How to adapt to cultural change | Fredric Jameson

that's the first question about you are between two words the German background and the French word and and you and a back is from Berlin SRE is a French reference but you always been between France and German in jran later the structuralism adoro Benjamin BL but also post structuralism right so the first question Fred as we decide is that you talk a little bit about your personal way of putting together these two words the French uh uh tradition and the German Marxist tradition uh well the first thing you should know is that s sart's family came from um alzas he was a cousin of Albert Schweitzer uh people don't know that and so already there was a German Franco German thing yes okay this um in ual autobiography uh I'm not sure what that is I've tried to write one uh but it didn't work I think Ramon will maybe help me put things together a little better but the main question would be what you think it is and what you want to hear uh and I don't know that either um I would say that um uh my background is really uh as Ramon has uh indicated the 1950s rather than the 60s I started I went to college in 1950 and our post-war uh in terms of culture and literature was the moment of the discovery of modernism I've written about this uh I think that the great modern writers many of whom were dead at that point Joyce and PR and so forth um didn't think of it as modernism they didn't use this word but the word came into being to describe this whole new kind of art in the post-war period uh in the United States and we had the first um critics uh distinctive uh critics of poetry the so-called new critics um for myself the things I was reading uh as a precocious um Youth and a bookworm um uh were above all pound Ezra pound whose politics didn't affect me but whose notion of of world literature uh and the relationship of all these cultures China uh uh the ancient world and so on and so forth um uh was probably quite formative in a lot of ways and the kantos as a project was important to me uh the other thing that we were reading in fact uh at that point I think 1947 maybe 48 uh it said that was Faulkner and all of Faulkner's works at that point were out of print for the French already was a classic they had translated him in the 30s but until his first post-war novel Intruder in the dust 1947 Faulkner was unknown so I read all of Faulkner um uh and many other influences Tomas man and so forth Tomas man played a special part for me in the sense that um Dr Faus his great music novel uh came out right after the war in in English uh um as well as in German uh and I found out that some obscure German philosopher um had played some part in the descriptions of music that man used his musical advisor uh that philosopher turned out to be adorno uh but adoro was completely unknown at that point and and uh and and didn't uh there were no trans ations and very little in German at that point they went back to Germany the Frankfurt School in 1953 so this was a very new thing for Germany too um so that was the that was the literary and cultural uh atmosphere uh uh of that period for me um the other point I want to make is that I did not become an English student or an English major because English departments were very old-fashioned and at in my college for example uh the literature that was taught only went up to the 19th century no joice nothing in the 20th century and so on so forth whereas in French departments I was a French student essentially um we were reading sart we were reading contemporaries living contemporaries and and U uh uh and I became interested uh through the French and what was happening uh in lit and in philosophy in that period and one of my great discoveries uh as a student was the work of sart now people talk about influence it's a very odd idea I I I I think that one is not one is not a chemical who who can be changed by dropping another chemical uh into the into the beaker um uh so I would say rather uh for me S was a recognition a discovery and a recognition of things that I hadn't been aware about before or that I hadn't found articulated before um uh and along with sart came both um certain forms of Aesthetics um and politics uh so those were for me the great uh uh and ontology those were for me the great branches of um uh of philosophy um I've never wanted to make a very great distinction between philosophy and uh literature it seems to me that one reads both they're both a form of um uh enjoyment if you like and um uh and it's not necessary they're both the invention of languages that's what I should say both modern literature each great modern writer it seems to me invents a language an idect I don't agree with wienstein that there are no private languages it seems to me that the great modern writers are all inventors of a different language and as you read you read I don't know DH Lawrence uh little by little you learn this language and then of course you can get tired of it and you move on to something else it's also these are also little religions one has a religion of a modern writer the same is true of the philosophers those languages May not be beautiful philosophical languages I don't know if you think heiger is a is a is a writer of a beauty although he's very distinctive Kant well Kant may not be very lovely uh but uh uh but nonetheless um uh it's it is a it is a specific language that one learns so I think now of of philosophy in that way too that uh one doesn't one doesn't um uh convert to a philosophy uh one doesn't uh um adhere to a philosophy find one's philosophy like a religion uh but rather one learns the code and then one transcodes from one philosophy to another I think I'm probably still deep down profoundly sartrean but I don't particularly use that language So Much Anymore all right now to Ramon's question I I uh it was very normal uh that I should as a French student go to France and spend some time in France but and I was learning a bit of German but uh nothing uh very serious and then I took a trip in Germany and I thought suddenly ah this is another language this is a whole this culture is another language um uh the spaces that remain this is the media postwar period lots of destruction