FREDRIC JAMESON AND FUTURAMA: A NOTE ON SOME XMAS PRESENTS

Happy 2012 to all readers! I hope the new year finds you well.

The Weeknd have been remixed by Slim K, their albums offered now in chopped & screwed form. Do I really need complete remixes of three albums I already love? Yes, yes I do. I'll probably write something up about these remixes at some point over the next few days, so if you're interested in (even more of) my thoughts on the Weeknd, stay tuned.

The most exciting thing to happen so far in 2012: my Xmas present to myself--a reward for a semester of hard work--arrived today.

I can't wait to start reading this. I picked it up in a bookstore a few years ago and read the chapter on Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (a totally underrated series of novels, especially the first book, Red Mars, which is an absolute classic--maybe they're not actually underrated, but I've never come across anyone talking about them). I didn't have the cash at the time (and buying a book like this in the bookstores around where I'm from is a rapid road to penury), so I'm glad to have finally tracked down a copy for a reasonable price. Jameson's writing on science fiction, which I encountered when I first started grad school and was exposed to theory as something other than a useless mass of pretentiousness to be avoided at all costs (not to say that none of it is that), was a pleasant surprise. That someone with a big name was writing about science fiction was particularly important to me because I'd been given the impression in undergrad that to do English Studies and to be at all serious (and taken seriously) one must avoid things like science fiction. Given that science fiction was a) just about the only thing I read from the age of about 7/8-18 and b) what got me interested in reading and talking about books, this was quite a blow. Since those dark times, though, I've come to (re)embrace my love of the things I wasn't supposed to talk and write about (like science fiction, music, cartoons, etc.). Huzzah!

This actually pairs quite well with a present from my parents:

I'd seen most of this season, but there were a couple of episodes I'd missed. Having a chance to sit down and watch them all in order, I think they made a slightly more favourable impression on me than they did on television. The season as a whole doesn't match the heights of the four movies between Season 4 and Season 5, but it also manages to avoid the lows of those movies. Overall, I'd say the quality is somewhere around the second half of Season 1 and the first half of Season 2. Considering that the second half of Season 2 is what I would consider the beginning of the Golden Era of the show, that's not too bad, and the animation has never looked so good. There were a few moments of absolute brilliance--"Lethal Inspection" provided an all too rare poignant moment for both Bender and Hermes, the middle act of "A Clockwork Origin" redeems an otherwise irritatingly didactic episode, and "The Prisoner of Benda" is nearly as much fun as "The Farnsworth Parabox" and its Professor-Zoidberg/Fry-Leela subplot provided one of the season's genuine belly laughs. 

I missed a lot of the sixth season and need to catch up with the DVDs at some point, but I do think that the show is moving in a positive direction, even if it will never quite recapture the dizzying heights of Season 3 and Season 4, when nothing seemed out of reach of the show--the Fry and Leela dynamic has obviously shifted, and they can't quite recapture the sweetness that it added to episodes like "Time Keeps on Slipping," "The Why of Fry," and "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings." Some of the most distinctive writing voices are missing and their absence is felt, but when the show gets out of the way of itself and lets the characters provide the humour and pathos without the zaniness and gags, it can still shine. Speaking of shining, the packaging for the DVD is absolutely gorgeous.

CONFESSIONS OF A FAILED SUMMER BLOGGER

I had something of a plan to blog more regularly in July; obviously that hasn't happened. Of course, I pictured my July as a non-stop workfest in which I would wake up, leap to my computer, and frantically type away until I could type no more. Other than typing some 140 character bursts for Twitter, though, I can't say I've spent much time at the keyboard. Or working. Or thinking about work. About the closest I've come to work so far is a conversation with a friend (he's a grad student in the sciences) in which he kept asking me (in a polite and friendly way, I should note) to explain the rationale for what I do (and, by extension, what English Studies as a whole does). His point was essentially "what I work on has the potential to contribute to a cure for cancer. What do you do for anyone?" It was an interesting conversation. Maybe I'll write up some of my thoughts and post them here to see what people think.

