Frederick Jameson, write with an almost tactile authority to 'always historicise'.
He arrives at this magisterial command by way of his majestic style,
a feature of which is the way that the convoy of long sentences freighted and balanced with subordinate clauses will dock here and there to unload a pithy slogan.
‘Always historicise.
Pray what does he mean?
One cannot not periodise,’ on the related necessity (as well as the
semi-arbitrariness) of dividing history into periods.
Totalisation might be defined as the intellectual effort to recover the relationship between a given object – a novel, a film, a new building or a body of philosophical work – and the total historical situation underneath and around it. To contemporary ears, the term inevitably calls up associations with totalitarianism, and there is no denying that the method derives explicitly from the work of the Communist Lukács and the fellow-traveller Sartre, whom Jameson also failed to disown. Anathema to conservatives, the recourse to ‘totality’ was no more endearing to a cultural left whose slogans included difference, heterotopia, nomadism etc.
With the eclipse of the written word; a new depthlessness –
we live in a late capitalist world, ‘surrealism without the unconscious’
pastiche papers our cultural walls, stand up comedian become millionaires by way of a bovine public.
Our exterior is unrepreseentable.
Jameson's claim that with the postwar elimination of pre-capitalist agriculture
in the Third World and the last residue of feudal social relations in Europe,
with the full commodification of culture (no more Rilke and Yeats and
their noble patrons) and the infiltration of the old family-haunted unconscious by mass-disseminated images, humankind had only now embarked, for the first time, on a universally capitalist history. Late capitalism was the dawn, not the dusk, of a thoroughgoing capitalism.
With Jameson it is ,as if everything was present in his mind all at once, and it was only the unfortunately sequential nature of language that forced him to spell out sentence by sentence and essay by essay an apprehension of the contemporary world that was simultaneous and total.
Jameosn offers us a tissue of hints, hypotheses, recommendations and impressions. It would be easy to find many sentences in Jameson starting like this one: ‘Now we may begin to hazard the guess that something like the dialectic will always begin to appear when thinking approaches the dilemma of incommensurability …’ Such accumulated qualifications.. The effect here may approach self-parody, but that is a hazard no truly distinctive stylist avoids. Not often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force.
Jameson’s preference for a conditional over a declarative mood is a token of the necessarily speculative quality of what he does. It’s far easier to be sure that culture is indeed mediating the economy than to establish in any given case how such mediation works., .’ In characteristic Jamesonian fashion, the stray hints and speculations gather themselves, towards the end of Valences, into a stark and audacious proposition: ‘The worldwide triumph of capitalism … secures the priority of Marxism as the ultimate horizon of thought in our time.’ How’s that for dialectical?
The particular ‘dilemma of incommensurability’ preoccupying Jameson in the long concluding essay of Valences concerns the disjunction of biological or existential time (one’s threescore and ten) with the differently experienced time of History. By History, Jameson means the succession of the happy or unhappy destinies of whole peoples and classes within the ‘single vast unfinished plot’ – as he put it almost 30 years ago in The Political Unconscious – of humankind’s existence. Of course individual experience and collective fate consist in the same living substance, but the sensation of their identity, ‘a recognition of our ultimate Being as History’, is a rare and fleeting glimpse into the demographic sublime – all those suffering persons dead, living and still unborn – too dizzying and appalling to be sustained.
Jameson has argued for years that the intersection of existential and historical time has become particularly rare in postmodern times. In spite of the obvious historical novelty of our present way of life, the past tends to fall rapidly away into oblivion or else to be taken up by media representations that serve as ‘the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia’. The result, as he put it in his great essay ‘The Antinomies of Postmodernity’ in The Seeds of Time (1994), was that ‘for us time consists in an eternal present and, much further away, an inevitable catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering apparatus without overlapping or traditional states.’
Jameson once likened the goofy eclecticism of certain postmodern architecture to the recipes inspired by ‘late-night reefer munchies’, and it may be an observation to bridge the gap between his generation, steeped in the 1960s, and my own to say that reading Jameson himself has always reminded me a bit of being on drugs. The less exceptional essays were like being stoned: it all seemed very profound at the time, but the next day you could barely remember a thing. Indeed there’s no other author frequented or admired to anything like the same degree so many of whose pages produced absolutely no impression on me.
And yet the best of Jameson’s work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you’d always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror. One of the trippier as well as more affecting passages in Valences of the Dialectic is a sort of aria on the condition of living, through global capitalism, in a totally man-made world, one in which even the weather patterns and the geological age (the Anthropocene, it was recently declared) are human productions:
He arrives at this magisterial command by way of his majestic style,
a feature of which is the way that the convoy of long sentences freighted and balanced with subordinate clauses will dock here and there to unload a pithy slogan.
