Browsing by Author "Jameson, Fredric R"

This dissertation deals with Cuban art criticism and other written texts related to Abstract Art. From a critical perspective that relates art to society and political and institutional practices, all of the above texts are interpreted as bearers of aesthetic ideologies, which are expressed in the paradigms from which Art Criticism attempted to validate Abstraction. This study further demonstrates that the dominant discourses in the realm of Art Criticism are strongly related to Ideological State Apparatuses. Art Criticism not only mediates between the artwork and the spectator, but also between artistic acts of provocation and the establishment.

Abstraction in Cuba constituted an important axis in the polemic between autonomous art and socially committed art, but the debates themselves were subsumed in ideological and even political battlefields. Art Criticism oriented these debates, by emphasizing certain problems, and diminishing the importance of other ones.

This dissertation is organized in function of the dominant questions that Cuban Art Criticism addressed. The first chapter accordingly deals with definitions of abstract art that were prevalent in art writing and publications from 1948 to 1957, a period in which Art Criticism is mostly concerned with the autonomy of art. The second chapter follows the debates about the social commitment of abstract art, which became predominant during the first years of a Marxist-oriented Revolution. This polemic is implicit in the emergence of an Anti-Academic movement in the visual arts, and it began to lose its strength once the Cuban Avant-Garde started to gain institutional recognition. After being relegated to a peripheral position, the question concerning the social commitment of Abstract Art became crucial after the triumph of the Revolution. The final chapter deals with the relations between Abstract Art and the diverse documents that embodied and defined the Cultural Policy during the Cuban Revolution.

Throughout, this study strives to establish the place of Abstract Art in the Institutional, and discursive practices from 1959 onwards. This place is defined by its instability, as it is constituted through intermittencies and steps backwards on the path towards the institutional consecration of non-figurative tendencies.

This dissertation analyzes the period of late modernism (roughly 1930-1965) by attending to an understudied subgenre: fictions that depict the experiences of the dead in the afterworld. The project originated from my observation that a number of late modernist authors resorted to this type of writing, leading to the question of what made them do so. Such a project addresses the periodization and definition of late modernism, a period that has received relatively little critical attention until recent years. It also contributes indirectly to the study of European culture before and after the Second World War, identifying clusters of concerns around common experiences of belief and time during the period.

To approach this question, I adopt a situational approach. In this type of reading, I attempt to reconstruct the situations (both literary and extra-literary) of specific authors using historical and biographical material, then interpret the literary work as a response to that situation. Such a methodology allows me to ask what similarities between situations led to these convergent responses of afterlife writing. My primary objects are afterlife novels and plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Wyndham Lewis, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett.

I find that the subgenre provided late modernists with the literary tools to figure and contest changes in experiences of belief and time in mid-20th century Europe. The situation of modernism is marked by the loss of belief in the world, a failure in the faith in action to transform the world, and the serialization of time, the treatment of time as static repetition and change as something that can only occur at the individual rather than the systemic level. While earlier modernists challenged these trends with the production of idiosyncratic private mythologies, late modernists encountered them as brute facts, leading to a shift in aesthetic sensibilities and strategies. Belief was split between private opinion and external submission to authority, and change reappeared under the figure of catastrophe.

Media studies today is a rapidly evolving discipline, with diverse and sundry emphases. Media alternately refers to specific objects and apparatuses (film, television, radio, video games, virtual reality, etc.), positions (mass media, new media, social media, fandom), and methods (theoretical, communications and rhetoric-based, social scientific). Media is in danger of becoming a word that means everything, and thus means nothing.

This dissertation configures a theoretical intervention that returns to the central question of what media means, positing a new, internal structure for media on the basis of reading (re-)mediation as primordial computivity and selection. In so doing, we establish a novel coherence for media studies through the construction of a computer- scientifically inspired "hypervisor," which entails a relativism that does not require choosing between alternate approaches yet refuses to erase distinctions. Through an interdisciplinary approach we combine resources from set theory, media theory, Continental philosophy, computer science, and linguistics to reposition the analysis of media's external, social effects on the basis of its newly discovered internal coherence, that of primordial computivity.

