aesthetics – Second Slope

Edgy enough for ya?

New publications, if you are interested~ My story “Blue Hour” in now live in Issue 18 of Scissors & Spackle, the experimental supplement to Emerge Literary Journal, and the ever-excellent Full Stop has published a review essay of WARNING TO THE CROCODILES by Lobo Antunes that I had mentioned working on back in my November 2021 post. Oof, those paragraphs looked shorter in the manuscript. Bah, paragraph breaks are overrated. Right?

And now for the blog

I do miss going to museums. I remember seeing Barnett Newman’s VIR HEROICUS SUBLIMIS in the flesh 12 years ago. Just your usual abstract expressionism, a big—massive color field. A simple composition, five lines before a pure red space, that might reach toward a hazy alien landscape, or a graph of the spectra of visible light.

However, being able to get up close to the painting, more things can be brought to your attention. There are subtleties in how these zips were applied to the picture.

The passage of one’s gaze over one of these lines brings out differences not just in color, but in the texture of the paint layers, and the nature of the edge, whether it is hard or rough. If you read cognitive linguistics and poetics, then at a conceptual level, you can talk about all of these definitional aspects of the painting as edges. It was convenient of Newman’s pictures to be concerned with the arrangement of edges as such. Edges and edgework (I wish they’d call it edging) are essential to the perceptual process. Edges bind the forms of objects in our vision, and distinguish these objects spatially through foreground and background. It’s in the processing of the edges that we process the imagined worlds presented by works of art. Changes in edge-processing reflect changes in artistic texture.

Any form of conceptual transition in any artistic medium, as well as our own physical experience, can be thought of as edges. Moving your hand over wood and glass and feeling the qualitative tactile change of the surfaces, seeing the grain of the wood become the smooth transparency, is an experience of edges. And so is moving your eyes over a line of normal text that suddenly becomes italics. Mr. Lanz would also have us know that switches in point of view, in the reference points for the grounding of figures, also qualify as edgework.

It’s interesting how fundamentally visual the concept is (based in part on gestalt psychology, with principles like in the above illustration), but that appears to be the orientation indicated by modern research into human consciousness. The “movie in your head” metaphor for reading fiction may be quite unavoidable.

(source)

Edges abound even in literary texts. And it was edges I had in mind while reading my third Jo Nesbø thriller. PHANTOM is Harry Hole novel #9. It was hearing about this one that got me to check out the series starting with SNOWMAN, so that I could get here. I was told this one is a deeply sad, slow burn, that it even reaches the realm of Literature. It’s certainly an intimate and dark scenario: the detective returns to Norway to clear the name of his sort-of adopted son Oleg, who is accused of murdering a drug dealer. There are painful scenes of Harry facing Oleg’s addiction problems. It’s a slow burn, and not that suspenseful, mainly because of a dead man’s testimony that interrupts Harry’s detective work.

To go back to edgework: most everyone knows spontaneously how storytelling works. You set a sequence of events, then it’s just a matter of how detailed you want to get. Novels and short stories by professionals aren’t fundamentally different. But where mastery and command come in is the way good writers can establish a story world while directing your attention around and through it. The opening paragraph of PHANTOM is a good example. There’s a general hierarchy of figures that attract readerly attention, with active human agents at the top and abstractions at the bottom, and the narration can brighten these figures or dim them, make them large or small, loud or quiet, bring them near or far away—like a conceptual black box theater. What happens when a text opens without any humans strictly speaking? The main “attractor” in his passage will be an animal, and a human being won’t appear till the end:

