Signatures of the Visible
Fredric Jameson
Language: English
Pages: 264
ISBN: 0415900123
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"The visual is essentially pornographic," writes Fredric Jameson, "films ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body." In Signatures of the Visible, one of America's most influential critics explores film and the culture surrounding it, interrogating the relationship between the imaginative screen world and the historical world onto which it is projected. By seeking the historical dimension of the visual, Jameson evaluates the power of the filmic form as a vehicle for the critique of culture and the diagnosis of social life. Jameson pursues this investigation through readings of politics, class, allegory, magic realism, and "the historical" in such films as Diva, The Shining, and Dog Day Afternoon. Throughout the book, he is concerned with the relationship between the achievements and limits of contemporary film theory itself, "a relationship," he argues, "which allows one to take the temperature of history itself."
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most recent or belated (perhaps even posthumous) work in this genre—Franco Moretti's Way of the World—rehearses and interrogates for one last time those classics of political philosophy and sociology which have been all but excluded Introduction I 5 from the positivism of their own specific disciplines, and rewrites Lukacs in the secular tones that befit a postmodern age, taking the formal compromises of the Bildungsroman as indices of the specificity of a daily life unique to middle-class
rather different. Nor is this at all comparable to the epic in medias res, which is even more clearly marked than the classic novelistic beginning as a set of givens whose origins and significance may calmly be expected to be divulged at the conventionally appropriate time. And in general I feel that we must sharpen our consciousness of the shock of entry into narrative, which so often resembles the body's tentative immersion in an unfamiliar element, with all the subliminal anxieties of such
gives an illusory equivalence to the object, even if Plato seems to be saying this. The point is that the trompe-l'oeil of painting pretends to be something other than what it i s . . . . It appears at that moment as something other than it seemed, or rather it now seems to be that something else. The picture does not compete with appearance, it competes with what Plato designates for us beyond appearance as being the Idea. It is because the picture is the appearance that says it is that which
sphere. The inconsistencies and contradictions of these various models of realism—the problem of writing a "realistic" narrative of realism itself—are best used to produce new problems (generally of a historical kind), rather than to stimulate that effort of the will by which we cut through the tangle to some dogmatic solution of "definition." In the present context, we have to distinguish between the realism of other people—something codified from the outside in the handbooks of 19th-century
"realism," but as compensatory wishfulfillment and consolation. Conventional notions of mass culture as "distraction" and "entertainment" recover a certain force and content—but also become structurally restricted as to time and place— The Existence of Italy I 175 when they are historicized to include that from which public needs most urgently to be "distracted." The most difficult problem confronting any "positive" theory of Hollywood realism as a socio-aesthetic construction of reality
