I can't do it. I just can't. I want to write about this man and my attraction to him and whatnot, but I watch way too much Sex and the City. And blogging about dating makes me feel too much like Carrie Bradshaw, and then I picture myself in the last season of my own personal dating sitcom, thirty eight years old and and asking the same questions, and I just get depressed.
But I will tell you that Fredric Jameson and Sarah Vowell were both excruciatingly good.
I took four pages of notes on Jameson in my little notebook. I'm going to sketch them out here, and add that we missed the first few minutes because we got a little lost. Also, I would like to point out that A)several of the undergrad Marxists-in-the-making certainly LOOKED the part, however, they neglected to turn off their cell phones. An appropriate ringtone might have amused me, but Chumbawumba did not. B)several people in my vicinity felt that ruffling through their backpacks, and shuffling their notebooks, and crinkling their paper, and creating a low leaf-like rustling were activities which fell into the category of Taking Notes. They were, perhaps, rustling about because words were not magically appearing on their notebooks, and they found this disconcerting. I saw two people actually using pens to write: one was a professor, the second a student next to me, who seemed to be taking good notes, interspersed with drawings of atoms, which I thought was charming. C)several people fell asleep. Although appalled, I thought throwing things at them would create more rustling, and in any case, their cell phones would probably wake them up anyway.
Now, as for Jameson--GREAT speaker. He trails off at the end of his sentences, so I had to, well, not lean forward, as I was sitting on the floor in the aisle, but tilt my head inquistively in an attempt to hear (kinda like how I duck and hunch over in the rain--like if I bend lower, it won't fall on me as much).
What rivets me immediately is that he's talking about temporality. Time, he says, is a construction itself and a construction achieved by narrative. He established a binary of Augustinian temporality and Aristotelian narrative, discussing Aristotle's "natural," chronological time, and Augustine's relation to Heidegger's Dasein.
"There can be no pure phenomenology of time," says Jameson, only representations of history. Time appears alongside movement, and is only seen in the representation of movement. In the intersection of the modalities of time is where Time can be made to appear. (I dug the hell out of that.)
Now, he's got three things on his plate: the three fold narrative structure of Aristotle, the insertion of subjectivity with the transition from happiness to misery and vice versa, and how completeness opens a text to notions of discordance.
He talked about Ricour's essential humanism underlying his text. There was a lot of rustling. Then how Aristotle's and Augustine's notion of time constituted a split between subject and object.
Then, he addressed the matter of taking sides in historical narratives. Narratives are structured in such a manner that they force us to take sides, and reduce history to a struggle of dichotomies.
My notes now say, "capitalism-->issues imperative to think good and evil simultaneously
most productive and destructive"
He discussed asymmetry in the Aristotelian narrative, and the lack of comedic narrative. The general assumption, he says, is that tragedy is worth more than comedy, tradegy is more moral, and more important.
Then the unity of opposites, where the winner loses, and the loser wins. The success story is really the anti-plot. And to go into this further, he goes into politics and narrative, and discusses Quint and the Western oriented myth of literary history. The Epic is "par excellence", whereas Romance uses narrative mechanisms to express non-narrative time--it's episodic, discontinous accounts of experience. Romance must borrow from the Epic to stay afloat, else it would verge on becoming a non-narrative. These two forms are representative of two distinct historical periods: the Epic is the time of victors, the expression of empire and imperialism, while Romance is defeat, the end of history and narrative that "leads to the stubborn silence of the vanquished and the enslaved."
Success is boring, really, he continues, it marks the end of a project, and there's nowhere else to go.
Then he gives a fabulous re-reading of The Aeneid, reading the Trojans as the victors AND the losers, using these binaries he's established and I wrote down nothing because I am enthralled. Just thinking about it makes me change tenses in the middle of my sentences.
Then I wrote "a music made of contradictions" because I really dug that too.
And then he goes into recognition and pathos, and the struggle of disentangling "us" from "them," and the emergence of the collective reality of human history--that the ones holding up the narratives are the slaves, the losers, who are the winners. And how narratives end in pathos because they are bound by class and by exploitation.
Enthusiastic applause.
If that doesn't make sense (since I'm just sketching down my notes), I'll try to correct that in the next blog or so. But now I'm really tired, and I'm driving to Charlotte tomorrow morning. But let me say this: should you have the chance to hear him speak, go. Not only does he say really fascinating things, but I just really love the way he uses language. I think so many theorists get so bogged down in what words "mean" that they forget how words sound. And Jameson doesn't.
Sarah Vowell listens to the sounds of words too, incidentally, but I'll have to get to that next time.
