Postmodernism and Consumer Society. In Ji, No. 19, 2000.

The article is a translation of a text by Fredric Jameson. The author analyzes postmodernism as a reaction to high modernist art, which had lost its subversive cultural and political potential. One of the key features of postmodernism is identified as the blurring of the boundary between mass and elite cultures. It is argued that the central artistic device of postmodernists is pastiche, the imitation of artistic styles of the past, devoid of a parodic impulse. The author sees the ideological death of the bourgeois subject as the reason for the postmodern belief in the impossibility of artistic innovation. He stresses that postmodernist works are characterized by a fragmented, schizophrenic temporality, an endless experience of an affectively intensified “now.”