John Norem wrote:
>
> First Impressions
>
> Fredric Jameson
>
> /The Parallax View/ by Slavoj Zizek · MIT, 434 pp, £16.95
>From which further down:
****As for what has persisted through this now considerable oeuvre, I will start with the dialectic, of which Zizek is one of the great contemporary practitioners. The old stereotype is that Hegel works according to a cut-and-dried progression from thesis, through antithesis, to synthesis. This, Zizek explains, is completely erroneous: there are no real syntheses in Hegel and the dialectical operation is to be seen in an utterly different way; a variety of examples are adduced. Still, that stupid stereotype was not altogether wrong. There is a tripartite movement in the Hegelian dialectic, and in fact, Zizek goes on, he has just illustrated it: stupid stereotype, or the ‘appearance’; ingenious correction, the underlying reality or ‘essence’; finally, after all, the return to the reality of the appearance, so that it was the appearance that was ‘true’ after all.
What can this possibly have to do with popular culture? Let’s take a Hollywood product, say, Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window (1944). (Maybe now Fritz Lang belongs to high culture rather than mass culture, but anyway . . .) Edward G. Robinson is a mild-mannered professor who, leaving his peaceful club one night, gets caught up in a web of love and murder. We think we are watching a thriller. At length, he takes refuge in his club again, falls asleep from exhaustion, and wakes up: it was all a dream. The movie has done the interpretation for us, by way of Lang’s capitulation to the cheap Hollywood insistence on happy endings. But in reality – which is to say in the true appearance – Edward G. Robinson ‘is not a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor dreaming that he is a murderer, but a murderer dreaming, in his everyday life, that he is a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor’. Hollywood’s censorship is therefore not some puritanical, uptight middle-class mechanism for repressing the obscene, nasty, antisocial, violent underside of life: it is, rather, the technique for revealing it.
Zizek’s interpretative work, from page to page, seems to revel in these paradoxes: but that is itself only some ‘stupid first impression’ (one of his favourite phrases). In reality, the paradox-effect is designed to undo that second moment of ingenuity, which is that of interpretation (it looks like this to you, but in reality what is going on is this . . .): the paradox is of the second order, so that what looks like a paradox is in reality simply a return to the first impression itself.*****
This would work fine as a construal of the opening sentence of Pride & Prejudice. I've always suspected that the coincidence of certain births* in the 1770s was significant.
Carrol
*Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Ricardo, Beethoven, Hegel. All six have much in common. The key is Marx's comment that the panic of 1825 revealed the historicity of capitalism. These six had been born _just_ early enough that TINA was a sensible premise for them.