So, I find myself reading things that I don’t completely understand. It seems like whenever I read something, I find that there are dozens of references I don’t get, like I’m a culturally incompetetent twit. Actually, to be more accurate, sometimes it feels like I’m cultural incompetent and I don’t get references to pieces of art, works, buildings, or artists/writers. Sometimes it feels like I’m academically incompetent, not understanding key terms or ideas, going back to Lacan, Heidegger, Hume, etc.: you name the theorist, I haven’t read him, it seems.
Today I finally got around to reading some Frederic Jameson. It’s a bit surprising that I haven’t read anything by him, I suppose. Just like my sci-fi fan friends who scold me for not having read Ender’s Game or something (yet more hints that indeed, cultural criticism and academic work are commodity fetishes).
So, what do I get from Jameson? First, he proposes, very importantly, that we do not just view postmodernism as an issue of style: “it seems to be essential to grasp ‘postmodernism’ not as a style, but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate features” (56). A reason to avoid viewing postmodernism as style is because the view of it as sytle can “obliterate difference” (56) and leads to moral judgments (85) that don’t allow for Marx’s insistance that we “do the impossible, namely to think this development positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously, within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment” (86).
Jameson writes about how revolt has become normal in a postmodern society:
As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features—from obscurity and sexually explicity material to pscyhological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism—no longer scandalize anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalized and are at one with the official culture of Western society. (56)
His “principal point”: “this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has finaly succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its postiion in a mappable external world” (83).
We can’t distance ourselves critically from culture: “We are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation” (87).
On affect:
One of the “constitutive features of the postmodern” is “a whole new type of emotional ground tone—what I will call ‘intensities’—which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime” (58). Jameson writes “that concepts such as anxiety and alienation (and the experiences to which they correspond, as in The Scream) are no longer appropriate in the world of the postmodern” (63).
Later: “As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centred subject may alos mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings—which it may be better and more acurate to call ‘intensities’—are now free-floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria…” (64).
Jameson later writes about “euphoria” and the “hysterical sublime” (76-77), but I don’t quite get it. I think I’ve read these pages three times. It seems that Jameson is saying we get a “stance new hallucinatory exhilaration” from out depthless society: “The world thereby momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without density. But is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating experience?” (76-77). Which, I think, Jameson is asking if this experience is sublime. But I don’t really get it after that.
Ugh. I give up. It’s Saturday night. I should be having fun.
Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92.
