--- It's Jason, naturally thrilled, for The Grice Club ---
Here is a sample from The Political Unconscious:
"Mechanical causality is thus less a concept which might be evaluated on its own terms, than one of the various laws and subsystems of our peculiarly reified social and cultural life. Nor is its occasional experience without benefit for the cultural critic, for whom the scandal of the extrinsic comes as a salutary reminder of the ultimately material base of cultural production, and of the 'determination of consciousness by social being.'
It must therefore be objected, to Althusser's ideological analysis of the 'concept' of mechanical causality, that this unsatisfactory category is not merely a form of false consciousness or error, but also a symptom of objective contradictions that are still with us. This said, it is also clear that that it is the second form of efficacy Althusser enumerates, so-called 'expressive causality,' which is the polemic heart of his argument as well as the more vital issue (and burning temptation) in cultural criticism today. The conter-slogan of 'totalization' cannot be the immediate response to Althusser's critique of 'expressive causality,' if for no other reason that totalization is itself numbered among the approaches stigmatized by this term, which range from the various conceptions of the world-views or period styles of a given historical moment (Taine, Riegl, Spengler, Goldmann) all the way to contemporary structural or post-structural efforts at modelling the dominant episteme of sign-system of this or that historical period, as in Foucault, Deleuze-Gattari, Yurii Lottman, or the theorists of the consumer society (most notably Jean Baudrillard).
---
One observation - The word "Althusser" appears as a basic warning system in critical texts that what is to follow will be largely indigestible.
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My longish comment on this unable I to post, hence attaching under different entry, "Jamesonian". Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI know, I got an error email from blogger.
ReplyDeletePerhaps you included too many Althusser's, triggering an Internet Self-Defence Mechanism...
Yes, it is odd. On the whole, the passage was brilliant. Provide page number! It is a _long_ sentence, and basically on:
ReplyDelete'mechanical causation'
versus the true type of causation identified by Althusser (or good ole Alth if you must -- he committed suicide and I think he also killed his wife -- or the other way round I forget).
Jameson, as I note, was born in Cleveland, OH, like Butler. The OH county!
--- The subtitle of the book you quote from (never overestimate an oeuvre by dropping the subtitle is interesting per se. At present escapes me.
While a long sentence, the Jameson thing includes a few subsentences. It has one 'thus' and a similar marker of 'arguability' (it is an 'argument'). It name-drops a bit: all of the people he quotes he does not provide the first name for -- except for the latter for whom he does provide the first name: "Jack" as it happens.
The problem with a long conversational move is that it resists analysis in Gricean maximal terms:
-- informativeness: I think the passage is pretty informative. (Broad sense of 'informative', without entailment that what one is being 'informed' is the truth).
-- trustworthiness: Jameson is obviously speaking what he holds is 'the truth' (as you would say, Jason) and he seems to have adequate evidence (by his standards). So it's not this he is flouting either.
-- relation. He seems to connect allright. In fact, too allright. He manages to drop 'consumer society' into the bargain profit, or profit bargain.
--- manner (or modus). Here seems to lie the 'problem' or 'issue' as Jameson would prefer. You are right, Jason, that 'avoid obscurity of expression' does not seem to be something these authors (such as Jameson) care for. He uses 'false consciousness' of ideology and Marxist attributions that any Marxist worth the name are bound to know. Since you mention the Dartingtonians who instilled Butleriana to you, perhaps they were out-of-the-closet Marxists, too? (Oddly, Grice was a Marxist of 'sorts': "They work, therefore they exist" he labels 'ontological marxism'). So there's the obscurity mainly. Not so much the ambiguity because these authors (such as Jameson, I'm growing a likeness to his explicitation of the style) care to discriminate senses -- note his reference to the "second" type of thing as enumerated by ... yes, Althusser.
Etc.
p. 11 Routledge, 2008
ReplyDeleteI am not sure the lecturers were Marxists, some were liberals, excessively so, such that I coined an aphorism for one unshockable professor.
"The only thing capable of shocking the ultimate liberal is the shabbiness of his own conduct."
"'the truth' (as you would say, Jason)" - is this going back to 'the rain' - that was not some major position of mine, re: God, etc, was just about the way that every 'It' could be seen as the same 'it...' a little like Borges' dictum that "Every man is William Shakespeare" or (paraphrase) "All books appear to be the work of a single person."
ReplyDeleteThanks. That was a grand adage. Reminds me of Mach, -- the Vienna liberal -- seeing his own reflection (unbeknownst to him) in the mirror of a bus, "Why, that _is_ some shabby chap". He was properly shocked upon revelation. I owe the adage to J. R. Perry, "Personal identity", in PGRICE and conversation.
ReplyDeleteNay, the 'truth' tag was a connection to your v. subtle idea that these authors think they are 'prophets' and that they hold the Truth, but they cannot 'communicate' it. I think you said you thought someone had said that. Will check it out. You repeated the argument twice. I.e. the idea that they are mystics who hold the truth, and that some level of obscurity is the mark of genius? Or something.
ReplyDeleteHmmm.
