Fredric Jameson – Second Slope

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 The guy hasn’t been talking, and most of the info online seems out of date.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.

High modernism: from situation to ideology

A SINGULAR MODERNITY: ESSAY ON THE ONTOLOGY OF THE PRESENT
Fredric Jameson
Verso, 2002, p. 199

Yet the late modernists took that modern vision of the artist who is more than a mere artist as their model: and here we meet the paradoxes of repetition, which, as has so often been said, can never take place in any first time, but is always second when it first happens. I can try to say this another way by suggesting that the situation of the first or classical modernists can never be repeated since they themselves already exist. The classical modernists came into a world without models (or at best with religious and prophetic ones), a world without any pre-existing social role to fill. For they did not for the most part wish to become professional artists in any standard nineteenth-century sense of the métier and the apprenticeship. Nor did they wish to endorse a system of artistic genres in which the task of the artist is simply to replicate a given form and to supply new examples of it (with whatever distinctive twist). These first moderns seeks support in patronage wherever possible, rather than in the market; and for the learning of the métier, they substitute fantasmatic images of the supreme works of the past, such as Dante’s Commedia. Their freedoms are utterly blind and groping; they know no identifiable public (‘I write for myself and strangers,’ Gertrude Stein famously said). And in the absence of any determinate social status or function — they are neither artists in the conventional sense nor intellectuals — they borrow all kinds of windy notions of genius and inspiration from the Romantic era, and surround themselves as much as possible with disciples who endorse these private languages and offer a simulacrum of the new Utopian community.

Steppe up

THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER
Alexander Pushkin, tr Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
NYRB Classics, 2014

I can’t remember the last time I read a novel in a single sitting, at such a fast clip. But Pushkin’s book is so much fun, and so smart, and such an interesting case for how to think about a text dialectically.

Marxist literary theory has identified a plethora of contradictions within literary texts. There’s proletariat and bourgeoisie of course, and also material labor and mental labor; then there’s phenomena and essence, Realism and Modernism, and the social position of art (its role in propagating ruling class power) and the Utopian impulse of art (the progressive aspects of the bourgeois tradition). But since western Marxism was/is idealist, these contradictions haven’t been dealt with in a systematic way. It’s difficult to identify which contradiction is principal, and to track how these contradictions have intensified, or weakened, or disappeared, or emerged, or transformed themselves at any given phase in literature’s historical development.

Fredric Jameson’s own take, in his concluding remarks to the AESTHETICS AND POLITICS reader, is that the fundamental contradiction is between material history itself and the apparatus of discourse that tries to inscribe it through language.

I need to study a lot more before I can say with confidence what the principal contradiction of literature is. But the meaning of what literature has changed a handful of times over its life span, which becomes clear when we change our view of literature from a static canon of monumental works to a historical process, a complex grouping of material practices and contradictions. Every shift in literature, I suspect, can be marked by a certain contradiction becoming the principal one, which determines the nature of the others.

Jameson’s POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS offers a powerful and convincing method of interpreting texts. Narratives, he argues, offer symbolic resolutions to social contradictions that are often in fact antagonistic, in which one of the terms can and must win over the other absolutely.

Now Pushkin in his novel stages a symbolic resolution to the contradiction of the old versus the new. It’s an all but explicit argument, put forward in moral terms. At the same time, the old-new dialectic is inscribed in the novel’s very texture and structure.

Like other early novels, this one presents itself as a memoir, that of a soldier, Pyotr Grinyov, who witnessed the peasant-Cossack uprisings of the late 18th century. He narrates his life from his upbringing as the son of a landed nobleman. Then it’s off to the soldier’s life in a southern fortress on the Eurasian steppe, where he falls for the captain’s daughter Maria. The fortress is attacked by Pugachov, leader of the peasant rebellion. Pyotr gets by through verbal duels rather than fencing duels. There’s an escape, and a quest to rescue Maria from an unscrupulous romantic rival, which is answered by Maria’s own quest to clear Pyotr’s name at a tribunal that has taken Pyotr’s activities behind enemy lines for treason.

The old: the rhythm and world view of the peasant life. The new: the refinement of western European culture (Catherine the Great is in power). It’s most compactly expressed in the epigraphs to each chapter (added by Pyotr’s children for publication). The tension is displayed in the novel’s form, which unfolds as a complicated series of narrative doubles: Pyotr gives his hare skin coat to a wayfarer (Pugachov in disguise) as thanks giving, which is answered later by Pugachov gifting Pyotr another coat; there are two duels; there are two framed and glazed documents which change in their significance; and at the end there are two quests. But under these devices, Pushkin preserves the logic of fairy tales and chivalry.

These values do get subverted in small and funny ways. Here is Pyotr describing life at Fort Belogrosk.