‘Always historicise.
Pray what does he mean?
One cannot not periodise,’ on the related necessity (as well as the
semi-arbitrariness) of dividing history into periods.
Totalisation might be defined as the intellectual effort to recover the relationship between a given object – a novel, a film, a new building or a body of philosophical work – and the total historical situation underneath and around it. To contemporary ears, the term inevitably calls up associations with totalitarianism, and there is no denying that the method derives explicitly from the work of the Communist Lukács and the fellow-traveller Sartre, whom Jameson also failed to disown. Anathema to conservatives, the recourse to ‘totality’ was no more endearing to a cultural left whose slogans included difference, heterotopia, nomadism etc.
With the eclipse of the written word; a new depthlessness –
we live in a late capitalist world, ‘surrealism without the unconscious’
pastiche papers our cultural walls, stand up comedian become millionaires by way of a bovine public.
Our exterior is unrepreseentable.
Jameson's claim that with the postwar elimination of pre-capitalist agriculture
in the Third World and the last residue of feudal social relations in Europe,
with the full commodification of culture (no more Rilke and Yeats and
their noble patrons) and the infiltration of the old family-haunted unconscious by mass-disseminated images, humankind had only now embarked, for the first time, on a universally capitalist history. Late capitalism was the dawn, not the dusk, of a thoroughgoing capitalism.
With Jameson it is ,as if everything was present in his mind all at once, and it was only the unfortunately sequential nature of language that forced him to spell out sentence by sentence and essay by essay an apprehension of the contemporary world that was simultaneous and total.
Jameosn offers us a tissue of hints, hypotheses, recommendations and impressions. It would be easy to find many sentences in Jameson starting like this one: ‘Now we may begin to hazard the guess that something like the dialectic will always begin to appear when thinking approaches the dilemma of incommensurability …’ Such accumulated qualifications.. The effect here may approach self-parody, but that is a hazard no truly distinctive stylist avoids. Not often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force.
Jameson’s preference for a conditional over a declarative mood is a token of the necessarily speculative quality of what he does. It’s far easier to be sure that culture is indeed mediating the economy than to establish in any given case how such mediation works., .’ In characteristic Jamesonian fashion, the stray hints and speculations gather themselves, towards the end of Valences, into a stark and audacious proposition: ‘The worldwide triumph of capitalism … secures the priority of Marxism as the ultimate horizon of thought in our time.’ How’s that for dialectical?
The particular ‘dilemma of incommensurability’ preoccupying Jameson in the long concluding essay of Valences concerns the disjunction of biological or existential time (one’s threescore and ten) with the differently experienced time of History. By History, Jameson means the succession of the happy or unhappy destinies of whole peoples and classes within the ‘single vast unfinished plot’ – as he put it almost 30 years ago in The Political Unconscious – of humankind’s existence. Of course individual experience and collective fate consist in the same living substance, but the sensation of their identity, ‘a recognition of our ultimate Being as History’, is a rare and fleeting glimpse into the demographic sublime – all those suffering persons dead, living and still unborn – too dizzying and appalling to be sustained.
Jameson has argued for years that the intersection of existential and historical time has become particularly rare in postmodern times. In spite of the obvious historical novelty of our present way of life, the past tends to fall rapidly away into oblivion or else to be taken up by media representations that serve as ‘the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia’. The result, as he put it in his great essay ‘The Antinomies of Postmodernity’ in The Seeds of Time (1994), was that ‘for us time consists in an eternal present and, much further away, an inevitable catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering apparatus without overlapping or traditional states.’
Jameson once likened the goofy eclecticism of certain postmodern architecture to the recipes inspired by ‘late-night reefer munchies’, and it may be an observation to bridge the gap between his generation, steeped in the 1960s, and my own to say that reading Jameson himself has always reminded me a bit of being on drugs. The less exceptional essays were like being stoned: it all seemed very profound at the time, but the next day you could barely remember a thing. Indeed there’s no other author frequented or admired to anything like the same degree so many of whose pages produced absolutely no impression on me.
And yet the best of Jameson’s work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you’d always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror. One of the trippier as well as more affecting passages in Valences of the Dialectic is a sort of aria on the condition of living, through global capitalism, in a totally man-made world, one in which even the weather patterns and the geological age (the Anthropocene, it was recently declared) are human productions:
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