Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
It took a while, but Jameson finally started saying something useful around page 280 of Postmodernism
I should digress, though, and trace my path through Jameson so far, which starts with Stephen Helmling:
Helmling, Steven. The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime and the Dialectic of Critique. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.
Helmling's book is very difficult to get through, one suspects deliberately so. There is an ultimate irony to the writing style itself. Helmling takes great pains to belabour Jameson's use of the Barthean concept of the scriptable meaning (very briefly), writing that inspires further writing, as opposed to writing that closes an idea, thus implying that there can be no more thought on a subject. Neat concept, actually. That Roland was a clever lad. The title of the book, The Success and Failure of... reflects the idea that a critical text shouldn't 'succeed' (say the last word on something), but rather 'fail' (leave it open). According to Helmling, there's a Marxist angle to the potential 'success' and 'failure,' as well, but it's empty doctrine, so I'm not going to bother with it.
Helmling's quite explicit, though, that the scriptable isn't just emulation. It's not writing in the style of a text, or even necessarily taking up a the same problem a text might present. It is, to paraphrase, more like taking a similar path to a similar goal, or if you like, taking up a similar practise to solve a similar problem. In any case, it's not just aping a style, which is hilarious once you compare Helmling's writing to Jameson's. It doesn't just copy Jameson; it multiplies and intensifies everything about Jameson to comical proportions.
Where Jameson's sentences are long and circuitous, usually involving a digression of some kind, Helmling's are twice as long, constantly interrupt themselves so as to create the impression of fragments even though the sentences are technically complete, and contain two or three parenthetical statements each. It's astonishing. I'm not sure what he's attempting to do, exactly. It could be that by creating eye-splitting text he hopes to leave his subject 'open to interpretation' (I.e., incomprehensible), and thus achieve 'the scriptable,' but I suspect he just loves Jameson so much that the 'J' on his WWJD bracelet doesn't stand for 'Jesus.'
And the emulation isn't just stylistic, as far as I can tell. It's also conceptual. Whereas Jameson creates chains of terms that either double for each other, contrast with each other, or directly antagonize each other, Helmling is obsessed, with a religious zealotry, with defining Jameson's key terms in as many different, equally incomprehensible, ways as he possibly can, thus leaving them 'open' by virtue of being evacuated of meaning because they can suddenly mean any of seven or eight totally unrelated things.
I'm not exaggerating for comical effect, here. Helmling's book is the critical equivalent of a drooling fan-boy who spends years studying the same comic book so he can draw just like Todd McFarlane, and thereby not only develop no style of his own, but produce nothing more than an insulting parody of the style created by the object of his sycophancy.
Suffice it to say that Jameson's actual text is crystal clear in comparison. The problem with Jameson is not the sheer density of his text; he could be a lot clearer, but that's a common illness among literary theorists. No, his problem is that he seems to treat Marx and later Marxist theorists as a crutch. Now, to be clear, I have a very thin understanding of Marx, and it may be that I'm simply unable to make sense of Jameson because I don't know his context. If what I'm about to say merely reflects my own ignorance, I will cordially accept it.
That said, Jameson seems to make bald assertions without a whole lot of actual evidence. I have two favourite examples. The first relates to the cover art for Postmodernism, which is an Andy Warhol piece called "Diamond Dust Shoes." Jameson compares it to the Van Gogh painting "A Pair of Boots", claiming that where Van Gogh's "shoes slowly recreate about themselves the whole missing object world which was once their lived context" (I.e., the real conditions of material existence), Warhol's shoes "no longer speak to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh's footgear," that "Nothing in this painting organizes even a minimal place for the viewer," and that "There is therefore in Warhol no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture and restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context of the dance hall or the ball, the world of jetset fashion or glamour magazines" (Postmodernism, 8-9, italics are mine).
Doesn't that 'therefore' just make you want to scream? Jameson has, here, and in many other places, followed a series of bald, unsupported assertions with the word 'therefore' to create the illusion that those bald assertions actually constitute evidence. I'm not trying to just attack the guy. He might very well have extremely good reasons for differentiating between how Van Gogh and Warhol's paintings either succeed or fail at invoking historical context, but none of that actually arrives on the page. The only clue as to why those two paintings are supposedly different that I can see is in Jameson's use of the neologistic noun-phrase "object world," which could imply that Van Gogh's realism itself (objective world?) constitutes 'historicization,' while Warhol's pop-art style detaches his painting from what Jameson presumes to be reality (I.e., material conditions). But that's giving him an awful lot of credit for a very badly-argued passage.