Amid the noises of the night in downtown Oslo—the regular drone of cars outside the window, the distant siren that rose and fell and the church bells that had begun to chime nearby—a rat went on the hunt for food. She ran her nose over the filthy linoleum on the kitchen floor. The pungent smell of gray cigarette ash. The sugary-sweet aroma of blood on a piece of cotton gauze. The bitter odor of beer on the inside of a bottle cap, Ringnes lager. Molecules of sulfur, saltpeter and carbon dioxide filtered up from an empty metal cartridge case designed for a nine-by-eighteen millimeter lead bullet, also called a Makarov, after the gun to which the caliber was originally adapted. Smoke from a still-smoldering cigarette with a yellow filter and black paper, bearing the Russian imperial eagle. The tobacco was edible. And there: a stench of alcohol, leather, grease and asphalt. A shoe. She sniffed it. The obstacle lay on its side with its back to the wall blocking the entrance to the nest, and her eight newly born, blind, hairless babies were screaming ever louder for her milk. The mountain of flesh smelled of salt, sweat and blood. It was a human body. A living human being; her sensitive ears could detect the faint heartbeats between her babies’ hungry squeals.

As readers we’re fixed in a place but not necessarily with a point of view (it’s there but it’s delayed, put at the end of the sentence). It’s like a movie whose first shot opens on an empty set before a character enters the frame. In this place there is a regular tone in “the drone of cars,” a faint sound in the “distant sirens,” and a new sound in “the church bells,” that come through a window in a room, placed in an interruptive clause that delays the appearance of the rat, who must be perceiving these things. A familiar scene of urban squalor is established through a defamiliarized POV (to use a keyword from Russian formalism, now a post-“Marxist” term of art). Linguists talk about “impersonation,” which can boost the “attractor” status of a given figure by lending it human qualities. Anthropomorphism is only the most visible form of this strategy: give a bear clothes and he immediately becomes more human, as many English authors understood. In this case, this rat is not just a rat but a momma rat (a mother is a mother), whose way to her hungry babies (not “pups”) has been blocked, not by a human being, but the shoe being worn by one.

The writer could have let us follow the rat until she runs up against “the body,” or “the dead man,” as a kind of readerly jumpscare, but that would miss the point. It is by obscuring the human, the figure that “should” be the most attractive to us, behind the shoe and the smells of a fresh crime scene, by blending him into the setting, that the rat retains our POV alignment. It’s all capped off with the faint heartbeats of the dying man woven in with the cries of the rat’s pups. Guiding readerly attention in this way, amplifying animals and downgrading humans as per the needs of the story, is the novelist’s bread and butter.

Motherhood is not the only thing applied to this rat that contributes to the “impersonation.” This is one attuned rat, who can pick out the smells of “wet cigarette ash,” blood on cotton, the residue of beer on a bottle cap, and she even knows the brand name. And what about that sentence in the middle, beginning with “molecules,” which might lead back to the animal’s smell, good enough to perceive the molecules “filtering up” from the bullet casing, but goes into a full forensic register about gunpowder and Makarov bullets. Is it the rat or the third person narrator demonstrating this ballistics knowledge? Maybe it’s the still-dying man, whose first testimony is about to begin. Maybe it’s what Harry Hole would have observed, if he could have.

Actually, in fiction there’s always a narrator and a POV, even when the first person is employed, and both sides supply language to the text in tandem.

As cool as the above passage was, I dunno, this entry in the HH series isn’t doing it for me (I’m 75% done). It feels slower than previous books even though it’s shorter. The crosscut structure with the dead man’s testimony dampened things down. The writing style is beginning to annoy me (Don Bartlett also translates Knausgaard’s books). I don’t know what writers and readers see in these clipped sentences that leave out verbs or agents. “Alex set his americano on the table next to his laptop. Took a small sip. Opened the laptop and got to writing.” It brings to mind a very narrow open door frame, and only one thing can ever come through it at a time. Perhaps it’s the intensively monotrack mentality of a detective.

One example is this passage where Harry Hole falls off his horse into the water. Because Harry’s been knocked out of his senses, this disintegrated experience from his POV gives us essentially a walkthrough on how edgework works in literature:

Harry swam toward the light, toward the surface. The light became stronger and stronger. Then he broke through. Opened his eyes. And stared straight up at the sky. He was lying on his back. Something came into his field of vision. A horse’s head. And another.

The edges mark the transitions from water to air (a literal edge of surface tension), darkness to light (and the light brightens). How much more basic can it get? An undefined shape, a “something,” resolves into a horse’s head, joined by an additional identical shape.

