Pastiche

Pastiche is one of those words many artists are lucky exists. In much the same way that plagiarism which makes no effort to hide its source may be rescued by the word homage, a parody with no discernable sense of humour can be given the distinction pastiche to save it. A particular and highly specialised form of mimicry which apes not the language nor the dialect but the very voice of its inspirator in the hope that in matching the timbre of those who have achieved what the artist seeks, they may trick the audience into finding it for them.
In his essay, "Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" Frederic Jameson calls pastiche "a fertile area in the idiosyncracies of the moderns and their 'inimitable' style"# and, rattling out an illustrative list of renowned and varied artists and devices each one had characteristically employed, supplies a cheat-sheet with which any amateur dilettante can produce a lost novel of Faulkner or missing Mahler concerto. Jameson continues on however to speak of the problems implicit; that in our current day and age there exist so many different personal styles that not only is the original, un-stylized form now so far back in memory it's as good as erased, but that the abundance of personal styles and quirks have rendered such qualities, once seen as eccentricities, to now be viewed as positively normal, Jameson argues, "modernist styles thereby become postmodernist codes" [Jameson 197.]
It could be argued that Postmodernism itself is a pastiche of all cultural theory. Culture, having rolled over its clock with the boldly final "Modernism", now has nowhere to go but to start again from zero-- the final decades of the twentieth century are the acid fangs of the ouroboros, gnawing and tearing away at all before it in order to digest it, deciding which parts to reconstitute the nutrients therein into a part of the new body, and which parts are to be rejected, shat out, and perhaps canned and sold to those further behind, shucksterism being one of the questionable nutrients absorbed by this particular beast.


Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Easthope, Anthony and Kate McGowan, eds. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992.