What have I been doing so far this month? Well, since you asked, not a whole lot. I've been playing a lot of guitar, listening to a lot of music, and reading. I went to a racetrack and watched harness racing. I went swimming. I went to EPIC LASER TAG.* None of these things are helping to get the tasks I wanted to complete in July accomplished, but I guess something in me wants more of a break than I would consciously like to allow myself to have. I've decided to crack the whip, though. Starting Monday, I will be up and writing when my alarm goes off. It's time to produce and not just to laze about. There's nothing to stop me doing work and enjoying myself, so I just need to start working on the former as much as the latter.

On the plus side, I've been slowly getting back into shape, and, after getting lost that first time, I've managed to keep my bearings while out running. I've realized over the past two months or so how much I've missed having running as a way to structure my days. Now, on the days that I don't run, I feel a little aimless. I'm even considering finding my spikes and going down to a track to work out. We'll see if I manage to get that far.


*It was fun, but three games was definitely excessive. The building was not air conditioned and we were all doused in sweat by the end of the night.

ALL WORK AND NO PLAY...

I finally got around to reading David Lodge's Changing Places today. I'd been meaning to for some time, and after finding a cheap copy in the used bookstore near me the other day, I could see no reason to put it off any longer. Part of the impetus behind my desire to read the novel came from the fact that it is, by far, the book I'm asked most often if I've read. This mainly has to do with my answer to the dreaded questions "What are you interested in?/What do you study?/What is your research area?" I never quite know how to answer those kinds of questions, so I usually mention that I'm interested in novels about the academy. The next question, almost without fail, is "Have you read Changing Places?"* Now I can say I have.

The novel was as funny and charming as people assured me it would be, and I enjoyed reading it. One particular passage early on in the novel detailing the scholarship (or lack thereof) of Philip Swallow describes a problem I often run into (though nowhere near to the extent of Swallow):

"Philip Swallow was a man with a genuine love of literature in all its diverse forms. He was as happy with Beowulf  as Virginia Woolf,** with Waiting for Godot as with Gammer Gurton's Needle, and in odd moments when nobler examples of the written word were not to hand he read attentively the backs of cornflakes packets, the small print on railway tickets and the advertising matter in books of stamps. This undiscriminating enthusiasm, however, prevented him from settling on a 'field' to cultivate as his own. . . . Seldom, indeed, had he drawn up a preliminary bibliography [for a project] before his attention was distracted by some new or revived interest in something entirely different. He ran hither and thither between the shelves of Eng. Lit. like a child in a toyshop - so reluctant to choose one item to the exclusion of others that he ended up empty-handed" (17).

I think we're to laugh at (along with?) Swallow here, but this seems to me like more of a description of a lively and active mind. As a professor once told me at a department party, "it's nice to be able to talk to people about something other than your own research." I have more or less settled on a field--or at least a time period--but I do genuinely love literature (along with various other cultural texts) and can get distracted rather easily by the next shiny thing that flies past my face. There are too many interesting things and not enough time to read them all, let alone talk about write about them.

Besides, it can be kind of fun to just let one's intellectual wheels spin and explore whatever appears. Rigour, discipline, and focus are important, too, but literary analysis is fun (or at least it is for me). I think anytime one analyzes something it can be useful and beneficial (if only to keep one's "mental muscles" in shape), even if just to serve as a reminder of how fun and pleasurable this can all be. That's what makes a book like Barthes' Mythologies so readable: his pleasure and amusement with his own work is there, transparent on the page. Now, this sense of fun, of pleasure, of (the word cannot be avoided) play, can be infuriating (as Derrida makes all too clear far too often, in my opinion) if it lapses into smugness and self-satisfaction--or if it ends up fostering or encouraging a kind of solipsism--but, by and large, I think it's a good thing. Cultural texts and literary analysis are tremendously powerful and serious things, but they are also bright, shiny toys in a toystore. I think I spend more than enough time working from the former position and not nearly enough working from the latter. I'm going to try, though, in the next year to recapture my sense of play. We'll see how this goes.