If you count the full stops, there are nine sentences. But I prefer to think that there are four sentences, and that two of them have four and three full stops, respectively.

And I may prefer to read about a rat detective than the next Harry Hole.

Any Welt that I’m welcome to

Fingering:
Arms disarmed and explaining themselves
—Brenda Shaughnessy

That was quite a hiatus. I ended up putting most of my energy in the April/May to finishing my thesis for my masters program, which centered on Jameson’s ideas about allegory—and “national allegory”—and Althusser. I’ve talked about the connection here before. Then immediately after, the George Floyd protests and urban rebellions directed my activities elsewhere (including writing activities).

I read a lot of great literature in this period, including Baldwin, O’Connor, Anne Carson, and a full catch up is beyond me, but I can share notes on a few texts recently finished. I am also eager to blog through THE TUNNEL by William H. Gass. I haven’t dug into this great writer on this platform yet, and after another two years of graduate (over)education I think I have more of the tools needed to crack into the concepts that manifest themselves “behind” the dazzling and terrible prose style.

For the lightning round of this post I’ll start with the SF.

I gotta admit, this is the first Delany fiction that I actually finished. It helped that this a nice novella that basically reimagines Goethe’s WILHELM MEISTER’S APPRENTICESHIP, transposing the bildungsroman formula onto a planetary opera with metafictional anagrams and time manipulation. I found this early 60s work enjoyable and compelling in ways that the post-DHALGREN novels I’ve attempted (STARS IN MY POCKET and TRITON) were not.

Delany also mentions Theodore Sturgeon in EMPIRE STAR. A Sturgeon story is also talked about at length in Bolano’s SAVAGE DETECTIVES. Sturgeon has commanded so much respect–I liked the tributes to him in this book from Bradbury and Wolfe. I’ve been an intense admirer ever since I read those brilliant opening lines of MORE THAN HUMAN.

I rooted around through this first volume of the collected stories, from North Atlantic Books. Most of these are short newspaper syndicate and pulpy stories, pretty hacky, but well written. It turns out Sturgeon doesn’t hit his stride till 1940, and I love his account of bashing out “Brianna’s Hands” in one of those urgent situations that distract a writer from assigned work–I know the feeling well, and there’s a parallel dynamic with reading books too, perhaps. That story is dark and twisted, in a kind of timeless setting, like Shirley Jackson or some of Robert Aichman. Brianna is a woman with no consciousness or volition except in her hands, which literally drag her body around the house. There is a gothic pulp formula here, but all it does is support really fucked up situations and a great style.

Then there’s “It,” which is a solid monster thriller, also apparently written in a white heat of inspiration on the writer’s honeymoon. But it’s an important work–the elements for Swamp Thing, Incredible Hulk, and other giants without emotion, or a surplus of only one emotion, in comics.

An honorable mention is “Helix the Cat,” which goes on for a little while, but is a diverting exercise in rationalizing the idea of the immortal soul (with a lot of mechanics introduced).

What opens up Sturgeon’s work is not only a new market for those weird tales that can surpass the rigid conventions and cheap O. Henry twists of the newspaper story, and allow him to stretch out his prose style beyond hard boiled narrators and 30s dialog, but also these kind of basic philosophical concerns about perception and being in the world: A moldy mud golem that investigates and analyzes things (quite literally, to grisly effect); it has perception and interests, without any feeling. “Helix” has some early discussions about the sense perception of “souls” too. (I’m afraid this will be an obsession of mine for a little while as I’m going through classical subjective idealism, like Berkeley and Avenarius and all that; it will also be very useful for Gass!)

Just as useful will be this hard SF Cartesian fable from hell, available for free.

I remember being terrified by this episode of LOST IN SPACE, which my dad taped off the Sci-Fi channel in the 90s.

