Fredric JamesonRecensioni

Super theoretical and dense! But if you can forgive the overuse of German phrases with no English equivalent this serves as a really good primer to some very exciting sci-fi! I can't wait to read (or watch the movie verison of) Solaris!

5 estante frente

In Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality Fredric Jameson returns to his work on the detective novel, focusing this time on Chandler. As usual Jameson makes nuanced observations and posits very reasonable and well-argued points for their presence. Some basic readers may claim Jameson is claiming things Chandler never consciously intended which, while in some cases may be true, is moot in that reading is a dynamic partnership and both the writing and the reading are contextualized within different realities (era, location, social and cultural norms, etc) so Chandler consciously choosing something makes no difference to what it may represent about Chandler's time or about a reader's time.

For Chandler fans there is much to appreciate. Jameson grounds his observations with textual support. One may agree, wholly or in part, with his interpretations or disagree but one cannot say it isn't textually based. Whether discussing spatiality, particularity (Ford rather than car) or Chandler's social typography Jameson highlights aspects of the texts that may have, for most readers, been nothing more than setting the scene. yet setting a scene, like taking a photograph, is as much about choosing what is seen and what is not seen. Those choices were indeed Chandler's.

For literary theorists, whether Marxist or not, Jameson gives many new perspectives with which to look at the novels. Non-theorists will just dismiss with a wave of the hand and claim Chandler didn't mean it, which, as I stated, means nothing. Theorists and serious readers will find some agreement with Jameson or perhaps find other ways of explaining the themes and trends Chandler had running throughout his novels.

This is not a casual read but neither is it a particularly dense nor convoluted read. It will be accessible to most readers, particularly those who choose to engage rather than dismiss before even engaging. I would recommend this to both Chandler fans, with the caveat that this is not a basic overview of plots, and those interested in how literature (particularly popular literature) works and what it can say about the society that both produced and consumed it.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.½

His writing has a remarkable resemblance to projectile vomiting.½

An interesting critique of Raymond Chandler and his novels.
I was given a digital copy of this book by the publisher Verso Books via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review.

An American Utopia consists of the Fredric Jameson essay by that name and a number of responses to his ideas, followed by an epilogue by Jameson. This is a dense but accessible book which should stir everyone to some level of discomfort whether one agrees or disagrees with Jameson's proposal.

I won't try to elaborate on what various terms mean in the book, the attempts I saw in other reviews should have been labeled as their opinions about what the concepts are rather than a hit and miss pseudo-lecture. I found every "explanation" or bit of historical background lacking, as mine would likely be, for the simple reason that there is no brief overview except from a selective viewpoint and I refuse to limit a new reader in this area to a not-wrong-but-not-right overview. One can read this without the background and still understand the arguments as they apply to the current political/economic situation. This does not have to be an academic exercise but rather one open to any interested party.

Jameson generally points out the many problems with so-called democracy, namely that it is all in service to capitalism and the illusion of a free market. He argues for a dual-state approach and uses conscription into the military as a way to create a viable second state. There is not a great deal of logistic detail on how this might be accomplished but the end product, from Jameson's description, sounds significantly better than the miserable state of affairs we are currently in.

Whether you find yourself drawn to western Marxism or not this would be a valuable book to read. The responses to Jameson are not all supportive and point out many of the proposal's weaknesses or unanswered questions. In other words, this book is not just for those of us who for decades have been interested in Marxist thought but for those who are not interested in Marx specifically but are interested in looking at all the options to try to turn this neoliberal mess around, or at least slow the destruction of life on Earth.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.½

Raymond Chandler influenced writers of all stripes, from Hemingway to SJ Perelman. It was his use of language and descriptions in stylistic ways that caught – and catch – the imagination. He said he went into novels when the magazine editor of his first story excised a (terrific) description. The editor said people wanted action, not descriptions. Chandler set out to prove otherwise.

There are six Chandler novels, and they are memorable for two things: Phillip Marlowe, and the moody, stylistic descriptions of Los Angeles, its homes, and in particular its offices. We remember the settings rather than the plot details. The scenes can easily be confused in our minds from novel to novel, particularly if you’ve read them all a long time ago. The actual murders and details of how they came to pass are secondary – by Chandler’s own admission.

Jameson applies his usual otherworldly analysis to Chandler, ascribing intent where most see coincidence. There are the usual references to the usual suspects: Heidegger, Freud, Barthes, Althusser and also Roman Jakobson. There is only one mention of Slavoj Zizek, and that in a footnote, which I found unusual since Zizek is all over pop culture, and it’s not as if they don’t collaborate.

There is mention of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, the film where style and description outchandler Chandler. It could easily have been the sounding board for Jameson to make or prove numerous points. But strangely, he does not see it that way, so it simply stands on its own.

As usual, Jameson’s plane is different, and a challenge to internalize. But then, that’s why we read him.

