Jameson 1

Jameson's analytic vision of postmodernism is a massive interlinking: of the experience of the subject to experience of space to aesthetic culture/consumer culture/form (all equivalents in J's vision), where artistic and commercial form (e.g. the Bonaventure Hotel) registers some profound aspect of a shift in our experience of space which is tied to a precipitating economic shift (post industrialism).

Pastiche is a formal strategy that marks the shift in our relation to history (and how we've become stuck in a perpetual present, also, in a world where our primary access to reality is through images). Unlike parody, pastiche quotes older forms without a normative standard that is implicitly being privileged and appealed to. Pastiche is not critical, in other words. And in this, it is metonymic to postmodern culture in general, which J thinks has not yet found its mode of criticism or negativity (cf. Edelman, No Future). The overall strategy marked by pastiche is mirrored in both artworks and the self-experience of subjects: neither can predicate their existence or worth anymore on uniqueness, individuality, singularity.