STEVE-O Jameson

Wholly Sh%t!!!
I just lost the blog I've been working on for three hours....

This Sucks...well back to the drawing board...

I began my post with a comment on the circular conjecture of these theorists and the confusing nature of their logic.

I have been reading for over four hours and have made it through ten...no make that twelve pages of Jameson's Postmodernism. The last hour of reading I was just waiting for something to stir inside me so I could put the book down for a moment and "riff" with my peeps...So here we Go:

"In faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as 'referent' finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts" (pg. 494).

This statement made me think about a summer term course taught by Dr. Dunn called "The Parrot In The palimpsest"

Palimpsest—a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.

We are constantly rewriting our...past...yeah...I guess we are reliving history in new ways. What did I just say...We are reinventing the past in the present to reflect a history that in reality didn’t happen or look or feel the way we are portraying it now…Whoa!

I can’t think of a better way of bringing this concept to light then by thinking of the movie Back To The Future. Is there anything more anachronistic then the DeLorian parked behind a billboard in the “Nostalgia Mode” neighborhood of Marty’s parents? This remake of our past puts the viewer, “in ‘intertextuality’ as a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect, and as the operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudo-historical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history” (pg. 495). And you guys wonder where Johnny Rockets gets its authenticity? Isn’t this pseudo-historical depth the “Depthlessness” (pg. 489) Jameson discusses in Diamond Dust Shoes?
We are reliving a false past…I Think

Let me get back to Historicism and my BTF “referent”. When the third installment of this ever-popular trilogy was released we got to see the future-future. What would Back to the Future be without the good old clock tower. If I recall correctly this Postmodern building took the clock itself and molded a futuristic or postmodern theme around the timepiece. Even though this film depicted the future it seemed familiar in a sense, like things were the way we would expect them to be…the people of this time were mere spectators to the spectacles of their surroundings. Ads for movies were 3-d sharks that swallowed you on the sidewalk. So can Nostalgia reflect the future as well as the past?????
And back to the past, the whole idea of Marty’s body disappearing in the Polaroid picture. He had to properly relive or reinvent his fathers history to make his reality possible, “The past is thereby itself modified” (pg. 494), and it becomes no more than “a set of dusty spectacles” (pg. 494) for us to compare our new ones with.