Reproductive technology itself is postmodernism’s deepest subject

Evidence

Yet another way of interpreting such a tape is conceivable, however -an interpretation that would seek to foreground the process of production itself rather than its putative messages, meanings, or content. On this reading some distant consonance might be invoked between the fantasies and anxieties aroused by the idea of assassination and the global system of media and reproductive technology. The structural analogy between the two seemingly unrelated spheres is secured in the collective unconscious by notions of conspiracy, while the historical juncture between the two was burned into historical memory by the Kennedy assassination itself, which can no longer be separated from its media coverage. The problem posed by such interpretation in terms of autoreferentiality is not its plausibility: one would want to defend the proposition that the deepest “subject” of all video art, and even of all Postmodernism, is very precisely reproductive technology itself. The methodological difficulty lies rather in the way in which such a global “meaning” — even of some type and status newer than the interpretive meanings we have touched on above — once again dissolves the individual text into an even more disastrous indistinction than the total flow -individual work antinomy evoked above: if all videotexts simply designate the process of production/reproduction, then presumably they all turn out to be “the same” in a peculiarly unhelpful way. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 254

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates the strongest global reading of video art: that all postmodern texts ultimately designate the process of production/reproduction.
• XREF: Links to the reader’s key idea that aesthetic form is the economy’s way of appearing — here reduced to the literal technics of reproduction.