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But in that case it is only consequent to reject moralizing condemnations of the postmodern and of its essential triviality when juxtaposed against the Utopian "high seriousness" of the great modernisms: judgments one finds both on the Left and on the radical Right. And no doubt the logic of the simulacrum, with its transformation of older realities into television images, does more than merely replicate the logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it. Meanwhile, for political groups which seek actively to intervene in history and to modify its otherwise passive momentum (whether with a view toward channeling it into a socialist transformation of society or diverting it into the regressive reestablishment of some simpler fantasy past), there cannot but be much that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural form of image addiction which, by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts, effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change to fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm, from visions of "terrorism" on the social level to those of cancer on the personal. Yet if Postmodernism is a historical phenomenon, then the attempt to conceptualize it in terms of moral or moralizing judgments must finally be identified as a category mistake. All of which becomes more obvious when we interrogate the position of the cultural critic and moralist; the latter, along with all the rest of us, is now so deeply immersed in postmodernist space, so deeply suffused and infected by its new cultural categories, that the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable.
[...] What must first be observed, however, is that most of the political positions which we have found to inform what is most often conducted as an aesthetic debate are in reality moralizing ones that seek to develop final judgments on the phenomenon of Postmodernism, whether the latter is stigmatized as corrupt or, on the other hand, saluted as a culturally and aesthetically healthy and positive form of innovation. But a genuinely historical and dialectical analysis of such phenomena -- particularly when it is a matter of a present of time and of history in which we ourselves exist and struggle -cannot afford the impoverished luxury of such absolute moralizing judgments: the dialectic is "beyond good and evil" in the sense of some easy taking of sides, whence the glacial and inhuman spirit of its historical vision (something that already disturbed contemporaries about Hegel's original system). The point is that we are within the culture of Postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt. Ideological judgment on Postmodernism today necessarily implies, one would think, a judgment on ourselves as well as on the artifacts in question; nor can an entire historical period, such as our own, be grasped in any adequate way by means of global moral judgments or their somewhat degraded equivalent, pop psychological diagnoses. On the classical Marxian view, the seeds of the future already exist within the present and must be conceptually disengaged from it, both through analysis and through political praxis (the workers of the Paris Commune, Marx once remarked in a striking phrase, "have no ideals to realize"; they merely sought to disengage emergent forms of new social relations from the older capitalist social relations in which the former had already begun to stir). In place of the temptation either to denounce the complacencies of Postmodernism as some final symptom of decadence or to salute the new forms as the harbingers of a new technological and technocratic Utopia, it seems more appropriate to assess the new cultural production within the working hypothesis of a general modification of culture itself with the social restructuring of late capitalism as a system.
god i love his brain
Postmodernism raises questions about the appetite for architecture which it then virtually at once redirects. Along with food, architecture may be thought to be a relatively late taste among North Americans, who know all about music and story telling, have been less interested in eloquence, and have sometimes painted small, dark, secret pictures for suspicious purposes, redolent of superstition or the occult. But until very recently they have not wanted -- for good reason! -- to think much about what they were eating; and as for built space, there too a protective narcosis has long reigned, a don'twant-to-see-it, don't-want-to-know-about-it attitude that may, on the whole, have been the most sensible relationship to develop with the older American city. (Postmodernism would then be the date on which all that changed.) The immediate postwar heritage of this virtually natural or biological species protection has been the diversion of such aesthetic instincts (a very doubtful thing to call them) into instant commodification -- fast foods, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the kitch interior decoration and furniture for which the United States is famous and which has been explained as a kind of security blanket -- chintz of the first postwar domestic production -- designed to ward off memories of the depression and its stark physical deprivations. But you can't start again from scratch; and everything after that -- in the so-called Postmodernism, long after the depression has been forgotten save as the pretext for Reagan's comparison of himself with FDR -- has had to build on those unpromising commercial beginnings. As though it had studied under Hegel, therefore, the postmodern lifts up, and cancels, all that junk (Aufhebung), including the hamburger within the diremption of its gourmet meals and Las Vegas within the rainbow-flavor landscape of its psychedelic corporate monuments.
