Handwerker Gallery Newsletter

Fall 1999 – Volume 1, Number 3

On Contemporary Culture, Briefly

Fredric Jameson is the William A. Lane Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. He is also chair of the Program in Literature and of the Center for Critical Theory. He is the author of many works, including Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991) and most recently The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998). During his recent stay at the Cornell University School of Criticism and Theory, Jameson shared with us some of his thoughts on contemporary culture.

HANDWERKER GALLERY: Could you tell us why we need to study the visual in contemporary culture?

FREDRIC JAMESON: Postmodern culture is saturated with the visual. I am reluctant to characterize it as predominantly visual in the sense that I think the question of space really takes pri-ority. But people tell us that we are bombarded with thousands and thousands of images a day. This is utterly unlike anything in any previous society, where you had to go find an image and the relationship was totally different. I think that one of the results of this is the supersession of the verbal. In modernism it was always language and poetry - poetic language, really - that were felt to be the supreme embodiment of art as such. Obviously, modern painting is very important, too, but it seems to me that all those things reflected a certain notion of art which is no longer present.

HG: Is the notion of image still appropriate in this type of inquiry?

FJ: I have a problem with the notion of image because I am no longer sure, in a situation in which everything is an image, how one distinguishes images from anything else. So perhaps that is the way to distinguish between the older experience of the visual and the new one. The image in this society - and people have used words like simulacrum for that - would seem to me a late stage of the visual, which is no longer completely sensory but delivered by media photography, television, and so forth. That is why I think it may be preferable to say that this predominance of the visual in postmodernity is really a spatial phenomenon, rather than a purely sensory one.

It seems to me that in the great paintings of modernism from the 19th to the mid-20th century, painting works in a particular physical sense. It also seems to me that this new kind of imagery is not sensory in that way and that, therefore, if one wants to give the notion of image some historical content and specificity, one has to connect it somehow to the idea of space, and so the visual today involves a saturation of space with images. I think that determines the whole transformation of what counts as visual art in the first place. I would imagine that in a way none of the arts are really so subsistent anymore.

In the older system of fine arts and the modern period - for example, painting, logic, and poetry - it seems that all of these modes are kind of broken up and floating in culture. They interact with each other. They don't really have their own independent or autonomous logic anymore - although they have a past, which, I guess, is only present in the form of simulacra, too. So that's the sense in which I would approach the visual today and in which I would pose the question of whether a painting is a real work of art the way it used to be. It seems to me that's implied by this notion. And the other thing, as I said in my book The Cultural Turn, is that all of this is taking place within an immense expansion of the sphere of culture, to the point where one can say that everything has been "culturized." Under these circumstances, obviously, the dynamic of individual cultural production is going to be very different from what it was in a certain previous period, even the modern period, when culture was a very limited form of daily life in the social system.

HG: How you define the culture, the cultural sphere?

FJ: I think of culture as the consumption of works of art and things of that kind. But it is clear that today almost all commodities function as cultural commodities. If you are buying a car, you are also buying its image; you are buying its other connotations. So the separation between culture and economics is no longer very watertight or meaningful; that is a problem for the work of art that is seeking some kind of separate existence, because it is already sunk back into the form of a commodity.

HG: Where, then, is one to look for art?

FJ: You have to look for moments in which culture has not yet become a commodity. That could be the early stages of a form. For example, I am thinking of jazz before the recordings are seized by the big companies, when it is still a form of activity and not a product. I think [of] experimental art, amateur art. It is finally the success of all these things in the public sphere that gives them a name, a label. Then it labels them as a tendency and turns them into something with a market value. And then, of course, the minute they enter the gallery system, they are by definition commodities. I think that is a much greater problem for contemporary art than for the modern period or earlier.

HG: Would you say that video installations, with their hybridity, fit into this category?

FJ: No, that is one form that is scarcely commodified, I think. There are video museums, but you cannot really sort out a canon of great video works. When you think of works that break the bounds of the form, such as all of the newer installation art, [you realize that] it is kind of hard to sell [installation art] as a commodity.