Signatures of the Visible “Jameson aptly demonstrates why he remains among the most significant literary theorists of the late twentieth century.” Philosophy and Literature Fredric Jameson Signatures of the Visible With an introduction by the author New York and London First published 1992 by Routledge First published in Routledge Classics 2007 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1992 Routledge Typeset in Joanna by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. 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 791.43—dc22 2006031262 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN10: 0–415–77161–7 ISBN13: 978–0–415–77161–0 for Peter Fitting . signatures of all things I am here to read... Ulysses CONTENTS acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 PART I 9 1 Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture (1979) 11 2 Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film (1977) 47 3 Diva and French Socialism (1982) 75 4 “In the destructive element immerse”: Hans- Jürgen Syberberg and Cultural Revolution (1981) 86 5 Historicism in The Shining (1981) 112 6 Allegorizing Hitchcock (1982) 135 7 On Magic Realism in Film (1986) 176 viii contents PART II 211 8 The Existence of Italy 213 notes 315 index 339 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the following essays: “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture”: Social Text #1 (Fall, 1979). “Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture”: Screen Educa- tion #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). x acknowledgments “On Magic Realism in Film”: Critical Inquiry, v. 12, #2 (Winter, 1986). “The Existence of Italy” appears for the first time in this volume. INTRODUCTION 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 world—now mostly a collec- tion of products of our own making—as just such a body, that you can possess visually, and collect the images of. Were an ontology of this artificial, person-produced universe still pos- sible, it would have to be an ontology of the visual, of being as the visible first 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 2 signatures of the visible (thus far) has transformed human nature into this single protean sense, which even moralism can surely no longer wish to ampu- tate. 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 Kant’s categories; or perhaps it would be better to say that memories are first 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 films, 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 thought—how 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 filmic images of the night before stain the morning and saturate it with half-conscious remin- iscence, in a way calculated to reawaken moralizing alarm; like the visual of which it is a part, but also an essence and concentra- tion, and an emblem and a whole program, film is an addiction that leaves its traces in the body itself.1 This makes it inconceiv- able that an activity occupying so large a proportion of our lives introduction 3 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 writing—perhaps we should say, certain kinds of sentences—to 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.2 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 atten- tion, 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 uncomprehend- ingly, 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 medi- ation 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 tech- nologies);3 it is the prose stimulated by the idea of sound, or the sentences that something visual—unfortunately, our only word for it is the image—calls into being by suggestion and by a kind of contamination. We don’t write about these things, it is not a metaphorical representation that the sensory pretext summons but rather something related by affinity, that prolongs the 4 signatures of the visible content of the object in another, more tenuous form, as though to prolong a last touch with the very fingertips. Out of nature, sound and the image will have to involve dif- ferentiation; it is only the single natural tone—the stone you hear through the peculiar dullness of a heavy drop of water, or the “green so delicious it hurts”—that has the power to hold the sensory attention for a time and at some length to fascinate. What is humanly produced must come in twos, by way of articulated contrast; but of course, that way you get two for one. What is however pursued by writing in these other senses is somehow subjectivity itself, which seems to have something to do with the coloration of the instruments, and in particular the ways in which their sounds cross and oddly interfere, making each one separately audible in a piquant simultaneity that at some outside limit actually hurts the ear. Pain is the instrument of this aural pleasure, but it must be the articulated pain of at least two very different kinds of sounds at once. Yet the occasion to say something like this about music does not come very often, and is at best an impoverished pastime. Images on the other hand can be thus endlessly collected, provided it is understood that here also color and coloration— even the degrees of black and white, especially the tonality of the monochrome, which offers something like a translation, and therefore something even closer to language, of the range of separate color—are the true object of the quest, and are what is always described, over and over again, in different words and by way of thoughts that do not look the same.