Postmodern painting simulates surrealism’s forms while lacking its psychic charge

Evidence

Surrealism without the Unconscious: such is the way in which one is also tempted to characterize the newer painting, in which the most uncontrolled kinds of figuration emerge with a depthlessness that is not even hallucinatory, like the free association of an impersonal collective subject, without the charge and investment either of a personal Unconscious or of a group one: Chagall’s folk iconography without Judaism or the peasants, Klee’s stick drawings without his peculiar personal project, schizophrenic art without schizophrenia, “surrealism” without its manifesto or its avant-garde. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 406

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson’s precise account of how postmodern painting strips modernist formal achievements of their original psychological content.
• XREF: Connects directly to Jameson’s ‘waning of affect’ and the pastiche-vs-parody distinction central to the reader’s project; also parallels the depthlessness of late-capitalist aesthetics. — connects to: Automatic writing contains self-consciousness, and Surrealism’s idea eclipses its actual texts — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 205