Friday, July 4, 2008

SY Opens With "She is Not Alone" from the s/t ep


Marxism and postmodernism: people often seem to find this combination peculiar or paradoxical, and somehow intensely unstable, so that some are led to conclude that, in my own case, having "become" a postmodernist I must have ceased to be a Marxist in any meaningful (or in other words, stereotypical) sense. For the two terms (in full postmodernism) carry with them a whole freight of pop nostalgia images, "Marxism" perhaps distilling itself into yellowing period photographs of Lenin and the Soviet revolution, and "postmodernism" quickly yielding a vista of the gaudiest new hotels. The overhasty unconscious then rapidly assembles the image of a small, painstakingly reproduced nostalgia restaurant - decorated with old photographs, with Soveit waiters sluggishly serving bad Russian food - hidden away within some gleaming new pink-and-blue architectural extravaganza....
As far as postmodernism is concerned, and despite the trouble I took in my principal essay on the subject to explain how it was not possible intellectually or politically simply to celebrate postmodernism or to "disavow" it (whatever that might mean), avant-garde art critics quickly identified me as a vulgar hatchet man, while some of the simple-hearted comrades concluded that, following the example of so many illstrious predecessors, I had finally gone off the deep end and become a "post-Marxist" (which is to say, in one language, a renegade and a turncoat, and in another, someone who would rather switch than fight.)
- fredric jameson, from the "secondary elaborations" chapter that concludes Postmodernism.

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