgment perpetuate the illusion of critical distance The idea that if what Jamison says is true it is a spectrum but ultimately inescapable he holds onto even in the less effective areas we cannot get distance Because there is no distance we cannot see outside of the postmodern and we cannot see what it is How can we possibly respond to it What do we need to escape This is a very negative place to be in so how can we redirect or get out of it See question 3 3 We need says Jameson a genuine dialectical attempt to think the present of time in History 46 He develops what such a form of thinking is with a reference to The Communist Manifesto The topic of Marx s lesson is of course the historical development of capitalism itself and the deployment of a specific bourgeois culture In a well known passage Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible namely to think this development positively and negatively all at once to achieve in other words a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race and the worst 47 He has spent much of his article detailing some of the negative baleful attributes of the postmodern Does he offer as he must thinking as a Marxist a possible positive vision less of the postmodern itself than as stemming from the postmodern See page fifty first full paragraph What is a dialectical approach Instead of looking at society as good or bad we have to lift our minds so we can see positive and negative at the same time How do positive elements come about POST MODERN ART II The Semi autonomy of Art vs The Abolition of Critical Aesthetic Distance Jameson suggests that in our era of multinational global capitalism the social function of the work of art has undergone a momentous modification 48 Previously art was semiautonomous a social artifact that was both a moment of a greater historical context but also sufficiently distant from that context sufficiently distant enough not only to evaluate and criticize it but to also offer a Utopian alternative Has culture disappeared for Jameson or has it undergone at kind of explosion 48 If it has undergone an explosion what has happened to its semi autonomy its aesthetic distance How far reaching has this explosion proven to be Put differently are there pockets of emptiness or absence anywhere on the globe that might escape this proliferation expansion penetration colonization of culture What in addition to art are the other spaces that were once precapitalist enclaves but find themselves today beholden the logic of late capital Autonomous art is independent and on its own outside of society But art is no longer outside of the system The comparison of art between society and culture we use to think culture and society are separate but really they are one now This is due to an explosion of the combination art falls apart because the interweaving of society and culture due to global capitalism consumerism over production of goods ect we cannot take a critical distance SO WE MUST CREATE ART THAT CAN GIVE US DISTANCE Big hotel and cognitive mapping see question 7 III The Culture of the Simulacrum Pseudo events 46 5 If distance critical and aesthetic not to mention the private has been abolished what exactly is saturating our consciousness Jameson and others call it the simulacrum What does this concept mean or alternatively can its meaning be gleaned from the following passages p 46 And no doubt the logic of the simulacrum with its transformation of older realities into television images does more than merely replicate the logic of capitalism it reinforces and intensifies it Meanwhile for political groups which seek actively to intervene in history and to modify its otherwise passive momentum there cannot but be much that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural form of image addiction which by transforming the past into visual mirages stereotypes or texts effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project p 48 The explosion of culture is substantively quite consistent with the previous diagnosis of a society of the image or the simulacrum and a transformation of the real into so many pseudoevents From the perspective of individual experience what happens to the real to the past and perhaps above all to the very notion of reference when simulation and the