but these spaces are radically different from French spaces and so the next year uh I studied in Germany and those are really my two languages in so far as I speak languages uh with any kind of fluency but what this meant is that um I believe I'm not sure when one should begin this particular story but in the last um 20 or 30 years in the United States because I don't know the situation elsewhere there has been a violent clash in Marxism for example between a French tradition a structuralist tradition uh and a German tradition a dialectical tradition uh people have lined up on either side have attacked the other ones um uh for for various uh for various reasons and so oddly I've always been caught in the middle of this because the French thought that I was too German and the Germans thought I was too French um uh and whereas I feel that um given my conviction about transcoding that these two Traditions have much to say to each other I think of it uh as a uh as the way one goes to an to an oculist an eye doctor and he puts in one lens and then asks you is this clear or is this one clear and so on and I think that each philosophical language each national language as well has a certain zone of clarity and distinctness but there are things it can't say uh and another language has a somewhat different Zone um and there are different things that it can't say um so that uh I think it's clear uh uh for me at least that um there I can say things in French that I can't say in German and vice versa and English is yet another thing and if I knew Spanish well enough I would understand that it had a a specific zone of of articulation of clarity um in which one cannot only say things but re certain realities exist uh and those realities is not that they don't exist for the other languages but um uh but those other realities are more blurred um so so that's a that would be I think a probably what's fundamentally distinctive about my work uh that uh that I have these two Traditions uh and that these two Traditions turn out really to be uh to represent seemingly very different um very different things structuralism on the one hand dialectics on the other but but oddly enough for me these are related the structuralist discovery of oppositions it seems to me uh very closely related to the dialectical use of oppositions and so I think it's useful to pass back and forth uh but the people who don't like that call that eclectic and um uh putting putting contres together well that's enough of that answer I think no it's not enough but we could we could yeah the next question you answered the next question so thank you for the work but um the next question was how can you put together what the books of the years are Marxism and form madoro block Benjamin but you also was studing levest gyas uh I mean bars uh er uh ham left everything so how can you put together formalism and history I mean history meaning you could be we could say in Spanish that you are a formalist or something like that a formala but it's the same with one eye we look at the story with the other eye we look at the forms and you don't you can't I mean you you want to keep both eyes you know so could you repeat the same um problem of having to lens but don't you know what I mean well the the the the first two books after my thesis that I published were called Marxism and form on this German tradition and the prison House of language uh on the French tradition and actually I believe that at least the prison House of language was first translated into Spanish maybe in B I'm not sure Latin America um but they were to be part of a single book and my editor wisely said it's too much cut them in half and um publish him as two books which was a wise decision but it perpetuated this idea that the dialectic was this one thing and that um structuralism was something else um I I think that um maybe I could come at it this way I was um as with all crazes uh uh you know that s dominated French intellectual life from 1945 1944 1945 up until the early 50s I mean it was a massive uh a massive domination in all fields and literature and philosophy and so on the only other the only other figure in the National culture I can think of uh who is comparable would maybe be benedi okochi in in Italy I think that uh in Germany and Spain in the United States I don't see anyone uh who had that kind of influence but what that brings with it is um is a let's say a s fatigue uh and the weariness withart began in the early 50s and was really perpetuated and maybe late mid-50s perpetuated by leevy stross's famous attack on S so there you had this first uh Clash now what I found um and I've never explained this to myself and I've never um examined it scientifically that is I'm going around and doing a real um investigation um uh but what I found was that many sarrians like myself had turned to semiotics now that seems very odd or it seems like an abandonment of a philosophy of freedom for this dry scientific stuff I think so I've tried to explain that to myself I think it has something to do with the very nature of phenomenology itself sart was not just a um an existentialist he was an uh an ontologist um and a phen a phenomenologist and much of the interest of sart's work what made him both a novelist and a philosopher were the descriptions in his philosophy of lived experience not private subjective feelings not OB objective situations but rather um uh the way in which um our experience uh itself is formed as a union of the subject and the object of the subjective and the objective um and so I think some of the greatest things in in San existentialism that's not only s that's meon Sim and so on come from that business of um being able to analyze lived experience um some of the German stuff was brought back to sart as a student by his uh uh classmate who studied in uh Berlin before him and tried to explain to him what this new new German phenomenology was so he said to start here now you can philosophize about this glass of beer um so that's what phenomenology uh brought brought us I think um and that's what interested me now in in a way semiotics pursues that further that is semiotics tries to find languages to to to render more precisely what's going