Postmodernism: Jameson and Baudrillard

andy pink, live from dollywood, happy to be away from the frost and in the land of vacation -

as i mentioned in the previous entry, these entries are not to be included in Hallucinations of Desire: Memoirs in Queer Manic Depression - the book is itself too long, and unorganized, and sprawling, and though i have been writing this material for 10 years, i'm paring down some of the work so that it is publishable, printable, and distributable. that said, i will be writing for the fact sheet, and keeping the site up as i've paid for the next 10 months on here, but then i will likely take it down, without match andy it doesn't really serve a purpose, and the newly designed match michael is now unnecessary.

for rich: for our walk, i think we should move it to a week or two before school vacation week, as i think the streets will be so crowded with kids and families that we won't be able to have a good time on our re-meet first-date again, walk. if you want to take a rental black van on our walk, i could get down with that, as i like the idea of having sex with you in the back of the van during our walk. if you'd prefer to fly delta for our walk, that's out of the question, as i don't fly, especially on a 1-hr (max) walk. if you'd rather talk on the phone, i have 2 cans and some string, perhaps that's your style. i prefer the walk in the rental black van.

to close my daily advice for you: i'm totally awesome, and given the hundreds of hours i've spent with you in your store, i suspect you are pretty good. let's walk once, i'd like to learn all about each of your tatts and make fun of them. i will be thin when you reveal yourself, but feel free to make fun of me about my age, blubber (which will be gone on 2/1, in time for the pre kid vacation week walk), lisp, gait, hand gestures, body beautiful, and j.crew outfits. when you get to know me more, you will find that there is an even longer list of risible material: bipolar, history of relationships, various repulsive habits and crutches, and so on.

postmodernism is an almost outdated term, even if its accuracy as a nomination of our contemporary moment is reasonable enough. of course, most people who talk about postmodernism don't really know what they are talking about (see youtube videos on postmodernism, i actually saw a video up that claimed that foucault was a marxist critic, which couldn't be further from the truth) - anyway, postmodernism as a term actually arose in the 1930s, about architecture and art, as "modernism" was such an overused term for art criticism (see museum of modern art in nyc) that it needed to be supplemented, with some desperation, to isolate a new era. Later, postmodernism as a term was deployed for a variety of objects, institutions, and texts - post-fordist production, experimental ethnography (anthropology), art and architecture (as mentioned), obscure literature, abstruse film, and so on. all of these mostly aesthetic domains are operative in western culture, today, and certainly film, art, architecture - all of these usually find permanent footprint and are preserved in the society.

fredric jameson, a professor at duke who published more than 30 books (and i vouch that not all of those books were actually written by him, he preferred the ghostwriters at mit; he is now dead) - i studied with jameson at cornell for a yr, and though it was a slightly excruciating experience, not least because the 76 year old fredric jameson, married with many children, had a little southeast asian boyfriend (about rich's height) whose dick he sucked for hours in the evenings in ithaca - it was gross. dude, get a black van. that said, jameson's "postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism" is a classic (and he wrote it), and it well explains postmodernism (mostly aesthetically) in a variety of domains, as he is (was) a literature professor (with substantial pretension for more), he focuses on literature, but the art and architecture dimension of his work is truly outstanding. it was this text - after a hiatus of 60 years after the inaugural discussions of postmodernism in the 1930 with later surrealism and dadaism - that defined postmodernism for an entirely new generation. i was at cornell to study "the arcades project" about the 19th century french arcades in paris, a book by walter benjamin, and jameson was so cruelly boring in his lectures that i started working on the jameson postmodernism thesis rather than the arcades project (a huge book that is a huge nightmare). everyone by now has read, "postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism," everyone has the book (i don't, i sold it), but the deficit in this tomb is that it really doesn't discuss selfhood or sociality, it doesn't get to the palpable shift in subjectivity over the course of the 20th c into the 21st c. for that: you need ken gergen's "the saturated self," which is a fabulous, totally underrated work of art, and it makes plain a "postmodern self" ("saturated self") that is a massive upgrade from the modernist subject ("individual"). Nobody would refer to themselves as "postmodern" anymore (like i said, i sold the book even), but gergen's book is worth keeping because it so beautifully lays out alternative selfhood and subjectivity that he, though perhaps wrongly, attributes to advancements in technology. this is in some ways a marxist thesis, as marx believed that it was technology (with ever more productive labor) that would enable us (the proletariat) to inherit the earth, and a movement toward a "saturated self" can only be greeted with enthusiasm, even if genuine excitement is not really the affect of postmodernism itself.

for his part, baudrillard's key term is simulation, and it means, essentially that a subject or an object feigns to have what it doesn't have. read through freud, you can see that simulation is the veil of the maternal phallus - which is ultimately, in the freudian tale, an impossible object, but it is certainly an important trace for us, as it is the object of the pervert's desire (drive), and what enables him to reject the father in masochism and pony up with the mother, with whom he invents a revolutionary world order that expunges the father and all that he represents (castration, loss, death, phallocentrism, patriarchy, capital, and so on). so, a simulated object is a good object (even a good breast, as melanie klein might say). we like simulation (think: disney world), and the peoples and institutions that populate the world of simulation are essentially subverting the father and initiating a new galaxy. the underside of successful simulation is castration (the part of "feigning" the maternal phallus or the object as private property) but that castration is finally nixed by the death of the father. (the older brother, and jock for that matter, always survive somehow.) re postmodernism: simulation is the grand tool of the subversive, and you can see that parody is the only way to subvert the father (i.e. law, institutions) as straight genuine contestation (political liberalism, even justice discourse that seeks substantiation in law) exists on the ordinary plane of the law, and the law always wins (unless rich and i are fucking in the back of the black rented van).

i'll finish this note on postmodernism later; it will not be published in the queer manic depressive memoir (that goes to print next week), but i will keep it here until this site eventually folds up, to be displaced by a design that will advertise the "perverse relational cinematic" series.

i'm really feeling it for you all, dear readers, and as i'm spending a month on google ads to hopefully garner some traffic for potential readers, the days of clocking in here i'm afraid are numbered. all this text on postmodernism will be used for the "cultural studies and revolution" volume for "perverse relational cinematic." next time i will write about your penis - if your hit is off google!

love from the a to the p to the roc: plan a creative reunion, dickbag; i'm not losing weight for someone else.

Andy Pink

if rich's dick doesn't look like this i'm walking home