Below are the fragmented pieces of writing emailed to me by Jameson at around 3am on February 12, 2013. Those of you familiar with the letters exchanged between Lovecraft and Kamprad will understand how these brief paragraphs relate to each letter and each other. The relevance of the section on postmodernism is obscure to me. If anyone knows, get in touch.
Jameson on the
horror of H.P. Lovecraft and IKEA
Our individual and collective praxis
lists with cyclopean weight and scale towards a dystopian horizon. Invisible in
its immanence, habitual and unthinking, the sum of all human thought and action
fixes our course. Existing on a continuum of reification and deification, the
incrementally and collectively empowered forces of our culture appear to bring
ruin or prosperity for their own inscrutable ends, as fabricated systems return
as unrepresentable entities both sublime and horrific.
* * *
R’Lyeh, near the pole of inaccessibility
Near the point furthest from land something vast and dead dreams
at a frequency beyond the resonance of human bones. Its alien call rings the
immaterial within us; a psychic tinnitus silent in its ubiquity. When the dead
dreamer shifts in its ancient slumber, earthquakes shake the crushing darkness
of pacific trenches and we dream with it. In the depths of our subconscious we
chant the unpronounceable and walk between architecture whose geometry defies
description. When we wake, the paradoxes we so recently walked amongst
anxiously jar and so quickly sink beneath our waking.
* * *
We are increasingly denied the agency to
determine the tactility of our domestic environments as mass produced domestic
objects with highly refined and delineated functions demand a set of complex,
reductively defined interactions. The lifestyle imposition of domestic consumer
utility precludes creative agency, while instigating the glaze of individual
production through consumer choice. The illusion of individuality is woven from
choice and complex postmodern
signifiers encourage us to curate domestic environments replete with
a-historical, knowingly undermined symbols of affluence: Persian rugs woven by
machines in Turkey; Bauhausian chairs flat-packet by the hundreds of thousands
in Romania; three Rothkos in five different frame sizes stacked, neutered and
profoundly banal. These examples come to function as expressions of ironic despair.
* * *
The dead dreamer, Cthulu, is foremost in a pantheon of cosmic
indifference. Alienation is year zero for gods, the beginning of the
abstraction of the banal that ends in deification. The liminal potential of ritual
is pregnant in the unthinking repetition of the habitual, where worship is
implicit rather than overt.
* * *
Jameson on the legacy of postmodernism
The grand narratives of modernism and the
institutional powerbase through which they are relentlessly reinforced and
renewed have conspired to reduce postmodernism to a schizophrenic period in
aesthetics and philosophy – an anomalous episode born of some collective
mania. A subconscious totalising
protocol has seemingly been initiated that has galvanised the academy and the
arbiters of our cultural memory to enact a pervasive, collective denial of the
ontological consequences of postmodernism.
The recent Victoria and Albert Museum
exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970 –
1990 exemplifies
the gentle denial and wholesale reduction of postmodernism to a style paradigm
by an institution whose very purpose is to categorise, historicise, neuter and defang. While seeming to explicitly reassert the
relevance of postmodernism, the exhibition in fact functions as a vaccine; the
deliberate introduction of a seemingly harmful element that serves to protect
the cultural corpus from threat.
Postmodernism’s historical cul-de-sac (as
it has been described) offers no easy trajectory on which to map progress and
has hence fallen victim to the very operations of modernism it sought to
challenge. The rise of categories like the contemporary and post-contemporary,
despite their seeming novelty, actually function to demonstrate the hegemony of
modernism as the dominant epistemological approach through which our cultural
and intellectual activities are organised.
If
modernism is ‘dominant but dead’ (Habermas), it seems to inexorably shamble
forward, propelled by orphan narratives stripped of their guiding ideals; a
zombie that thoughtlessly treads a routine stripped of purpose. The notion that the contemporary is the
dialectical offspring of modernism and postmodernism ignores the contemporary’s
fundamental sublimation to modernism. Yet the wry smile it turns on
postmodernism communicates a certain critical maturity and gentle distain for
the energetic radicalism of its paradigmatic predecessor.
But its critical triumph is seemingly pyrrhic,
creating a vacuum or politically inert space for redundant yet seductive
narratives to re-colonise. Or perhaps more accurately, to quieten dissenting
voices and return our attention to the outmoded yet familiar resonance of
modernism’s baritone; a utopian mantra repeated until its component words slip
into a continuum of meaningless utterances that somehow fail to strike us as
absurd in the light of the incremental apocalypse we are experiencing.
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