In the other example, even more maddening, Jameson makes a fascinating point and then almost deliberately cuts off at the knees any chance of going somewhere with it. He claims that "our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network [the internet] are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism" (37), and that capitalism is, for Jameson, synonymous with postmodernism. This idea has legs. The connection between capitalism and communications technology is powerful. Multinational corporations wouldn't be able to function without, for example, email or web sites. You can't have head office in New York and your factories in the Philippines, the Caribbean, and South-East Asia without real-time communication.
But Jameson immediately undercuts that statement, claiming that "high-tech paranoia," or "conspiracy theory," "must be seen as a degraded attempt [...] to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system" (38), which at the very least strongly implies that it's impossible to imagine that world system, for which the internet is a potent symbol, or even a material doppelganger. I wracked my brains trying to figure out how he could think that. All I can think of is that Jameson goes from postmodernism to global capitalism to the internet, and it is doctrinally dictated that no one can fully understand capitalism, therefore, in an exercise of pure rationalism that is totally unconnected to the 'material conditions of existence,' no one can understand the internet.
But that's not actually true, is it? Regardless of whether I agree with the ethical implications of their assessments, there are people who can absolutely conceive of the international economic system, and regardless of whether or not I understand their explanations of it, lots of people who can conceive the structure of the internet. I can give you their email addresses.
But, there is a bit of Jameson's book that is useful, if all-too brief. His chapter on film, "Nostalgia for the Present," is mostly about a Philip K. Dick novel (don't ask) that takes place in the pax Americana, the neverwhen of the fifties, in a small down with all the nice feelings of safety and uniqueness that goes with that setting. Think Pleasantville. Unfortunately, that town actually exists in 1997 (an impossibly far-flung date for Dick), during an interstellar civil war.
In the midst of this discussion, Dick starts to compare the historicizing qualities of science-fiction as a genre to the historicizing qualities of the 18th-centuiry novel. First, though, he makes the point that mainstream, pacifying television of the 1950s represented America as a land of abundance and peace, think of Leave it to Beaver, despite the reality of WWII in recent memory, the Korean war being fought, Beat poetry and the revolution that came with it, and all the other very un-status quo things that actually happened in that decade. Mainstream American entertainment of the decade revised the stifling surveillance of the 1950s and projected it back at Americans as the comforting projection called 'the fifties.'
However, instead of blaming mainstream television for misrepresenting the world, Jameson points out that it was actually a kind of coping strategy. So-called 'high art' "apparently cannot deal with this kind of subject mater except by way of the oppositional" (280), whereas what logically must be 'low art' does what oppressed people are usually forced to, try to make the best of an awful situation, turn the 1950s into The Fifties.
Dick's book then represents a convolution of the concept of history, something that Jameson sets in direct opposition to the novel, which he claims "'corresponded' to the emergence of historicity, of a sense of history in its strong modern post-eighteenth century sense" whereas "science fiction equally corresponds to the waning or the blockage of that historicity, and [...] to its crisis and paralysis, its enfeeblement and repression" (284). Needless to day, I think his attack on sci-fi as a genre is probably based in severe ignorance of it (he calls it a "subgenre," for example [283]), but in defining "historicity" as the thing science fiction supposedly isn't, he actually describes the genre as I know it.
Think about this claim: "Historicity is, in fact, neither a representation of the past nor a representation of the future," but rather "a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective" (284).
Now, replace 'historicity' with 'science fiction,' and you have an absolutely clear statement about the defamiliarization effect of science fiction and fantasy. Paul Kocher's Master of Middle-earth describes The Lord of the Rings as "strange, but not too strange, familiar, but not too familiar" (paraphrase from memory). The defamiliarization of fantasy and science-fiction is how it historicizes, how it makes us look at ourselves as if we weren't products of our environment, in a cultural or material sense, or even the much more reasonable position that it's both. Jameson seems to conceptually agree, saying that "Dick's 1997," the era of the novel, "is not, however, centrally significant as a representation or an anticipation [...]" (285). Instead, that setting is a "narrative means" (285) to do certain things with history, and yet, he spends several pages arguing that sci-fi/fantasy is diametrically opposed to the novel, and the novel is inherently 'histiricitic' (or some such made-up word for something we already have word for).
The trouble is that (a) he rarely backs up his claims with evidence or logic, and (b) even if I wring some useful statement out of this chapter, it's the opposite of what he's claiming. Why is this man so famous?
Posted by orion at May 30, 2006 3:07 PM