Several weeks passed by and my life in the fortress grew not only bearable but even enjoyable. I was received in the commandant’s house as one of the family. Both Ivan Kuzmich and his wife were the worthiest of people. Ivan Kuzmich, a soldier’s son who had risen from the ranks, was simple and uneducated but extremely honest and kind. His wife ruled him, and this suited his easy-going disposition. Vasilia Yegrovna made no distinction between military and domestic affairs and ran the fortress exactly as she maned her home.

It’s a military fortress without military discipline–and ruled by a matriarch. The captain’s family name is Mironov, derived from the Greek for sweet perfume. An institution of war kept on the peace footing.

But Pushkin gives the game away when Mironov gets ready to torture a Bashkir caught with “seditious papers.” The Bashkir is mutilated, nose and tongue cut off, for having participated in a prior uprising. Here Pyotr interjects into his narrative:

When I remember that this happened in my own lifetime and that I have lived to see the mild rule of Tsar Alexander I cannot but feel astonished at the success of enlightenment and the rapid spread of the principles of respect and love for humankind. Dear young reader, if these notes of mine have fallen into your hands, remember that the best and most enduring changes are those that come about as a result of an improvement in morals, without any violent upheavals.

Indeed, the new must supersede the old. But for Pyotr as he narrates (and for Pushkin at the time he wrote this) this is a steady and harmonious process, not a rapid transformation achieved through revolution. In this idealist argument, great changes are necessary for Russia at this historical conjuncture, but they happen by changing the way we think, not the material situation.

In the narratives of modern novels, such a harmony can be symbolically expressed through the pattern of doubling mentioned earlier, arguing for the value of kindness to make a society where the values of the old are preserved without its brutality. The newness of the historical novel, as opposed to the folk tale, can pull off this necessary move.

Or can it? Check out the final pages. Maria heads to St. Petersburg to petition the Empress on behalf of Pyotr, who couldn’t defend his actions at the tribunal since he didn’t want to get his betrothed involved. She arrives at the suburb of Sofia, where the Court retreats for the summer.

The next day Maria Ivanovna woke early, dressed, and slipped out into the park. It was a splendid morning; the sun had already turned yellow. The broad lake lay still and gleaming. Stately swans, also only recently awoken, were sailing out from beneath the bushes that overhung the banks. Maria Ivanovna came to the beautiful meadow where an obelisk had just been erected to commemorate Count Rumyantsev’s recent victories. All of a sudden a little white English dog ran barking towards her. Maria Ivanovna felt frightened and stood stock-still. She heard a gentle voice: “Don’t be frightened, she won’t bite!” And Maria Ivanovna saw a lady sitting on a little bench opposite the monument. Maria Ivanovna sat down at the other end of the bench. The lady was looking at her intently. Maria Ivanovna, for her part, kept glancing discreetly at the lady; very soon she had surveyed her from head to toe. She was wearing a night mob-cap, a white morning gown, and a fur-lined waistcoat. She looked about forty years old. Her plump, rosy face was calm and dignified; her slight smile and her light blue eyes had an ineffable charm. The lady was the first to speak.

Coincidence grants Maria quick access to the Empress. Her clothes, her dog, and even the obelisk are from a portrait of Catherine the Great by Vladimir Borovikovsky, as the book’s notes tell us. But it’s not seamlessly worked in: these are not summer clothes. The whole denouement is broadly working like a fairy tale.

So love conquers all, Pugachov is hanged, despite the genuine admiration and mystique the narrative builds around him, and Pyotr and Masha live happily ever after, with social relations restored to their proper equilibrium. And yet Pushkin takes us there by inserting a painting, deliberately making the details incongruous. Moreover, the notes also tell us this is a reworking of a climactic scene from a Walter Scott novel. Old and new may have its own resolution, played out in the novel’s ideology, its moral arguments. But formally the narrative stops on its most modernist note, that one can’t help but take as a wink from Pushkin, acknowledging that in our own sequence, resolving this and other contradictions will be quite different in its character.

Some jottings on Don César

THE LITTLE BUDDHIST MONK / THE PROOF
César Aira, tr. Nick Caistor
New Directions, 2017

Exhaustion. In his interviews, Aira seems to take seriously an idea from Ortega y Gasset, that literature is like a mountain, and its practitioners are mining it. Which makes literary art a finite resource that can be exhausted. And that’s why his books are so lean, not just because he likes to be elegant, or respect his readers’ time, or that his Louis Aragon or dada-like fantastic narratives are hard to sustain for long, but simply that this mode of production is on its way out.

It’s edgy to elegize for the novel, but believing or pretending to believe that art is dead is the right position to be in for creating. And besides, it had a beginning; surely it has an end. Literature could have died in its sleep a generation ago, and now carries on in an afterlife, much like liberalism.