Consciousness, the realm of the thought, the mind, that’s the thing that creates our mental images of the world, our ideas and feelings and reflections, what would we be without it? Well, what if consciousness and self-awareness is just a vestigial object, an evolutionary glitch, a burden on our capabilities to survive, an energy sink. Maybe we’d be better off without it, and maybe the “intelligent” life that exists out there is far more likely to be without it. The aliens of this novel can do higher logic and mathematics as instantaneous reflexes, but without any thought for themselves. They operate in a vessel giving off insane electromagnetic fields that completely disturb the human astronauts, like convincing you to the core that you are in fact dead. It’s a very classical idealist notion, that you are only your perceptions, that the world you experience is something modeled from sensory inputs, the permeable membrane between self and matter. The novel explores other aspects of consciousness in a fun way: half of the narrator’s brain is cybernetic, leading to trouble with relationships, and a generally isolated kind of life.

This is an amazing book. Frank Lentricchia in the 80s produced a solid, astoundingly well-written survey of American literary theory in the second half of the 20th century. He portrays this sequence—so convincingly—as a series of formalist polemics against the New Criticism, from Frye to existentialism to the American phenomenologists to the structuralists and post structuralists. Harold Bloom along with Hirsch and others get individual chapters, and even Bloom is so busy countering the NC’s attack on Romanticism that the multicultural interventions and the canon wars must have struck him as an attack on the rear. Here is Lentricchia on Heidegger’s language of earth and world:

The work of art “sets up” a world, but it “sets forth” the earth: “The work lets the earth be an earth” is the way Heidegger phrases it. What he means by this is not that the work is realistic in its portrayal of nature, but something far more familiar to readers of neo-Kantian aesthetics. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” earth is a reference to the aesthetic medium: the sculptor’s stone, the painter’s pigment, the poet’s language, the architect’s rock and wood. The aesthetic handling of medium is in brilliant contrast to the handling of medium as equipment: “Because it is determined by usefulness and serviceability, equipment takes into its service that of which it consists: the matter. In fabricating equipment-e.g. an axe-stone is used, and used up. It disappears into usefulness …. By contrast the temple-work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather it causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the Open of the work’s world.”

So we have the familiar formalist distinction of utilitarian and aesthetic values, of a medium which must remain unobtrusive if it is to be useful, if it is to mediate, and of a medium cherished for its own sake, set forth in its irreducible sensuous reality, as good in itself, thrusting itself upon our attention.

The whole book holds to this level of solidity, of careful argumentation and quotation. The type and design of the book is so nice too. One of those rare experiences of a theoretical text that is also just really delightful to read.

Somewhere along my insane drive to finish school I also finished up the new novel by Ellmann. I heard a lot of excitement about it toward the end of last year (plus it took home the Goldsmiths prize). Among the more core vanguard crowd of readers it might be getting a slight backlash now. I admired what this book was doing. It’s not at that supreme level of innovative fiction, but it draws on that tradition, on Stein, Lessing, Richardson, Young. It’s not that experimental or demanding, despite the form. I don’t think it’s a “river book” in the “stream of consciousness” sense (though Ohio’s rivers are important), but a spiral book, both a mental downward spiral and a compulsive circling of recurring thoughts around some absent center with no end in sight…till one reaches the unthinkable.

Basically, the form of the book is a single sentence that expresses the inner monologue of a white middle aged suburban housewife making baked goods for some extra income. She has a loving second husband and a few kids. The monologue is broken up with the lyrical story of a mountain lioness in the greater area who embarks on a quest to find her lost cubs–this is actually the A plot. There is something of a writing constraint. The Oulipo had an exercise called “Starter Text,” where every sentence of a work has to begin the same way. George Perec’s “I Remember” is the classic example, and there’s also le Tellier’s book A THOUSAND PEARLS where every sentence starts with “I’m thinking about…” DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT is driven by “the fact that.”

That idiomatic phrase is meant to point to the significance of something. But when it’s used as the main connecting points for wall-to-wall language, containing almost everything the middle classes have been worried about in the pre-Covid society, then the problem becomes the pure lack of significance or the ability to draw out significance in this flattened landscape of thought (Ellmann runs a risk in making historical tragedies seem trivial when they poke out among a collage of pop lyrics and clickbait article titles, though perhaps that is the point made about our daily lives now). Sometimes the “fact” is definitely an opinion, or a memory, or a question–”the fact that why do I remember that Amish woodshop and not my mother…” As a result a lot of the language is generic in that classically novelistic way (the fact that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife).

