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Fredrik Jameson | Image Source: Internet
The noted American literary critic and Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson passed away on 22 September 2024. He was born on 14 April, 1934 in Cleveland, Ohio to a small bourgeois family. His father was a doctor and mother a housewife, even though she was a graduate. Jameson obtained a degree in French, and later taught Comparative Literature, which would become one of his gateways to theory. For much of his early life, he was not in the limelight even though he was in touch with leading academics of the time. He began to study Marxism and eventually adopted it as his framework of theorising. His first book was published in 1961, and dealt with the literary style of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. He went on to publish a few books in the next three decades with increasing popularity.
Fredric Jameson is most known for the seminal book Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, published first in 1991. In this book, he attempted to explain and describe the different ways in which changes in our social system were being reflected in postmodern art. Jameson foregrounded the process of commodification which had affected mass culture — in this way, he took over many of the concerns of the Frankfurt School and the British Cultural Studies.
A thinker who is deeply concerned with form, Jameson broke new ground by describing the dialectic through which forms evolve. Postmodernism deals with architecture, film, and literature among other things — but there is a notable absence of a separate section dedicated to photography. However, the introductory chapter includes a significant discussion on the postmodern quality of photography. In particular, he wrote of photography’s crucial rule in the postmodern aesthetic of reproducibility and commodification on one side and the “oral history” it produces, especially in America, through the vast collection of photographic images depicting the American way of life in the documentary realist style. Jameson writes:
“It is this constitutive differentiation [between the high, classical art and the low, popular art] which now seems on the point of disappearing: we have already mentioned the way in which, in music, after Schonberg and even after Cage, the two antithetical traditions of the “classical” and the “popular” once again begin to merge. In the visual arts the renewal of photography as a significant medium in its own right and also as the “plane of substance” in pop art or photorealism is a crucial symptom of the same process.” (Jameson, 1991, p.64)
Further, Jameson was keenly attentive to the mediation of various art forms through photography. Invoking Debord and Baudrillard, he has dwelled on the photographic image as a simulacrum — the photorealist painting, being a painting of a photograph of an object perfectly describes the condition of simulacra. The chain of self-referential representations, which are characteristic of contemporary mass culture and public art, has photography at its heart. Jameson observes a quite different relationship between photography and video art. In the early days of photography, thanks to the slowness of the photographic apparatus, the subject had to sit still for a long time in order for a clear and sharp photograph to be captured. The first photographers, Jameson writes, designed contraptions that were akin to electric chairs, into which the subjects were strapped and made to sit still, a situation that was “relatively intolerable”, constantly battling against the urge to twitch the face or scratch the nose. With the arrival of video art, there is a strange repetition of this intolerable experience — now it is the viewer who is metaphorically strapped onto the video art, unable to leave until the long sequence of images have run its course.
Discussing the presence of photography inside filmic narratives, Jameson observes:
“[P]hotography within film seems to retain what Benjamin might have called an archaic aura, a dimly threatening primitive power, as when stills of the murder victims silently circulate among the police team, who thereby see and are present in ways denied the movie-goer even when the still is flashed on the screen for us in passing.” (Jameson, 1992, pp.140-141)
A few photographers make an appearance in his texts—Walker Evans, Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol are subjects of discussion, as is Susan Sontag’s book On Photography. But Jameson’s engagement was more with photography as such and what it was doing to our worlds and experiences rather than with individual photographers. His discussion on architecture photography give an insight into his way of thinking about photography:
“The real color comes when you look at the photographs, the glossy plates, in all their splendor. “Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir au Livre.” Well, at least the picture book! and many are the postmodern buildings that seem to have been designed for photography, where alone they flash into brilliant existence and actuality with all the phosphorescence of the high-tech orchestra on CD. Any return to the haptic and the tactile, like Venturi’s conversion to respectability in the Gordon Wu Hall at Princeton, with its polished metals and genuinely solid banisters, seem to hearken back to Louis Kahn and the “late modern;’ when building materials were expensive and of the finest quality and people still wore suits and ties. It is like the transition from precious metals to the credit card: the “bad new things” are no less expensive, and you no less consume their very value, but (as will be suggested later on), it is the value of the photographic equipment you consume first and foremost, and not of its objects.” (Jameson, 1991, p.99)
One wishes that Jameson would have embarked on an epic journey through photographic forms — he did write about films and novels in quite significant detail — but it was not to be. Nonetheless, Jameson remains one of the great thinkers who were able to grasp the shattering arrival of photography into the world of perception. Many have written about photographers, the technology of photography, the history of photography and styles of photography. But Fredric Jameson took it seriously as a form. For this, the world of photography is sincerely indebted to him.
“For bodily perception is already a perception by the physical and organic machine, but we have continued to think of it, over a long tradition, as a matter of consciousness—the mind confronting visible reality or the spiritual body of phenomenology exploring Being itself. … [P]hotography and the various machineries of recording and projecting now suddenly disclose or deconceal the fundamental materiality of that formerly spiritual act of vision.” (Jameson, 1991, p.124)
References
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press.
Jameson, F. (1992). The Geopolitical Aesthetic, or, Cinema and Space in the World System. Indiana University Press and BFI Publishing.
Arjun Ramachandran is a visual communication student and photographer, with interests in cinema and literature.
Published on September 26, 2024
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