The Ancients and the Postmoderns

On the Historicity of Forms

Fredric Jameson

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781781685938
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781687444
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

High modernism is now as far from us as antiquity was for the Renaissance. Such is the premise of Fredric Jameson's major new work in which modernist works, this time in painting (Rubens) and music (Wagner and Mahler), are pitted against late-modernist ones (in film) as well as a variety of postmodern experiments (from SF to The Wire, from "Eurotrash" in opera to Altman and East German literature): all of which attempt, in their different ways, to invent new forms to grasp a specific social totality. Throughout the historical periods, argues Jameson, the question of narrative persists through its multiple formal changes and metamorphoses.

PART ONE

OUR CLASSICISM

Mercy Altar, Basilica of the Fourteen Holy Helpers (also Basilika Vierzehnheiligen), 1743–1772. Bad Staffelstein, Germany

Chapter 1

Narrative Bodies: Rubens and History

Modernism, Alexander Kluge observed somewhere, is our classicism, our classical antiquity. That presumes that it is over; but if so, when did it begin? It is a question, or perhaps a pseudo-question, that leads to deeper ones about modernity itself, when not about historical storytelling. I will myself begin (as one must) with an outrageous assertion, namely that modernity begins with the Council of Trent (ending in 1563)—in which case the Baroque becomes the first secular age. I’m sorry to say that this may not be as perverse a claim as it sounds at first: for if we inevitably associate the Baroque with the building of extraordinary churches all over the Christian world, and with an unparalleled efflorescence of religious art, there is an explanation ready to hand.

With modernity and secularization, religion falls into the realm of the social, the realm of differentiation. It becomes one world-view among others, one specialization among many: an activity to be promoted and sold on the market. In the face of Protestantism, the Church decides to advertise and to launch the first great publicity campaign on behalf of its product. After Luther, religion comes in competing brands; and Rome enters the contest practicing the usual dual strategy of carrot and stick, culture and repression, painters and architects on the one hand and generals and the Inquisition on the other. Maravall’s thesis—that the Baroque is the first great deployment of a public sphere and of mass culture—thereby finds its corroboration and confirmation.¹

But we may well want to augment this periodizing hypothesis with another, of a rather different kind. Hegel thought there was a moment in which, after religion, art assumed the vocation of expressing the Absolute: a moment then rapidly superseded by philosophy.² It is a theory of history we may want to complete by suggesting that, even as he saw it, the various arts will have chances at this vocation unevenly and in distinct chronological periods (I’ll come back to music in a moment). We do not meanwhile need to mount any head-on assault on the concept of the Absolute at this time, but can certainly deduce something from the odd implication that at a certain moment religion is no longer able to assume its vocation. That moment is surely the moment of “the end of religion,” a profoundly Hegelian idea we can forge on the model of the famous “end of art” also implicit in these formulations (but having nothing to do with Kojève’s infamous “end of history”).³

It is then plausible to assume that “the end of religion” is on us with secularization, and probably with Luther’s revolution, which transformed a culture organized by religion into a space in which what is still called religion has become an essentially private matter and a form of subjectivity (among many others). In that case, it would follow that the apogee of art as a vehicle for the Absolute arrives in the Renaissance/Reformation period and finds its most extraordinary flowering in that century normally characterized as the Baroque, which opens with Shakespearean drama and concludes (stretching the notion of a century somewhat) with the building of Vierzehnheiligen (or maybe even with Bach’s elaboration of the tonal system).⁴ The Baroque is the supreme moment of theatricality, the Elizabethans only serving as the prelude to Spanish theater (Calderón) and French classicism (not excluding the somewhat less than illustrious German playbooks cited in Walter Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book): but drama also includes the emergence of opera (and perhaps it will not be extravagant already to glimpse the proleptic shadow of Wagnerian music drama in those early forms).

