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Sianne Ngai is describing her choice of Jameson's The Political Unconscious as part of the "A Book That Changed My Mind" series.
(I posted a screenshot and deleted because she's asked that talk not be recorded. All the more reason to tune in right. now.)
(I posted a screenshot and deleted because she's asked that talk not be recorded. All the more reason to tune in right. now.)
Ngai: Use can use synchronic (structuralist) concepts (e.g. semiotic squares in Phillip Wegner) to undertake literary-historical work.
Things that feel very static, like aesthetic categories, which don't seem to be narrative or like they have time in them (even though they do), can be used for historical work.
Yes, "Always historicize," as Jameson says, but what that means isn't necessarily what a "historicIST" critic does.
Jameson models how to think about texts in a longue durée kind of way. There are multiple temporalities encoded in a text (e.g. Jane Austen).
Even punctual events like a revolution depend on things that are happening on a daily scale, like the reproductive work in a household.
Even punctual events like a revolution depend on things that are happening on a daily scale, like the reproductive work in a household.
Every one-dimensional way of doing is critique is taken down in this book. Jameson is against "unmasking" as a method of critique.
Jameson writes of the priority of political interpretation. "It's bold," but Ngai agrees with it.
Ngai: The bold thing that Jameson says that's really liberating is that Marxian criticism is a horizon that's broad enough to include a plurality of approaches to literary criticism (postcolonial, feminist, etc.). [Ed.: I don't agree.]
Jameson: "Yes, these other ways of seeing have 'sectoral validity', but if you want the *real* way of seeing, it's the Marxian one." Michel Chaouli: That can be off-putting. [Ed.: Yes.]
Ngai: "It's a bummer. There's no women in this book. I still love this book, but there's no women in it."
Jameson talks about the problem of mediation. The question of how you move from something cultural to something economic is the problem of Marxian criticism. How do you get from A to B? How do you move between these two things?
Jameson is very explicit. Mediations are devices used by the critic. The classic example of bad mediation is Adorno admonishing Benjamin for using Baudelaire to talk about a Paris wine tax. Or going from character systems in the Victorian novel to the Corn Laws.
So what categories *do* you use? Ngai mentions Weber's rationalization and the concept of reification [Ed. Lukacs].
The concepts themselves, the aesthetic categories themselves, are mediations.
The concepts themselves, the aesthetic categories themselves, are mediations.
The book makes you very conscious about not being the Marxist critic that's easy to mock. The book also shows you it's so incredibly difficult to think about two separate things that are part of one large thing. It seems simple, but it's not.
There are so many ways of two things relating that are not causal or identity. Many things aren't reducible to one another.
Cuteness is not reducible to the commodity, but it kind of still is. Why is hard to think that the cute and the commodity are part of the same world that creates them both?
Chaouli: Are there other books you thought about when thinking about your choice for Books That Changed Your Mind?
Ngai: Mark Seltzer's Serial Killers.
Ngai: Mark Seltzer's Serial Killers.
Rather than simply thinking of Marxian criticism as unmasking, which Ngai suggests post-critique discourse does, Jameson wants to take pleasure seriously. Why do viewers/readers find pleasure in certain texts?
Ngai: Our ability to think about things in a collective way is so stunted it ends up being what we want.
Jameson shows us that these bad things like reification are really creative.
The act of reification is actually very compensatory and creative and *produces modernism*. [Ed. I'm loving some of these risky claims.]
"How can you *not* have a theory of the Unconscious?"
For Jameson, the problem with psychoanalysis is the individual subject.
We live in this reified world where sex seems like this separable, reified, autonomized thing.
Jameson: "If sex were as integrated into our lives as eating, we wouldn't have a theory of desire."
Jameson: "If sex were as integrated into our lives as eating, we wouldn't have a theory of desire."
Ngai: For me, the Marxism comes through the feminism. I wish there were a better way those things could be brought together.
Alright, folks. Looks like I'm gonna have to drop off this webinar. M.I.A. comes first. https://twitter.com/laksh_mi/status/1336799401222823937?s=20
The synchronic & the diachronic map onto form and history. Synchronic is form and diachronic is history. It's odd how easy it is for us to disconnect the two.
Ngai: When Jameson said "Always historicize," I don't think he was saying "Become a historicist, not a formalist." But we're still there in the debate. [Ed.: That's a wrap.]
