Chapter 3: Surrealism Without the Unconscious
The materiality of culture
Jameson starts this one off with a little heat for leftist twitter guys: As a result of "Capitalism, and the modern age," he writes, "it is clear now that culture itself is one of those things whose fundamental materiality is now for us not merely evident but inescapable...it is because culture has become material that we are now in a position to understand that it always was material, or materialistic, in its structures and functions" (67).
Here you could insert that meme of the astronaut looking back at the earth and saying "wait...culture is material?" and the other astronaut is holding a gun and saying "always has been." Probably 100 faves on the table folks.
Anyway. For Jameson this materiality is the basis for the shift away from the antiquated terminology of "genre and form," and toward "media," which, as he notes, more accurately evokes the material conditions that are an inherent feature of any cultural or artistic production. He breaks this down into a nice tripartite schematic: "that of an artistic mode or specified form of aesthetic production, that of a specific technology, generally organized around a central apparatus or machine; and that, finally, of a social institution" (67). As he argues, a given piece of media is not wholly defined by these three dimensions, but these three dimensions need to be addressed in order for any kind of definition to be produced. Culture is a product of its material conditions. Always has been.
This materiality finds its clearest expression in movies: "For some seventy years the cleverest prophets have warned us regularly that the dominant art form of the twentieth century was not literature at all...but rather the one new and historically unique art invented in the contemporary period, namely film; that is to say, the first distinctively mediatic art form" (68). Why this is the case is obvious enough. Making and distributing movies takes a whole bunch of people, technology, institutions, and money. The infrastructure that sustains them as a form is fundamental and obvious in a way that can then be sort of retroactively evident in other forms, like literature. Because books are also material objects, and obviously require a whole bunch of technologies and infrastructure for their production and distribution, but that materiality can sometimes feel a little secondary to or beside the point of a lot of conventional "literary analysis."
So what. Well to link back up with the broader project here, the reason that this materiality matters is that movies, like books, have a relation to "the postmodern" that tends to revert back into the (moralizing) question of style. Certain movies are stylistically "postmodern," and are therefore asked "to serve as some supreme and privileged, symptomatic, index of the zeitgeist" (69). But, as Jameson has repeatedly pointed out already, that's not what we're here to do. And so turning to the materiality of the production of a given bit of media is a useful way to avoid this “moralization” about style he’s so concerned about.
And if we're looking not only to stylistic elements but instead the actual material conditions of production, then for Jameson that means we’re going to be looking at that classic medium we know and love as "video, in its twin manifestations as commercial television and experimental video, or 'video art.'"(69). The big claim in this chapter is that video constitutes the dominant medium of postmodernism, but in classic Jamesonian style he's got a sort of frustrating way of phrasing this. "This is not a proposition one proves; rather, one seeks, as I will in the remainder of this chapter, to demonstrate the interest of presupposing it, and in particular the variety of new consequences that flow from assigning some new and more central priority to video processes" (69). Fine. Have it your way.
Flow
So how he's going to get there is by talking about what makes television work as a distinctive medium. And to do this he's going to use the concept of "flow," borrowed from Raymond Williams. This concept is really useful and Jameson doesn't really define it all that clearly for us, so we can just go right to the source on this one: Raymond Williams introduces this term "flow" in a book on television he wrote back in the 70s, and he uses it to characterize the unending sequencing of programming as the defining feature of television as a medium.
As Williams describes, "In all communications systems before broadcasting the essential items were discrete. A book or a pamphlet was taken and read as a specific item. A meeting occurred at a particular date and place. A play was performed in a particular theatre at a set hour. The difference in [television] broadcasting is not only that these events, or events resembling them, are available inside the home, by the operation of a switch. It is that the real programme that is offered is a sequence or set of alternative sequences of these and other similar events, which are then available in a single dimension and in a single operation" (81). So when we're talking about television as a medium, it’s less about any discrete "item" of television but rather the formal organization of television as such, the flow or sequence of "items" as a whole.
