Postmodern culture is essentially visual with a slack and flabby linguistic element

Evidence

As far as taste is concerned (and as readers of the preceding chapters will have become aware), culturally I write as a relatively enthusiastic consumer of Postmodernism, at least of some parts of it: I like the architecture and a lot of the newer visual work, in particular the newer photography. The music is not bad to listen to, or the poetry to read; the novel is the weakest of the newer cultural areas and is considerably excelled by its narrative counterparts in film and video (at least the high literary novel is; subgeneric narratives, however, are very good, indeed, and in the Third World of course all this falls out very differently). Food and fashion have also greatly improved, as has the life world generally. My sense is that this is essentially a visual culture, wired for sound — but one where the linguistic element (for which some stronger term than “standardization” needs to be invented, and which is in addition marbled by the worst kind of junk-language, such as “life-style” or “sexual preference”) is slack and flabby, and not to be made interesting without ingenuity, daring, and keen motivation. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 652

Categorization

• XREF: Jameson’s own taste judgment separates his ‘liking’ from his analysis of postmodernism’s function — connects to the taste/analysis/evaluation distinction just established in the previous paragraph. — connects to: Postmodern culture is tactile and operative, not visual and representational — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 237; Eclecticism of contemporary culture signals a general slackening of taste — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 486; Postmodern urban imagery erases class relations and production from its aestheticized surface — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1998