And the details of her life and history come through, her concerns with her eldest daughter, her ex-husband, the daily chores, skeevy neighbors, financial worries, family history, US politics, etc. There’s still plenty of plot, maybe even too much. I admit I found the ending disappointing for this reason, though I liked the story with the lioness very much.

The albatross has landed

A new book by Fredric Jameson appears this month.

Which I *think??* caps off a cycle of books known as THE POETICS OF SOCIAL FORMS. There are six: POSTMODERNISM, SINGULAR MODERNITY, MODERNIST PAPERS, ARCHAEOLOGIES OF THE FUTURE, ANTINOMIES OF REALISM, and the latest, ALLEGORY AND IDEOLOGY. SM may just be a companion to MP or vice versa, so it may or may not count. The guy hasn’t been talking, and most of the info online seems out of date.

Which moved me to finally read his paper on postmodernism, as it ran in New Left Review (No. 146, 1984) (paywall, sadly). Jameson is best known for that work, and despite taking in a lot of his writing since I first read LATE MARXISM in early 2017, I was never drawn to the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” His early stuff, popularizing Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School (MARXISM AND FORM) for the Anglo-American public, or his short tutorials on formalism and structuralism (PRISON-HOUSE OF LANGUAGE) as well as his other monographs and critical essays, took up my attention.

The concept of “late capitalism” that he based his work on comes from the Trotskyist economist Ernest Mandel. Any third stage to the capitalist mode of production will be a revision of Lenin’s work on imperialism—I’ve probably said it before on here, but this posited third break is always hard to support beyond vague gestures toward globalization. The poli-econ aspect of Jameson’s presentation is the weakest and by now definitely shows its age. Mandel’s “late capitalism” era indeed may have ended before Jameson’s first book in the POETICS cycle was published.

But Jameson is always enjoyable to read because of his style (which may not be a popular opinion). He doesn’t have Eagleton’s spontaneous discourse; he writes technical theory that only the experts will follow. But he doesn’t have Williams’s will to hermetic abstraction, either. He simply writes compelling academic sentences that by turns engage in interpretive descriptions of aesthetic products and thrilling explanations of the material, or at least historical basis of these objects (“Metacommentary” is a must-read for anyone remotely interested in literary criticism). For example, one feature of postmodern culture for Jameson is the “waning of affect,” or how postmodernist art deconstructs the “expressionism” at work in high modernism.

The very concept of expression presupposes indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and the outside, of the worldless pain within the monad and the moment in which, often cathartically, that ’emotion’ is then projected out and externalized, as gesture or cry, as desperate communication and the outward dramatization of inward feeling.

Maybe you don’t know what he means by the monad—and if you don’t, don’t feel guilty. But “worldless pain” doesn’t conceptually qualify the concept, but gives you a sense of how it’s subjectively experienced. You get the focus on “worldlessness,” or alienation, the “pain” of individuation. It’s very existential. Jameson’s style is mind-blowingly consistent across his career; it seemed to have emerged autochthonously from his graduate thesis. His interpretive school trades on a Sartrean, Hegelian-quasiMarxist notion of a horizon of interpretation, accepting all other non and even anti-Marxist procedures into its own project. Eclecticism, or properly militant? You be the judge.

Postmodernism for Jameson reflects postmodern-ity; it’s a historical category, not a style of art or thought. So he will not morally condemn postmodern ideology the way Eagleton did in his polemic from the 90s. But he does have some thoughts in that direction, like when he points out how theories of the postmodern “have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of lass struggle,” if only to explain why communist thinkers are so hostile to them. Later, he addresses charges of periodization or stageism (which have been strongly argued by Daniel Hartley in his recent book) by musing on the ironic nature of the attempt to describe a totalizing system.

What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system of logic—the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example—the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.

