Signatures of the Visible, and: Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars (review)

Signatures of the Visible collects eight essays on film that Jameson published between 1979 and 1988. As set out in the introduction, the essays work toward what one could call the “novelization” of film as an object of critical analysis; though strategically retracted, homage to Lukács and to The Theory of the Novel sets the groundwork (however belatedly) for the following arguments. Because these essays are meant “to think the visual, to get a handle on increasing, tendential, all-pervasive visuality as such,” they are inevitably involved, Jameson suggests, in grasping the visual’s “historical coming into being” (1). Jameson is also interested in how history comes into specific texts; the burden of his study, in fact, is to identify the “raw material” of everyday life as it appears in the cultural dreamwork of individual films—material that includes how we live, what we long for (especially the nostalgic), and how we represent periods and historical change.

We most often associate Jameson’s writing with such words and topics as the “political” and “historical,” but moral and ethical concerns are never far away. Indeed this book begins in the manner of a sermon, claiming, “The visual is essentially pornographic,” and it is difficult at times not to think of Jameson as a kind of postmodern Jonathan Edwards whose sacred texts now comprise the whole of modern culture. Continuing the metaphor, one could say that, besides Lukács (and his theory of reification), most important among the many writers and texts Jameson draws on to gloss the theme of History in his quiet jeremiads are the following: Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams); Marx; Frye (The Anatomy of Criticism); Althusser (for ideology); Benjamin (for experience); Adorno (for pastiche and the serious analysis of “popular” culture); and Ernst Bloch (for the “utopian” dimension of cultural works).

Sartre, a thinker who appears repeatedly here, is for Jameson something like a role model of an intellectual. (Jameson titled his first book Sartre: Origins of a Style.) That Sartre’s early moviegoing was behind his theory of contingency gives Jameson justification for an idiosyncratic yet critical approach to film that avoids what he uncharitably refers to in one place as “self-punishing frame-by-frame analysis” (100). Jameson’s own practice is more heterogeneous, glancing from film to history to critical theory and back again. Over the course of this book, however, a pattern emerges, one that may be worthwhile to trace.

A typical chapter begins with a weighty issue (the “problem” of mass culture; the role of class in contemporary critical theory) or thinker (Adorno, Metz), and moves gradually to introduce the film or films in question. Much like the New Historicism, Jameson then stresses the synchronic: the fact that the events restaged in Dog Day Afternoon occurred “on the climactic day of the Nixon-Agnew nominating convention” (39), or that The Exorcist (which Jameson sees as the first in a “new wave of occult films”) was released in 1973, the beginning of “the global economic crisis which marked the end of the sixties as such” (96). In pointing to the simultaneity in 1981 of Diva and “the first left government in France for thirty-five years,” Jameson calls this “historical conjuncture” (55). The difference from New Historicism here is that Jameson sees such conjuncture as symptomatic of historical process, not—as with much New Historicism—neutral circulation.

Freud’s theory of dreamwork has been extremely important to Jameson’s thought, and the central sections of these essays show the influence of the allegory theories of both Freud and Frye when Jameson identifies the symbolic freight carried by characters within specific films. Thus an eerie character in The Shining represents both the American 1920s and everything which that decade stands for (in relation to class, leisure, and capital) in the national imagination...