*Sometimes they can't remember the title of the book and can only vaguely describe the plot (and I can then guess the book because of other, similarly vague descriptions of the novel's plot), but they're almost always asking me about Changing Places. Occasionally, they'll ask about Richard Russo's Straight Man or Philip Roth's The Human Stain  (both of which I've yet to read), but 90% of the time, they want to know if I've read Lodge.

**If these are my two options, I'll take the back of the Cornflakes box, thanks.

QUILTING POINTS, IDEOLOGEMES, AND CRITICAL HISTORIES

I will preface this post, like last time, by saying that I've done no research on this topic, so what follows might very well be cliched and passé (or just flat out wrong). I will further preface this post by saying that if you don't like boring questions about theory, feel free to skip on over this.

I've been thinking about Fredric Jameson (I'm not going to lie, I think about him a lot. His ideas fascinate me and I envy him his writing style, even as writing or talking about him terrifies me) and his concept of the “ideologeme” (introduced in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act) in relation to Lacan's idea of the “point de capiton” (quilting point). I should say at the outset that I'm no expert on Lacan (I'm not even a novice on Lacan) and I'm drawing what I know about the quilting point from Žižek. If I've read my Žižek correctly, he seems to suggest that the quilting point (or maybe here “anchoring point,” the other translation of Lacan's term, is more appropriate) fixes the subject in a symbolic field against which the subject can be delimited, given shape, known (at least in some way). His example, at least in Violence, is anti-Semitic discourse and the image of the “Jew.” For anti-Semites, the “Jew” is a symbol, an image projected onto the “real” Jew. This symbol contains all the irrational fears, hatreds, and associations that make up the anti-Semite's conception of “Jew” as a subject. In order to create, maintain, and justify the anti-Semitism (or perhaps the anti-Semite's worldview, or the anti-Semite's conception of the “Jew” as subject or “Jew” as Other), the Jew must be affixed to this symbolic field (that matrix of hatred, fear, and associations) via the quilting point of the “Jew.”

Now, it seems to me that we can read this quilting point (the symbolic “Jew” is Žižek's example) as a kind of narrative. A small narrative, but one that fulfils a particular (and extremely important) function ideologically: it is by way of this quilting point, this narrative of the “Jew,” that the anti-Semite reconciles the fact that the flesh-and-blood Jew he or she experiences is in fact not the “Jew” that he or she hates and fears, by affixing the Other in the symbolic field that creates and sustains the hatred by dictating how he or she experiences the Jew. Or, as Žižek puts it in Violence:

What the perpetrators of pogroms find intolerable and rage-provoking, what they react to, is not the immediate reality of Jews, but the image/figure of the “Jew” which circulates and has been constructed in their tradition. The catch, of course, is that one single individual cannot distinguish in any simple way between real Jews and their anti-Semitic image: this image overdetermines the way I experience real Jews themselves, and furthermore it affects the way Jews experience themselves. What makes a real Jew that an anti-Semite encounters on the street “intolerable,” what the anti-Semite tries to destroy when he attacks the Jew, the true target of his fury, is this fantasmatic dimension. (66-67)

This narrative function (if I'm correct that we can see the quilting point—via the example above—as a kind of narrative) is remarkably similar to the function Jameson assigns to an ideologeme. For Jameson, an ideologeme:

is an amphibious formation, whose essential structural characteristic may be described as its possibility to manifest itself as either a pseudoidea—a conceptual or belief system, an abstract value, an opinion or prejudice—or as a protonarrative, a kind of ultimate class fantasy about the 'collective characters' which are the class in opposition. (87)

He goes on to say that the ideologeme serves to explain or narrate away social and historical (which he terms objective) contradictions that emerge from ideological conceptions; the ideologeme is a “symbolic resolution” and an “imaginary resolution” to these contradictions (much as the “Jew” is for the anti-Semite the resolution to the conflict raised by the flesh-and-blood Jew). The ideologeme provides ideological closure that would otherwise be denied by the objective contradictions raised; it fills in a gap that the contradictions have exposed. The similarity to the quilting points function in relation to a symbolic field appears obvious (of course, this similarity rests on my having correctly understood the concept of a quilting point. I might not would not wager money on this being correct).

