Reading on Jameson in
Warren Montag - postmodernism and its discontents (ed. E Kaplan)
Jameson is criticised
alongside Lyotard, for reducing Marxism to a meta-narrative. Moreover, Jameson
is linked to apologetic strains of thought, for not being able to conceive of
opposition to current forms of domination. Postmdernism for Jameson is so
totalised it removes the possibility for critical space and opposition to the
Being of Capital. (94) The latter dominates all. In previous times for Jameson,
culture and the unconscious, offered spaces wherein the toalizing force of
capital could be resisted. Today there exists no such space and renders
Jameson’s own opposition to something like the Beautiful soul in Hegel
(phenomenology pp 400) that withdraws from the world, to preserve its perfect
difference and sanctity.
Thus Jameson is taken up
here for his proclamation of the absolutisation of reality by capital, and his
incapacity to understand social reality as antagonistic in its very nature. All
positions within society become expressions of the totalising force of
Capital…critical philosophy alike.(pp 95)
Fundamental complicity of
Jameson, Lyotard and Baudrillard. I.e. ultimately share Baudrillard’s position
of the impossibility of resistance, and the ignorance of the mass (pp101)
Materiality of
representations. They are not indeterminate. Thus to conceive of works of art
as surfaces without depth (like Warhol’s shoes for Jameson) is I think seen as
undermining their materiality. Montag is thus against ‘absolute determination
(culture as expression)’ leads to notion that work of art is unknowable. (98)
“Jameson seems unable to
grasp that this unknowability reflects the inadequate character of the
theoretical constructions through which the object is known, rather than the
nature of the object itself’. (98)
“In the absence of a
concept of the overdetermined material existence of the work of art, Marxism,
faced with an art and literature that question the very foundations of
traditional philosophical reflection…can do no better than cry ‘Apocalypse
Now!’, taking for the end of art what is in reality a crisis of its own theory