>So here in the--enormously wealthy by all previous
>standards--industrial core we *should* have broken through into the
>realm of freedom. But then we take our culture and turn around and
>reenslave ourselves: we reenter the realm of necessity by deciding
>that what we "need" is not to live our lives but to acquire the cash
>to buy a Ford Expedition and a projection TV?
Dunno what others reckon, Brad, but that'll do me nicely (insofar as we're taking the point of view of the relatively few for whom, unlike yours truly, Expeditions and projection TVs are realistic propositions, anyway).
And Ted sez:
>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"?
Good Socratising, Ted!
Fred also sez somewhere that we have to historicise everything except the rule that we have to historicise everything. To historicise Jameson is not to say he doesn't know stuff Brecht and Lenin didn't know, of course - whatever Jameson's constraints, he does have a spot of hindsight available to him. And there was, by the time Jameson makes this call in 1991, a tenable case to be made for the proposition that the relative autonomy of the literary form (for instance) did not afford it the transformative ideological power Brecht might have hoped for.
Things didn't look too good for a goodly portion of Lenin's more instrumentalist ideas (or, perhaps, what anyone could have made out of his time and place) in 1991, either.
I dunno, still sounds pretty true a decade later, really. Anyway, if history progresses by the failures of people in thrall of their time and place, that does at least remind us that agency - the self-conscious capacity and effort to make a difference - is what keeps us going. We're the conscious part of the big contradictions-unto-contradictions that are history, and we'd do best to be conscious of our conscious part. There ain't anybody else to look after us ...
We'll have to wait and see how Jameson looks half a century from now, I s'pose ...
Cheers, Rob.