jesus
At this point, however, interpretation has turned around in production, and reception has begun to be recycled as use. This particular dialectical reversal -- which might also be taken as the very opposite of Luhmann's processes of infinite fission and differentiation, in which all of those new microscopic subsystems are now powerfully reassembled into a unified form of praxis -- is perhaps the most interesting the nouveau roman has to offer, and the most historically original feature of its innovations (about which it seems less significant that they may themselves already have passed into history as so many false starts or unsuccessful patents). I want to argue, in particular, that it is the linguistic focus of Simon's "new novels" that uniquely -- and for one long moment, the one in which we read these texts -- renders reception (or consumption) indistinguishable from production. We have to read these sentences word by word, and that is something already fairly unusual (and painfully unfamiliar) in an information society in which a premium is placed on briefing and instant recognition, so that sentences are either skimmed or preprepared for rapid assimilation as so many signs. The discipline of the word by word (Simon's own expression, by the way) is enforced by the practice of cross-cutting, the possibility that the subject may change without warning at any minute. There is, in any case, no point whatsoever to speed-reading books of this kind; they have no supplemental content or information to offer us, nothing to store up and carry away, not even anything to find out (as at the end of a mystery story), unless it is the one simple tragic discovery that there is nothing to find out in the first place.
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Now the polemic is given another, supplementary turn: for it follows, according to Michaels, that since Dreiser's is a work of absolute immanence to the market, Dreiser criticism can only dishonestly exhibit these texts as the market's critique. Suddenly, therefore, we are confronted with the unexpected reemergence of one of the central problematics of all radical or Marxist literary or cultural criticism: namely, how the negative is to be conceived in practice and, in particular, how one can impute critical value to works that are ideologically or representationally complicitous with the "system." What is at first blush politically shocking in Michaels, then, is not the evaluation of Dreiser himself (despite the writer's conscious ideological positions). It is what was shocking in a classic version of this debate which turned on a writer fully as ambiguous as Dreiser, namely, Balzac, in whose works commodity lust is also very much an issue, along with Tory fantasies of landed squireship and overt monarchist positions (of a very different complexion from Dreiser's). One is, I think, permitted to disagree with Marx and Engels and to judge Balzac to be far more deeply corrupt and irrecuperable than they thought (although in that case their position -- that Balzac was able to register contradictory social forces more acutely than merely "liberal" writers -- is the more complicated and interesting one). What is probably more shocking about such discussions in The Gold Standard is the very presence of this problematic itself, which has never interested formalist or aestheticist criticism and which we thought belonged to us: that the "other side" should now draw up its battle lines on our own terrain -- and offer to fight it out on matters of literary and cultural "subversion" or negative, critical value -- is now even more alarming that the appropriation of those economic materials and topics mentioned earlier and hitherto associated with the Left. Doubts about the viability of critical and mostly dialectical models of the negative function of culture have, of course, come to be widespread in the poststructural period: but they have mostly been expressed by writers who remained political and "hommes de gauche," and whose "methods," like deconstruction, promised to be more subversive and more "revolutionary" than the traditional ones. But Michaels no longer raises, I think, any more than the New Historicism in general, any claim of "revolutionary" or subversive value for his own work.
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[...] There is certainly a Marxist practice of politics, but political thinking in Marxism, when it is not practical in that way, has exclusively to do with the economic organization of society and how people cooperate to organize production. This means that "socialism" is not exactly a political idea, or, if you like, that it presupposes the end of a certain political thinking. It also means that we do have our homologues among the bourgeois thinkers, but they are not the fascists (who have very little in the way of thought in that sense, and have in any case become historically extinct), but rather the neoliberals and the market people: for them also, political philosophy is worthless (at least once you get rid of the arguments of the Marxist, collectivist enemy), and "politics" now means simply the care and feeding of the economic apparatus (in this case the market rather than the collectively owned and organized means of production). Indeed, I will argue the proposition that we have much in common with the neoliberals, in fact virtually everything -- save the essentials!
lol
We must suspect, therefore, that essentialist defenses of the market in reality involve other themes and issues altogether: the pleasures of consumption are little more than the ideological fantasy consequences available for ideological consumers who buy into the market theory, of which they are not themselves a part. Indeed, one of the great crises in the new conservative cultural revolution -- and by the same token one of its great internal contradictions -- was displayed by these same ideologues when some nervousness began to appear over the success with which consumer America had overcome the Protestant ethic and was able to throw its savings (and future income) to the winds in exercising its new nature as the full-time professional shopper. But obviously you can't have it both ways; there is no such thing as a booming, functioning market whose customer personnel is staffed by Calvinists and hardworking traditionalists knowing the value of the dollar.
