Page 196 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Postmodernism and cultural theory

TV series and Readers’ Digest culture, of advertising and motels,
of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film’ (p. 2).
As a thoroughgoing commodity culture, postmodernism can
have no defining normative standards of its own: its value is what
it will fetch in the market. It is therefore a ‘field of stylistic and
discursive heterogeneity without a norm’. In consequence,
parody, which assumes such norms, has been progressively
effaced by pastiche, which does not. Both involve imitation,
Jameson explains, but pastiche is a ‘neutral practice of such
mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of
satiric impulse, devoid of... any conviction that alongside the
abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy
linguistic normality still exists’ (p. 17). In the absence of any truly
distinct, contemporary style, postmodernism becomes ‘the
random cannibalization of all the styles of the past’ (p. 18). The
result is a ‘waning of . . . historicity’, so that ‘the past as “referent”
finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether,
leaving us with nothing but texts’ (pp. 21, 18). Discussing contem-
porary cinema’s use of earlier novels and films, Jameson argued
that ‘our awareness of the preexistence of other versions...is
now a constitutive and essential part of the film’s structure: we
are now...in “intertextuality” as a deliberate, built-in feature of
the aesthetic effect’ (p. 20).

Globalisation and cognitive mapping
Jameson also stressed the radically internationalising nature of
socio-economic postmodernity, that is, late capitalism’s peculiarly
global character. There is now a world capitalist system, he
concluded, as distinct from the previous set of competing colonial
empires. The new system and the new culture is thus simul-
taneously post-European, ‘American’ and global: ‘it was the brief
“American century” (1945–73)’, he wrote, ‘that constituted the
hothouse, or forcing ground, of the new system, while the devel-
opment of the cultural forms of postmodernism may be said to
be the first specifically North American global style’ (p. x).
Moreover, Jameson was clear that there is something ‘progressive’
about this ‘original new global space’ that is ‘the “moment of

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