CharlesB
>>> dredmond at efn.org 07/02/01 11:16PM >>>
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!
-- Dennis