week two_article one_blog two

Fredric Jameson_Postmodernism and Consumer Society

On page 177, Jameson posits the question, “Do we really need the concept of Postmodernism?” This query, conceived of and recorded in 1988 during the heart of what is generally recognized to be a postmodern era, is as equally interesting today as it was when originally stated. Do we have need of the concept of postmodernism today? If so, in what way is it (still) useful? Furthermore, are we in a postmodern age today, or is postmodernism, as outlined by Jameson, ‘dead’, much in the same way that it is generally recognized that high modernism is ‘dead’? Do the concepts and ideologies of both Modernism and Post-modernism still have importance? It would seem to me that they do. Perhaps these concepts and ideologies now serve as a mechanism by which we are able to locate and understand our architecture of today; perhaps the language of contemporary architecture lies somewhere between the utopian language of high modernism and the pop-cultural language of the masses that postmodernism utilized. Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps, more than ever, we exist within what can generally be called a postmodern culture/mindset; one of pastiche, nostalgia, and a series of “fractured perpetual presents.” Are some of our most influential theoretical concepts today not strikingly similar extensions of previous postmodern theories? Consider for example, Koolhaas’s ‘Bigness’. Does it not propose an architecture similar to that which Jameson documents in the Bonaventure Hotel; one which “no longer (attempts) to be a part of the city, but rather be its equivalent… its replacement or substitute”? Furthermore, are such developments now not only ‘possible’, but even perhaps ‘practical’? Do such concepts not situate us further within a postmodern existence than ever before?