Impure Cinema: Political Pedagogies in Film and Theory asks what are the ways that the politics of film theory have been conceptualized since the era now known as "70s film theory." In particular, it analyzes the writings on cinema, politics and art by contemporary French philosophers Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière in relation to the influential approaches of Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze and to theories of documentary cinema. I argue that unlike the political modernism of 70s film theory and the post-theory turn of 90s film studies, Badiou and Rancière offer an approach to film theory that neither assumes that all films are political, nor that politics underdetermine theory, but rather suggests that we analyze both theories and films in terms of how they construct connections between cinema and politics. Following Deleuze, I call these connections "pedagogical" not because they transmit knowledge but because they always involve a new kind of connection or relation that seeks to transform habitual ways of seeing, saying or doing. For Badiou and Rancière this is based on a conception of cinema as "impure." Cinema, they argue, is never free of elements from other arts or daily life, but it is this impurity that is the grounds for linking its artistic and political possibilities. I look at various film forms that highlight cinema's impurity, in particular the "actuality" and how it has been reappropriated in various forms of documentary and essayistic practices as a way of giving cinematic form to questions of political equality.

Focusing on a diverse set of creative work from Europe, East and South Asia, the Americas, Middle East, and Africa, Minor Measures investigates modalities of world writing through modernist, postcolonial and contemporary transnational literatures in the intertwined moments of imperialism, developmentalism and globalism. It studies the category of world literature as a heterogeneous set of narrative-cognitive forms and comparative modes of gauging from a particular positionality the world-systemic pressures on individual and collective bodies. To this end, Minor Measures focuses on the dynamic and increasingly central role of geoliterary imagination in fashioning a secular hermeneutic that maps the relationships and overlaps between the local and the global, here and there, past and present, self and other. Moreover, it highlights the capacities of the literary aesthetics in configuring local subjectivities, affiliations and histories in relation to the abstract cartographic totality of global modernity. Shuttling back and forth between the two poles, literature as world writing refers to the unconscious framework of representing the contingencies of the lived experience of economically, racially, and geographically differentiated subjects from metropolitan, (post)colonial and diasporic positions.

What ideological dreams does music express? And how does it do so? In listening to three paradigmatic moments in American Jazz, this dissertation attempts to answer these two problems by illustrating how the modes of our production structure the range of our interpretive possibilities, and how music responds to and overcomes these dilemmas aesthetically.

The basic question of "Political Cinema: The Historicity of an Encounter" is whether or not it is possible to think a concept of political cinema while affirming the autonomous capacities of both cinema as an art and politics as the thought of collective self-determination. Is it, in other words, possible to elaborate a relationship between cinema and politics that would at the same time establish a separation between the two and thus refuse to reduce one to the other. Such a relation of separation is called an encounter. Cinema encounters politics insofar as politics affects it and insofar as cinema can produce certain political effects, but also only insofar as cinema itself is immanently capable of configuring this relationship to politics. Following this conviction, the question of political cinema has to be considered at a distance from questions of genre, where political cinema would be merely one among other cinematic genres, and distinguished from the problem of political instrumentalization of cinema (propaganda). Political cinema refers to real cinematic inventions that happen in relation to processes of human emancipation.

"Political Cinema" tests this basic conviction through four separate case studies. These case studies are limited and local analyses, which nevertheless cover a broad historical background and are, furthermore, meant as concrete points from which more general theoretical questions can be addressed and formulated. The introductory statement (Chapter 1) sets up the theoretical stakes of the dissertation. Part I analyzes the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's appropriation of several elements of laughter - comedy, militant humor, carnival, caricature and satire, etc. - as specifically cinematic means Eisenstein used to bring his films as closely as possible to the revolutionary process of the October Revolution and the break the latter introduced into the history of humanity. Part II of the dissertation (Chapters 3 and 4), presents a discussion (primarily on the example of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times) of the figure of the worker as a forceful cinematic symbolization of the existence of the modern proletarian masses, through the creation of which, however, cinema does not give up the effective autonomy of its expression. Part III, which consists of an analysis of the work of the Palestinian director Michel Khleifi, shows how the filmmaker's strategy of blurring the boundary between documentary and fiction is an artistic procedure (a cinema of "documentary fiction") that makes visible the complexity of Palestinian historical experience and memory, but does so at a distance from any direct political discourse on the question of Palestine (Chapter 5). And finally, the Conclusion to the dissertation, presents an analysis of the recent Romanian film, which renders visible striking new ideas of political cinema that are, however, produced in the absence of anything more than mere traces of what deserves to be called politics (Chapter 6)