ReplyDeleteThe point being that I do not regard them as effective communicators.
Butler might refer to her 'audiences' as the Precarious Lives book is written in regular prose.
Perhaps the Jameson and the Butler is part of a move away from writing that is to be quoted by other academics, towards encouraging their fellow scholars to instead refer to their name?
Jason, I think you are right. The more we discuss The Butler and the Jameson we are starting to sound like them. I think they are effective communicators. Don't know much about Jameson -- because perhaps he is not as effective as La Butler is. In the youtube thing you shared with the blog she was very articulate. She did not stammer, was very confident. Used prosodic marks: she emphasised certain points. She was echoing a homophobic ("The boy walked with a very effeminate walk" -- and she, of all people, does the 'effeminate' touch to the gesture). She is crucial in the choice of words. "Yet, they wanted -- these boys in Maine -- to _terminate_ the walk". So I think she effectively communicates what she is thinking. She herself had gender troubles -- as a member of a community in Ohio whose parents and relations identified with Hollywood stars --. Her problem, as you see it, is her writing arm. Perhaps part of the fault is the word-processor. Had she to handwrite what she wrote, perhaps she wouldn't have used 'temporarilty', and 'structure' qua verb and 'hegemony' twice in the same sentence.
ReplyDeleteJameson, as you say, seems a different beast. He quotes more author per sentence, and he manages to quote Althusser _twice_ in the same sentence.
I wonder if he pronounces the 'th' in Althusser as a /t/. I'm sure Butler -- who is fluent in German -- says "altuser'. For some reason, "Althusser" is harder to _read_ than _hear_. Etc.
From the Denis Dutton website then, referred to in other blog entries:
ReplyDelete"The first prize goes to the distinguished scholar Fredric Jameson, a man who on the evidence of his many admired books finds it difficult to write intelligibly and impossible to write well." Follows the quote from his Routledge, 1990 book, p. 1.
Nominator commented it is
"good of Jameson to let readers know so soon what they’re up against.”
Dutton expands:
"We cannot see what the [...] “that” in the sentence refers to."
Thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object.
"And imagine if that uncertain “it” were willing to betray its object?", Dutton exegises.
I'm keeping some of Dutton's comments on 'bad writing' as being 'bad syntax' under this thread, as Jason may want to provide further stuff or commentary. This is from Stephen T. Tyman, “Ricoeur and the Problem of Evil,” from Dutton's webpage and for which he adds:
ReplyDelete"Speaking of shell games, see if you can figure out the subject of that sentence":
With the last gasp of Romanticism, the quelling of its florid uprising against the vapid formalism of one strain of the Enlightenment, the dimming of its yearning for the imagined grandeur of the archaic, and the dashing of its too sanguine hopes for a revitalized, fulfilled humanity, the horror of its more lasting, more Gothic legacy has settled in, distributed and diffused enough, to be sure, that lugubriousness is recognizable only as languor, or as a certain sardonic laconicism disguising itself in a new sanctification of the destructive instincts, a new genius for displacing cultural reifications in the interminable shell game of the analysis of the human psyche, where nothing remains sacred.
Subject = gasp
ReplyDeletewould be my thought on the matter.
It's poetic, to locate all of that stuff inside a gasp.
ReplyDeleteIt is not a well-balanced sentence, though. Particularly bad is the clause that ends with 'settled in', while 'to be sure' is there purely to afford the reader a breath. The final use of 'nothing' is ambiguous, either nothingness remains sacred or nothing at all remains sacred. Have you written on 'nothing'? for the GC? I am probably not giving too much away if I say that 'nothing' is my favourite word in the English language (having said the various stuff about Blanchot way back when).
I loved the title of Warhol's TV show 'Nothing Special' (and intend to call my first book the same)
If you have a copy of Nabokov's Pnin, then it would be worth typing out the first sentence, for comparison, which is a long and perfectly formed statement of brilliant intent.
Otherwise, I will endeavour to retrieve it.
VN:
ReplyDelete"The elderly passenger sitting on the north-window side of that inexorably moving railway coach, next to an empty seat and facing two empty ones, was none other than Professor Timofey Pnin. Ideally bald, sun-tanned, and clean-shaven, he began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his, tortoise-shell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrows), apish upper lip, thick neck, and strong-man torso in a tightish tweed coat, but ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair of spindly legs (now flannelled and crossed) and frail-looking, almost feminine feet."
Wow. That _is_ a brilliant start! I once discussed with Literary (a listserv with Topic) first sentences to novels (favourite ones) and that must be a winner. I submitted, humblier, Isherwood, "I am a camera". Or something -- with its diaphragm closed, I think it goes on.
ReplyDeleteI will write about 'nothing'. Wait and see.
I think your point about 'nothing' being ambiguous in that sentence is a good one. In a way it reminds one of Grice's comment on the Blake (elsewhere in the blog): "Love that never told can be". Grice finds 5 interpretants to that: which is particularly obfuscating because of the use of 'never' which does incorporate 'nothing' (of sorts).
Yes, gasp _is_ the subject.