If anybody out there wants to know the very essence of Jameson's theory of intellectual investigation, here it is: the whole thing is based on one extremely misleading metaphor.
I agree with Jameson's infamous call to "Always historicize!" in the forward to The Political Unconscious (even though I still have no idea what the political unconscious is), but the structure he builds around that call just doesn't hang together.
His reason why we must "Always historicize!" when we analyse art is ostensibly because history is that which gives rise to art. He implies that relationship almost continuously, but in the second chapter of Political Unconscious, he spells the relationship out in no uncertain terms. He even resorts to a chart, which always strikes me as a way to lend the appearance of mathematical irrefutability to often quite arbitrary assertions. The chapter, by the way, is supposedly about the conceptual transition from magic in Romance literature (Mediaeval) to realism in the novel (18th-century), but the chapter is actually about the formation of genres. He ends up saying very little about the novel, and it's clear even to me that he has very little working knowledge of Romances. But I digress.
The basic premise (that art comes from history) is still fine so far, but there are a couple of hitches. First, I've misquoted his terms. It's not 'history,' it's 'historicity,' and the difference is subtle but important. As far as I can tell, 'history' is the product of historicizing. It's the texts and knowledge we end up with after the fact. 'Historicity' is the process of historicizing, of making historical facts into an understandable narrative of some kind (I.e., narrativizing). It's what we do to arrive at the product, at history. Bear that in mind. There will be a test later.
Similarly, I've expanded to all art, whereas Jameson's claims are ostensibly about genres alone. I make that expansion, however, because Jameson claims that the real significance of art is its form, not its content, so when he refers to 'genre,' he is, in fact, referring to all art, or at least the parts that he considers important enough to talk about.
Therefore, it's not that history gives rise to art, it's that historicity gives rise to genre, which is different. But there is still a real conceptual problem, here. This arrangement derives directly from the relationship of base to superstructure in Marx, where the base is the raw materials around which an economic system developes, and the superstructure is the social system that arises out of the base. Jameson has imported the base/superstructure relationship and replaced the names with historicity/art. It's precisely the same relationship, and he says so explicitly in the chart.
Problem the first: if we're staying within Marxist theory, the superstructure is all of what we call 'culture' or 'society,' which includes art. It pretty much has to. From a Marxist perspective, we already know where art comes from, the base. If art is part of culture, and culture is the superstructure on top of the economic base, then in Jameson's arrangement, the superstructure begets the superstructure. One part of culture gives rise to another part of culture, but Marxism would seem to indicate that that's an illusion, and it all actually arises from the base. Jameson's discussion is superfluous.
Problem the second: it's not only superfluous, it's circular. Historicity is, at least partly, the act of narrativizing, therefore to historicize we need to already have some concept of narrative, and narrative is one of the most general categories of 'genre' that we have. So in Jameson's arrangement, genre must precede historicity, and yet historicity gives rise to genre. I am certain that this is a huge conceptual flaw because immediately after stating it, Jameson insists that we ignore it.
On literally the very next page after the ill-fated chart, he pleads with the reader to not read his arrangement causally, but I can't see any other way to read it. He doesn't use the language that might imply the paradox of self-reflexive production, language he is no doubt familiar with as a postmodern scholar. Instead, he uses seemingly 'common sensical' and literal language, which requires a metaphorical statement that I have saved to last because it’s the most entertaining part of this whole cock up.
Problem the third, and last: Jameson's chart, and the prose that surrounds it, calls historicity the "raw material" that gives rise to art (genre), but historicity is not a raw material. Coal is a raw material. Lumber is a raw material. Iron is a raw material. Historicity as "raw material" is a metaphorical statement, and as I explained a few days ago, metaphors are powerful things precisely because, even as we use them in full knowledge that they are metaphors, we tend to treat them literally, or at the very least like extremely simple allegories, transparent representations of 1:1 relationships.
Jameson's arrangement makes sense only if we treat his metaphor literally. If we acknowledge that it's a metaphor, and an inaccurate one at that, then the whole thing is at best useless, and at worst, both in violation of Marxist principles and logically self-contradictory. But what's really interesting about it is that it forced me to arrive at the topic of my last entry, which is one of the most important things I've ever said on this blog, and therefore one of the shortest.
Posted by orion at June 12, 2006 4:45 PM