Mapping the Rebel Image: Postmodernism and the Masculinist Politics of Rock in the U. S. A.

In his 1984 essay Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson compares two paintings to provide a now-familiar pair of synecdoches for the modern and postmodern cultural moments. Vincent van Gogh's modernist painting Peasant Shoes, Jameson argues, provided us with a hermeneutic depth, an invitation to reconstruct some raw material truth about the world (such as the miserable poverty of peasant life) that it has reworked or transformed. In contrast, Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes allows us no comparable opportunity to restore its flattened postmodern images to some larger lived context, a politically disturbing fact for Jameson given how Warhol's work turns centrally around commodification. In the cultural shift from the modernism of middle capitalism to the postmodernism of late capitalism, Jameson detects the abolition of critical distance as aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally (56).1