on in experience um and it does so by seeking well I would call them uh ideological motifs they're called seams and ztics but it doesn't matter uh the way in which certain ideological um motifs or themes cross each other in every moment of experience so in a sense um uh that prolonged the uh the sartan um uh the sartan uh experiment uh semiotics and and I think that um it was not inconsistent with it um um and as for uh the German tradition as I say I think the the semioticians and the structuralists when they rediscovered they rediscovered the dialectic when they made the notion of the biner opposition Central uh coming out of their Linguistics so the idea that you never think one thing at a time you think that thing and its opposite uh so s said if I can quote it right um language is a system of differences without positive terms it's a relation ship of negation and of opposition well that's very dialectical that's already in Hegel if you like uh so I I have always felt that these things complemented each other um and since I've mentioned ideology I should say that that that was one of my fundamental always one of my fundamental uh concerns really to pursue the analysis of ideology as that um uh as that is acted out in Daily life uh I think the sociological term values is not a good not a good one delos used to say that's not a good concept that's a bad concept values are these little ideas that are in your head or something uh it seems to me that's not helpful but ideologies particularly when examined through these methods of uh uh of of uh structural oppositions uh that seems to me to be basic and it's basic to politics it's basic to literature since literature itself is a formation of uh an and an expression of ideologies I think it's wrong to think that um uh the only interest that political people like myself have in literature is uh is over denunciation and so forth uh finding out what um uh what kind of bad ideologies are at play in a in a given work so that you can denounce it uh no on the contrary I think uh it's a question of we all have ideologies and it's a question that of uh of seeing articulating making clear uh what is at stake what forms the the essence of a of a particular work were you rem making the you're reming the plan wonderful that what about the glass the something changed in the between the seven and the ' 80s and is that you start to reading more things that than uh literary text the change is that you start to include I mean this first AIC TV series architecture buildings movies so this change has to do a lot with your style and and these days I try to describe this combination in your own style between the global market I mean any sort of cultural artifact This Global you are always traveling all over the world since the 80s more or less China New Zealand Germany South America everything so you have in included in your books all this Global Market full of things TV series you know uh uh buildings things but this global scale it's in one eye but I with my other eye I'm looking you at home with the with not the local type of Rider so you combine this fascinating Supermarket as ter eal said but you are when you come home you are there in front of the small machine not the global machine the small machine the typewriter how can you also combine this crazy life around the world with the small uh craft domestic industry this handicraft because your books everybody knows that you take a lot of time making your your books with this mentality of a craft domestic industry so could you also tell me why I'm looking something with this eye and I'm looking the global the world here and the domestic thing here yeah well that's a number of questions but I would let's begin with mass culture uh writing about film and so forth uh I don't write so much about popular music but there was a moment when I it's very hard to write about music but there's a time when I was immersed in that there I think one has to um credit the fact that whatever whatever else it is the United States and we lots of things and they're not all good but um it is also the the homeland of mass culture itself not just Hollywood but um but uh music and and TV and all the rest of it so as an as a simple fact of life I was always immersed in that now it's interested me um one of my dearest um let's say ideological comrades slavo GIC uh for him also Alfred Hitchcock was sort of crucial and Central and hitchock was Central for me too and I I think that um it has to do with the way in which uh in Hitchcock the whole world of popular films um uh takes on a very special formal concentration uh and uh uh and thus lends itself as a filmic language to analysis I should say that U film has lived an underground language in uh the world of of the intellect since its onset sart uh was taken to the movies for the first time when he was three or four years old by his mother this we're talking about 193 or four or something right um and there's a wonderful passage in his uh oral Memoirs in which he says this is how I first even at this age I had some idea of the concept of contingency contingency is a medieval idea and so forth but has obviously is revived in modern philosophy how is this well because he said in the theator as you see the screen everything on the screen is somehow meaningful then the film stops you go outside cars people of the big city because he grew up in Paris nothing is Meaningful so suddenly I understood the difference between uh meaning and this kind of accent um which was a contingent okay so Jump Ahead to other people I don't know what role Phil played for heiger I doubt if it did but for the Frankfurt School in their Exile in Hollywood uh adorno wrote a lot of nasty things about mass culture and Jazz and so on forth so on so forth but I understand they went to movies every three or four times a week uh bad Hollywood movies of the type he would condemn so um I think in film has been in the background of a great deal of intellectual life without our being aware of it um but it was very important for me to try to find out ways of talking about this film culture which I'm as fully immersed in I would say I figured out once that for the years I first went to films was allowed to