Mamta Kalia

separations between high culture and
mass or popular culture have disappeared
in present age. Like Baudrillard, he also
finds a causal relationship between new
developments in western capitalism and
the rise of the post-modern- ‘a new society
of the media or the spectacle or
multinational capitalism’, characterised
by new consumption patterns, fast
changing fashion and style, planned
obsolescence, ubiquitous presence of
advertising and the media (especially
TV), explosion of suburbia (at the expense
of city and rural areas) and automobile
culture. In this list, one may add internet,
mobile phone and fast food culture. The
deeper logic of new social system has
led to ‘the disappearance of a sense of
history’ in the culture, to a persuasive
depthlessness and to a ‘perpetual present’
from which the memory of tradition has
disappeared. In post –modern art, he
observes, the deeper logic of new social
system brings two features: (a) ‘pastiche’
and (b) ‘schizophrenic discontinuity’.
Pastiche is a ‘blank parody’- without
parody’s ‘ulterior motive, without
satirical impulse, without laughter,
without that still latent feeling that there
exists something normal compared to
which what is being imitated is rather
comic. In this context we may cite the
various laughter programmes on Hindi
channels in India or even such
programmes like ‘America’s Funniest
Videos’ on foreign English channels which
are more imitative, artificially comic,
unrealistic and remote from normality.
78 :: April-June 2010
Further these programmes make the
audience insensitive to the victims of
accidents and even tragedies – laughing
when one falls! On the other hand, his
concept of ‘schizophrenic discontinuity’
is a language disorder resulting from
the subjet’s failure ‘ to accede fully into
the realm of speech and language’. He
elaborates that since language gives us
our experience of temporality, human
time, past, present, memory, the
persistence of personal identity’, such
a failure leads to an absence of the
experience of temporal continuity in the
patient who is condemned to live in
a perpetual, always discontinuous,
present: ‘schizophrenic experience is an
experience of isolated, disconnected,
discontinuous material signifiers which
fail to link up into a coherent sequence.
Thus it transpires that Jameson’s postmodernism
is ‘ the transformation of
reality into images, the fragmentation
of time into a series of perpetual presentshistory
has disappeared and the present
is dissolved in images. In his view, the
pastiche and radical discontinuity had
only a marginal place in the ‘modernism
proper’ but now they have a central
place in the contemporary cultural
production. Unlike Lyotard, who
perceived anti-representationism as a
necessary defensive maneuvre against
the terror of representational consensus,
Jameson argues about the impossibility
of representation as the end of an
emancipatory politics. He saw later
(1984) post-modernism ‘dialectically as