So I’m fairly fond of what’s happening in this section of the reading, and something we should talk about, I think is Jameson’s ability to understand and see underlying systems of thought, a particularly helpful ability if you want to make a case for Marxism as the most useful or rigorous interpretive system. I’ll add another topic Monday, but I wanted to go ahead and post the following topic while it’s fresh on my mind.
1. In the “space” section Jameson discusses the “Largely ‘structuralist’ episteme in which Language as such is grasped as the bottom line” (171). What seems to be happening is that Jameson is setting this up against a properly Marxist belief in which History as such is the bottom line. I was hoping, though this might teeter on the abstract, that we could talk about this distinction between Language and History, whether it is a false distinction, and just how, exactly are we to grasp History as such.
Ryan has introduced what I think is a fundamental component of Jameson's argument in this section and the book as a whole, namely the relationship between linguistic/cognitive structures and the commodity form. To quote him, "For our purposes here, it will be useful to transcode 'commodity fetishism' into a vast process of abstraction that seethes through the social order." (235) I have had some trouble with this book, and it was as I was reading the section on "Theory" that (I think) I finally started to understand Jameson's project of "cognitive mapping." I can be slow on the uptake at times.
It seems to me that here, as perhaps in the section on Sartre in M&F, Jameson is demonstrating how "structuralism" provides an alternative vocabulary for talking about, in the phenomenological/experiential/cognitive realm, the processes that are also taking place in the material/economic realm. So, as the relationship between labor and the commodity becomes ever more elusive and obscure, so too the structures that govern language (broadly construed as the language of cultural production in general, e.g. images, architecture, sound, etc.) and thought become increasingly difficult to grasp and understand, resulting in the "schizophrenic" language of the post-modern text. It doesn't seem to be a turn away from Structuralism, in the sense that forms and formal relationships can always be found in language, so much as expanding our notion of Structuralism to include an understanding of how those forms and formal relationships mutate in accordance with transformations in the material/economic realm. Conseqently, Jameson's insistence on the necessity of History seems also to be an insistence on the importance of "narrative" as a form that can be grasped and understood, even if it no longer looks like the linear, carefully controlled narrative of the realist novel.
I may be totally off base here, but I think that his (albeit brief) mention of LeGuin's The Dispossed to illustrate "Utopian" writing is instructive. In that book, in a communist or post-capitalist "Utopia" where the idea of private property has become a kind of perversion, even physics (i.e. the language of science) has been rediscovered/reinvented. Thus, to abandon all hope of uncovering the "structure" or "form" or "cultural logic" in post-modern cultural production is in some sense to abandon all hope of diagnosing and understanding the post-modern, late-capitalist present as a discrete historical phase of capitalism that is, in turn, governed by the materialist logic of capital and the dynamic of class relations/struggle.
...and here is where a quick read of FJ's _Prison House of Language_ will come in handy as 1. an examination of the "rise" of linguistics and the ensuing rise of Russian formalism, structuralism, and poststructuralism, and 2. as a Marxist critique of those interpretive systems. anyone seeking to investigate ryanperry's question #1 would be well served to read it.
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So I’m fairly fond of what’s happening in this section of the reading, and something we should talk about, I think is Jameson’s ability to understand and see underlying systems of thought, a particularly helpful ability if you want to make a case for Marxism as the most useful or rigorous interpretive system. I’ll add another topic Monday, but I wanted to go ahead and post the following topic while it’s fresh on my mind.
1. In the “space” section Jameson discusses the “Largely ‘structuralist’ episteme in which Language as such is grasped as the bottom line” (171). What seems to be happening is that Jameson is setting this up against a properly Marxist belief in which History as such is the bottom line. I was hoping, though this might teeter on the abstract, that we could talk about this distinction between Language and History, whether it is a false distinction, and just how, exactly are we to grasp History as such.
Ryan has introduced what I think is a fundamental component of Jameson's argument in this section and the book as a whole, namely the relationship between linguistic/cognitive structures and the commodity form. To quote him, "For our purposes here, it will be useful to transcode 'commodity fetishism' into a vast process of abstraction that seethes through the social order." (235) I have had some trouble with this book, and it was as I was reading the section on "Theory" that (I think) I finally started to understand Jameson's project of "cognitive mapping." I can be slow on the uptake at times.
It seems to me that here, as perhaps in the section on Sartre in M&F, Jameson is demonstrating how "structuralism" provides an alternative vocabulary for talking about, in the phenomenological/experiential/cognitive realm, the processes that are also taking place in the material/economic realm. So, as the relationship between labor and the commodity becomes ever more elusive and obscure, so too the structures that govern language (broadly construed as the language of cultural production in general, e.g. images, architecture, sound, etc.) and thought become increasingly difficult to grasp and understand, resulting in the "schizophrenic" language of the post-modern text. It doesn't seem to be a turn away from Structuralism, in the sense that forms and formal relationships can always be found in language, so much as expanding our notion of Structuralism to include an understanding of how those forms and formal relationships mutate in accordance with transformations in the material/economic realm. Conseqently, Jameson's insistence on the necessity of History seems also to be an insistence on the importance of "narrative" as a form that can be grasped and understood, even if it no longer looks like the linear, carefully controlled narrative of the realist novel.
I may be totally off base here, but I think that his (albeit brief) mention of LeGuin's The Dispossed to illustrate "Utopian" writing is instructive. In that book, in a communist or post-capitalist "Utopia" where the idea of private property has become a kind of perversion, even physics (i.e. the language of science) has been rediscovered/reinvented. Thus, to abandon all hope of uncovering the "structure" or "form" or "cultural logic" in post-modern cultural production is in some sense to abandon all hope of diagnosing and understanding the post-modern, late-capitalist present as a discrete historical phase of capitalism that is, in turn, governed by the materialist logic of capital and the dynamic of class relations/struggle.
...and here is where a quick read of FJ's _Prison House of Language_ will come in handy as 1. an examination of the "rise" of linguistics and the ensuing rise of Russian formalism, structuralism, and poststructuralism, and 2. as a Marxist critique of those interpretive systems. anyone seeking to investigate ryanperry's question #1 would be well served to read it.
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