This is an age which is poor in many of the things and experiences we take for granted; poor in images, before technical reproduction, not to speak of advertising; no radio, no newspapers, not even a bourgeoisie; poor in instrumental sounds, save for that rudimentary instrument called the human voice; poor in that rich background of continuous aesthetic sensation which makes it so hard to define art in our own society of images and spectacles, but which here is limited to the specialized and discontinuous moments of performance, of festival, of chorale, and even of sumptuous space, which in that period was still limited to churches and palaces. We have to try to imagine a time before film (and before television); a world without the novel; a world which is therefore also poor in narrative. Theatricality is thus the punctual eruption of the aesthetic in this newly secularized world whose principal excitement is the unexpected arrival of foreign mercenaries in unprotected peasant villages, which they sack most cruelly—it being remembered that for Nietzsche as for Artaud long after him cruelty was an essential feature of aesthetic pleasure.

Otherwise, art in the small towns and fields of this world whose dazzling epithet—barroco—causes us today to see transcendent sunbursts and an excess of richness in physical ornament and language alike—aesthetic pleasure is limited to the shock of an unexpected encounter—the abrupt flash of the vision of Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St. Peter in a dim side chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo, say. We have to imagine that shock today; it will have to be an accident, the boredom of a London afternoon in the National Gallery suddenly transfixed by Rubens’s immense Samson and Delilah. And indeed the whole century, the long seventeenth century is here, in the force-field between Caravaggio and Rubens, the immensity of the struggle of these narrative bodies suspended in blinding oil paint before our disbelieving eyes.

I want to examine the historical conditions of possibility of such works; but first I will read into the record a famous, or indeed, notorious aesthetic generalization by Nietzsche, which may not on the face of it seem the most obvious reference here, and indeed on the face of it would seem to result from the crossing of the wires of quite distinct interests. Indeed, this Nietzsche reference documents what I have been trying to theorize as the emergence of affect in nineteenth-century literature, an emergence of which I see him both as theorist and a symptom. His characterization of aesthetics as a physiological matter will have to suffice at this point, and the relevance of this typically nineteenth-century (or “decadent”) view to the seventeenth century is what will have to be defended in a moment. At any rate here is the passage I wanted to recall:

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. Intoxication must first have heightened the excitability of the entire machine: no art results before that happens. All kinds of intoxication, however different their origin, have the power to do this; above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the oldest and most primitive form of intoxication. Likewise the intoxication which comes in the train of all great desires, all strong emotions; the intoxication of feasting, of contest, of the brave deed, of victory, of all extreme agitation; the intoxication of cruelty; intoxication in destruction; intoxication under certain meteorological influences, for example the intoxication of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; finally the intoxication of the will, the intoxication of an overloaded and distended will.—The essence of intoxication is the feeling of plenitude and increased energy. From out of this feeling one gives to things, one compels them to take, one rapes them—one calls this procedure idealizing.⁵

By spiritualization Nietzsche means that “path of distance,” that “formidable erosion of contours” evoked by Gide, and not any spiritualization or intellectualizing dilution. Now the word Rausch is here untranslatable; Kaufman gives us “frenzy,” David Crell “rapture”—the one seems to me too kinetic, if not excessive, the other too prim and religiose. Heidegger of course does not need to translate, but he interprets this state as the primal form of the will to power, thus stressing that “feeling of plenitude and increased energy” of which Nietzsche speaks, without really coming to terms with the outright physiological drunkenness Nietzsche’s whole description wishes to convey.

I therefore think that Hollingdale’s forthright “intoxication” best preserves the ambiguities and multiple connotations of the German Rausch. Meanwhile, if we attempt to sanitize this term by reconfining it to the Nietzschean canon and simply identifying it with the Dionysian, it should be added that in the second paragraph after this one, Nietzsche evokes a properly Apollinian “intoxication” which is above all active in the eyes, in the visual (just as the heightened form of the Dionysian overwhelms the ear, and finds its heightened form in music).