go to films by myself say 1943 the theater was down the street they had three sets of three different films a week I went to all of them until 1950 when I went to college so I saw every film made in Hollywood between let's say 1943 or 4 and 1950 that's a lot of films and that that also forms one's um one's uh point of view so uh so that's I think and and then the international side of it comes in from the fact that Hollywood is one of our Great American exports and it's also political uh when we made the Marshal plan uh with uh France for example uh and Germany and and the rest of them um in the treaties the Americans insisted on the admission of American Hollywood films uh a um uh I think um uh it's very difficult for countries uh I mean that's those days are gone but uh it was very difficult for countries after the war to restart their own film industry suddenly all these Hollywood films get dumped on them uh and their fledgling film Industries are destroyed uh Brit Britain had a moment of the so-called elen comedies Hollywood wiped that out and they made uh just conventional things Germany uh was starting to have its own film culture again and that was wiped out and after that they only made what are called Kies that is Edgar Wallace Thrillers of of a low level I should say uh so so um Hollywood was was really a first part of this whole International scene which it was in interesting to look at and how other countries reacted how they managed to make a um a kind of film that was distinctive different from Hollywood well then that becomes part of the story uh really of of uh of comparative literature of world literature as well as uh as the history of um uh of of film um now the other thing about this business of internationalism I think one has to understand that the Cold War itself created internationalism because suddenly all the countries of the world were linked together in this struggle and then you had a third world trying to stay somewhat separate from it uh and that I think is utterly unlike anything that existed in the world before the the the the world before 19 uh before World War II was not linked together in that way um let alone uh the 19th century but suddenly some kind of uh World relationships were uh were unavoidably coming together uh but then you mentioned the DAT 1980 I think this is decisive in 19 around 1980 I think everything changes and I don't know if we should if you want to uh take things up there or shall I go on and say something about break but I will I would like to come back to your room not to the movie theater how how can you put all these things together in front of the machine in in in a I mean in as a composition in compositional terms have you absorbing things during your troubles and when you are at home you suddenly you know compose a SC or how do you work uh well there are mysteries of how what one is attracted to I think one must first first of all analyze one's own uh one's own Fascination by certain things um uh and one can't I that's why I think the idea of a Canon of great works is is not is another bad concept uh one has to I think criticism is always explaining what it is that fascinates you about a certain uh a certain work now as far as um as far as topics for uh criticism for analysis I would say uh that over the years I've come to understand that what is really interesting for me is Nar ative and that novels uh and films have in common maybe other kinds of um uh Arts have that in common I've as I when I in the period when I was looking at architecture I would ask myself how can this uh how can how can architecture be described in narrative terms L had an idea of the trajectory that is a a house a space would be formed by trajectory is that narrative or not uh and maybe later on when we talk about music we can think about that too um and that's why uh and I think that's what these various these seem very different to people but for my mind they're all uh questions of narrative and narrative is then I would say fundamental to personal experience because we tell ourselves the stories of um of these experiences so it's fun fundamental for psychoanalysis uh and it's also fundamental for history what is history but turning brute events into narratives of some kind and the conflict of these narratives with each other uh the stories this I've noticed that all of this emerges in the public sphere in newspapers in on television so on in recent years maybe again this last uh few decades suddenly everybody's talking about narrative they didn't used to do that back in the ' 50s and before what is the narrative The Narrative of these events the president uh gave us this narrative and so on so forth the word narrative uh at least in the United States is everywhere well it's a kind of recognition that uh our um sense of reality is always uh takes the shape of a narrative uh so the difference between these narratives and their clashes because I think much in intellectual life is a clash of narratives it's a conflict of narratives um uh uh is based on that that deeper um I don't want to make an ontology of it but I think that uh uh narrative is a is a very fundamental um uh a very fundamental space for uh for understanding reality or at least it is for me and it's Central in my work do have had another question about the differ between making making movies or an opera or buildings a book is a you something you do at home but you you are trying to go ahead so let's go to the next question okay this is the question about um how do you understand the relation between content and form and as you know you describe this square with four options the first one is the content of the content that means history psychos social realities then we have the form of the content that is ideologies representation of this content then we have the form of the form that means forms pure Aesthetics but you will concentrate in the in the in this corner of the square on the content of the form and it has to do with what you are saying but my question is as I understand stand this corner of the square and I don't know how to say the this in English but in Spanish is you you are not trying uh in this corner of the square what you say to the people is when