RB Jameson

Disclaimer: Some of my comments may be based on Fredrick Jameson taken out of context or misinterpreted. This is unintentional. Although surely Jameson’s (and most theorists’) ideas are not as complicated as their long-winded, preposition-packed, colon-loving, esoteric language has me believing. His sentences are like, to quote him, a “Signifier in isolation,” and the “signifier comes before the subject [me] with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect, here described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality.”

That quote is out of context. What Jameson is really saying is that we are reinterpreting history through our modern prisms and conforming it into our modern image, just as I above reinterpreted Jameson’s quote through my prism and conformed it into my image. We are isolating signifiers and shuffling them. We are taking history out of context.

Art feeds on art, according to Fredric Jameson, like a cannibal feeds on the flesh of his or her own kind. It’s a “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past,” Jameson writes. It’s a buffet, historical signifiers the food. Various foods unrelated to each other are carried off on plates together, digested together, and together produce a hybrid mutation of their individual antecedents.

In another analogy, Jameson’s got us sitting in Plato’s cave looking at the shadows of history. Pop culture is the flame illuminating the shadows. It’s called “pop history.” For example, ancient Rome is illuminated by 35mm film, actors, a musical score—and together they cast a Gladiator shadow. Jesus’ crucifixion is illuminated by the Gospels, medieval passion plays, Mel Gibson—and together they give us The Passion of the Christ shadow.

Just as “pop history” represents “our ideas and stereotypes about the past,” so too does my rehash of Jameson’s ideas. I don’t know what he’s talking about any more than any of us were actually alive to witness Christ’s passion.