> Jameson gave his talk today at Cornell, and pretty much rocked the house.
> I'd never seen Fred at work before, but the body language gave him away
> immediately: self-effacing, absolutely no academic hauteur, radiating a
> kind of quiet dignity which I've seen in only one other academic: the
> inimitable, indispensable Pierre Bourdieu. Fred started off with a precis
> of his concept of postmodernism, as the cultural logic of multinational
> capitalism, then turned to globalization, "the latest face of
> postmodernity", as he called it, and the point where "culture has become
> the economic and the economy has become the cultural". This led to a segue
> on synchrony and diachrony and some of the basic terms of Marxist
> analysis, going back to the trope of identity vs. difference (a nod in the
> direction of Adorno, though he didn't actually say non-identity). Then he
> postdated this apposition in terms of the cybernetic technologies of the
> present (the productive forces) and global finance capital (relations of
> production). This then led to a series of intriguing observations on
> modernism and time, specifically, the mutations of lived experience, how
> capitalism grinds down, pulverizes and colonizes time, transforming the
> temporal into visual networks, lived time into labor-time.
>
> Nothing terribly new, you'd think. But Fred had a dialectical trick up his
> sleeve: after critiquing the "ideologies of communication" endemic to late
> capitalism, he paused and invoked the "negativity of thought" (Adorno
> again, the ghost from the Eurostate's future, as it were) and quoted
> Hegel's comment that the object is not identical to its concept (a.k.a.
> non-identity). He then tied this back to Sartre, and the existential
> experience of time -- a profound moment of self-critique, really, because
> this is where he started his career as a dialectician. After demolishing
> Deleuze' notion of virtuality and the postmodern fetishization of the body
> faster than Serious Sam taking out a scorpion, he ended with an analysis
> of "Speed", tying in all the above categories, outlining the thing as an
> allegory of the Bubble subject (the kinetic energies of modernism accessed
> by the new information networks, which are the story-within-the-story of
> the flick).
>
> DJ Freddy J delivered, Seattle to Cornell, coast to coast. Yow!
>
This seems to contradict what I understand to be Jameson's own (self-contradictory I think) idea of how to approach other people's thought.
"History progresses by failure rather than by success, as Benjamin never tired of insisting; and it would be better to think of Lenin or Brecht (to pick a few illustrious names at random) as failures - that is, as actors and agents constrained by their own ideological limits and those of their moment of history - than as triumphant examples and models in some hagiographic or celebratory sense." (Postmodernism, p. 209)
Putting the point about self-contradiction in the form of a "Socratic" question: How, given that "actors and agents" are "constrained by their own ideological limits and those of their moment of history", is it possible for the actor and agent Jameson to know that "it would be better to think of Lenin or Brecht ... as failures"?
Ted -- Ted Winslow E-MAIL: WINSLOW at YORKU.CA Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York University FAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario CANADA M3J 1P3