Coordinating Contemporaneity: (Post) Modernity, 9/11, and the Dialectical Imagery of <i>Memento</i>

Abstract

-Lt is now widely accepted that the debate surrounding postmodernity reached a highpoint with the 1991 publication of Fredric Jameson's article Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in which he questions the historical uniqueness of the postmodern, arguing that its apparent newness is in fact a depthless expression of reification in late capitalist society. Two decades after the publication of Jameson's essay, certain key ideas such as those of living in a society of spectacle, of experience being a narrative/ interpretive process (or worse yet, pure simulacra), of language being a groundless signifying procedure of difference and deferral, and of meaning and truth being an interplay of power relations that are neither absolute nor stable have attained an established intellectual