The Jameson was a powerful read. Here are a few thoughts and questions, to which I'd very much love to hear some input from others.

• "...if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all" (p. xvi).

This resonates profoundly. What good is all this critiquing if we are still unable - or perhaps too afraid - to imagine an alternative structure in which to live. Anyone can pack a punch with postmodern jargon at any plethora of oppressions, but only the truly creative, the wholy courageous can dare to offer up a concrete plan of action for building Utopia.

• I was very interested in Jameson's assertion that the economic factors were in place as early as the end of WWII for the wheels to begin turning on that late capitalism of today, but that the cultural component didn't arrive until the social movements of the 1960s (p. xx). I don't entirely understand how Civil Rights sociopolitical resistance constituted the final brick, so to speak, for the foundation of multinational capitalism. I would imagine that this argument stems from the idea that the baby boomers were the first financially independent generation and thus were heavily marketed to. Hence the construction of 'generations' and a 'generation gap'. Because of their vulnerability to shifts in spending, the birth of 'pop culture' and the media-enraptured society as we now know it was given the space to blossom. In this sense, I think Jameson would argue that the cultural-consumption component of present day late capitalism was finalized with the induction of a media consuming and thus adoring society. This is totally just a gander...any thoughts?

• "What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic...the more powerless the reader comes to feel...[thus] the critical capacity of the his work is thereby paralyzed" (p. 5).

Oh, so true! I imagine this is an experience rather common to many a Pomona student. The more critical and comprehensive the critique, the more we feel like there is absolutely nothing we can do. It is certainly a feeling I can empathize with. But critical discourse is most necessary; how do we do overcome this debilitating experience? Community? Dialogue? Art?

• On Mr. Warhol, one thing that has always bewildered me is that he (and Robert Roschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger, and many other 'pop'-based artists) makes art that is so profoundly coopted and reproduced. Jameson wonders if Warhol's work is in fact posing a critical political statement (p. 9), but I can't help but feel skeptical about anything that can so easily be reinscribed as consumable - and thus integral to the logic of capitalism. Is this the point? Is this the political nature of his work - to point out how capitalism leaches onto any and every cultural event, strangling out it's Benjaminian 'aura' and slapping it onto every t-shirt and dorm wall possible? I know this isn't exactly Jameson's focus (at all) but I wonder what he would do with that aspect of the 'Warhol effect'.

• "...concepts such as anxiety and alienation (and the experiences to which they correspond, as in The Scream) are no longer appropriate in the world of the postmodern" (p. 14)

Is this because Jameson feels that concepts of anxiety and alienation as they were experienced in modernity cannot be experienced in postmodernity? That the modern use of these terms simply cannot be translated into the realm of postmodern schizophrenia?

Also, in this discussion of modern v. postmodern anxiety, Jameson comes close making a few rather classist claims about the experience of 'anxiety.' (p. 9) We are all living in this thing we're calling postmodernity but not everyone's anxiety is that of a luxurious blond icon, popping pills and living a life of fame. Anxiety for Marilyn and anxiety for a working class mother of the same part may not be comperable to that of modern anxiety, but in how many ways, I wonder, are they even comperable to eachother?

• I wonder what people read as the significance of the lost referent, or more specifically, the lost historical referent, that arises in the era of simulaecrum. "The new spatial logic of the simulacrum can now be expected to have a momentus effect on what used to be historical time. The past is therey itself modified..." (p. 18) I am very attracted to the theoretical notion of simulaecrum and find it heavily situated in the my own tangible experience. Jameson speaks with such urgency in his address of this sea of texts that stand in the place of 'historical time' and yet, I wonder what are the 'real world' implications of this so-called loss of historicity. Outside of the theory, what does it really mean for the past to have been modified as such?

I might argue that our disengagement with history as a continuous connection between ourselves and past events could work to further the power had over us by the workings of multinational capitalism. In this sense, one could assert that our consumption of 'history' as palpable isolated texts encourages the 'waning of affect' that would result from being so historically disconnected. Being cut off from history prohibits us from looking at ourselves in relation to larger social forces, and by extensions, in connection with eachother. just a rumination. any other insights?

• I had an interesting encounter with Jameson's discussion of 'nostalgia film': After reading through his treatment of the present-day presentation of past eras on screen, I wondered in what ways this might differ from the use of realism in set design in stage productions throughout the history of theater. Plays have, for centuries, referred back to previous historical moments, and thus employed sets and costumes intended to replicate the aesthetic of the given era. In considering this similarity, I then realized that Jameson's claim about nostalgia film comes in his connection between the presentation of the past and the present: if we only make sense of the past in glossy 'distanced' images, we then come to use this same language of the simulaecrum in the way refer to the present. This is different from theater because it is the specific articulation of the past into the film narrative that modifies our presentation of the current historical moment. Theater does not have that same culture-industry power over our self-social conceptualization. Mediatized images become confused for reality in ways unlike past cultural productions.