http://www.funnyphotos.net.au/images/mona-lisa-on-the-simpsons1.jpg

Frederic Jameson would have much to say on the subject of the above image in which the Mona Lisa is drawn as though a character of The Simpsons with the now culturally ubiquitous town of Springfield serving as the backdrop. There is no doubt that the image (and indeed the show) fit into the postmodern canon, although how exactly it goes about doing that would be the topic of a lengthy discussion on what constitutes postmodern as opposed to modern or any art. Jameson would probably start by speaking to the background from which the movement emerged.

“the last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by sense of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the “crisis” of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.) Taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism.”

According to Jameson, postmodernism is in many ways characterized by an underlying sense of the end being nigh. The world in which postmodernism, as opposed to modernism, has risen to prominence is one in which the downfall of man feels almost a tangible blip over the horizon and in many ways both acts as a criticism of and signifies the end of many facets of human achievement, including art.

“the enumeration of what follows, then, at once becomes empirical, chaotic, and heterogenous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also photorealism, and beyond it, the “new expressionism”, the moemnt, in music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of “classical” and “popular” styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock”

Perhaps, then, the superimposition of popular culture into classical themes such as this one speaks to postmodern playfulness, while the image's underlying humor can be seen as an expression of postmodernism's both reflective and pointedly cynical and stance on human development, what Jameson refers to as “inverted millenarianism.”

“Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough state itself as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi's influential manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. However we may ultimately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric, it has at leat the merit of drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern”

The image is also perhaps an example of postmodernism's destruction of the boundaries between high culture and commercial culture, this image going so far as to satirize said rift. The image and The Simpsons could be placed within either category of high or commercial culture, and in doing so inspires the new reading of the texts “denounced by all the ideologues of the modern.”

“One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is that these tend to obliterate difference and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable chronological metamorphoses and punctuation marks). This is, however, precisely why it seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features.”A postmodern society is one in which all forms of culture are subjected to a self-perpetrating system by which every manufactured piece of art, regardless of intent or underlying meaning, even if that meaning is to distance itself from this very cycle, is swallowed into a vast, all encompassing cultural catalogue which absorbs and homogenizes the work. Everything produced within a postmodern society is a product, and as such is an extension of the progressively capitalistic western society from which it originated. Postmodern society is therefore society lacking perspective from which to judge itself. The image of the Mona Lisa is in this sense both a parody of postmodernism and a facet of the same dominant culture.

Jack Baur's entire life takes place in a fictional world similar to our own in every way, with the small difference that an any given point the entire place could explode into nothingness. Jack runs through life bouncing from one various potential world-ending crises to the next, and deals handles them with an all-or-nothing modus operandi in the most tension-creating way a team of screenwriters can conceive.

The paranoia and sense of constant threat which appears to pervade every hour of Mr. Baur's life, and the methods he employs to deal with said threats would appear to Freud to be the product of fears and desires originally manifested during an early stage of Baur's childhood development. Freud believed that all neurotic adult behavior can be traced back to childhood episodes and that such behavior is essentially an expression of fears and anxieties developed during that period.

An empirical relationship has exists between adult traits and common events during childhood and infancy. It is possible that Baur is the subject of a series degree of sublimation, that is to say his initial sexual impulses have been over time re-channeled by society into the ostensibly more useful medium of counter-terrorism and it is for this reason that he strives to save the world at any cost.

It may be that Baur obtained a fixation at the anal stage. Freud would possibly explain Jack's methodology for dealing with his superiors, everybody he believes to be on the wrong side, and people who stand in his way as the result of an anal expulsive character developed during the anal stage of his development. The anal stage occurs immediately after the oral stage. Beginning during potty training, and characterized by the subsequent shift in the primary erogenous zone from the mouth to the anus, it is during this phase that a conflict develops between the part of the child that wants to expel bodily waste and the newly present societal and parental pressure to control said desire. Children generally deal with this pressure in two ways. Either they outwardly rebel against their parents by expelling said waste particularly inconveniently, or they retain it in a move of passive-aggression. Children who choose the former, which probably describes Jack Baur, are characterized by recklessness, carelessness, and defiance, which quite accurately describes Jack Baur's particular idiom, as well as messy. Children who choose the latter tend to be the opposite.