David Wineberg

Fredric Jameson is someone who is oft-cited in science fiction criticism, and as someone who is interested in the genre as a vehicle for imagining future utopias, I felt his work would be relevant to my growing interest in the way that science fiction depicts future revolutions. Unfortunately (and this isn't necessarily a slight against the book), it turned out to be not particularly useful-- I only have a scant 2.5 pages of notes on its 431 pages, and most of them are just me rewriting the chapter titles.

Not that it was useless, though; there are a lot of concepts here about utopia that will be worth revisiting for me: that the utopia actually synthesizes the pleasure principle of fantasy with the reality principle of sf (74), that it's often impossible to imagine that the changes we seek in society could actually happen* (23, 86, 97, 118), that utopian change is often compressed into a single apocalypse because it's difficult for narrative to deal with generational time (187), that history does not end but we demand ending of it anyway (283), and that all of this thinking is not necessarily fanciful-- utopian fiction wants us to contemplate "real" politics just as much as sf wants us to contemplate "real" science (410).

So maybe more useful than I gave him credit for-- I am pretty sure I could build a whole essay out of any one of those ideas, and I look forward to coming back to Jameson and working with his concepts in the future.

* After all, it was Jameson who kind of once remarked that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism."

In this work, Fredric Jameson essentially performs a massive compare and contrast exercise between modernism and postmodernism. His examples are examined extensively for locations of a call and respond, a postmodern response to a modernist call.

Aside from any overarching thesis in the book, the close readings of the various 'texts', from paintings and music to film, are well worth the time and effort given to them. Jameson is an accessible writer but not a simplistic writer. The book is meant to be a discussion with the reader which means some effort is needed. But with the effort comes new perspectives on works mostly familiar with a few lesser known works thrown in.

I will revisit this book again and fully expect to gain new insights yet again.

Reviewed from an ARC made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

Nothing just stands on its own

It is always fascinating to read what experts have concluded from a microscopic examination of a work of art. They put things in historical perspective, in biblical context, and find similarities and anomalies, dialectic conundrums, support and contradiction - where I see or hear beauty. So I appreciate the different perspective. This book is the latest collection from Fredric Jameson, as erudite, expert and analytical as any author ever has been. He analyses artists, film directors, novels, films and tv shows. Some of them you’ve even heard of.

He follows a dictum of Thomas Mann: “Only the exhaustive is truly interesting.” (He quotes it twice.) These then are substantially all of Jameson’s thoughts on these works, including the references, tangents, asides and free associations. They are piled high and thick.

Reading The Ancient and the Postmodern was like stepping into an alternate universe, where nothing was as it seemed to the naked eye and the unsharpened mind. Jameson’s intensive scrutiny is otherworldly and so granular as to be mystifying. Sometimes you no longer remember what was under consideration. It is filled with dense references, facts and mysterious sentences like: “Leitmotif is the scar left by destiny on the musical present.”

Jameson’s obvious passion is Wagner and Mahler. Their era redefined music. He has seen their works multiple times, can distinguish different directors’ productions and different performers’ interpretations. He links them to past present and future, moral values, trends, fashions, and the tangents of adaptations. They get about a third of the book.

The central theme is: like a black hole at the center of every galaxy, works of art “must have a contradiction at their center in order to win any value.” This colors his approach to everything. Whether or not it is valid is beyond the scope.

The irony, if there is one, is that Jameson looks at the macro period from the Baroque to the present in the tiniest micro increments, dwelling on fine details in every medium. Drawing historic conclusions from this approach is impossible.

His Marxist credentials are on vivid display, which is the major reason most readers would want this book. But his text is so much more dense than say, the accessible Marxist Slavoj Zizek. It doesn’t inspire further reading. Having read the in-depth appreciations of all these artists and authors, I have no desire to rush out and acquire any of their works, which is normally how my reading branches out. It is nonetheless, a remarkable ride.

David Wineberg

Superb

A solid option among books which introduce Adorno, and it has the benefit of being in print (unlike, say Martin Jay's 'Adorno'). The best thing here is that Jameson recognizes the importance of Marx for Adorno, which many of other books (especially Berstein's 'Adorno') don't. On the other hand, Jameson's Marx is a shifty figure based on Mandel and Harvey, and thus actually does a disservice to Adorno. It's like someone offering you chocolate with the promise that it's got just the right amount of cocoa in it... and then finding out that the perfectly proportioned cocoa was scooped up off the floor of a sawdust factory (Marx here = cocoa, not sure how clear that is).
Other downsides are a general vagueness which is probably inevitable given Jameson's Jamesian prose style; a too-swift examination of Negative Dialectics with a lot of chat about the aesthetics; and a fatuously 'hip' recourse to Althusser and the concept of hegemony as a corrective to Adorno's theory of ideology. This last is only necessary because Jameson doesn't understand Hegel at all, and fails to see how important the German Idealists were for Adorno's work.
That said, it's really not bad, and gets the general point right: Adorno's obsession with totality and so forth must be separated from an affirmation of totality and almost every other concept he uses, and we would do well to remember that.

