week two_article one_blog one

Fredric Jameson_Postmodernism and Consumer Society

On page 171, Jameson presents us with the word ‘realism’. He writes, “cultural production has been driven back inside the mind, within the monadic subject…if there is any realism left here, it is a realism which springs from the shock of grasping (this) confinement.” In postmodernism, Jameson finds not realism, but nostalgia. A nostalgia which is a result of a culture’s inability to focus its own present as though “incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of (its) own current experience.” It would seem that in contrast modernism was very much a search for that which was real (even though modernism rendered itself null when it defined realism strictly in terms of universals). Is contemporary architecture in a similar battle with/against/for realism? How do we define ‘realism’ in terms of its relationship to contemporary architecture? Can we return, somehow, to realism as a mode for generating meaningful architecture; as a means of cultural production which can look at the world around it as a direct referent? Can realism even exist as a concept today, or is it impossibility within our current cultural mindset? Furthermore, if we can somehow return to a cultural mindset which values and searches for that which is real, how can we insure its cultural creations will differ from/avoid the previous pitfalls of Modernism?