you are looking for the political meaning of something wait there is a sleep rage a Gap a l so it's like the eyes don't try to put together the two eyes here we have the forms here we have the political but don't try to put together both both eyes fast you know it takes time and sometimes we have to keep the the Gap to keep the luck so could you describe um also in your in your own work how did you put together the content and the form yeah uh it's um this is an opposition which is very often thought to be crude uh and philosophically um uh untenable to speak in these terms for and content certainly an older literary criticism abused this notion uh I found that um well the the the use the Ramon speaks of comes from a linguist a Danish linguist called hamf and he is the first I think really to insist that uh and I don't want to make this too complicated but that uh a work let's say has content uh it it is raw material so you draw you're writing a novel um and you want to draw your raw material from the suburbs uh so the suburbs become somehow the the social content of the work and then you write it in a certain way uh uh uh according to a certain pattern and that's the form well uh what hu said was the content that Suburban life it already has a form inside of it it is formed and the writer uh really does not impose a form on it the writer draws the form out of the very content itself the form of the content and on the other hand so the form of the content is historical that means that there's certain kinds of stories you can't tell about the suburbs uh uh there's certain kinds of narratives that are not there certain kinds of experiences that are not there people live out there in the evening on the weekends but in the in the in the daytime they in the week they go into the city they have where other kinds of experiences are possible and so if you limited yourself to the um uh to the suburbs you would be limited to a certain kind of content which means a certain kind of form um on American television it's all comedies that uh take place in the in the suburbs so but that's that's historical that content the suburbs be began in the United States with the construction of the great highway system by Eisenhower in the uh uh in the early 1950s so that permitted and the expansion of the automobile and so that permitted people to live out in these places which are no longer the older um uh Countryside but are uh this um uh these development projects and so on attached to the city itself um uh and then the things happen in the suburbs so the very nature of suburban life is a historical process and with it um it's um uh uh it's its forms the forms of its experience okay but now there's also the content of the form the novelist itself the novel itself has a has a historical uh has a history uh and the forms the kind of stories that are told uh have their uh have their history as well I think for example of something I've talked about this in other circumstances about melodrama good and evil villains and so on and so forth well there's a period in the 19 century went on on stage um that's a very popular kind of form um and then I think uh this uh this form of waines and um people try to replace it with other other kinds of things so uh history comes in on both sides of this Divine uh both in the history of the suburbs themselves and what can be lived in them and in the form of the narrative uh narratives that you can tell about them and the and the history of the novel so I think that um while uh certainly there are novels whose content is politically important uh and that tell the story of great events and so forth um and I suppose there are forms that are politically uh active certain kinds of documentaries certain kinds of um uh novels which are exposes of of those things um there's another kind of politics and another kind of History which enters by way of these formal questions uh which is the let's say the politics of History itself um it seems to me that um of the great I I don't approve of the idea of a sociology of literature that's not what I do um but the masters of this process I don't include myself such as lukach um what lukach uh uh wrote about was essentially uh the form of um uh of of experience and its relationship to history for lukach the political novel was the historical novel in some sense and so I think that um one comes to a sharper sense of the political meaning of these works by looking at the presence of history in it uh than examining it for um in a very crude way for ideological content and of course that's there but it's not the most important thing the most important thing for me is history really so what about allegory when I suggested to to to talk about allegories because you say that in postmodernism you said it seems to me that allegory is the dominant Concept in the postmodernism book so many people was obsessed with the method you you you took to wrote the when you wrote the book but allegory was as a very important Concept in your career and allegory is not a sybol but you are meaning allegory in a new sense is not the all allegory in which you can um you have a code to to to interpret it to interpretting the for interpreting the the the the elements and you say the new allegory the postmodern allegory you don't have fragments because you're are not part of a hole you have elements and they are isolated they have their own meanings sometimes it's like an uh hallucination you said that but at the same times you try to put together all these isolated elements you have the the tri the tri the impulse to put in in a single in a hole so could you explain better why the concept of allegory is so important for you why did you interpret it did you interpret H Gary's house as allegory Joe uh some movies as allegories some um I mean why did you talk also about the national allegory in the literature of the third world and the debate with with am mat could you explain them why this concept is so important for you yes of course allegory is a very um is a very technical term and comes out of uh uh the medieval period even the CL the the ancient uh period um and I don't want to become too technical with this but it does seem to me that um in uh and