In my dissertation, I connect the role of literature and its interpretations with France's current occultation of its colonial and imperial past and present. The dissertation puts forth a re-consideration of an excluded work and of some hexagonal classics across time-periods.

The first chapter focuses on an excluded author from the Canon, The Baron de Lahontan (1683-1716). His Dialogues avec un sauvage (1703) are unique because the strident critique of the clergy, the wealthy and the aristocracy is free from patriotic and essentialist concerns. Today his works are claimed by some Amerindian scholars (such as George Sioui) as illustrative of Amerindian values, but largely ignored by French educational and publishing institutions. . I then examine briefly Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1773). The comparison of Diderot's Supplément with Lahontan's Dialogues underline that Diderot critique of colonialism was not the primary objective of this work and was limited to issues of sovereignty and pointedly left aside the issue of commerce and indirect political influence.

The second chapter is on the work of Flaubert, Salammbô. I propose that Flaubert' Salammbô (1862) paints a world in which a collective consciousness based on class begins to emergeI also propose basing myself on Sartre's work on the author, that in Salammbô Flaubert finds a space in which to unfold his own contradictions (as symbolized in the novel by those of Salammbô herself) regarding his belonging to and hatred of the French bourgeoisie.

In the third chapter, I examine the works of Maupassant as a journalist and novelist in the context of colonialism. As a journalist he defended the interests of an emerging class of colons as a journalist by engaging in a complicated manipulation of public opinion. Maupassant was also the author of classic novel Bel-Ami (1885) which can be read as a ruthless indictment of the financial motivations behind France's colonial expansion. One of my arguments is that Maupassant's fiction in relation to the colonial renewal of the 1880's was what Balzac's novels were to emerging capitalism: his powers of observation transcend his political beliefs.

The ultimate chapter is about Camus's L'étranger (1942), Le premier home (written in 1959 published posthumously in1994) and his relation with Sartre. I examine how the historical events shaped Camus's fiction and how after his death they contributed to his standing in the literary field today. In L'étranger Camus does not acknowledge Arab characters by name, nor is the violence inflicted upon them considered neither central nor worthy of particular concern. I argue that Camus standing today as progressive and humanitarian thinker despite writing for the French colonial empire is indicative of France's inability to come to terms with its colonial past.

My re-visitation of the above works has led me examine the notion of progress in history and how its political corollary, the division between progress and reaction, later between left and right does not incorporate the issue of colonialism. I also attempted to assess the colonial and imperial projects as endeavors motivated primarily by economic gains of specific social groups which used race and identity as justifications and cover ups. This interpretative framework based on the theories put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre in his works on colonialism, racism and Flaubert.

This dissertation contributes a novel critique of hexagonal canonical works and proposes a re-evaluation of the extensive influence of political imperatives on the elaboration and status of works of literature.

This dissertation takes as its starting point what contemporary cultural, literary, and science fiction scholarship have described as the “end of the future,” or the post-1970s rise in stagnant, bleak, and apocalyptic images of what is to come. Using science fiction films and novels as its primary objects of inquiry, it argues that such a dystopian (or false utopian) imaginary should not be normatively chastised or embraced, but rather analyzed as part of a set of post-productive capitalist conditions. Doing so makes visible both the material constraints upon the contemporary imagination—the way that images of decline, particularly in SF, are cognitively imbricated in their larger socio-economic moment—and what is termed the “postfuturist problem,” or the question of science fiction without a future. With both ideas in mind, the ultimate claim is that in order to think science fiction (and cultural production more broadly) in a moment of imaginative foreclosure, one must look deeper into these no-futurist works themselves. Rather than nostalgically lingering upon the past, lamenting the loss of a dynamic and optimistic futurism, our task is to discern how renewed conditions of thought might develop out of the contradictions of the present. In an era without a future, science fiction—and culture writ large—does not gain its relevance (its ability to map and estrange us from our actually-existing reality) by offering visions of the radically new and different, but immanently, within the hyper-extended confines of the present.

