UTOPIA AND POSTMODERN ARTHow could all this be done? Nobody knows yet. It seems totally "unrealistic." That is no argument against the utopian possibility, however. Capitalist culture has taught us to define "realistic" as the opposite of "imagined." But imagination is an essential part of reality. So imagination can be very "realistic," as long as we act on it. Every real change has to be imagined first; imagining is the first step in figuring out a new reality. Most of us cannot even take that first step today. However a few artists have made some initial attempts. Some postmodern works of art suggest that the way to radical change is to subvert the system from within. The idea is to show society its true face by exaggerating it, by turning everything into simulacra as quickly as possible. This includes making all the institutions of society nothing but simulacra.
For example, an artist might mount an exhibit in an art museum showing t-shirts he made with pictures on them, just like the t-shirts the museum sells in its gift shop. In both cases the pictures would be simulacra. The museum's shirts would bear its logo, or a famous painting turned into a simulacrum. But the artist's shirts would have pictures of the museum itself, or the gift shop, or his own exhibit. This would turn the institution and art itself into a simulacrum. (If he is very political, he might have pictures of the museum's trustees, who are also directors of local corporations that pollute the air, make weapons, have no minority executives, etc.) Some postmodernists believe that the more simulacra we create in this way, the quicker we will show society that it is built on simulacra. Society will see how empty its whole life is. This will drive society to a point where it will simply collapse into its hollow core. Then something new will emerge: a utopian society that releases the virtues of postmodernism because it is free of the totalitarian structure of late capitalism.
However this is a risky route. Who can say whether a totally empty society will necessarily turn into a utopian one? Moreover it gives no basis for a great collective utopian project. How can we come together to plan the kind of life we want together if all things remain radically separated? Jameson has no answer to this question. Again, the problem is that we don't know how to think about it clearly yet. The necessary first step is to understand where we are now. Perhaps the most useful political act we can do now is just to analyze the totality in all its complexity and understanding why it is so hard to change it. This means we must have shared images to describe our relationships to the system of postmodern late capitalism. These images must be like maps, showing us how to locate ourselves in the overall scheme of things. We need "cognitive maps" to symbolize our place in the system.
Now that culture has suffused all of life, there is no difference between the culture and life. So it should be possible to use culture to map our experience of life. Cognitive maps could be images drawn from postmodern culture and transcoded in new ways. They cannot literally represent the totality of the system, since that totality is beyond our capacity to represent. But they can give us a symbolic language to relate the various parts and levels of the totality to each other by transcoding them. Most importantly, the maps would link together three crucial codes: the media and its imagery, the mode of production of late capitalism, and the individual's experience as a member of a particular economic class within late capitalism. This would enable us to express our relationships within, and attitudes toward, the totality. It would also show us how little power and control most of us have over the circumstances of our lives. It would show how few people actually own the means of production and therefore make the basic decisions that shape our society; it would show how many people have only the illusion of ownership and free choice. Once we understand the truth about what we have and don’t have today, we can talk together about what it is that we really want for tomorrow.
http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/NewspaperColumns/LongerEssays/JamesonPostmodernism.htm
Could be done with an open source computer game (see 'relief') based on discourse analysis/subject positions
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