one of our problems I think um when we're talking about National allegory is that a country as enormous as the United States I think it may also be true of China uh really doesn't feel the need need um uh to situate itself in the world or at least not consciously whereas it seems to me that in other countries that I've that I've lived in that I've read some of the literature of um part of one's life and one's existence is depends on one's place in the world so I use the word third world this is an essay written back in the 80s maybe one wouldn't say that anymore but I would say that if you're from a smaller country in Africa or whatever the outside world is vital to you I mean it it you you are the fact of your birth in this country with this language um in the force field of other countries um is is not some external uh politics but is uh but is a part of your personal experience uh but everybody wants to separate the personal and the and the objective and the social and so on so forth I think that's a mistake um uh and I put it to you this way I I talked about this concept of national allegory well I think that means that um not only do countries uh uh symbolize themselves in their literature uh their literature is really um uh an attempt to make a picture of what their country is to have some to use uh popular terminology to to discover the identity of their country and thereby themselves now I don't think identity exists I'm sort of a leanian in that respect but but that one tries to have an identity that seems certain so uh so uh in these individual stories there also floats a kind of picture of the world as a whole which is peopled by certain characters who are imaginations uh this totality is something that none of us can see individually from our limited standpoints but we think it nonetheless and we think of the world as a set of uh important characters I mean for example um when I was in China and when I taught in China it seemed to me that the Chinese not view of the world but their National allegory was something like this there was uh China there was the United States with which China was becoming friendly there was the Soviet Union who was the enemy and then there were the Vietnamese who were very ungrateful to them for their because as you know they had a war uh with Vietnam after we did uh so it's as though uh it's as though the world were a stage a set of these Supra individual um uh allegorical personifications and they relationship their individual they they position themselves in this world in a certain place with respect to these larger um National entities which are imaginary of course no one has ever seen the Soviet Union the United States and so forth but but they they take on this fantasmatic existence now if you look inside a country then I think one has a different kind of allegory and that's social classes uh I think people who say that social classes don't exist anymore are completely um blind or aberant I mean but social classes have this allegorical existence for us that is uh we think of the various classes certain we associate C certain kinds of things with a certain class we position ourselves uh with respect to these uh these classes in this internal allegory and then some of that spills over under the external thing now if that's the case if we are always in some imaginary maybe even unconscious way positioning ourselves in the world and creating a an allegorical world around us to position ourselves in then how could that not get into our literature and into the narratives we tell ourselves of course it's there even when you have a film that has nothing to do with foreign countries nonetheless one of my analyses bore on that it it showed how various it was a crime story um there were various police agencies involved and I tried to show that those represented not just a class structure but a sort of afterimage of the uh of the rankings going on in the world itself uh I don't practice this kind of analysis in a dogmatic way Freud said you know uh who invented the analysis of dreams you can't analyze every dream some dreams are incoherent you can't really get at them some dreams very few dreams suddenly you can analyze almost completely well that's true of literature I think it's true of any work of art but surely one of the function of the work of art is to situate Us in the world uh and that means situating us internally with respect to social classes uh and and our Destinies with relation to them and externally uh our own country our own language with respect uh to the outside world um so something like that seems to me a very important um uh thing to uh uh to trace and to follow with one of the last key words we are going to use allegory but what what about a effect you also said in in postmodernism that postmodernism has to do with a new type of emotional ground to tone some sort of schizophrenic and you you predict the weaning of affect but some later some years later you say well affect is not a word it could be Emo because affect is something else and the logic of of of affect is very important and in your recing word you are working a lot with both things allegory and aect so what if you explain a little bit what is your idea of affect connected with the with the year from postmodernism to now um and we l for the last question how do you apply or how do you come to turns with music with bagner or with merer using both allegory and affect well it's um uh this began to appear in some of my Works in in in in this these years around 1980 uh when I started to think of uh of this radical change in economics and Society uh which um following some other people at the time I called post postmodernism postmodernity I wasn't clear about the differences uh in those days and I I I made this unhappy statement of the waning of affc um it was the time when and there were many other things going on I would just say that it seems to me that uh this was the true end of the post-war period when Mrs Thatcher and Reagan and others uh began to um uh apply uh neoconservative politics that is to say cutting taxes deregulation allowing a whole unbridled new capitalism uh to come into being and part of that was of course the absorption of the yeast The