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.engender the well-nigh universal practicetoday of what might be called pastiche (P: 16). Pastiche is a sort ofcopying or appropriation of the forms and styles of other literature.It hasa strong family resemblance to parody, where a satirist writes a versionof a well-known work in order to make some point.For example, theEnglish Romantic poet Felicia Hemans (1793 1835) wrote a famouspoem called The Homes of England which includes the quatrain:The stately homes of England,How beautiful they stand!Amidst their tall ancestral trees,O er all the pleasant land.This was parodied by English satirist Noel Coward in a 1938 song:The stately homes of England,How beautiful they stand,To prove the upper classesHave still the upper hand.There is some point to this parody; Coward is wittily unearthing therelationships of power and class that are mystified by Hemans rose-tinted poem.But according to Jameson, under postmodernism parodyceases to be a potent cultural force; it finds itself without a vocationwhilst that strange new thing pastiche slowly comes to take its place (P:17).Pastiche is parody emptied out of content: it is a neutral practice ofmimicry, without any of parody s ulterior motives, amputated of thesatiric impulse, devoid of laughter.pastiche is thus blank parody, astatue with blind eyeballs (P, 17).We might choose an example fromfilm, appropriately because Jameson sees cinema as one of the pre-eminent postmodern forms (because of its stress on the visual).RidleyScott s 1981 film Blade Runner is often cited as a thoroughlyPOSTMODERNI SM 125 126 KEY I DEASrepresentative postmodern text.As a film it simultaneously inhabits thevisual idioms of a futuristic science fiction, and a retro film noir thatevokes the 1930s.The technology is forward-looking, the dress styles,dialogue and situation of a form of private detective narrative isbackward-looking.But Scott does not quote these filmic styles of noirin order to make any specific point about that time or ours; it is rather amatter of surface styling.As another example, we might want to comparethe actual, directed anger of punk rock as manifested in an album suchas the Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks with the postmoderndirectionless emotion of Nirvana s album Nevermind (an album whosevery title seems a laconic, wearied shortening of the Pistols original).Kurt Cobain layers the raging of punk-influenced guitar noiseunderneath an ironically detatched vocal persona, ah well, whatever,never mind.The Sex Pistols parodied British patriotism ( God Save theQueen, the Fascist Regime ), where Nirvana are all about pastiche.DEPTHLESSNESSIn all this what Jameson is identifying is a certain emptying out ofsignificance, a flattening that leads to what he calls depthlessness.Where under previous cultural logics art has involved some emotional orintellectual depth, postmodern art is thrall to the waning of the affect.In a pungent demonstration of the difference Jameson reprints twofamous pieces of visual art: Vincent Van Gogh s painting A Pair ofBoots (1887), the vivid and painterly representation of two worn oldbrown boots of the sort that a nineteenth-century peasant might haveworn.The visual texture of this work of art is rich and involving, thedetail rendered boldly and sensually.Jameson contrasts this famousimage with a screen print by Andy Warhol from the 1960s, DiamondDust Shoes (both these images are reproduced in Postmodernism).Thisis a cluttered conglomeration of women s smart shoes, seen from aboveand rendered in tones of grey.There is no illusion of depth here, no visualperspective and no markers of context or explanation.Jameson sees ahighly significant breach between these two art works.The Van Goghcontains within it, in a manner of speaking, the whole missing objectworld which was once [the shoes ] lived context.the heavy tread of the peasant woman, the loneliness of the field path, the hut in the clearing,the worn and broken instruments of labor in the furrows and at the hearth(P: 8).But the Warhol image is nothing like this; not so much empty aslacking even the space in which this sort of depth could be conceived.Andy Warhol s Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us withany of the immediacy of Van Gogh s footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say thatit does not really speak to us at all.Nothing in this painting organizes even aminimal place for the viewer.We are witnessing the emergence of a newkind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literalsense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms.(P: 8 9)For a critic like Jameson who has throughout his career been wedded, aswe have seen, to one particular version of a surface depth model theFreudian Marxist political unconscious where the surface of the textrefers to the hidden depth , the content of history this represents themost striking development in postmodernism.In this current culture ofthe simulacrum (P: 18) the very concept of the real has been thoroughlyproblematised.SIMULACRUMThis word, which means an image, copy or shadowy likeness of some-thing, derives from the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato,who thought the whole world was simply the copy of a better, purer worldthat existed on some other level of being (which he called the world ofForms).Its currency in debates around postmodernism stem from anessay by the French critic and theorist Jean Baudrillard called The Pre-cession of Simulacra (1983).Baudrillard, another critic to emerge fromthe Marxist tradition, argues that Western capitalism has moved frombeing based on the production of things to the production of images ofthings, of copies of simulacra.Today we live in a world where the differ-ence between real life and simulated life (or simulacrum ) hasdegraded to a point where it becomes hard to tell one from the other: aworld where millions fight the Gulf War through their television screens indeed where the war appears to us as if it were actually happening ontelevision rather than in real life; where newspapers report the goings-onPOSTMODERNI SM 127 128 KEY I DEASof soap opera characters as if they were real because people care more forthe artificial characters of soap operas than for their own neighbours.Bau-drillard calls this state of affairs hyperreality , where reality and simulationare received as being no different from one another: his prime example isDisneyland, which (he argues) is neither real nor simulated, neither true norfalse.The old model where the copy comes after the original is overturned,now the simulacrum precedes the real, hence the title of Baudrillard sessay.Jameson reads Baudrillard s simulacrum chiefly in visual terms,following another French critic Guy Debord in diagnosing a society in[which] the image has become the final form of commodityreification (P: 18)
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