Chapter 6: Utopianism After the End of Utopia
Ballard
So up until now, we've been talking a lot about the particular problems that the postmodern poses to ideas like "history" and "ideology." We've seen what Jameson has characterized as a kind of "historical deafness" represented by Warhol's floating shoes and Nam June Paik's unwatchable T.V. arrangements. These are works that are on some level meant to be disorienting and contextless in the way postmodernism is disorienting and contextless.
But what we haven't yet really talked about is that all of this weird disorientation and contextlessness is also tremendously sad. Here Jameson turns to J.G. Ballard's "Voices of Time," a story that (like a lot of Ballard's work) is really interested in entropy and decay, as well as this new "spatialized" conception of time: The story is built in part around this extraterrestrial signal that is understood to be a kind of countdown to the end of the universe. The temporal dimension of this signal is rendered in explicitly spatialized terms: "Every particle in your body, every grain of sand, every galaxy carries the same signature."
For Jameson, this pairing of entropy and the "spatialization of the temporal" can be read as an expression of this loss of the utopian project of modernism: "what is mourned is the memory of deep memory; what is enacted is a nostalgia for nostalgia, for the grand older extinction questions of origin and telos, of deep time and the Freudian Unconscious...forms whose Absolutes are no longer audible to us, illegible hieroglyphs of the demiurgic within the technical world" (156).
So not only does the postmodern register a transformation of capitalism's underlying cultural logic, but it also registers this kind of mourning process for modernism, which, for all of its problematically universalizing tendencies (which have been critiqued ad nauseam over the course of the poststructural turn), was also aspirational and utopian to a degree that seems sort of impossible to imagine now. What makes stuff like Warhol's soup labels etc all sort of vaguely depressing is that they register the loss of this "utopian impulse," or ability to coherently imagine some kind of future.
As you might expect, this is no good. But it does set up an interesting project for this chapter. Jameson "wants to insist very strongly on the necessity of the reinvention of the Utopian vision in any contemporary politics: This lesson...is part of the legacy of the sixties which must never be abandoned in any reevaluation of that period and our relationship to it" (159).
Politics
Okay: so Jameson's suggestion that we need to somehow reinvent the utopian vision in the postmodern moment again raises the question for us of how exactly postmodern "art" can interface with "politics" more generally. Thus far prospects have looked pretty bleak. As suggested by the discussion of Warhol way back in chapter 1, Postmodernism's characteristic tendency toward imagery without substance really foreshortens its political efficacy. Warhol can show you the shoes, the coke bottles, the soup labels, and you go, "right yeah, commodity fetishism or whatever." But there's no real bite to it. It's only gesturing in the direction of something that feels like criticism.
But this is where Jameson's careful positioning of Postmodernism as a cultural "dominant" starts to pay off. Because "domination" implies a little space for "oppositional culture." Here:
the totalizing account of the postmodern always included a space for various forms of oppositional culture: those of marginal groups, those of radically distinct residual or emerrgent cultural languages, their existence being already predicated by the necessarily uneven development of late capitalism, whose First World produces a Third World within itself by its own inner dynamic. In this sense postmodernism is "merely" a cultural dominant (159).
This is a push-and-pull that has become only more pronounced and obvious. Marginalized people resist the dominant cultural logic, and the dominant cultural logic in turn works to subdue and incorporate their resistance. It's a tension we're probably all extremely familiar with; It sucks!
Utopia
In the context of this chapter, though, Jameson is interested in a sort of narrower angle on the intersection of art and politics: the political potentialities organized around identifying the "utopian impulses" of Postmodern society.
Typically, though, Jameson has a kind of weird way of trying to get there: where the utopianism of the 1960s served to produce "a vital range of micropolitical movements (neighbourhood, race, ethnic, gender, and ecological) whose common denominator is the resurgent problematic of Nature in a variety of (often anticapitalist) forms" (160), Jameson argues that each of these utopian visions can also be approached spatially: They form a range of Utopias in which "the transformation of social relations and political institutes is projected onto the vision of place and landscape, including the human body" (160).
Which, sure. This seems trivially true on its face, even if we don't generally think about it in these terms: Utopian visions of society do generally at least imply a reorganization of space. And while spatialization never really seemed like the central goal or project of any of the 60s utopian projects, I guess they weren't exactly not about space.
Robert Gober
Okay so what. Well here Jameson turns to Robert Gober's "Untitled Installation" pictured above. The Gober installation is essentially a bunch of other, older pieces, arranged in a room: Gober’s own untitled wooden door and doorframe (1986-88), a painting called Lake Tahoe, California (1867) by Albert Bierstadt, a handwritten joke from 1988 by Richard Prince, and a piece called Moss Bed, Queen (1986–88) by Meg Webster that Jameson just refers to as a "mound".