Disappearance of the Communist block um and and many other things and above all a transformation of culture it seemed to me that the great modern Works um I would even include Nabokov but then going back back to uh to pound to Joyce Faulkner and so on that they weren't it's not right for somebody to say they're not possible anymore but at least they weren't being produced and a new kind of literature uh was coming into being the the classic music of the modern schernberg Stravinsky all that was being replaced by some new kind of fil glass kind of pop music and so on and so forth influence of Jazz I think Jazz also was transfer so the the 1980s were a a kind of fundamental uh fundamental period Well at that point maybe a little later I got attacked a lot for this phrase by a new you would say a new school of uh of criticism and even politics and philosophy called queer Theory um because they emphasized um this term a effect for their own purposes um uh and they thought that I had misunderstood uh misunderstood the term I don't use it the way Freud used it but I do think it has to do and and and for these people that did too it has to do with a Consciousness a new consciousness of the body um my argument uh about affect really goes back to the mid 19th century uh and it maybe rather outrageously suggests that with the coming into existence of the Bourgeois World a new way of feeling the body came into being uh and that's what I call affect uh and and I thought that being as I told you both a structuralist and a dialectician um you can't talk about affect unless you talk about its opposite what would be the opposite of this new kind of BU feeling uh emotions but I called them named emotions because it seemed to me that they were like objects um sing goddess the wrath of Achilles okay wrath is a thing this anger is kind of reified um and indeed from the very Beginnings you had tables of emotions in Aristotle dart's tretis of the passions the emotions were sort of named and set in relationship to each other as though they were things it seemed to me that okay people are still feel anger feel jealousy and so on so forth but alongside of those that moment of possession by a a named force of that kind there were these nameless things which were the atmosphere of the body so to speak uh let's say a slight depression I feel in this weather and so forth I I feel somehow that things are not right and it's not an emotion it's not named you can't name it but it is a sort of or a feeling of elation of Joy I think what the the people who use affect the most nowadays uh tend to associate with it associated with the rather negative um uh experiences uh above all of melancholy Melancholy has become a very great um uh point of interest in contemporary criticism well I think that's fine but there's also joy and um uh even a manic kind of Joy which is which is an AFF effect and not an emotion so from the mid 19th century on it seemed to me there was a kind of dialectical struggle between these named emotions and a whole new world of affect coming into being and the writers I think who um where you can see this make this diag historical diagnosis were essentially FL and bodair and obviously other ones that one could find because they for the first time it seemed to me tried in their writing to note the um uh the the the movement uh of these strange things called affect this new bodily whole bodily Zone that opened up for literature um and uh transformed I think at least the style of writing of the novel finally in a way dissolved the novel itself in in the mo in modernism um and um uh uh and I think today is uh somehow omnipresent but so my theory of affect had to do with that uh with that opposition now uh music is of course a marvelous place to watch this because um you'll say well music it's always bodily you hear he it it's uh there's a rhythm uh uh you experience it with your body well I think not exactly in that sense I think you would get I think everyone says okay modern music begins with Vagner the pr the Tristan cord the preluded Tristan this is the first uh this is the first moment in which one can really see something new which which really goes on and hasn't stopped uh uh up until our own time um yes because I think what Vagner and chro chromaticism and so on men was precisely aect what Vagner discovered was that music was a could be this um uh this uh instrument for detecting for rendering affect and its Transformations because the other thing one wants to say about affect is that it is immensely variable when passes it's a mood what heiger called shtim one passes from one uh um um tone of aect to another very rapidly and I think suddenly in music that becomes a very interesting thing to explore um when you get to mer for example you have these tremendous mood swings uh by which affect in this uh Perpetual transformation expresses itself okay but then what about emotion well this is where I think you can see it in Opera uh in the area in Veri for example you have the the um the ARA in Opera expresses emotion um jealousy Vengeance love and so forth there you have the very um the very uh um uh instruments by which these named emotions are expressed so if the 19th century in music is this struggle between very and Vagner uh I I would see it along those along those lines um on the one hand this sort of ceaseless play of affect and on the other hand this absolute expression emotion demands expression affect is something else you have this uh this and then one could go on and that interests me now uh but I think it's it's a hopeless task uh to narrativize music what is the what are the N what does music have a narrative which is not which is not linguistic um surely certain kinds of forms the Sonata form was a story adoro interpreted it as uh finally the transformation of contingency accident I I mentioned before into necessity uh and that's what he thought Beethoven shared with Hegel uh uh and that the two were really the the expression of this great moment of uh of of bua of the consolidation of of the boura way of life um I don't know uh is um people have tried to do these things with Linguistics is a is a Melody a sentence uh as in film criticism is a uh is a series of images