It’s interesting to see that a few years before Jameson fully formulated his concept of post-modernism, its contours are already delineated here, in a discussion of Surrealism and its dependence upon a certain object-world now historically superseded:
"The privileged objects of Surrealism – “mysterious pieces of junk, inexplicable artefacts which seem to bear some hidden message, the lettering that leaps out from a shop window in passing as a miraculous coincidence or a thinly disguised omen, the store windows of inner passageways, now long since torn down..” – these, says Jameson “Are immediately identifiable to us as the products of a not yet fully industrialised and systematised economy. This is to say that the human origins of the products of this period -their relationship to the work from which they issued – have not yet been fully concealed; in their production they will show traces of an artisanal organisation of labour while their distribution is still predominantly assured y a network of small shopkeepers…
“We need only juxtapose the mannequin as symbol, with the photographic objects of pop art, the Campbell’s soup can, the pictures of Marilyn Monroe, or with the visual curiosities of op art; we need only exchange, for that environment of small workshops and store counters, for the marche aux puces and the stalls in the streets, the gasoline stations along American superhighways, the glossy photographs in the magazines, or the cellopane paradise of an American drugstore, in order to realise that the objects of Surrealism are gone without a trace. Henceforth, in what we may call post-industrial capitalism, the products with which we are furnished are utterly without depth: their plastic content is totally incapable as serving as a conductor of psychic energy.. and we may ask ourselves whether we are not here in the presence of a cultural transformation of signal proportions, a historical break of an unexpectedly absolute kind.”
See also a recent edition of
Radical Philosophy:
"In 1934 two men in Paris contemplated something new and wonderful. They had obtained a pair of Mexican jumping beans. The younger of the two wanted to cut open one of the beans to test his theory that it contained an insect or larva. Surrealist magus André Breton would have none of Roger Caillois’s suggestion: dissecting the bean would destroy its mystery.
Why should mystery in the object be linked to the semi-visibility of its laborious origins? Is it because this semi-visibility also involves hidden-ness, and this 'hidden-ness' lends to the object its depth and intrigue. Surreal objects manifest or bare traces of that which is concealed. There is a kind of blindspot in the object and it is - cf Zizek - this ‘blindspot’ which makes it ‘real’ . Postmodern objects don’t have this blindspot. They have the flatness of what Heidegger calls a 'blind mirror' - they reflect or manifest not some hidden ground but merely all that is external to them.
What is mysterious is that 'dark earth' out of which appearances arise and which subtends and underwrites those appearances.
Note, though, in the above example, that Breton is determined to maintain mystery even at the cost of a certain self-deception. The 'mystery' is the effect of not opening the bean, and this poetic effect overides the truth of the matter. The sense of a 'dark earth' inside the bean is to be maintained artifically, as it were, soley because of its poetry.