THE ANCIENTS AND THE POSTMODERNS On the Historicity of Forms FREDRIC JAMESON THE ANCIENTS AND THE POSTMODERNS THE ANCIENTS AND THE POSTMODERNS N FREDRIC JAMESON Y VERSO London • New York First published by Verso Books 2015 © Fredric Jameson 2015 Author and publisher would like to acknowledge the prior appearance of earlier versions of certain chapters in the following publications: Chapter 2, Modernist Cultures 8: 11 (2013); Chapter 4, Andrew Horton, ed., The Last Modernist: The Films ofTheo Angelopolous (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1997); Chapter 5, Critical Inquiry 1: 33 (2006); Chapter 6, D. Kellner and S. Homer, eds., Fredric jameson: A Critical Reader (London: Palgrave, 2004); Chapter 7, New LeftReview 64 Quly-Aug. 2010); Chapter 10, Criticism 52: 3-4 (Summer/Fall 2010); Chapter 11, New LeftReview 71 (Sept.-Oct. 2011); Chapter 12, New LeftReview 75 (May-June 2012); Chapter 13, London Review of Books 34: 22 (22 November 2012) All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 57 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-593-8 (HC) eiSBN-13: 978-1-78168-594-5 (US) eiSBN-13: 978-1-78168-744-4 (UK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jameson, Fredric. The ancients and the postmoderns I Frederic Jameson. pages em Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78168-593-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Modernism (Aesthetics) 2. Art, Modern. I. Tide. BH30l.M54J36 2015 700.9-dc23 2014048484 Typeset in Garamond by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall Printed in the US by Maple Press for Ranjana Khannaand Srinivas Aravamudan Contents PART ONE: OUR CLASSICISM I Narrative Bodies: Rubens and History 3 2 Wagner as Dramatist and Allegorist 31 3 Transcendence and Movie Music in Mahler 67 PART TWO: LATE MODERNISM IN FILM 4 Angelopoulos and Collective Narrative 131 5 History and Elegy in Sokurov 149 6 Dekalog as Decameron 161 PART THREE: ADAP TATION AS EXPERIMENT IN THE POSTMODERN 7 Eurotrash or Regieoper? 181 8 Altman and the National-Popular, or, Misery and Totality? 205 9 A Global Neuromancer 221 I 0 Realism and Utopia in The Wire 239 I I The Clocks of Dresden 255 12 Counterfactual Socialisms 269 13 Dirty Little Secret 279 Index 293 PART ONE OUR CLASSICISM Mercy Altar, Basilica of the Fourteen Holy Helpers (also Basilika Vierzehnheiligen), 17 43-1772. Bad Staffelstein, Germany Chapter I Narrative Bodies: Rubens and History Modernism, Alexander Kluge observed somewhere, is our classi­ cism, our classical antiquity. That presumes that it is over; but if so, when did it begin? It is a question, or perhaps a pseudo-question, that leads to deeper ones about modernity itself, when not about historical storytelling. I will myself begin (as one must) with an out­ rageous assertion, namely that modernity begins with the Council ofTrent (ending in 1563)-in which case the Baroque becomes the first secular age. I'm sorry to say that this may not be as perverse a claim as it sounds at first: fo r if we inevitably associate the Baroque with the building of extraordinary churches all over the Christian world, and with an unparalleled eillorescence of religious art, there is an explanation ready to hand. With modernity and secularization, religion falls into the realm of the social, the realm of differentiation. It becomes one world­ view among others, one specialization among many: an activity to be promoted and sold on the market. In the face of Protestantism, the Church decides to advertise and to launch the first great public­ ity campaign on behalf of its product. After Luther, religion comes in competing brands; and Rome enters the contest practicing the usual dual strategy of carrot and stick, culture and repression, paint­ ers and architects on the one hand and generals and the Inquisition on the other. Maravall's thesis-that the Baroque is the first great deployment of a public sphere and of mass culture-thereby finds its corroboration and confirmation.1 But we may well want to augment this periodizing hypoth­ esis with another, of a rather different kind. Hegel thought there 1 Jose Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 4 OUR CLASSICISM was a moment in which, after religion, art assumed the vocation of expressing the Absolute: a moment then rapidly superseded by philosophy.2 It is a theory of history we may want to complete by suggesting that, even as he saw it, the various arts will have chances at this vocation unevenly and in distinct chronological periods (I'll come back to music in a moment). We do not meanwhile need to mount any head-on assault on the concept of the Absolute at this time, but can certainly deduce something