heh
This interpenetration by way of the content is then augmented in a somewhat different way by the nature of the products themselves: one's sense, particularly when dealing with foreigners who have been enflamed by American consumerism, is that the products form a kind of hierarchy whose climax lies very precisely in the technology of reproduction itself, which now, of course, fans out well beyond the classical television set and has come in general to epitomize the new informational or computer technology of the third stage of capitalism. We must therefore also posit another type of consumption: consumption of the very process of consumption itself, above and beyond its content and the immediate commercial products. It is necessary to speak of a kind of technological bonus of pleasure afforded by the new machinery and, as it were, symbolically reenacted and ritually devoured at each session of official media consumption itself. [...]
ooo this makes me think of neil's routine of going through credit card offers
European books, movements, and art films; a lonely and premature political rebel or theorist like C. Wright Mills: such, in retrospect, seems to be the balance sheet of fifties culture. All the rest is Peyton Place, bestsellers, and TV series. And it is indeed just those series -- living-room comedies, single-family homes menaced by Twilight Zone, on the one hand, and gangsters and escaped convicts from the outside world, on the other -- that give us the content of our positive image of the fifties in the first place. If there is "realism" in the 1950s, in other words, it is presumably to be found there, in mass cultural representation, the only kind of art willing (and able) to deal with the stifling Eisenhower realities of the happy family in the small town, of normalcy and nondeviant everyday life. High art apparently cannot deal with this kind of subject matter except by way of the oppositional: the satire of Lewis, the pathos and solitude of Hopper or Sherwood Anderson. Of naturalism, long after the fact, the Germans used to say that it "stank of cabbage"; that is, it exuded the misery and boredom of its subject matter, poverty itself. Here too the content seems somehow to contaminate the form, only the misery here is the misery of happiness, or at least contentment (which is in reality complacency), of Marcuse's "false" happiness, the gratifications of the new car, the TV dinner and your favorite program on the sofa -- which are now themselves secretly a misery, an unhappiness that doesn't know its name, that has no way of telling itself apart from genuine satisfaction and fulfillment since it has presumably never encountered this last.
Yet if history is discreetly evoked and invoked in Something Wild, it is rather its opposite -Nature -- which is given us as the overall frame and inhuman, transhuman perspective in which to contemplate the events of Blue Velvet. The father's stroke, which opens the film like an incomprehensible catastrophe -- an act of God which is peculiarly an act of scandalous violence within this peaceful American small town -- is itself positioned by David Lynch (director of Eraserhead and Dune) within the more science fictional horizon of the Darwinian violence of all nature. From the shot of the father lying paralyzed, the camera withdraws into the bushes surrounding the house, enlarging its microscopic focus as it does so, until we confront a horrible churning which we take first and generically, in good horror-film format, to be the hidden presence of the maniac, until it proves to be the mandibles of an insatiable insect. The later insistence on robins with worms twisting desperately in their beaks also reinforces this cosmic sense of the dizzying and nauseating violence of all nature -- as though within this ferocity without boundaries, this ceaseless bloodshed of the universe as far as the eye can see or thought can reach, a single peaceful oasis had been conquered by the progress of humanity and whatever divine providence guided it; namely -- unique in the animal kingdom as well as in the horrors of human history as well -- the North American small town. Into this precious and fragile conquest of civilized decorum wrenched from a menacing outside world, then, comes violence -- in the form of a severed ear; in the form of an underground drug culture and of a sadomasochism about which it is finally not yet really clear whether it is a pleasure or a duty, a matter of sexual gratification or just another way of expressing yourself.
History therefore enters Blue Velvet in the form of ideology, if not of myth: the Garden and the Fall, American exceptionalism, a small town far more lovingly preserved in its details like a simulacrum or Disneyland under glass somewhere than anything the protagonists of Something Wild were able to locate on their travels, complete with high-school leads on the order of the most authentic fifties movies. Even a fiftiesstyle pop psychoanalysis can be invoked around this fairy tale, since besides a mythic and sociobiological perspective of the violence of nature, the film's events are also framed by the crisis in the paternal function -- the stroke that suspends paternal power and authority in the opening sequence, the recovery of the father and his return from the hospital in the idyllic final scene. That the other father is a police detective lends a certain plausibility to this kind of interpretation, which is also strengthened by the abduction and torture of the third, absent, father, of whom we only see the ear. Nonetheless the message is not particularly patriarchal-authoritarian, particularly since the young hero manages to assume the paternal function very handily: rather, this particular call for a return to the fifties coats the pill by insistence on the unobtrusive benevolence of all these fathers -- and, contrariwise, on the unalloyed nastiness of their opposite number.
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