Here's the joke if you're interested. It's pretty good:
Anyway. This piece is similar to some of the stuff by Paik that we've been talking about already, where the point of the installation has more to do with the arrangement of elements than any individual part of it: You don't watch any one of the Paik T.V.s, and to just walk through the Gober installation and look at the joke, then the painting, then the moss thing as if it were just a room in an exhibit would be to sort of miss the point.
Well so what is the point: Well Jameson says that he is "tempted to suggest that [Gober's work is] a form of conceptual art [that] constructs, not an already existing concept... but rather the idea of a concept that does not yet exist" (162-63).
Sounds vague! Note that this is sort of different from the "material thought" stuff from the fourth chapter's discussion of Frank Gehry's house. Here, the irreducible spatialization of Gober's installation is not an "answer" to a specific problem, it is rather an effort to produce something like the conditions under which some new kind of thinking can emerge.
As Jameson describes, the installation is "meant to stress, over against the deconstructive operation, the production of a new kind of mental entity, but at the same time to exclude the assimilation of that entity into any kind of positive representation, and in particular to sketch for an 'affirmative' architecture" (165).
Crucially, this "new mental entity" is produced somewhere in the tension between the irreducibly heterogeneous and social nature of its various constituent elements, and the singular authorship of its spatialization. The most basic parameters of the work itself, its authorship and dimensions etc, become difficult to conceptualize at all once you start to think about it. Jameson describes this problem really well:
all of these distinct artistic materials, which emit their own discordant formal and material voices, also here summon up the ghostly, but social, presence of real human collaborators, who raise again the issues of the individual intention, along with the nonsolution of "signatures"... Meanwhile, the door off its hinges continues to urge us to put all this back together, all the while inscribing itself as disjoined, as we gradually get it through our heads that producing a concept is uncomfortably different from merely having one, or even thinking one through.
He's right, it is difficult. And that difficulty is the point: In the same way that utopianism is a sort of orientational precondition for the formation of a new type of politics or political organization, so too might the "production of a new kind of mental entity" examined here offer the precondition for the emergence of a new kind of politics that resists assimilation— and through which we might map an escape from the dominating logic of late capitalism.
allegory
So okay. The seemingly irresolvable spatial problem posed by the Gober piece, in which we are effectively being asked to generate a whole new conception of what constitutes a "work," signifies, for Jameson, either the re-emergence or re-invention of allegory and allegorical interpretation, which, as he notes, "any future historians of our own cultural and theoretical moment are bound to consider significant and symptomatic" (167).
Since the publication of this book, Jameson has written extensively (and, in my view, really compellingly) on allegory, most recently in 2019's Allegory and Ideology, but the most salient insight for our purposes here has to do with the distinction he draws between the allegorical and the Symbol. As he writes, "the displacement of modernism by postmodernism can also be measured and detected in the crisis of the older aesthetic absolute of the Symbol, as its formal and linguistic values secured their hegemony in the long period from romanticism to New Criticism and the canonization of 'modernist' works in the university system in the late 1950s" (167).
To put it a little crudely, the idea is that the totalizing logic that governed "modernist" literary interpretation enabled these really tight relationships between literary "symbols" and what they're meant to symbolize. I remember having profs in my undergrad that had these really rigid understandings of like, what the lighthouse in To The Lighthouse "meant," as if the various elements of any novel had this really clean 1:1 correspondence with some fixed meaning outside of the text.
Allegory, by contrast, takes for granted that no such clean and definitive signification is possible. As Jameson argues, the allegorical "can be minimally formulated as the question posed to thinking by the awareness of incommensurable distances within its object of thought, and as the various new interpretive answers devised to encompass phenomena about which we are at least minimally agreed that no single thought or theory encompasses any of them" (168).
We've seen this already, in the shifting, unfixable "meaning" of the AlienNATION videotext, the Nam June Paik stuff, and again here with Gober, where we find "a constant movement from one item to another in which each term, as it confronts one of the other three, finds its value and its meaning subtly or not so subtly modified" (168). These works are allegorical, in the sense that they take for granted the fact that the present cultural moment is irreducible to a singular interpretive logic.
And this, for Jameson, signals the quiet emergence of a new kind of clandestine political organization pulled together by this new utopian impulse:
in our time, where claims of the officially political seem extraordinarily enfeebled and where the taking of older kinds of political positions seems to inspire widespread embarrassment, it should also be noted that one finds everywhere today— not least among artists and writers— something like an unacknowledged "party of Utopia": an underground party whose numbers are difficult to determine, whose program remains unannounced and perhaps even unformulated, whose existence is unknown to the citizenry at large and to the authorities, but whose members seem to recognize one another by means of secret Masonic signals. One even has the feeling that some of the present exhibitors may be among its adherents" (180).
[Giving you the secret spatialized utopianism nod] See you next week.