Allegory, Allegoresis, and Suspiria

JULIAN MURPHET Allegory, Allegoresis, and Suspiria Is ours an especially allegorical age? Do we routinely—if not automatically— reach for further levels of meaning behind every cultural datum? It is a time of excruciating literalness, to be sure, each passing year seeming to diminish the shared connotational repertoire to some bare minimum of available reference points, as the total mass and weave of “text” (now superabundantly audio-visual and digital) exceeds any capacity for collective, let alone individual, incorporation. 1 That sheer proliferation of cultural material, its unstoppable differentiation and diffusion, may well occultly call out for higher-order synthesis and reunification—as if, reassembled aright, the innumerable pieces might be seen to spell out a tale of the tribe. But efforts at doing so—like Propp’s Russian folktales, Levi-Strauss’s “pensée sauvage,” Barthes’s Mythologies, or Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne—are thin on the ground these days; testimony, no doubt, to the impossible scale of the task. Here, indeed, allegory suggests itself as a working solution to the acephalous and multiplying infinity of cultural “stuff” in an ethno-religiously diverse, ever-expanding world population, as some of us desperately strive to work from each centrifugally charged fragment towards a usable collective reservoir of sense. Often enough, of course, the task is done for us by a marketplace of gratifying capital-intensive artefacts whose master code is the prevalent one of surplus value: our attention to the object, and the price of admission, amounting to the not-so- elusive meaning itself. The allegory here catches us in its web and demotes the “literal level” of the text to a mere prop within a ubiquitous cultural drama, namely consumption. Adorno’s mandarin shudder—“Every visit to the cinema leaves me, 1 Perhaps the prime exhibit here comes in Fincher’s Se7en (1995), where Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman) heads to the municipal library to chase up some leads on a serial killer’s criminal deployment of the “seven deadly sins”: stylish close-ups of illustrated editions of Milton, Dante, and Chaucer convince us of nothing so much as the fact that these “classics” can no longer be counted among the communal lexicon of the audience. Affirmations: of the modern 7.1 Murphet: Allegory, Allegoresis, and Suspiria 85 against all my vigilance, stupider and worse”2—surely elicits more than a passing spasm of empathy today. Joshua Clover and Chris Nealon’s grim assurance that “it is not possible to conclude […] that there is some kind of value external to capitalist value” sends salutary shock waves through the edifice of philosophical aesthetics, and recalls us to our ineluctable enmeshment within a unilateral horizon of sense.3 To posit values and meanings over and above this crushingly banal one is to persist with a bankrupt idealism. Everything would indicate that, in the general “dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture,” exchange value has so radically suffused quotidian existence that the older “ontological cleavage of ideal from material values”—once so critical to a conception of “culture” that exonerated and exalted the abstract liberties of bourgeois society over and against the grinding monotony of everyday life—has been stapled shut.4 Indeed, not only the “affirmative” character of culture, but its “negative” character too, once hypostasized by Adorno as the homeopathic relationship of the modernist work of art to the commodity sphere, has vanished without a trace. Commodity fetishism does not, once exposed and comprehended, dissolve in waves of enlightenment; it persists objectively in the ritual of exchange whatever subjective irony one brings to it. Having shifted from a situation of “they know not what they do” to one of “they know very well what they are doing, and they are doing it,” we are increasingly resigned to the fact that the things themselves believe for us—and presumably “mean” for us as well.5 As Jameson has observed, in the obscenity of full postmodernity, the negativity of critique has become a redundancy: Now all the complex and subtle forms of evasive and ideological philosophy shrivelled back down to the original simplicity of the right to 2 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), p. 25. 3 Joshua Clover and Christopher Nealon, “Literary and Economic Value,” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (2017): https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore- 9780190201098-e-123?rskey=XM1qns&result=1. 4 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 48; Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (London: Free Association Books, 1988), pp. 93ff. 5 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 30-31. 86 Affirmations 7.1 make money; while the new climate of cynical reason rendered the exposés and discoveries of ideological analysis unscandalous and even uninteresting: everyone knew it already.6 Nothing needs interpreting; which is a far cry from the ecstatic allegorical cry of “everything means something else,” surely Jameson’s most infectious aphorism.7 The paradox being, of course, that both positions refer to precisely the same historical epoch, our own. Still, rare objects there are which, trapped along with us on this plane of immanence, appear to emanate meanings with some precarious extra-economic foothold, not entirely tethered to the regime of equivalence that is the “cash nexus.” At least, that is the hope of Nicholas Brown, who writes: “if a moment of autonomy with regard to the commodity form is analytically available, if there is something in the work that can be said to suspend its commodity character—then it makes entirely good sense to approach it with interpretive tools.”8 Unavoidably commodities, such works are also (somehow) more than that, and require the application of something other than routine cynical reasoning to draw out their ductile aesthetic heteronomies. It is at any rate those eccentric artefacts, radiating a potentiality for allegorical decryption, that Fredric Jameson wants to feature in the final substantive chapter to his Allegory and Ideology: weird one-off performances, “ephemeral conjunctions,” non-iterable and un-foundational, irreducible to any single interpretive code, yet all somehow showing that “meaningful narratives today, in late capitalist globalization, tend to find their fulfillment in structures that call for allegorical interpretation.”9 Only, in a context of radically compromised “centralization,” and the disappearance of universal master texts, allegory itself—the four levels of Jameson’s adaptation of Origen— is upended and destabilized: 6 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), p. 358. 7 Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (London: BFI Publishing, 1992), p. 11. 8 Nicholas Brown, Autonomy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019) (Kindle Edition), loc. 225 of 5164. 9 Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019), p. 309. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically. Murphet: Allegory, Allegoresis, and Suspiria 87 the old levels enter on a variety of new and impermanent relationships and complex structural readjustments. These can range from the substitution of this or that level with one another, as when a thematic level momentarily takes the place of a textual one; to the relations of identity and difference among the levels, as when the traditional interpretive identification of moral and anagogical levels gives way to a play between the allegorical key and individual or collective motifs, rather than the classic combination of text and allegorical or mystical sense. These displacements are meanwhile unstable and in contemporary texts in perpetual dissolution and recombination in such a way that durable structures cannot be formed. (310-11) Everything still means something else, but it is henceforth undecidable which “thing” is what; without any secure grounding in a stable ontological order of things, allegory tips over into what he calls “allegoresis,” “the reading of a text as though it were an allegory” (xx). Such is the working solution proposed by this book to the paradox of allegory in a world that has disburdened itself of interpretation. Jameson’s analytic instances are, it must be said, curiously disappointing in their evidentiary function; and his presiding opposition (between minimalism and maximalism) signally fails to operationaliZe what he discerns in postmodernity’s “volatile” allegorical matrix. Doubtless this has to do with America as the eye of the geopolitical economic storm, a vantage point from which it becomes impossible to find native symbolic acts—like Bolaño’s 2666 or Krazsnahorkai’s War Is War—of potent allegorical intent, because there aren’t any. As Jameson wrote elsewhere, postmodern globalization can best be felt, allegorically, from the outside: In the displacement of national literature by international or American bestsellers, in the collapse of a national film industry under the weight of Hollywood, of national television flooded by US imports, in the closing down of local cafés and restaurants as the fast-food giants move in, the 88 Affirmations 7.1 deeper and more intangible effects of globalization on daily life can first and most dramatically

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