Leading into the Future IX: Fragmented and Inconsistent Images

Heaps of Fragments

A few years after Gitlin, Frederic Jameson (1991) wrote about the “heaps of fragments” (a pastiche) in the production of postmodern culture—though he declares:

. . . the description of postmodernism [is] something for which the word fragmentation remains much too weak and primitive a term . . . particularly since it is now no longer a matter of the breakup of some preexisting older organic totality, but rather the emergence of the multiple in new and unexpected ways, unrelated strings of events, types of discourse, modes of classification, and compartments of reality. (Jameson, 1991, p. 25)

Jameson sometimes uses two other terms, random pluralism and pastiche (a clustering of mimicry and blank parody) to address the issue of fragmentation. Random pluralism is found in the hand-me-down scrapes of culture and images from the modern and even premodern era in our postmodern world. These remnants are inextricably interwoven with new and surprising cultural elements (Jameson’s pastiche) to produce a fragmented and inconsistent image of our time.

Such a world tends to deny the continuity of tradition and undermines the certainty of specific social constructions of reality. History, according to both Jameson and Gitlin, has been ruptured. We live in an era that need pay little attention to the past. As Jameson (1991, p. 36) observed, over half the people who have ever lived on earth are still alive: “the present is thus like some new thriving and developing nation-state, whose numbers and prosperity make it an unexpected rival for the old traditional ones.”

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