For Jameson, this notion of flow is useful primarily in what it tells us about the relationship between television and memory. As he describes, "Turning the television set off has little in common with the intermission of a play or an opera or with the grand finale of a feature film, when the lights slowly come back on and memory begins its mysterious work...But memory seems to play no role in television, commercial or otherwise...nothing here haunts the mind or leaves its afterimages in the matter of the great moments of film (70-71). Um sir have you ever heard of a little show called The Wire.
Just kidding. But you can probably already see here that Jameson is setting up a problem similar to the one described in the previous chapter, about the collapse of critical distance. If the thing never ends, you can never really theorize it. It's another snake eating its own tail. The more recent transition from "media" to "content" makes this notion of flow even more pronounced. The discrete items matter even less, they're just the stuff that flows through their respective distribution networks. It's evident in the things that streaming platforms try and replicate from classic television: You have to specifically direct Netflix to let you watch the end credits of a show before it fires you into the next episode. It's sort of what's implied when pop critics describe TV shows as "binge-worthy," which seems less about the show itself than how smoothly it accommodates your participation in this more general "flow" of content.
Boredom
So there's this collapse of critical distance that renders television difficult to theorize. But, Jameson posits, this is why we need to turn to "video art." Much in the same way that a study of poetry can yield some interesting insights into the normal and quotidian functions of language, so too can a turn toward experimental "video art" tell us some stuff about commercial television. Here's a fun example of the video art that Jameson has in mind. He asks you to imagine
a face on your television screen accompanied by an incomprehensible and never-ending stream of keenings and mutterings: the face remaining utterly without expression, unchanging throughout the course of the "work," and coming at length to seem some icon or floating immobile timeless mask. It is an experience to which you might be willing to submit out of curiosity for a few minutes. When, however, you begin to leaf through your program in distraction, only to discover that this particular videotext is twenty-one minutes long, then panic overcomes the mind and almost anything else seems preferable (72).
For Jameson, this is a type of boredom that is unique to video art and television, and this has to do with video’s unique relationship "real time." Obviously, literature and movies don't generally operate in "real time" but rather move through a kind of foreshortened fictive temporality: the plot of a movie might take place over several days, but what's represented is the like 120 minutes relevant to the telling of the story. There's another set of terms for this that I'm sure some film studies guy will DM me about on twitter later. As Jameson argues, this is not the case in video art, which doesn't operate in fictive time at all, but rather indexes "the ticking away of real time minute by minute, the dread underlying irrevocable reality of the metre running" (75).
And of course this "real time" is itself strongly informed by the tightly regulated temporalities of our old friend Capitalism. Here he cites E.P. Thompson's "Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” but a more contemporary example (and one that is similarly concerned with "late" capitalism) would be Jonathan Crary's 24/7. In either case, the basic idea is that since industrialization, machines have allowed for a much tighter regulation of time, and therefore a more rigid structuring of both the labour and relaxation time of workers. This has all kinds of weird effects on our relationship to time, leisure, and productivity: Even when we're "off the clock," we're still some tightly regulated amount of time from being back on the clock.
This more regulated "machine time" usually relents when we're watching a movie or reading a book or whatever, but crucially, this isn't how it works with TV. As Jameson argues, "Material or machine time punctuates the flow of commercial television by way of the cycles of hour and half-hour programming, shadowed as by a ghostly afterimage by the shorter rhythms of the commercials themselves" (76). A lot of this has to do with the interface of the television itself. It's not really meant to be the immersive experience of the movie theatre. You're always sort of halfway still in the real world, never fully absorbed into fictive time. This is another thing that has only gotten more pronounced in the time since this book was published: David Lynch describes this problem really succinctly here.
Logo
So he gives another description of "video art," this one of a piece called (no joke) alienNATION. It sounds extremely '90s:
"[the video features] experimental mice, voice-overed [sic(?!)] by various pseudoscientific reports and therapeutic programs...then science fiction footage...optical effects, children's blocks and erector sets, reproductions of classical paintings, as well as mannequins, advertising images, computer printouts, textbook illustrations of all kinds, cartoon figures rising and falling" (80)
What's interesting about the video for Jameson is that it's hard to say what, if anything, this piece is "about." If you try to apprehend it through a more conventional "filmic analysis" type lens it doesn't really yield all that much. The juxtaposition of, say, classical paintings and cartoons might sort of evoke a more general thematic of the distinction between "high culture vs. low culture," but it doesn't seem to be actually saying anything about that distinction.
