Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process.
Jameson provides a definition for the prickly identity of postmodernism through a metaphor that establishes modernism as a movement that was part of the marketplace of ideas as well as existing outside it as a critique of the marketplace. Postmodernism differs by becoming so fully integrated into the marketplace that even a critique of the system acts first and foremost as a product within it.
“Death of the subject.”
This phrase recurs throughout the text and acts a broad metaphor that describes the fragmentary nature of identity in the face of the loss of individualism as a condition of postmodernity. The metaphor is essential to understanding the conceptualization of pastiche as a methodology for creative expression in which inherent meaning is no longer a personal aesthetic of the creator, but is fueled by multiple sources which allow for multiple interpretations.
Schizophrenia
Variations of the word “schizophrenia” recur throughout the text and take out of context, one might well suppose that the reference is literal in the psychological sense. In reality, Jameson applies schizophrenia to the postmodern condition purely as a metaphor for the disconnection from traditional modes of receiving and responding to information which is fundamental to the loss of individualism associated with postmodern cultural aesthetics. The clinically diagnosed schizophrenic responds to stimuli that are disconnected from experience and history. This state of a perpetual present in which there no agency and information is received without depth is akin to the metaphorical condition of the postmodern existence.
Utopia
Utopian ideals and the anti-utopian fears of what may come when those ideals transform into concrete realities serves to become an extended metaphor which Jameson applies liberally to considerations of essentially one thing: what arrives in response to a rejection and rebellion against the postmodernist flattening of the self, identity and individualism. Alternately, as Jameson put it, utopia has become a “crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all.”
a random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips
Of course, even Jameson can occasionally introduce a simile for no other purpose than that it makes an entertaining image for the use of comparison. This particular comparison describes no encompassing aspect of postmodernism, but rather just one single particular creative work informed by the aesthetic Andy Warhol’s screen print “Diamond Dust Shoes.”
