READING GUIDE:
FREDRIC JAMESON, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture":
a rough outline
(orig. pub. 1979 in Social Text and reproduced in many places)
The mass culture/high culture split. Opening paragraph: the two positions about mass culture tend to be reduced to binaries of "populism" (or an overly celebratory view of the popular) and the negative critiques of mass culture laid out by the Frankfurt School (see Adorno reading guide).
Aside: are "mass" and "popular" culture the same?
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the term "mass" suggests forms of mass reproduction and readers/audiences as passive consumers; but also carries some of the old emancipatory potential suggested in Benjamin's time.
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the term "popular" is favored by Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and other defenders of the agency of those who partake in this culture. (We're reading Hall next week.) They define "popular" as a historicized, relational category of the traditions and practices of particular classes.
Foundations of the "negative" view of mass culture: why is mass culture seen as a problem?
* reification: the transformation of person, process, abstraction into a thing (Latin res). Makes commodification possible. [note: Jameson here intervenes in a previoustheoritical debate(the terms of which aren't important to us here( to state that materialization is essentially the same concept as reification]* instrumentalization: just as humans are reduced to a quantitative amount of labor power under capitalism, artworks are reduced to "means to an end" (example: reading for the plot, "consuming" a TV show). While many works of "high" art also open themselves to instrumental usage, the concept of the commodity blurs the distinction between alleged levels of culture.* "The reading process is itself restructured along a means/ends differentiation": so are there any works of art immune from commodification? (Adorno was also fascinated by this question.)
A theory of the image
* Because images are predominant (and can themselves be commodified( example of tourists taking photos of a landmark to "own" it), "everything in consumer society has taken on an aesthetic dimension"
How can we consider the high/mass culture split more dialectically?
* Movies, Jameson says, more readily adapt narrative to consumption as "plot."
* "We must rethink the opposition" . . . "twin and inseparable forms of the fission of aesthetic production under capitalism"; this applies to both our concepts of High and Popular. Emphasis on the "structural dependency" of modernism and mass culture
Aside: in postmodernism, the distinction between those levels, High and Popular, can be said to blur to the extent that it disappears.
* because of atomization and alienation of social life, "the 'popular' as such no longer exists"(what does he mean by this?
Repetition and Genre.
What structures render the artwork prone to reification and instrumental usage?
* Repetition, in Benjamin's sense of "mechanical reproduction": art is no longer primarily an experience of an original presence
* Another new term: the simulacrum, "the reproduction of 'copies' which have no original'"
* Under the "ever swifter temporality" imposed by the culture industry, the pressure of innovation (compare Bourdieu) is a pressure "to produce something which resists and breaks through the force of gravity of repetition as a universal feature of commodity equivalence."
Here's where we can see the dialectical relationship between Modernist high art on its mass-cultural Other: Modernism desperately seeks to defy repetition with its emphasis on aesthetic innovation, its resistance to being readily "understood" and thereby commodified. [Or: repetition becomes a "tactic"( Modernism tries to neutralize the threat of commodification by incorporating repetition as a key structural feature. Gertrude Stein: "A rose is a rose is a rose"]
* Genre. The part of the form which repeats in a way as to make the artwork readily appropriated to instrumental usage may be understood as genre: the detective novel, the romantic film, etc. How does this fit with other ways of understanding literary genre?
"We must specify this development historically: the older precapitalist genres were signs of something like an aesthetic contract between a cultural producer and a certain homogeneous class or group public . . . with the coming of the market, this institutional status of artistic consumption and production vanishes"
* Repetition and generic form are the key components of mass cultural forms: we never experience them "for the first time"
Thus, mass cultural artifacts clearly cannot be studied with the "purely formal"tools of aesthetics:
* if there is no "first instance" of the piece, if the status of the original is so deeply in doubt, how can we perform an "exegesis," or a close reading, of that unstable, un-singular object?
Aside. The passages on 22-24 in the original constitute an impassioned, and utterly galvanizing, response to certain conceptions of "political art" in which the aim of the politically engaged artist should be to present revolutionary messages and critical-but-uplifting content. Jameson's devastating diagnosis of the moment of global capitalism (remember, this was 1979; he was quite early, and prescient, in describing the global direction capitalism has now irrevocably taken) as a producer of images casts even the "reality" of political struggles into question. "If we want to go on believing in categories like social class, we are going to have to dig for them in the insubstantial bottomless realm of cultural and collective fantasy."
We need, instead, to think about the transformational task accomplished by mass culture.
* Here, Jameson again pulls out a couple of important concepts in Freudian psychoanalytic discourse: the unconscious deals with aroused desire through a number of mechanisms like repression, sublimation, and projection (desire, by the way, doesn't have to be sexual: here, it is the desire for an egalitarian, post-capitalist world). Repression and wish-fulfillment are "twin drives of a single structure": culture, like the unconscious itself, can "strategically arouse[] fantasy content within careful symbolic structures which defuse it".
* Mass culture is therefore not "empty distraction or 'mere' false consciousness" but a form of "transformational work on social and political anxieties and fantasies."
His analyses of Jaws and The Godfather seek to show how "genuine social and historical content must first be tapped and given some initial expression"(how some kind of Utopian content is solicited(and then tucked neatly away, contained within a symbolic form that neutralizes that potentially radical awareness.
* "such works cannot manage anxieties about the social order unless they have first revived them"
* The conventions of genre are the primary ways in which this plays out: e.g., the genre of the gangster film.
As was the case in The Political Unconscious, for Jameson here the political "content" of a work can never be separated from its form.
1 The references on p. 23 of the original: "the Brecht-Benjamin position" that mass art forms have the potential to be revolutionary is one you should be able to reiterate. What he calls "the Tel Quel position"(that we should look for such emancipation in the contradictions and breakdowns within anguage itself(refers to a journal, Tel Quel, published in France and associated with the post-structuralist "school" of deconstruction throughout the 1970s and (in the US) the 1980s, of which Jacques Derrida is the best-known figure. Lacanian psychoanalysis is also an important part of this group.