I want to make a few more comments on a couple of points raised by Carl
and Barry about my covers piece. I started this a week or so ago, and just
now kind of finished it off. Hope it's not too stale by now. This'll
probably be my last words on the subject (but I'm always psyched to hear
what other folks think). I think we've covered some of this ground in
other posts, but I don't have the energy to weed that stuff out of here.
Sorry. This is long, but hopefully it'll be interesting if you take the
time with it (I guess this is starting to be a theme--I'm sorry I didn't
have time to make it shorter).
first Carl:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
"I also have some thread-sparking questions (what was the first known
instance of the half-ironic cover - is he right in naming the 'Mats's
Kiss cover as Patient Zero - and also how to relate this web of
analysis to the various levels of irony in alt-country covers of both
rock and country so-called cheeze). "
Jake:
Well, I'm not sure if the Kiss Cover is "Patient Zero" or not. I suspect
not. It's a question I've asked myself. But in the end, I'm not sure it
really matters. Instead, I prefer to jump off from some ideas I first saw
in Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism or the Logic of Late Capitalism" In
the intro, he says the following. Indulge me, it's a little long and
dense:
"In periodizing a phenonomenon of this kind [here he's talking about the
phenonomenon of Postmodernism and Late Capitalism], we have to complicate
the model with all kinds of supplementary epicycles. It is necessary to
distinguish between the gradual setting in place of the various (often
unrelated) preconditions for the new structure and the "moment" (not
exactly chronological) when they all jell and combine into a functional
system. This moment is itself less a matter of chronology than it is of a
well-nigh Freudian Nachstraglichkeit, or retroactivity: people become
aware of the dynamics of some new system, in which they are themselves
seized, only later on and gradually. Nor is that dawning collective
consciousness of a new system (deduced itself intermittently in a
fragmentary way from various unrelated crisis symptoms such as factory
closings or higher interest rates) exactly the same as the coming into
being of fresh cultural forms of expression (Raymond Williams" "structures
of feeling" do finally strike one as a very odd way to have to
characterize postmodernism culturally). That the pre-conditions for a new
"structure of feeling" also preexist their moment of combination and
crystallization into a relatively hegemonic style everyone acknowledges;
but that pre-history is not in synch with the economic one. Thus Mandel
suggests that the basic new technological prerequisites of the new "long
wave" of capitalism's third stage (here called "late capitalism") were
available by the end of Wolrd War II, which also had the effect of
reorganzing international relations, decolonizing the colonies and laying
the groundwork for the emergence of a new economic world system.
Culturally, however, the precondition is to be found (apart the wide
variety of aberrant modernist "experiments" which are then restructured in
the form of predecessors) in the enormous social and psychological
transformations of the 1960s, which swept so much tradition away on the
level of metalites. Thus the economic prepartion of postmodernism began in
the 1950s, after wartime shortages of consumer goods and spare parts had
been made up and new products and new technologies (not least those of the
media) could be pioneered. On the other hand, the psychic habitus of the
new age demands the absolute break, strengthened by a generational
rapture, achieved more properly in the 1960s (it being understood that
economic development does not then pause for that, but very much continues
along its own level and according to its own logic). If you prefer a now
somewhat antiquated language, the distiction is very much the one
Althusser used to harp on between a Hegelian "essential cross section of
the present" (or coup d'essence), where a culture critique wants to find a
single principle of the "postmodern" inherent in the most varied and
ramified features of social life, and the Althusserian "structure in
dominance" in which the various levels entertain a semiautonomy over and
against each other, run at different rates of speed, develop unevenly, and
yet conspire to produce a totality."
Then in Chapter one Jameson says the following:
"One of the concerns aroused by periodizing hypotheses is that these tend
to obliterate difference and to project the idea of the historical period
as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable
chronological metamorphoses and punctuation marks). This is, however,
precisely why it seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a
style but rather a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the
presence and coexistence of a range of very different,