This speaks to the inevitable tendency in postmodernism toward a cul-de-sac of petty bourgeois despondency and impotent liberal politics, impotent because postmodern styles of thought mobilizes support for the bourgeoisie while cloaked in libertarian rhetoric, at such a moment when the ruling classes’ progressive potential has depleted itself.

And before that, he seems to casually deliver the most decisive pronouncement on this global cultural situation, alluding to both Benjamin and Marx in the part in CAPITAL on primitive accumulation while doing so:

This whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror.

Jameson’s paper is not a polemic but a critical exposition, and the main features of pomo as cultural logic that he identified have spread far and wide. They are: 1) depthlessness, emphasis on surface, the refusal of hermeneutics, or “depth models” of interpretation; the problem of the simulacrum; 2) weakening of historicity, the upshot of which is a swarming multitude of images and aesthetics in place of an authentic connection with the past; problems of schizophrenia and parataxis; 3) a new type of “emotional ground tone” better explained by discourses of the sublime; 4) the reality of a new technological world system; i.e. globalization; and 5) the return in art to didacticism and pedagogy.

He compares readings of Van Gogh’s PEASANT SHOES (1886) with Warhol’s DIAMOND DUST SHOES (1980) to underscore the first two features. The high modernism of the first piece has been transformed in the postmodern situation. Gone is the thrust against the conventional Victorian bourgeoisie, “for whom [modernist art’s] forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive and generally ‘anti-social.'” Picasso and Joyce are not ugly any more, Jameson says; they’re “realistic,” certainly real to us. The dissident petty bourgeois art movements are now centered in the academic canon, a set of “dead classics.”

As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features—from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological 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.

If this thought seems outmoded due to the discussions of art versus the personal conduct of the artist and the emergence of sensitivity reading services, etc., the new situation may speak to the greater tendency Jameson is suggesting, that of the increasing subsumption of cultural production under fixed capital, a de-skilling of art. (The emblem of this for me has to be the startup copywriting gigs for producing all that SEO trash.) This point also speaks to Jameson’s starting-point for the postmodern being in architecture, both for the beginning of his own investigation and in the logic of its history: “Architecture is…of all the arts closest constitutively to the economic,” an unmediated relationship with land values (and in Manhattan and Brooklyn today, the AIR itself, pace Adam Smith).

Anyway, Jameson gives us two pictures of shoes, a high modernist and postmodernist treatment. Van Gogh has shoes on the floor; a whole situation and lifeworld is suggested by them. Warhol on the other hand has inert commodities hanging in space. His piece precludes a hermeneutics of restoration, that is, we can’t “restore” the shoes to their “larger lived context” through interpretation.

Plus the Warhol is aggressively flat. The layer of sparkly dust only reinforces the closed nature of the picture and its consumer culture superficiality. Jameson sees in Warhol a mutation of the world of objects into simulacra, a situation in which we can only relate to the (advanced metropolitan capitalist) world textually.

The subject in Van Gogh is alienated and anxious; in Warhol it is fragmented and gratuitous. Jameson marks postmodernism as a new social formation with a new “cultural pathology.”

The end of the subject as it was known means for him the end of style as we know it too, “in the sense of the unqiue and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction).”

Which brings us to a transition from parody to pastiche. Pastiche is a neutralized version of parody. (Parody here is not in the same sense as a spoof for entertainment, though that is an element of it; following Bakhtin here, it’s generally about “running parallel to” previous kinds of texts. Think of how novels absorbed the genres of premodern epochs like historical chronicle, biography, epic and tragic narrative, and romance—and these forms enter a process of dissolution through humor in both the old and modern sense.)

Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs: it is to parody what that other interesting and historically original modern thing, the practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne Booth calls the ‘stable ironies’ of the 18th century.

The point of the gloss on Booth is that parody and stable ironies had clearly outlined rhetorical projects and purposes. Pastiche and unstable ironies are the order of the day under schizophrenic postmodernism, naturally.

And so postmodernism cannibalizes all hitherto existing art styles, presents them “horizontally” as available to everyone all at once. There is no history here, but only historicity, signifiers of pastness. Walter Scott and Tolstoy are impossible here: now it is Pynchon and E. L. Doctorow: novels representing how we prefer to represent history, combining historiography with libidinal phantasy.