This dissertation seeks to understand the conditions of hegemonic transfer, in the case of world-historical cycles of accumulation, through investigating the cultural production of the period. I examine turn of the century British and American science fiction to more fully comprehend the historical situation of imperial decline, and find that a concern with the possibility of resource depletion and imminent future “overpopulation” of racialized people, specifically Chinese people, lie at the heart of cultural understandings of the turmoil which the British-led world economic, social, and political system had entered. I thus study its science fictional imaginations of the future, mainly constellated around the threat of social collapse occasioned by future war, invasion, or resource scarcity, then emergent in order to elucidate how cultural production narrates the historical tendencies of intensifying industrialization, the formation of the military-industrial complex, economic stagnation, and increasing imperial instability. Given that the US-led world-system has itself has seemingly entered protracted decline, and as “overpopulation” once more emerges as a prominent social problem, especially as imbricated within global climate collapse, this dissertation contributes to a more thorough understanding of the present through comparison with a historically analogous cultural instance.

Psychoanalysis has always been based on the eclipse of the visual and on the primacy of speech: this is evident in any clinical experience where the patient lies on the couch and never looks the psychoanalyst in his/her eyes. The work of Jacques Lacan though, is strangely full of references on the visual field and on images: from the text on the “mirror stage” in the Forties to the elaboration of the visual dimension of objet petit a (gaze) in the Sixties. As a consequence, a long tradition of film studies made reference to Lacan and used psychoanalysis as a tool in order to explain the inclusion of the subject of the unconscious in the experience of vision. What is less known is how the late Lacanian reflection on the topic of analytic formalization opened up a further dimension of the visual that goes beyond the subjective experience of vision: not in the direction of a mystical ineffable (the Real-as-impossible) but rather toward a subtractive mathematization of space, as in non-Euclidean geometries. The outcome sounds paradoxical but it can have major impacts on the way we understand the visual field and we represent it in visual studies: sometimes abstract formalization can help us looking at the space even better than our eyes.

This dissertation examines space as a privileged yet repressed site of cultural production in a global America, in response to ongoing attempts to reconfigure American literary and cultural studies through the lens of globalization, postnationality, worlding, and planetarity, and to build conversations between literature, the arts, and space. Drawing its inspiration from Henri Lefebvre's work on the production of social space and Fredric Jameson's theory of postmodern global culture, this project studies globalization with a particular emphasis on its unique spatial apparatus, which through geographical expansion and contraction and worldwide connection and disconnection produces hitherto unprecedented social spaces, including most notably the global city, virtual space, transnational diasporas, postmodern architecture, and the "non-places" of shopping malls, airports, and highways. I discuss how these global social spaces radically alter our experience of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and transform our representational practices, by analyzing innovative contemporary cultural forms such as literary theory (Jameson, Derrida, Adorno, and Deleuze), deconstructive architecture (Peter Eisenman), video art (Nam June Paik), diasporic writing (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), postmodern detective fiction (Paul Auster), the cyberpunk novel (William Gibson).

While I thus mediate global spatial production and cultural production, I argue that the predominant focus on deterritorialization, disjuncture, and postspatiality in much of contemporary discourse on globalization oftentimes diverts our attention from the complex mechanism whereby the spatial world system of globalization brings the entire globe into its all-encompassing and totalizing force field. I formulate the concept of a spatial unconscious in order to address the salient, though repressed, presence of the totalizing spatial logic of global capitalism that underlies contemporary cultural production. In so doing, I demonstrate that diverse contemporary literary and cultural forms have their conditions of possibility the newly emergent global spatial network of cultural flows and exchanges; and that those literary and cultural forms function as symbolic acts or registering apparatuses that reflect, remap, and reimagine the multifaceted and even contradictory spatial configurations of the world today. By bringing a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective to American literary studies, this study seeks to shift our critical attention from a putatively unitary and homogeneous national literature towards manifold cultural loci crisscrossed by dynamic interplays and fluid interchanges amongst multiple axes and nodal points on the globe.

