Benjamin and Jameson

I can see Jameson’s arguments elucidate and are especially pertinent to postmodernism (as he tackles more directly in other essays). Intertextuality, itself a cultural as well as an aesthetic phenomenon it seems to me, is so prevalent in so wide a range of cultural texts—“works of art” or no—that Jameson’s de-emphasis on purely aesthetic valuation and his insistence that mass culture and high art (Jameson usually speaks specifically of modernist art) operate at opposing dialectical poles is especially well-suited to deal with a wide range of classifiable (and, as he also tells us, intentionally classified in our commodity culture) art and to eschew elitism. He writes, “we must rethink the opposition high culture/mass culture in such a way that the emphasis on evaluation to which it has traditionally given rise, and which […] tends to function in some timeless realm of absolute aesthetic judgment, is replaced by a genuinely historical and dialectical approach to these phenomena” (133 italics added). Jameson cites several specific tendencies in art production—the music of Phillip Glass, the literary texts of Thomas Pynchon—that “suggest an increasing interpenetration of high and mass cultures” (Ibid.).

In this instance, Jameson’s ideas seem to relate to some of Benjamin’s; Jameson’s insistence on historicization and a dialectical approach results in an evolving conceptualization of what constitutes a “work of art”, much in the same way Benjamin tracked the evolution of human sense perception and the role/function of art from one historical context to his present. Indeed, Jameson’s discussion of “repetition” as doing away with notions of primary production, raw materials, or “originals” seem to be Benjamin’s ideas on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction applied to Jameson’s own historical moment. (And likewise, Kierkegaard and the simulacrum of Baudrillard are similar modern Benjaminian incarnations whom Jameson notes). But Jameson applies this concept to a broader area of cultural/artist production; rather than focus only on the mass production of any single work of art and its lack of an original, Jameson argues that the instrumental reorganization of late capitalism has led to the proliferation of generic repetition, specifically in the case of popular narratives, regardless of medium. This indicts mass culture’s very content as repetitive and atomized into its quantifiable commodity form, and draws our attention to a deeper understanding of the dearth of originality.