from the odd implication that at a certain moment religion is no longer able to assume its vocation. That moment is surely the moment of "the end of reli­ gion," a profoundly Hegelian idea we can fo rge on the model of the famous "end of art" also implicit in these fo rmulations (but having nothing to do with Kojeve's infamous "end ofhistory").3 It is then plausible to assume that "the end of religion" is on us with secularization, and probably with Luther's revolution, which transformed a culture organized by religion into a space in which what is still called religion has become an essentially private matter and a fo rm of subjectivity (among many others). In that case, it would fo llow that the apogee of art as a vehicle fo r the Absolute arrives in the Renaissance/Reformation period and finds its most extraordinary flowering in that century normally characterized as the Baroque, which opens with Shakespearean drama and concludes (stretching the notion of a century somewhat) with the building of Vierzehnheiligen (or maybe even with Bach's elaboration of the tonal system).4 The Baroque is the supreme moment of theatrical­ ity, the Elizabethans only serving as the prelude to Spanish theater (Calderon) and French classicism (not excluding the somewhat less than illustrious German playbooks cited in Walter Benjamin's Trauersp iel book): but drama also includes the emergence of opera (and perhaps it will not be extravagant already to glimpse the pro­ leptic shadow ofWagnerian music drama in those early fo rms). This is an age which is poor in many of the things and experiences we take fo r granted; poor in images, before technical reproduction, not to speak of advertising; no radio, no newspapers, not even a bourgeoisie; poor in instrumental sounds, save fo r that rudimentary 2 G. W F. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). 3 Alexandre Kojeve, In troduction to the Reading ofHegel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). 4 Wylie Sypher is perhaps the first in English to posit these periodizations for litera­ ture. See his Four Stages ofRen aissance Style(New Yo rk: Doubleday, 1955). NARRATIVE BODIES:THE CASE OF RUBENS 5 instrument called the human voice; poor in that rich background of continuous aesthetic sensation which makes it so hard to define art in our own society of images and spectacles, but which here is limited to the specialized and discontinuous moments of perfor­ mance, of fe stival, of chorale, and even of sumptuous space, which in that period was still limited to churches and palaces. We have to try to imagine a time before film (and before television); a world without the novel; a world which is therefore also poor in narra­ tive. Theatricality is thus the punctual eruption of the aesthetic in this newly secularized world whose principal excitement is the unexpected arrival of fo reign mercenaries in unprotected peasant villages, which they sack most cruelly-it being remembered that fo r Nietzsche as fo r Artaud long after him cruelty was an essential fe ature of aesthetic pleasure. Otherwise, art in the small towns and fields of this world whose dazzling epithet-barroco--causes us today to see transcendent sun­ bursts and an excess of richness in physical ornament and language alike-aesthetic pleasure is limited to the shock of an unexpected encounter-the abrupt flashof the vision of Caravaggio's Crucifixion of St. Peter in a dim side chapel of Santa Maria del Po polo, say. We have to imagine that shock today; it will have to be an accident, the boredom of a London afternoon in the National Gallery suddenly transfixed by Rubens's immense Samson and Delilah. And indeed the whole century, the long seventeenth century is here, in the fo rce­ field between Caravaggioand Rubens, the immensity of the struggle of these narrative bodies suspended in blinding oil paint before our disbelieving eyes. I want to examine the historical conditions of possibility of such works; but first I will read into the record a famous, or indeed, notorious aesthetic generalization by Nietzsche, which may not on the face of it seem the most obvious reference here, and indeed on the face of it would seem to result from the crossing of the wires of quite distinct interests. Indeed, this Nietzsche reference docu­ ments what I have been trying to theorize as the emergence of affect in nineteenth-century literature, an emergence of which I see him both as theorist and a symptom. His characterization of aesthetics as a physiological matter will have to suffice at this point, and the relevance of this typically nineteenth-century (or "decadent") view to the seventeenth century is what will have to be defended in a moment.