This dissertation, "Theories of Everything: Science Fiction, Totality, and Empire in the Twentieth Century," argues that the ideology of empire shares with science fiction an essential cognitive orientation towards totality, an affinity which has made science fiction a privileged site for both the promotion and the critique of imperial ideologies in the United States and Britain in the twentieth century. The cultural anxieties that attend a particular moment of empire are especially manifest in that period's science fiction, I argue, because of the importance of science and technology: first as a tool of imperial domination and second as a future-oriented knowledge practice that itself has totalizing aspirations, grasping with one hand towards so-called "theories of everything" while with the other continually decentering and devaluing humanity's importance in larger cosmic history. As technological modernity begins to develop horizons of power and knowledge increasingly beyond the scale of the human, I argue, science fiction becomes an increasingly important cognitive resource for navigating the ideological environments of modern political subjects.

In particular I argue for a new understanding of the science fiction genre focused on an aspiration to totality: cognitive maps of the historical world-system on a immense, even hyperbolically cosmic, scale. In the twentieth century empire itself is one such totality, insofar as imperial ideology asserts the existence of a historical logic of progress that ultimately culminates in the empire itself. Such totalities necessarily provoke thoughts of their own inevitable negation, an eventuality I organize around the general category of "apocalypse." In three chapters I consider apocalyptic texts concerning entropy and evolution (chapter one), environmental collapse and ecological futurity (chapter two), and zombie catastrophe (chapter 3). In particular I focus on literary work from Isaac Asimov, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, Olaf Stapledon, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Kirkman, Joss Whedon, Ted Chiang, and Philip K. Dick. I ultimately argue that the totalizing thought experiments of science fiction have functioned as a laboratory of the mind for empire's proponents and detractors alike, offering a "view from outside" from which the course of history might be remapped and remade. As a result--far from occupying some literary periphery--I argue science fiction in fact plays a central role in political struggles over history, empire, identity, justice, and the future itself.

Dreams of Reason: The Imagination of Alterity in the Long Eighteenth Century historicizes the assumptions underlying theories of fantastic or non-realist genre fiction. In the course of a comparative analysis of the lunar voyage, oriental tale, and Gothic novel, representative fictional texts in English and French from the late seventeenth through the late eighteenth centuries are read along with critical works by their contemporaries. The aim is to show how modern notions of fantastic literature arose not from a rhetorical opposition to realism or verisimilitude, but to historical encounters with alterity, from new cosmological ideas to increased exposure to non-European cultures around the world. This dissertation locates fantastic fiction at the center of the development of a European identity in the early modern period.

In the industrial vocabulary of the nineteenth century, “obsolescence” is regularly cast as a loss; it is the profit forfeited when advances in technology render the current means of production unnecessary. But in the twentieth century obsolescence morphs in both sensibility and cultural meaning, becoming a routine feature of discourses dedicated to the re-invention of the self, as in the declaration of an ad from the New York Times of November 12,1950: “New New a thousand times New (we’d rather die than obsolesce!)” Here and elsewhere obsolescence becomes valued for the distinction it helps to impart: that modernity is about newness, that futurity and commodities are often linked to the ephemeral. For the Futurists, “houses will last less long than we”; for General Motor’s Alfred P. Sloan, automobiles will change every year; for the post-WWII manufacturers of disposable goods, objects like Kleenex will lapse mere seconds after their use. My dissertation “Useless: The Aesthetics of Obsolescence in Twentieth Century U.S. Culture” studies how art acts as a repository for the obsolete, a “home” for the worthless objects, rejected places, and ruined bodies otherwise considered to be useless.