Here F. J. might have bent the stick too far by saying social hegemony stands to be dissolved under all these proliferating styles and codes.

If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm.

If literary culture seems to have let itself go, from a conservative perspective, it’s due to “not only the absence of any great collective project” for the now wholly reactionary and decadent bourgeoisie, “but also the unavailability of the older national language itself.”

These are good observations but it clearly seems that capitalist society is manufacturing consent for the ruling classes’ rule as it has been doing before. We can’t forget that one upshot of all this hyperpluralism is another inverted universalism. Everyone in the “progressive” urban petty bourgeoisie has their own niche culture but they’re still voting blue no matter who.

Jameson uses more examples, like an engaging description of the Bonaventura hotel, and my favorite, “China” by Bob Perelman. Jameson’s descriptions helped me out once again. Postmodern poetry does verbally here what its ideology does in political practice, namely, Xtreme empiricism. Each and every object is disjoined, to be experienced as an intense and self-validating thing. “The isolated Signifier is no longer an enigmatic state of the world or an incomprehensible yet mesmirizing fragment of language, but rather something closer to a sentence in free-standing isolation.”

Isolated signifiers speak to our bewilderment toward our own sense of dislocation in both space and time, unable to get our heads around the new totality of multinational capital and its gratuitous phenomena; the “third machine age” of Mandel’s late capitalism. Jameson takes up the economists’s identification of electric and nuclear power as the paradigm of this machine age. Many revisionist or neo-Marxists in the academy in my experience would prefer the language of “cognitive capitalism.”

Jameson ends with a long and problematic passage on Althusser.

The second observation to be proposed is that a return to the Lacanian underpinnings of Althusser’s theory can afford some useful and suggestive methodological enrichments. Althusser’s formulation remobilizes an older and henceforth classical Marxian distinction between science and ideology, which is still not without value for us. The existential—the positioning of the individual subject, the experience of daily life, the monadic ‘point of view’ on the world to which we are necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted—is in Althusser’s formula implicitly opposed to the realm of abstract knowledge, a realm which Lacan reminds us is never positioned in or actualized by any concrete subject, but rather by that structural void called ‘le sujet suppose savoir’, ‘the subject supposed to know’, a subject-place of knowledge: what is affirmed is not that we cannot know the world and its totality in some abstract or ‘scientific’ way—Marxian ‘science’ provides just such a way of knowing and conceptualizing the world abstractly, in the sense in which, e.g. Mandel’s great book offers a rich and elaborated knowledge of that global world system, of which is has never been said here that it is unknowable, but merely that it was unrepresentable, which is a different matter. The Althusserian formula in other words designates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific knowledge: ideology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of articulating these two distinct dimensions with each other. What a historicist view of this ‘definition’ would want to add is that such coordination, the production of functioning and living ideologies, is distinct in different historical situations, but above all, that there may be historical situations in which it is not possible at all—and this would seem to be our situation in the current crisis.

First of all, it’s a natural choice to work in Althusser’s method on ideology by way of Lacan. The latter Hegelianized Freud to re-tool the category of the subject. Jameson shows us here that both Lacan and Althusser are trading on a bourgeois epistemology: the hard split between theory and practice, between existential experience and abstract knowledge. Where could this leave us other than good old Hegelian speculative thought and Althusser’s theory as praxis? Ideology, the representations of imagined relations between individuals and material conditions, is here a mechanism for “articulating those two distinct dimensions with each other,” as Jameson says, but it is also an idealist double-image. The real and the thought remain radically segregated. This is irreconcilable with a materialist identity of thought and being. But Jameson tries to rescue the argument by making a distinction between unknowability and unrepresentability. And his final suggestion is that this whole mechanism may no longer apply under this social formation—seems more like a presentist than a historicist interjection.

This sort of conciliatory move reminds us that Jameson is closer to a great, (the greatest American) post-Heglian bourgeois asthete than to a genuine Marxist theorist of culture.