Historicism and Materiality

Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, in their “Introduction” to The Jameson Reader, point to the uneasy intersection of discussions of literature and culture with discussions “of economic and social structures” (1) in Jameson’s work. While a lot of the work that’s been derived from Jameson’s writing makes me incredibly impatient (it seems to me a fine example of what the Tutor has lambasted as the spineless equivocations of postmodern theory), some of Jameson’s ideas are useful, and seem germane to what I’m looking at.

Hardt and Weeks, for example, helpfully gloss Jameson’s demonstration of “how culture occupies a central position in the functioning and reproduction of capitalist society” (3), and of how “as culture has come to play a more important role in the life of capital, capital correspondingly has become ever more deeply rooted in the domain of culture” (5). I think this points me towards a better understanding of my reductive binary between the liberal education and vocational education models of the university, with one seeming to serve culture and the other seeming to serve capital: in what Jameson calls “late capitalism” and what I’ve been referring to as the post-Fordist information economy, the lines between culture and capital become more blurred.

This is a phenomenon particular to our time. Some of the engaging discussions of class among Gerry, the Tutor, myself and others have hinged upon the historicity of class and classes, and understandings of how classes and modes of production have changed over history (Curtiss, by the way, has recently posted an absolutely excellent discussion of historicism: check it out), which is part of the reason I’ve been dipping into some of the always-historicizing Fredric Jameson’s writings. While Hardt and Weeks’ introduction to the Reader get a little frothy and frivolous at more than a few points, in precisely the ways that get “postmodernism” so vilified, they do redeem themselves with careful glosses similar to the ones quoted above: “Just as capital is understood as a comprehensive social (not narrowly economic) power, so too a mode of production must be conceived in terms of not only economic production but also cultural production and social production of all sorts” (12). As old hat as this may be, it helps me understand the economies of the wired writing classroom as cultural, social, and material. What we do with words and computers — the stuff I was talking about yesterday — has effects beyond the merely instrumental.

In other words, the problem David Bleich points to in the May 2003 issue (Vol. 65 No. 5) of College English, the problem “that, socially, language has been separated from ‘actualities’ and treated simply as an instrument of reference or conveyance” (“Materiality, Genre, and Language Use: Introduction” 470) holds equally true for the way we think about computers. The theoretical starting point Bleich proposes as a remedy: “If the ‘mind-body’ problem as a pertinent binary is put aside, language is recognized as material. We are physical people connected to one another by an equally physical entity, language. We are not ‘minds’ relating to other minds, but people relating to one another and to society” (Bleich 471). Too much of the discourse on computers and writing has constructed peoples’ engagement with and through computers precisely as those isolate minds: the “virtuality” cheerleading of Sherry Turkle and others has led to a contempt for the flesh and the material, and has fostered a corresponding willful blindness to the plight of those excluded by the rhetoric of computers-as-salvation. Apple’s iTunes Music Store will happily sell you a copy of “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” but they don’t seem to have the Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor.”