Jameson - Signatures of the Visible

Jameson aptly demonstrates why he remains among the most significant literary theorists of the late twentieth century.

Philosophy and Literature

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First published 1992 by Routledge

First published in Routledge Classics 2007

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Jameson, Fredric.

Signatures of the visible / Fredric Jameson; with an introduction

by the author.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Motion pictures. I. Title.

PN1994.J29 2007

791.43dc22

2006031262

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN10: 0415771617

ISBN13: 9780415771610

for Peter Fitting

signatures of all things I am here to read

Ulysses

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint thefollowing essays:

Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture: Social Text #1 (Fall, 1979).

Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Screen Education #30 (1977).

Diva and French Socialism: Originally published as On Diva, Social Text #6 (Fall, 1982).

In the destructive element immerse: October #17 (Summer,1981).

Historicism in The Shining: Originally published as The Shining, Social Text #4 (Fall, 1981).

Allegorizing Hitchcock: Originally published as Reading Hitchcock, October #23 (Winter, 1982).

On Magic Realism in Film: Critical Inquiry, v. 12, #2 (Winter,1986).

The Existence of Italy appears for the first time in this volume.

The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer). Pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body. On the other hand, we know this today more clearly because our society has begun to offer us the worldnow mostly a collection of products of our own makingas just such a body, that you can possess visually, and collect the images of. Were an ontology of this artificial, person-produced universe still possible, it would have to be an ontology of the visual, of being as the visible frist and foremost, with the other senses draining off it; all the fights about power and desire have to take place here, between the mastery of the gaze and the illimitable richness of the visual object; it is ironic that the highest stage of civilization (thus far) has transformed human nature into this single protean sense, which even moralism can surely no longer wish to amputate. This book will argue the proposition that the only way to think the visual, to get a handle on increasing, tendential, all-pervasive visuality as such, is to grasp its historical coming into being. Other kinds of thought have to replace the act of seeing by something else; history alone, however, can mimic the sharpening or dissolution of the gaze.

All of which is to say that movies are a physical experience, and are remembered as such, stored up in bodily synapses that evade the thinking mind. Baudelaire and Proust showed us how memories are part of the body anyway, much closer to odor or the palate than to the combination of Kants categories; or perhaps it would be better to say that memories are frist and foremost memories of the senses, and that it is the senses that remember, and not the person or personal identity. This can happen with books, if the words are sensory enough; but it always happens with flms, if you have seen enough of them and unexpectedly see them again. I can remember nothing but conscious disappointment from a visit to a then current Soviet film at the Exeter Theater in Boston over twenty years ago; when I saw it again last week, vivid gestures reawakened that have accompanied me all that time without my knowing it; my first thoughthow I could ever have forgotten them?is followed by the Proustian conclusion that they had to have been ignored or forgotten to be remembered like this.

But the same thing may be observed in real time, in the seam between the day to day; the flmic images of the night before stain the morning and saturate it with half-conscious reminiscence, in a way calculated to reawaken moralizing alarm; like the visual of which it is a part, but also an essence and concentration, and an emblem and a whole program, film is an addiction that leaves its traces in the body itself.should be assigned to a specialized discipline, but also that we could ever hope to write about it without self-indulgence.

Barthes thought certain kinds of writingperhaps we should say, certain kinds of sentencesto be scriptible, because they made you wish to write further yourself; they stimulated imitation, and promised a pleasure in combining language that had little enough to do with the notation of new ideas. But I think that he thought this because he took an attitude towards those sentences which was not essentially linguistic, and had little to do with reading: what is scriptible indeed is the visual or the musical, what corresponds to the two outside senses that tug at language between themselves and dispute its peculiarly unphysical attention, its short circuit of the sentences for the mind itself that makes of the mysterious thing reading some superstitious and adult power, which the lowlier arts imagine uncomprehendingly, as animals might dream of the strangeness of human thinking. We do not in that sense read painting, nor do we hear music with any of the attention reserved for oral recitation; but this is why the more advanced and rationalized activity can also have its dream of the other, and regress to a longing for the more immediately sensory, wishing it could pass altogether over into the visual, or be sublimated into the spiritual body of pure sound.

Scriptible is not however the poetry that actually tries to do that (and which is then itself condemned to the technical mediation of a relationship to language not much more poetic than the doctrine of the coloration of orchestral instruments and the specialized, painfully acquired knowledge of their technologies);content of the object in another, more tenuous form, as though to prolong a last touch with the very fingertips.