On one level, I like Jameson a lot. I agree with him about a lot of important stuff: yes, most art contains hefty doses of ideology (lies we tell ourselves so we feel better about living in a crappy world) and utopian hope (desire to live in a better world than ours). Yes, to understand this you need to pay attention to history and not just the book/movie/painting/building/symphony. Yes, it's a nice idea to read stories as attempts to solve real world problems.
But there's plenty not to like about this book. Primarily, Jameson treats the authors he writes about as naughty schoolboys who *never* tell the truth. Young Conrad, you keep telling me you're writing about the late-Victorian culture of honor, but I know better. Present thy buttocks for a class-war** caning! Whack! 'Lord Jim' is a proto-existentialist philosophy of the act, and you know it! Whack! This philosophy of the act demoralizes the capitalists and reveals to us, your reader, the omnipresence of class war! Whack!
Why not say that Conrad had some frigging clue about what he was doing? Why not see that Lord Jim just is about the late-Victorian culture of honor, that it criticizes that culture, and then ask how that critique might fit in to an historical understanding of the time? Well, doing that wouldn't let Jameson spend endless pages constructing Greimasian structural-quadrilaterals that eliminate any sense that a plot moves. That wouldn't let him make pointless, ignorant arguments about the Bourgeois Subject. That wouldn't enable him to take random pot-shots at Henry James for believing that people think stuff sometimes. In short, he might have to admit that he's no cleverer than the authors he's reading.
Let's do a Jamesonian reading of Jameson. The ideology is his insistence that structuralism and anti-humanism are somehow emancipatory, when experience (not to mention his reading of Adorno) should have taught him that they are deeply oppressive.*** Jameson's utopia, on the other hand, is his belief that literature matters to us, that it isn't just an autonomous formal jewel floating somewhere in the empyrean. Nice.


** His insistence on 'class war' as *the* structure of all history just seems silly in contrast to the ideology stuff, but it's important to note why: the only definition of class that can hold this kind of weight is Marx's. His definition is: the bourgeoisie owns the means of production, everyone else is a proletariat. The problem should be clear. Lawyers, for instance, don't own the means of production; nor do plastic surgeons. By contrast, the owners of small bookstores do. Now class obviously hasn't been eliminated. But in a post-industrial society, the bourgeois/proletariat model no longer makes any sense in political terms. So, the only model of class conflict that can be a prime-mover of history no longer makes sense in political terms. We need to re-think any reliance on 'class' as said prime-mover.

*** By which I mean, capital itself is structuralist and anti-humanist; the unreflective use of structuralism and anti-humanism as 'radical' theories is just bowing down before the thing you're trying to undermine.

Well, this is seminal stuff. The postmodern defined and instantiated; while there's possibly a split in use-value between the first couple of essays, which are structure-setting, and some of the ones that apply Marxian analyses to the postmodern characteristics of some literature, film and architecture, it's still cool for the versed reader to have all this stuff in one place. Jameson's cornerstones you know if you've read anything about this stuff before (or even if you haven't, you'll probably find this stuff familiar if you've ever, like, watched The Simpsons): the move from parody into pastiche, the crisis of historicity, the "perpetual present," the multiplication away from the modern, even--we go back this far--the arguments against the vulgar Marxism of economic base and cultural superstructure (Gramsci is not mentioned(!). A lot of it must have seemed like collation even then, but oh, what exquisite collation! "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations." E.g. And other times he meanders, and you wish for a little more of the vulgar Marxist's clear-eyed flensing.


Ironically in light of Colin MacCabe's genuinely moronic back-cover blurb to the effect that "it can be truly said that nothing cultural is alien to him", Jameson's unexpected shining moment here is in connecting the tripartite "M-C-M" movement of money (liquid acquisition, capitalization, "solid" acquisition--land, factories, etc.) in Capital with the rise of the postmodern financial sector--the sign of a neoimperial capitalism that has extended itself as far as possible, as with the old imperial financial centres of the early 20th century, and then the intensive turn, "the feverish search not so much for new markets--as these are also saturated--as for the new kind of profits available in financial transactions themselves and as such". But then, he connects it too with land, which from our perspective seems so apparent as to be almost quaint, but from a Marxist perspective that theorizes capital value as labour and exchange value, is evidently a relief to him, twenty years back--land is not a capital refuge, it's the last deterritorialization, in the Anti-Oedipus sense--the deterritorialization of territory itself, its transformation into the biggest bonanza of liquidity ever. Welcome to the subprime crisis! It's the Spanish Empire and Inca silver all over again!


Man, that's depressing. And all Jameson can think to do with this insight is a little minianalysis of Rockefeller Center's development history and the referentiality of postmodern architecture, no longer the modern phallus, no longer the storehouse of treasure. Super interesting, but you wonder if he's now wishing he could appear to his younger self in a dream and cause him to make those few missing connections. And then what? To the IMF? Nobody ever listens to prophetic Marxist savants, even when they should (49% of the time at most).

Not for the faint of heart or the deficient in vocabulary, but for those of us who believe that criticism points out the good and the bad, and uncovers what is not obvious, this is a worthwhile read. Hmmm. Think it's time to read it again. Ah, so many books, so little time....

excellent on demystifying the origins of the term "modernity" and its abuses. Vintage jameson