Jameson - Courtney Sparling

What I really got from this reading is the connection of postmodernism with capitalism and how things are changing from the old modern movement.

 I thought the contrast between Van Gogh's painting, "Peasant Shoes" and Andy Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes" really helped me to grasp the way Jameson felt about postmodernism. In looking at the peasant shoes, it requires the viewer to reconstruct a situation from the past. These shoes could be from agricultural work, rural poverty, etc. These shoes can tell a story. In Warhol's artwork, nothing can really speak to us, as the peasant shoes did. Jameson calls out the representation of "dead objects"that speak for commodification and fetishism of late capitalism. In contrasting these two images, we see a new flatness in the postmodern world.

I think it is also important to look at Warhol's Campbell Soup image. It is similar to the "Diamond Dust Shoes," in that it also represents commodity and capitalism. These objects are things we buy that do not necessarily have the same depth and story behind them that the painting of a pair of peasant shoes has buried within its history. Although it may just be a can of condensed soup, Warhol was making a huge political statement hinting at capitalism.


I think Warhol's iconic images of Marilyn Monroe are similar to those of the shoes and the soup. But how? Marilyn Monroe is a woman, not an object. The way Warhol has commodified her as transformed her into an object, an image.

Jameson also speaks about Munch's painting, "The Scream." It represents an aesthetic deconstruction of expression in itself. It is a painting of someone "screaming" yet we know it is impossible to hear a scream through the medium on which it is presented to us. We can hear no sound in the painting. There is a separation between from the subject. Just looking at the painting, we can see the waves of a scream and the dramatization of inward feeling.