Now why does any of this matter? (Short answer: it doesn't). I think I might be a structuralist at heart more than I'm anything else (theoretically, at least). Hayden White makes a lot of sense to me, and his concept of metahistory (and I do love all things meta. Is it because I was born in a period that would not allow me to be anything other than a child of postmodernism?) seems particularly useful and valuable when considering the critical history of literary texts. Ditto with Jameson and his dictum to “Always historicize!,” or his ideas that:

we apprehend [texts] through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or—if the text is brand-new—through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions. (9)*

and that:

our object of study is less the text itself than the interpretations through which we attempt to confront and to appropriate it. Interpretation is here construed as an essentially allegorical act, which consists in rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive master code. (9-10)**

Without this kind of metahistory or metacommentary (Jameson's term for the method of literary analysis outlined above), it seems to me like critical histories can become factories of ideologemes, producers of quilting points, forever fixing texts as narratives that shore up gaps in ideological conceptions or visible entryways into symbolic fields. That is, my critical reading of a text makes it perform a particular ideological role or function because I know that that ideology already exists and the text must therefore (through a kind of Althusserian interpellation, it seems like) always-already be a part of that ideology.

For example, if I'm a post-structuralist critic, I must read a text as embodying elements of post-structuralism (not only because I'm likely to choose texts that embody those elements given that those are texts I would enjoy reading) because post-structuralism is how I understand the world, and the text, as part of that world, must therefore enact post-structuralism. The text must become a narrative that smooths over/explains away/fills in any contradictions/gaps that emerge from the interaction between the content of the text and my worldview. The text must be the quilting point that serves as the visible aspect of the symbolic field. In short, the text itself is overdetermined (always-already read, as Jameson says). In such an environment, moving the critical discussion further and introducing new ideas seems difficult (at the risk of understatement). Jameson's method of ideological analysis and critique—the process that starts with the identifying and naming of ideologemes—in order to uncover the political unconscious of a text seems especially relevant in this context. By performing this critique on the critical histories of texts, the criticism of the text can move beyond ideology (even if it is only to a different ideology). At the very least, perhaps new, fresh ideas in a critical discussion can thereby emerge.

* Hello, Stanley Fish and “interpretive communities!”

** Again, hello Mr. Fish, I didn't see you come in.

CLOSE READING: HOW/WHEN DID YOU LEARN TO DO IT?

I will preface this by saying that I've never done any research on this topic, so I might be repeating the most mundane conclusions in the world. They're new to me, though, so I thought I'd share.

After a conversation with a colleague about close reading and how to teach it to first-year university students, I tried to remember how I learned to close read. At this point, the practice is so ingrained in me that it is largely unconscious. Obviously I picked it up somewhere, but I couldn't nail it down to a particular assignment, a particular class, or even a particular level of school (I can remember, however, discovering New Historicism--or my very basic imitation of it--as a result of a high school essay. I didn't know it was called that then, nor was I encouraged to engage in its practices, but that's a story for another day). I'm fairly certain I learned the term "close reading" in university, but I could already perform a basic close reading when I entered university.

I remembered two books this evening that seem to me to offer a starting point (or at least a pretty significant nudge along the path) for my life as a practitioner of close reading. I can't remember the title of either book, but I do know that they were both mystery novels. One was a kind of traditional whodunit and the other was a graphic novel (I recall my mother hated it for that fact alone) and involved a "haunted" house (the resolution of the mystery proved it to be a perfectly normal house with the hauntings contrived by a conman to deprive a family of its millions; the gothic's anxieties about property and its rightful transmission surface again!). Both explicitly modeled the practice of close reading a text in order to uncover information that would otherwise be hidden, with the graphic novel going so far as to have an "answer key" in the back that contained examples of the kind of information hidden in its words and pictures the alert reader would spot and use to solve the mystery before the book presented the solution. The more traditional novel relied on wordplay to disguise clues to the murderer's identity in otherwise innocuous-seeming sentences (a character helpfully explained all the wordplay in the denouement). For whatever reason, I found this strategy infinitely less irritating than Dan Brown's use of basically this same device in The Da Vinci Code.