Again, the reason for this is that the figures portrayed in the video (the paintings, the advertising, the cartoons) are not so much meant to be read on their own terms but rather interpreted as "logos," each vaguely gesturing toward the historical context from which they've been clipped. As Jameson describes, the logo "is something like the synthesis of an advertising image, a sign or emblem which carries the memory of a whole tradition of earlier advertisements within itself in a well-nigh intertextual way"(85). The idea here is a loss of specificity. He doesn't say which paintings are shown in the video but as "logos" they'd all be flattened out as allusions to the idea of "classical paintings" more generally.
So the real action of the video is in this rapid and seemingly random "flow" of intertextual logos. And there isn't really a good "traditional" analytic framework for figuring out how to interpret what that is supposed to "mean" in any conventional sense:
the terminology and nomenclature of the traditional models do not register what surely becomes a fundamental property of the stream of signs in our video content: namely, that they change places; that no single sign ever retains priority as a topic of the operation; that the situation in which one sign functions as the interpretant of another is more than provisional, it is subject to change without notice (87).
So okay: Is that what the piece is about? It's a kind of meta thing about our weird impulsive need to find "meaning" in a random string of signifiers? There's definitely a kind of pressure imposed by the constant shifting of signs and logos, the demand that the viewer decodes their relationship, determining the relative cultural impact of sci-fi vs. cartoons vs. classical music vs. advertising. After all, Jameson points out, this impossible search for meaning is in itself obviously fairly alienating.
But this would be a pretty unsatisfying read. Jameson points to two reasons why: First, he notes that "alienation is, first of all, not merely a modernist concept but also a modernist experience" (90). More substantively, though, if alienation is itself a modernist experience, then the insight that "life is alienating" is itself recontextualized not as a theme but just another sign or logo, just like the laboratory mice or the high vs. low culture distinction, ideas that the video evokes and gestures toward more or less ironically. As he summarizes, "these ‘themes’ are corny...but not old-fashioned enough to be camp" (90).
This is the point that Jameson wants to make about video art: the videotape is "a structure of sign flow which resists meaning, whose fundamental inner logic is the exclusion of the emergence of themes as such in that sense, and which therefore systematically sets out to short-circuit traditional interpretive temptations...whatever a good, let alone great, videotext might be, it will be bad or flawed whenever such interpretation proves possible, whenever the text slackly opens up just such places and areas of thematization itself" (92).
Production/Reproduction
So is video art fundamentally uninterpretable? Not necessarily, it turns out: "Another way of interpreting such a tape is conceivable…an interpretation that would seek to foreground the process of production itself rather than its putative messages, meanings, or content" (95). Rather than pointing to the content of the tape, which as discussed above really is just a random string of signifiers or logos that seem to actively resist any attempt at understanding, you can instead look to the process of its production.
This seems plausible. As the earlier portion of this chapter worked to describe, the general trend of art from "genre and mode" to "media" could suggest the growing importance of the actual technologies of production, even positioning them as the "subject" of the work they serve to produce.
The problem with this method of interpretation, though, is that it would basically flatten out all video art to be about the same thing: "if all videotexts simply designate the process of production/reproduction, then presumably they all turn out to be 'the same' in a particularly unhelpful way" (95).
Jameson's not going to solve this one for us. In fact, this particular bind is why video art and TV are the definitive media of postmodernism, which signals the end of "interpretation," at least in the conventional sense, alongside historicization. As Jameson describes, "we are left with that pure and random play of signifiers that we call postmodernism, which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts— such is the logic of postmodernism in general, which finds one of its strongest and most original, authentic forms in the new art of experimental video" (96) Ooof. Now that is grim.
Be sure to tune in next week, when I'll have some more fragments of preexistent texts to shuffle around for you.