Infantile disorder. The tonal whiplash and narrative switchbacks in Aira’s work remind me of the way kids tell stories, a storytelling that’s hardcore diachronic: and then, and then, and then. Just as it’s said somewhere that Picasso once visited an exhibit of art by children, and remarked that it took him years to learn how to draw like that. This return to a more naive space is in keeping with surrealism (between automatic writing and OuLiPo’s input-based creation) as well as Utopian SF or fantasy (Olaf Stapledon).

The commitment to high modernism remains, but there’s no more desire for grand, solemn mega novels that strain to capture the totality of bourgeois or monopoly capitalism. The Joyces and Musils and Prousts and Manns that amount to secular religions.

Absolute Formalism. Aira’s books are so overwhelmingly about themselves, about their own aboutness in the way the formalists wanted them to be. Their content is a projection of their form, of the elements selected to build the story. It’s most obvious in VARAMO, while MIRACLE CURES OF DR. AIRA presents a mystified version of the creative process. As with Kafka, there’s a risk of turning his stories back to realism by reading them as social parables. On the other hand, the weirdness of Aira’s books, as I read them, are about renewing our own perceptions of literary theory.

Which is why I felt that THE LITERARY CONFERENCE is a jab or at least an elbow nudge against Carlos Fuentes. The giant blue silkworms that lumber down the hills and attack the city, are they not like that writer’s mega novels and others like his? The threat is overcome by the narrator’s device that was a prop for one of his plays — a retreat or regression to fairy tale logic. (Fuentes giving the Nobel to Aira in one his stories is no less of a backhanded compliment.)

How to apply the word novel vs. novella is really inconsistent these days. Novellas were more easily distinguishable in the 19th century institution of the triple-decker novel that allowed library systems to loan out the same work to three people. But now most novels aren’t that long, besides the few middle-brow prestige pieces that come out in the US each year. Novels can be any length these days, and Aira’s output then addresses, not formalism, but the redefining of the novel form itself. Perhaps they aren’t novels at all.

Revolutionary break. I’ve never totally loved an Aira book right away, except for EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A LANDSCAPE PAINTER and HOW I BECAME A NUN. Other than those two, I finish them thinking it’s second-tier Aira and wait for them to grow on me over the weeks till I know it’s a new favorite. THE PROOF’s own narrative switchback into a genre of surreal ultra-violence has tyrannical reign over both that story and the whole book. But that’s also appropriate.

Two young women named Mao and Lenin hold up a supermarket in the name of love, as the Love Brigade. It’s amusing to read this under Cold War liberal programming: revolutionary situations as a terroristic surge led by hopeless Utopian romantics. But then again, was Marxism not a product of Romanticism, if only as a rebellion against it? Forget thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Real dialectics means appearance-reality-appearance again.

Aira never respects the reality principle, but even then the very end of THE PROOF goes beyond unreal. As the store catches fire, we read about one woman whose body melts until she’s like a Modigliani painting on crack. It appears this mundane “revolutionary” act (all the world’s a supermarket in globalization) has torn the fabric of reality apart and anything is possible, is aesthetically legitimate.

Which is why Aira’s work I think speaks so earnestly to our historical moment. It’s a different tack from Roberto Bolaño, who usually stays close to realism in order to show us why such a commitment is no longer truly possible. The liberal consensus in the last couple of decades has become more authoritarian as per the needs of the ruling class. In our own country, NFL workers taking a knee during the anthem is unacceptable, let alone taking to the streets in a serious stance against white power and its servants in the police force. That’s just one example of the hard constraints on political imagination (insert the obligatory quote of capitalist realism and imagining the end of the world here). Thinking also of the appalling repression on J20, and the situation in Argentina today.

I won’t say that Aira’s is the authentic realism for today. Just that his way of producing stories do the urgent work of presenting any and all alternatives to what we have. It’s hard to see exactly how his work upholds the historical perspective of the proletariat. But that may be precisely it: such a historical perspective has been lost in the wake of the end-of-history 90s (9/11 not being a wake up call for the global metropolis but the trigger for denial), as well as the disembodiment and amnesia that makes up the spectacle, the culture of late capitalism.

Around the same time I was flying through Aira’s translated ouvre, I read an incredible insight in Jameson’s POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS. It may well have been what permitted me to start writing fiction again. What he said made me realize that it wasn’t realism that bothered me. Realism is noble, difficult to do, and, if the Marxists are right, the plebian weapon of choice against aristocratic form. What I couldn’t stand in today’s literature was the reification of realism. So there’s a new notion of what is realistic, aside from the reality principle and character psychology: that which simply keeps the historical dialectic going in its own representations. Those books are to be prized, especially as our own literary darlings seem hellbent, more often than not, on stopping it.