However, Jack's methodology and masculinity are most probably explainable by fixation at the phallic phase. The phallic stage is characterized by the shifting of the primary erogenous zone from the anus to the genitals. According to Freud, during this phase as a child becomes aware of his genitals said child's instinctual love for his mother transitions to sexual love. He begins to see his father as an object standing in the way of his mother's affection, and as a result begins feeling envious of and aggressive towards his father. More so than aggression and envy, however, the child is afraid that the father will strike back and develops castration anxiety. As his castration anxiety greatly eclipses his desire for his mother, he represses this desire. Eventually, he learns to express this repressed desire vicariously through the father, which results in the child attempting to emulate and later identify with the father. Individuals who develop a fixation during this phase are characterized by recklessness, self-assurance, confidence and excessive narcissism. Fixation during this phase most accurately explains Jack Baur's masculinity as well as the manner in which he deals with objects that stand in his way.

Jurgen Habermas's “public sphere,” as defined in his essay The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, consists of a zone outside the immediate control of any governing body characterized by rational political discourse between subjects of a public which emerged as a reaction to the late 18^th century's polarized political culture, in which one portion of society attempted to subjugate the other by overpowering it. The “public sphere” emerged as a reaction to the polarized “representational culture” by providing the public with a forum in which criticism could be formed and directed towards the ruling classes and in doing so provided a countermand to said classes.

In essence, the public sphere's purpose can be seen as something which "mediates between society and state, in which the public organizes itself as the bearer of public opinion, accords with the principle of the public sphere- that principal of public information which once had to be fought for against the arcane policies of monarchies and which since that time has made possible the democratic control of state activities.”

“Though mere opinions (cultural assumptions, normative attitudes, collective prejudices and values) seem to persist unchanged in their natural form as a kind of sediment of history, public opinion can by definition only come into existence when a reasoning public is presupposed.”

Habermas argues that the while individuals have and will always harbor critical notions towards those in charge, it was not until the emergence of a public sphere that these notions would enter into the collective opinion of any body large enough to carry influence. By this logic, the development of a public sphere was essential to and possibly a major factor in the development of democratic society in the western world.

Habermas also believes that the commercialization of mass media, which he believes transformed democratic culture into consumerist culture, and the development of socialist governments and socialist government institutions, which blurred the line between state and society, led to the transformation of the public sphere into something more akin to a zone in which members of the public argue over the distribution of government sanctioned wealth as opposed to a realm of genuine political debate.

Habermas would probably look at Ghosts of Rwanda and similar documentaries as the development of a new public sphere. Habermas speaks of the public sphere in terms of its effect on Great Britain and the French Revolution, but in an increasingly globalized world the advent of new technologies which advance the spread of information and communication across groups of people who would normally never be in contact films such as Ghosts of Rwanda exist as testimony to a sort of emerging global public sphere in which political criticism can be made the subject of universal debate.

“Only when the exercise of political control is effectively subordinated to the democratic demand that information be accessible to the public does the political public sphere win an institutionalized influence over the government through the instrument of law-making bodies.”

The documentary about the genocide in Rwanda exists not as a commercialized piece of mass media but as a piece of information designed to increase awareness of an event which would have otherwise gone undocumented and therefore to inspire rational political debate. The political situation in place in Rwanda as documented by the film bears much common ground with the oppressive pre-public sphere society described in Habermas's essay. The film Ghosts of Rwanda, in making the world at large aware of the situation, could aid the development of the vital critical element necessary to change the situation and the global public sphere could aid the development of a local public sphere.