Demystifying the would-be master narrative; on writing

On the other hand, the issue of the academic disciplines serves to dramatize the ambiguity of the Althusserian position. For in its insistence on the semi-autonomy of the levels or instances–and in particular in its notorious and self-serving attempt to reinvent a privileged place for philosophy proper, in a tradition in which the latter was supposed to have been overcome and subsumed by the “unity of theory and practice”–the Althusserian conception of structure has often seemed to its adversaries to constitute a renewed defense of the reified specialization of the bourgeois academic disciplines, and thereby an essentially antipolitical alibi. It is true that a somewhat different Althusser has himself…taught us that in this society what look like ideas require vigilant demystification as the messages of so many institutional or bureaucratic infrastructures (for example, the University). But his critics turn this view against him by reading his own system of semi-autonomous levels as a legitimation of the FCP, henceforth one more inert institution among others within the bouregois state. It would be frivolous to try to choose between these antithetical evaluations of the Althusserian operation…rather, they mark out a space in which that operation is objectively and functionally ambiguous. (TPU, Jameson 38).

Whew, well that took a while to type: coffee can of pennies held the book open. This paragraph, like many of Jameson’s paragraphs, says as much within his method of writing as the meaning of the words. It’s funny that I’m about to strip away so many of the layered stylistic and synchronic bits in this paragraph for the very purpose of exploring the ills of reduction. Consider this not to be a reduction but… a temporary suspension.

Althusserian structuralism is so properly dialectical that it was mistaken for something else all together: reification. It’s clear enough for the reader to look through the imaginary lens of history and imagine that Jameson is quite right. The adversaries were reductionists and there was very little to be said about it at the end of the day (at the end of the twentieth century…) people were mad that means were still twisting out the same contorted, rotting, stumped ends.

But maybe, all this nonsense with the ends is really what Jameson, Althusser, the Marxian dialectic, demand that we abandon. Perhaps any type of life philosophy, or “unity of practice and philosophy” in a truly a. historical and b.material master-register *don’t* line up with this or that political movement.

Scandalous as it is, maybe there’s something more than politics.

On Jameson’s preface to The Political Unconscious

This post marks the beginning of my free reading of Jameson. And already, the preface says so much more than I thought it might. For my first attempt at understanding it, I will try to close read some passages.

The Political Unconscious accordingly turns on the dynamics of the act of interpreation and presupposes, as its organizational fiction, that we never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, texts come before us as the alway-already-read; we apprehend them though sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or–if the text is brand new–through the sedimented reading habits and vategories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions. (FJ 9)

What this points to, in unaffected language, is a way of reading, a way of interpreting literature. Much like the world we live in, literature is not directly experienced because of two forces (that FJ later expands): history and literary criticism (or modes of criticisms). These might be considered two opposing things, but I have more than a feeling that they are a part of the same dialectical (Marxian) truth. In the case of the old text: it is easy enough to imagine how we do not really read a text, directly. The tradition of the text, the cultural assignments, the quick and dirty indexes on a work’s author, its secondary and reified use in popular (contemporary) culture, etc, are exhausting. Not to mention the historicist lens that we don every time we attempt to read a work outside our own epoch (as an aside, I wonder if “our epoch” or season of epochs, each pass away more and more frantically, as we are outmoded not at century’s intervals, nor even decades, but now by the week, the day, the minute…). Until we, as historical readers, or readers blinded and harnessed by our inaccessibility to history, or even time itself, cannot read any text without a mode; this brings us to the second type of reading: literary criticism.

The inaccessibility of the reader to his own epoch, while also isolating him from any other, might be temporarily overcome with a manner of reading. FJ lists the many en vogue in the following pages, and points out that in the end, these kinds of literary understandings, like any given feuding mysticism, competes soulessly with all the others with all the same words and stifled promises. Of course, FJ makes no bones about his premise: to show that the Marxist mode of reading is not just another type of reading on the “intellectual marketplace,” but that it eradicates the need for such a dogmatist view and allows the reader to come into the closest type of contact with any given text because it accounts for the historically real material context of the work as well as our own. Thus, it unites us with the text. There is much more to be said about this text. And I will post on more quotes in the preface during all my spare moments this week, though they appear to be few.

Back to reading Oscar Wilde; as I was reading the two in concurrence (not to mention Whitman for a third) I have overcome my hatred of the former and the latter. FJ reminds that Marx’s favorite author was Balzac–

it’s really just too bad that Wilde falls so hideously into his own traps. Brilliant imagery helps this. Onward!

signing off.

The semester is running out in two directions: towards the banal and the extremely challenging. What’s banal is practically everything I do “for school”. What’s challenging is figuring out how to complete my various projects and continue to read and grow even when classes are in session. Should be better after this week. Give me a minute… I will select a book to read! … …

A classic: The Political Unconscious.

I will post a note on the preface this weekend, and will have completed On Interpretation by Friday. I apologize to myself for not working harder.

In other news, my *project* is under way, but I’ve caught myself in a slight hiccup: computer incompatibility i.e. printing issues. But I should have this resolved by the end of the weekend as well. I promise that I’m not just sitting around idly!