Memory has become a degraded repository of images and simulacra rather than authentic perception.

Evidence

If this is true, then it becomes interesting to detain Macrae-Gibson’s modernist formulations for another moment and to interrogate them a little more insistently. What would be, for him, this “intellectual picture” which blocks the more authentic perceptual processes of art? I think that more is at stake here than the simple traditional opposition of the abstract and the concrete — the difference between intellectualizing and seeing, between reason or thinking and concrete perception. Still, it would seem paradoxical to thematize such a concept of the intellectual picture in terms of memory (the opposition between the memory of a thing and the perception of the thing) in a situation in which both personal and collective memory have become functions in crisis to which it is increasingly problematical to appeal. Proust, you will “remember,” did it just the other way round and tried to show that it is only by way of memory that some genuine and more authentic perception of the thing can be reconstructed. Yet the reference to nostalgia film suggests that Macrae-Gibson’s contemporary formulation is not without some justice if we suppose, as against Proust, that it is memory itself that has become the degraded repository of images and simulacra, so that the remembered image of the thing now effectively inserts the reified and the stereotypical between the subject and reality or the past itself. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 314

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces a key Jamesonian inversion: under postmodernism, memory no longer restores authentic perception (as in Proust) but interposes stereotype between subject and reality.
• XREF: connects to: Reification colonizes even memory, annulling the emigré’s past as mere background data. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 42; Clip-show culture operates like anterograde amnesia, unable to make new memories — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2426