can that be compared to a sentence probably not I mean one is complete the other but a Melody is somehow complete also so could there be Expressions could there be ways of analyzing um the the the the buried narratives the buried uh affective narratives of Music uh that might be vaguely comparable uh to what one would do in in other circumstances um uh I don't know if the music critics are interested in this kind of thing but I've been led to some of these things and i' I've been vaguely interested in without exactly believing that one could uh could do it but at any rate that's sort of the role of uh that affect has played in some of my recent U work that is affect is another way to history the emergence of affect it's development That's History that's a way of touching on the history of experience of the body and so on and so forth what's happened to named emotions uh emerges in this new way uh it seems to me that's always for me the most important um the most important goal is is history itself so so anyway I invite the audience to read all that you wrote Of Music you wrote on alorian history in Dr Fus you wrote many years ago the four the the preface to jaali political economy of noise and I know you are finishing a whole thing of maler and you also publish this beautiful essay on bagner as allegorist and dramatist no dramatist and allegorist but I was thinking on the paper of this other say on Roop per or trash because you're talking about aects right but what what happened when birie is played in China for example how the reappropriations of European emotions by other countries this question is an improvisation by the way we we never thought about that because you you explain very well this thing with bagner distant Houser by Holton but I was thinking in bagner in China or merer in in Hong Kong or so what happened with music and the global market too how can you I mean China has thousand of children playing bin in pianos so they're like an army MH they will colonize were playing Boven or or prooff they have thousands thousands of people so what all these classic repertoire as the Noels are going to be transformed completely in the future because this new reappropriations of cultural uh tradition so it's an improvisation or or the Chinese will be transformed by this I mean so it's not this is not um this is not so clear the Chinese have a saying had a saying the West cannot understand the beauty of Chinese characters which are this is a whole language and so on and I don't mean that a language that it's obviously a written language but the style of the character uh is a source of aesthetic great aesthetic pleasure in China and um you have uh characters from various centuries that people uh find take great Delight in in watching okay so the Chinese say the westerners cannot understand our characters the the the nature of them and the Chinese cannot understand Bach yeah well now I think the Chinese certainly understand Bach and have produced some very great musicians and for them this conquest of uh uh of western music has been has been very uh very exciting indeed at a moment when uh classical music in the west is is imperiled um I I I uh I have no I I think that this is not a question of um an alien culture anymore I think the Chinese are uh are perfectly comparable to to Western publics and so forth the the uh um but I think it's a it's it's a domain into which that tradition had not yet penetrated and into which like everything else in China it's being very rapidly absorbed and as I say very great musicians are in the process of formation in in China so uh so I'm not sure that that's a a significant uh quite so significant a development and the new book is the ancian and the postmodern on the historicity of forms so we have a new book maybe in on February so between Christmas and February you can read all of the stuff when Utopia and but anyway you have the last war and and you can close I mean there's no way to to look for a good ending so close as your warri I would just explain this title Alexander kuga who I think is a very interesting thinker filmmaker uh philosopher in Germany very I don't know what his role is here in Spain in the United States people don't know his work at all but he said at one point modernism the moderns are in a way our ancients they are to us now what Greece and Rome were to the people of the Renaissance and so on and so forth so I thought this was very interesting that uh we have a we have a sort of closed Tradition now of of with the of the richness of modernism my examples are not numerous I mean I begin with rubben and painting because rubben in a way was the let's say the greatest artist of his time um in in all kinds of ways uh for for his contemporaries uh and then I pick up some things in music but it's not an extensive um but but my idea was to sort of juxtapose the richness of this modern tradition from the Renaissance to the to to to to to World War II let's say with the things that are going on now in television in even in the novel and science fiction and so on and so forth because I think we are in a we are in another period and now we need to know what that period is we need to locate ourselves within it make an allegory of it if you like uh and find out uh uh uh how we uh how things have changed because that's always the historical question and I would like to end with that question aler said you know um the the the main thing is not to produce Solutions but to produce problems solutions anybody can think of and they disappear and so forth uh but producing problems is a very creative act and uh that's what I've tried to do with uh with contemporary stuff is produce the problem of these uh of these new works which are not like modernism so thank Sal [Applause] lot

Channel: Fundación Juan March

Views: 47,606

Keywords: Fredric Jameson (Author), History (TV Genre), EEUU, United States Of America (Country), Filosofía, biografía, Biography (Media Genre), Jean-Paul Sartre (Author), dialéctica, semiótica, Postmodernism, Interview with Fredric Jameson, Fredric Jameson postmodernism, fredric jameson postmodernism quotes

Id: 6oK0W1Gl36s

Length: 67min 38sec (4058 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2015