Anyway, those mystery stories seemed particularly suited to demonstrating the practice of close reading to a novice reader. Obviously what they were doing was simplistic and didn't necessarily offer a way to immediately translate the skills they flaunted to other texts, but they made me aware that techniques like the ones on display existed. Without that kind of exposure I don't know that I could have taken to literary analysis. I wonder: is there something inherent to mystery stories that relates to close reading that makes them so effective at demonstrating this skill? I guess that would explain the interest (obsession might be a better word) that literary theorists have with Poe--his mystery stories somehow model practices that they want to encourage readers to make part of their repertoires, so they highlight what Poe is doing and how's he doing it.

Of course, the ways these skills were being modeled for me were not without their ideological, social, and political purposes, I'm sure (just like early teen slasher films usually served--covertly--as a warning about premarital sex). That, once again, is a topic for another day, though. For now, I'm going to try and remember the name of that graphic novel. I really liked it, and I never did manage to figure everything out without the "answer key." Could I do it now?

BEER, BURGERS, AND THE DISCIPLINE

A friend of mine was in town yesterday and we met up for drinks. He's currently in the process of deciding what school to attend for his PhD, so we spent some time talking about the visits he's made so far. This quickly became a topic about our respective projects and what we hope to do with our degrees. We're both very interested in the future of English Studies as a discipline and how to move our work outside of the academy. We're both also very excited about collaboration and about doing collaborative work in the future. Increasingly, I find the idea of working by myself on a project very depressing. I like talking with other people. I like sharing ideas and using conversation to make my ideas stronger. Why not take advantage of those facts to make stronger work with other people? It was all very exciting and refreshing to spend a few hours being unabashedly idealistic about what we (the people working towards PhDs and entering the field right now) can do.

One thing we both found very interesting is that despite self-identifying as students of English, many of the topics we were excited to talk about had only tangential relationships to literature. This is obviously not a new phenonmenon, but it is interesting to think about in the context of public perception of English Studies as a discipline both inside and outside of the academy (my own research interest; my friend explores similar questions in his work). What cultural products were these two English majors excited to talk about? Girl Talk (particularly his pairing of Aphex Twin and Soulja Boy), Kanye West, Arcade Fire, and Radiohead. Theory after 9/11 and the Freshman Writing classroom. Social media as a curatorial space for cultural artifacts. The term "American" and its many (contradictory) definitions. Restaurant menus and the legacy of Deconstruction.

Again, nothing there is really groundbreaking or revolutionary. That's sort of the point, though. That our conversation topics are standard (some might even suggest passe) to those within the discipline seems to work against the perception of those outside the discipline as to what English Studies does. When my sister asked me what I do, she was disappointed to find out it had little to do with grammar. For her, being an English major could only mean learning about the technical aspects of the language. At a New Year's Eve party, a friend in chemistry asked me what I do, but he couldn't reconcile my work with the English classes he took in high school and the one literature he took in university. Maybe we need to start demonstrating to people what it is that English Studies does today (and explaining why we do it), rather than letting people talk about our discipline by restricting its activities to what we used to do.

Anyway, those are just some idle musings. For now, I'm just glad I had the opportunity to talk with my friend and get fired up about being a PhD student. Coupled with the warm weather and sunshine of the past few days and a few stimulating class sessions recently, I feel refreshed and energized after our talk.

On a more prosaic note: I tried Five Guys for the first time ever last night. They make good burgers. Why didn't anyone ever mention this to me before?