In his essay "The Transformations of the Image" in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 Fredric Jameson says that the current postmod­ern age seems to be experiencing a general return to the aesthetic as a philosophical discipline at the very moment, paradoxically, when the trans-aesthetic claims of modern art seem completely discredited and a bewildering variety of styles and mixtures of all kinds flows through consumer society under its new postmodern dispensation. He adds:

The older aesthetic traditions were rarely prescient enough to theorize these new works, many of them incorporat­ing new communications and cybernetic technology (film was already developed enough to produce several proposals for a specifically filmic aesthetics, but video, far more generally used and influential, came too late for that kind of theoretical codification). Meanwhile, the discrediting of the older modernist idea of 'progress' - the telos leading to new technical discoveries and new formal innovations - spells the end of evolutionary time in the arts and augurs a new kind of spatial proliferation of artistic modes which can no longer be valorized in the older modernist ways.

Finally, the general breakdown of the divisions between the older disciplines and specializations - in this case, the collapse of the once fiercely defended border between high art and mass culture (let alone daily life) - leaves traditional analyses of the 'specificity' of the aesthetic, of the nature or artistic experience as such, of the autonomy of the work as a space somehow beyond the practical and the scientific realms, in much uncertainty, as though somehow the very nature of reception and consumption (perhaps even the production) of art in our time had undergone some fundamental mutation, leaving the older paradigms irrelevant or at least outmoded.