First of all, Jameson's identification of two related but different working definitions for postmodernism made sense of a lot of things for me. Lyotard's use of "postmodern" as "the condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies" is all encompassing: things in current society are postmodern because everything in this age is postmodern. The state of knowledge for all is different because of changes in our world. But as Jameson says, "I am far from feeling that all cultural production today is 'postmodern' in the broad sense I will be conferring to the term". Based on this and another passage I am unable to find, I interpreted his view to be that postmodernism was able to coexist with other patterns of thought, and was not a necessary and exclusive product of the culture/economy of "late capitailsm". This makes great sense to me especially considering his active condemnation of postmodernism as a further integration of capitalism into human life. He recognizes that new political art must comprehend postmodernism and acknowledge its "truth" as a product of the state of the world, but he seems to suggest that little real revolution will come from thinking in a postmodern way (he cites the ways in which postmodernism is already institutional and not so revolutionary on page 4).

I was interested in the way that space continually appeared in our reading, and the different ways in which writers seemed to make use of spacial conceptualizations to make sense of postmodernism. I felt that these readings also helped me understand more clearly where Habermas's thinking on the public and private spheres had come from. Habermas asserted that the private sphere was had lost its legitimacy as a source of political troubleshooting when it became too closely integrated with the processes of consumption/production. Soja and Harvey particularly, but Jameson as well, use spacial language to describe the ubiquity of producing and consuming images. Because communication is now commodified, society has more completely internalized capitalist discourse. I can see the threat this offers to critically analyzing and considering marxist, or indeed, any discourse other than that of capitalism. Overall, the writers for today saw a necessity for revolution in how space was organized, seeing the relative positioning of objects as a threat to breaking out of the system of late capitalism. I would be interested to know what people thought about how one might re-conceptualize space in order to empower individuals to regain the possibility to change and reform their world. Would this necessarily have to be a return to historicity (and thus re-expanding the cognitive distances between objects, symbols, and events of particular ages)?

I was also interested by opinions about dialectic. We talked last monday about issues of losing referents in the sense that what were thought to be knowable referents have become unknowable and, in a way, unreal. Applying this concept from language to the process of history yields exactly what our authors described as the state of current culture: a fragmented society of images that has traded the deep space of history for the depthless time-sphere of flexible accumulation. But just as Jameson points out, this idea has disastrous consequences for the narrative of dialectical history because it is so focused on interpreting current events as responses to past events, and thus is heavily dependent on ideas of an objective referent. I feel that it bears some discussion as to whether the project of maintaining a dialectic history is truly such a "legitimate" goal. In our reading for today, there is little question about the absolute knowability of the state of the world, something many thinkers have described so far as a crisis of postmodern society. Perhaps I've misunderstood something, but it seems that we have read thinkers cogently advance serious challenges to historical knowledge that would interfere with continuing to write a history in terms of the influence of past events.