The parallel with language is only too clear, and it is enough to evoke the fad for rapid reading and the habitual conscious or unconscious skimming of newspaper and advertising slogans, for us to understand the deeper social reasons for the stubborn insistence of modem poetry on the materiality and density of language, on words felt not as transparency but rather as things in themselves. So also in the realm of philosophy the bristling jargon of seemingly private languages is to be evaluated against the advertising copybook recommendations of "clarity" as the essence of "good writing": whereas the latter seeks to hurry the reader past his own received ideas, difficulty is inscribed in the former as the sign of the effort which must be made to think real thoughts.
- Fredric Jameson,
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Sure, Doug, why not. My kid is in Houston (mall city of the damned) and there is nothing on the tube.
Jameson has trouble penetrating the surface style of almost everything from architecture to language and therefore does not see all kinds of foundational levels of similarity within the formal means. For example, language and architecture in fact do mirror one another. The so-called clarity of classical modernist writers who use plain declarative sentences, one following another in a modular simplicity, is the equivalent to plain modernist architecture, where the same modular style motif is endlessly repeated. For contrast, compare the elliptical and endlessly attenuated sentences, with rhetorical flourishes of empty praise used in Baroque music, literature and architecture. To the old guard purist of Renaissance formalism, sculpture like Berinni's St. Teresa must have looked like a disease of the mind, a badly tempered sentimentality.
If you wanted to set up a sequence of parallels between our own forms and earlier periods of western history, it seems to me you could find fairly remarkable correspondences between say the high Italian Renaissance and Modernism, followed by the confusion in Mannerism/Baroque and our own Postmoderism. Well those are stylistic similarities. But the underlying formal means that made these changes possible or in fact drove them, were primarily in the expansion of the craft gilds from rather small master-shops to pre-industrial levels of much larger contractors. In other words in the organization of skilled labor and other means of production. This expansion coincides with a simultaneous increase in the centralization of power in the economic and political realm and reflected as the emergence of national states under more unified monarchical powers. Simply, the Baroque in art arrives at the same moment as the building of global colonial empires. Economic historians will have to fill in the money details--birth of global capitalism?
Chuck Grimes