Imagining a Space That Is Outside

Abstract

An Interview with Fredric JamesonIn our times, which have been aptly characterized as the moment of theory, Fredric Jameson distinguishes himself as an artificer of a rec ognizable and productive thought system. This system is laid out in an oeuvre constituted, to date, by twenty major books that map out what is perhaps the most ambitious intellectual project in contemporary cultural criticism: nothing less than to revitalize the great tradition of the dialectic and to equip it to face the tasks that the historical moment demands. In an essay reprinted in his 2009 book, Valences of the Dialectic, Jameson elucidates three sites where the dialectic has persisted since its first modern flowering in the hands of G. W. F. Hegel. The first one involves thinking itself -the reflection on our own thinking apparatuses and the recognition of the historicity of our categories. The second site, which presents itself in a more diachronic form, raises problems of causality and historical narrative and explanation. And the third site involves the emphasis on the contradiction as such. Jameson's project, his intellectual response to our profoundly anti dialectical historical times, is the continuation of the dialectic in those three sites.When one thinks of his contribution to the first site, reflexivity, the first feature that comes to mind is his prodigious capacity for the invention of categories to think the contemporary. This either takes the form of coining new notions or it takes a more historical turn and presses into new uses terms like periodization, totalization, allegory, and, crucially, utopia. But perhaps this reflexivity, or thought to the second degree, that includes the process and product of thinking, is best exemplified by Jameson's much commented style. The comments run from students' bewilderment at an English prose that "seems to have been written in German" to fellow critics' appreciation. This excess is a mark in the syntax that signals the impossibility of, and at the same time the wish for, a mode of expression that would not be immediately subsumed as yet another academic novelty to be imitated by fashion followers. If syntax records the movement of history, Jame son's style is the materialization of the difficulty, but also of the corre sponding exhilaration, of thinking real thoughts in a thoroughly rei minnesota review 78 (2012)

Terrestrial Realism and the Gravity of World Literature: Joe Sacco’s Seismic Lines

“…As Jameson suggests, "Intellectual work in our time does not mean converting to a single code and trying to hammer it into people but rather being able to address the nuances that exist between codes." 61 This is why I suggest "terrestrial realism" as a way through to this ground: it takes, on the one hand, Said's terrestrial humanism, with its emphasis on human autonomy insofar as it operates as a collective force, and on the other, combines it with peripheral realism and its ability not only to grasp the totality, but to breath "new life into the critical and aesthetic project of apprehending the real [and thus of questioning] global capitalism's status as a permanent fact." 62 Which is to say, terrestrial realism, like peripheral realism, allows us to recognize the epiphenomenal effects of capital as a systemic force.…”