Pastiche

"Although we create the technologies, they also create us." McLuhan, Understanding Media.

The contemporary individual becomes a 'made' entity, a postmodern pastiche of different styles.

Pastiche is a 'blank parody' or 'speech in a dead language... but without any of the pafody's ulterior motives, instead amputated of the satiric impulse. F. Jameson

Kroker & Kroker on 'disappearing bodies' The body dissolves into a stream of floating parts, a 'body-without-organs'(Deleuze), which reveals that it has been processed by the media, and that we experience our bodies only as 'fantastic simulacra of body rhetorics.'
The posthuman body enters the world: a techno-body, a screen, a hybridised version of pluralities: a cyborg, a hybrid, a body-without-organs, a virtual body, a body in-process. p251 Beginning Postmodernism
Relevant artists: Stelarc and Orlan.

According to Nicholas Abercrombie on postmodernism in television p228
- we no longer live in reality, but in images or representations of reality. A collapse of image and reality
- contemporary societies are about creating an image, refining a look, presenting a style, a 'surface appearance'
- no respect for authenticity anymore. Pastiche, amalgations of different styles genres and elements make their way.
- self referentiality
- not following conventions of realism and narrative
- postmodern culture is fragmented, bits do not add up to a whole

Jameson proposes 'an aesthetic of cognitive mapping' as a remedy. It is a reorientation of our experience of time and space in an era where the opportunity to place ourselves into a definable time-space location has become systematically challenged.

Kaplan has a more optimistic view. She says that the elision of "boundaries toward a heteroglossia('different-speech-ness') that calls into question moribund pieties of a now archaic humanism." Rocking around the clock p 148