frouella, Jameson

So did anyone else notice that Frederic Jameson shares a last name with a brand of whiskey? And a porn star, but I'm not going to go there. At any rate, whilst slogging through Mr. Jameson's porridge-like prose, the thought occurred to me that perhaps partaking of his namesake spirit would actually help things out a bit, since my sober perusal proved to be rather fruitless. I'll have to try that next time...

Moving on now, I have to talk about shoes. Specifically, I have to talk about the comparison of Van Gogh's "Peasant Shoes" and Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes." More specifically, I have to say that I have a problem with the way our Freddy has presented his argument in this case. When referring to the Van Gogh painting, he writes, "...if this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges." In other words, the initial situation, which in his own words has "vanished into the past", is something that we need to make up. He suggests that "Peasant Shoes" stresses misery, poverty, peasant toil, etc., but that Van Gogh's use of vibrant color transforms the "drab peasant object" into a kind of grand "Utopian gesture." Um, okay; personally, that wasn't my first thought about the painting, but I can see how he might have drawn that conclusion.

When speaking of Warhol's work, however, Jameson suddenly loses his vast powers of reconstruction. Of "Diamond Dust Shoes", he says that this work is "a random collection of dead objects, hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn of their earlier life-world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz..." Ouch, that's pretty harsh, I would say. Especially since I think it would be quite easy to construct an "initial situation" from a pile of shoes at Auschwitz. In any event, Jameson then decides that "there is therefore in Warhol no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture..." Oh really? Hmmm, howzabout we use the same process that was used for the Van Gogh? Let's look at the subject: A collection of various dress shoes in a somewhat haphazard grouping. So for it's initial situation, we could say it stresses glamour, fashion, beauty, etc.; additionally, its monochromatic color scheme, coupled with the use of actual diamond dust on the canvas, might suggest the extravagance and excesses of the fashion world, as well as the potentially cool and uncaring nature of the fashion industry. Maybe these shoes are the remnants of an unsuccessful designer's last attempt? Maybe it's a picture of the closet of a Hollywood starlet? I'm not saying that these attempts are the absolute answer; all I'm saying is that if he really wanted to, Jameson could've come up with something. So why didn't he? Not to sound cynical or anything, but I think perhaps it was because that wouldn't have supported his point.

Meh. So anyway, I do have to say that I didn't think Freddy was a *complete* quack; actually, I thought his points about Munch's "The Scream" were pretty good, especially the part about how the whole idea for the painting is undermined by the fact that a picture can't convey sound. And I didn't know that the figure in the painting was an earless homunculus (FullMetal Alchemist, anyone?). But I did have to spend about an hour trying to figure out what a "monad" was exactly. After much research, I've discovered that a monad is 1) Latin for "unit" 2) Greek for "one", "single", or "unique" 3) symbol for God or "totality" 4) describes all numbers infinitesimally close to a given number 5) type of functor (don't even ask me what a functor is) 6) symbol for the Technocratic movement. I'm gonna go with definition number 1 right now, but that may or may not be correct.

Monads and strife, monads and strife, monads and STRIFE!