The project is divided into four chapters that trace how the presence of obsolescence in cultural texts produces aesthetic effects that resist, mourn, or disrupt the logic of obsolescence. In my first chapter, “The Totemic: Willa Cather, Mesa Verde, and Modernist Form,” I illustrate how modern artists form a relation to obsolete objects that is sacred. Reading Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House (1925) in relation to her own cross-country journey to Mesa Verde National Park in 1915, I argue that the park, the museum, and the World Exposition all demonstrate the ways in which the U.S. forges a “totemic” relation between its citizens and obsolete indigenous objects in the first decades of the twentieth century. This relation is what motivates the National Park Service to preserve the indigenous ruin and to accrue vast tracks of land and expend Federal resources to assure their continuity; it is also what attracts Cather to these particular objects as worthy of literary representation, producing a “totemic” form that mirrors the form of the National Park. Importantly, the various acts the U.S. is committing contemporaneously in order to preserve the ruins (expelling tribes from ancestral homelands, laying claim to sacred spaces, appropriating funeral objects) is actively under erasure in both the NPS and Cather’s text.

In Chapter Two “Decaying Spaces: Faulkner’s Gothic and the Construction of the Capitalist Real,” I continue the trajectory begun in the first chapter with a focus on how obsolescence impacts modernist aesthetic practice. In particular, I study William Faulkner’s novels As I Lay Dying (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Absalom, Absalom (1932) to illustrate how his literary modernism is not a movement dedicated to the “new” but is instead deeply invested in the objects (and bodies) made “useless” by industrialization. Interestingly, it is his investment in rusting artifacts that prompts literary critics to assign his works to the gothic tradition. Responding to this classification, I argue that since the categorization of literature often defaults to realism-mimesis as the originary mode from which all other genres deviate, many critical accounts of Faulkner tend to simply approximate how far his narration strays from accurately describing economic reality. The paradox is that Faulkner’s narration of the actual decay present in his cultural landscape is often not “real” enough to be considered realism; it is in “excess” of the real, which suggests that the capitalist real is an ideal referent containing only minimal traces of degradation. I therefore explore the tension in the first half of the 20th century between realism and Gothicism where, increasingly, the capitalist real comes to be articulated around that which is new, modern, and efficient.

Taking as its historical marker the automation of industry, Chapter Three “The Political: Junk, Trash, and Post-Modern Technique” investigates how a junk aesthetic begins to develop in the mid-century out of the detritus of industrial production. To illustrate how this aesthetic functions in literary texts, I examine Philip K Dick’s novels Time Out of Joint (1954), Ubik (1969), and Valis (1981) as well as his depiction in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) of “kipple”—all of the useless objects like wrappers, containers, and plastics that industrialism leaves behind and that ultimately threatens the grounding of our material existence. Since Gross Domestic Product peaks in the middle of the century, making these the years in which the United States floods the cultural landscape with a staggering amount of disposable goods, I argue that writers and artists in the 1950s and 60s (Bruce Conner, George Herms, Ed Kienholz) respond to this saturation by making sculptures and fictional worlds out of plastic chairs, dirty dishes, and wrecked autos, an illustration of how the obsolete commodity, meant to be ephemeral, takes on a new political significance in the art of the mid-century.

The last chapter “Apocalyptic Vision: Revelation in the Ruins of Detroit” examines how the city that perfects built-in obsolescence finds itself obsolete. In particular, I study how the recent proliferation of ruin photography circulating both online and in print registers the obsolescence of the U.S. industrial sector. Based on the sheer number of visual texts that take Detroit’s ruins as its subject: Lowell Boileau’s The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit (1996), Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled (2010), Dan Austin and Sean Doerr’s Lost Detroit (2010), Julien Temple’s Requiem for Detroit (2010), Marchand and Meffre’s The Ruins of Detroit (2011), not to mention all of the amateur footage on YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook, I consider Detroit ruin photography to be a genre in its own right. I illustrate how the focus of these representations is on industrial decay—the ruinous landscape of post-industrial Detroit with its abandoned houses, defunct factories, and rusting ports, and argue that the effect of this decay is “apocalyptic”; it is, to paraphrase Michel de Certeau, the very concept of the City that is in decline. To illustrate the economic force of obsolescence, I interrogate how post-industrial artists like Detroit’s Tyree Guyton re-purpose defunct industrial objects into art pieces at the same time that portions of decaying Detroit houses sell on the global art market as found art.