Still, Apollinian Rausch remains more enigmatic: it is not clear what form an “intoxication of the eyes” might take; all we have along those lines in the way of a concept is voyeurism, which may or may not be relevant here; but anyone committed to the experience of paintings will feel the lack of a name for what is certainly a distinctive experience. As far as Nietzsche himself is concerned, it is worth pointing out, not only that his eyes were bad and that his sight suffered chronically, complicated by almost permanent headaches, but that in general his reference to painting and the visual arts is virtually absent, a curious silence for someone willing to talk endlessly about his taste in the other arts. He was in short not an Augenmensch and very much an Ohrenmensch; and therefore, apart from stereotypical evocations of Greek statuary, not particularly inclined to speculate or theorize on the matter—even though he very emphatically wishes to distance his aesthetic concepts, and in particular the Apollinian, from standard (German) views of the classical. So there is a conceptual gap to be filled, which I cannot hope to remedy here.

I am myself currently interested in making a historical distinction between affect and emotion, and am therefore motivated to understand Nietzschean Rausch or intoxication in terms of an explosion of affect rather than the expression or sympathetic reception of this or that named emotion. (Nietzsche also serves to authorize a theory of affect that formulates it as an unnamable scale of bodily states, ranging from melancholy to euphoria, and in strict counterdistinction to the reified conscious objects tabulated in the various historical and traditional “theories of the passions.”)⁶ Affects are bodily feelings, emotions conscious states; and one line of my interrogation of these various Baroque works presupposes that affect enters painting at the moment of modernism, the moment of Manet and impressionism, the moment in which bodily feeling becomes inscribed in oil paint. In that case, what is it that we find happening in Caravaggio or Rubens, unless it is simply the representation of an emotion in the content, if not the rhetorical call for emotional reaction along the lines of Aristotelian psychology? In other words, I also want to refuse the facile solution which would grasp Caravaggian chiaroscuro or Rubens’s brush-strokes simply as anticipations of some modern foregrounding of the medium as such.

But just as clearly the history of the medium and of technique will have its role to play in any approach to these works. That history will then have to be grasped in its intersection with the history of the social, that is, the history of human relations and the historical subjectivities they produce; and it will also have to take account of the relationship of the specific art itself to narrativity and to the availability of narrative vehicles in which both levels—that of the advanced technology of the medium, that of the variety of human relations and interactions developed in the social realm—can be more fully exercised. We might also want to make a separate place here for the accumulation of precedents, of stories and legends in the case of the narrative arts, of precursors in the visual realm, of generations of musical exercises in the auditory: a level which can then either be identified with or distinguished from the social evolution of the status of the craftsman and of the economic demand for his products, which is to say, the evolution of his public.

The individual work stands at the confluence of all these levels or conditions; and music may once again be taken as the example of what happens when some are missing; before tonality, nothing like the emergence of a musical absolute—for example, of the extraordinary multidimensionality of Beethoven—is yet possible. The withdrawal of some of these same conditions also results in an interesting historical question: such as the gradual end of tragic drama after the seventeenth century, let alone the extinction of epic as such.

In any case our topic here is rather the efflorescence, the unique combination of possibilities that alone can explain, in that first great secular age which is the Baroque, the artistic achievements I have mentioned earlier and which I now want to begin to approach in terms of an accumulation of stories and of precedents. Let’s speak then of that peculiar historical and cultural heritage which is the concept of Christ’s body. The development of the visual arts in the West is unthinkable without the resources of this body, from its birth to its agony and death (and even including sexuality, as Leo Steinberg has shown in a notorious essay).⁷

Christ’s body has therefore served as the laboratory for innumerable experiments in the representation of the body in all its postures and potentialities; and these will then enable the theatrical staging of equally innumerable dramatic—which is to say narrative—scenes, in a far more dynamic and cinematographic way than the various stills or freeze-frames of the High Renaissance. I hope it is not too outrageous to claim that the body in this sense—I ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part One: Our Classicism
• Part Two: Late Modernism in Film
• Part Three: Adaptation as Experiment in the Postmodern
• Index