Looking Ahead

“You put your soul in it, you put your heart in it – they will devour both the soul and the heart. You extract the baseness out of the soul – they devour the baseness.” - “Writer” upon entering “The Meat Grinder” in Tarkovsky’s Stalker [1]

My last entry covered a wide time range, from prehistory to John Locke. This entry concerns a much shorter one, the era of late capitalism. Continuing the theme of inequality -- economists have noted that [2] it has been increasing since the 1970’s. During that period, postmodernism, a movement that had been encroaching on world culture since about the late 50’s, was becoming prominent and has since come to dominate it. The linked book, [3] published by Fredric Jameson in 1991, analyzes this movement, which seems intimately connected with this growing inequality [4]. Since I remember best through simile, I’ll use the above-quoted movie, which contains many interesting parallels to the book, to guide us through it.

Text on the screen describes a mysterious event, either a meteorite or an alien visitation, which burned a village down, prompting the country’s government to send troops. When they didn’t come back, police surrounded the area—which became known as “the Zone”—to keep the curious away. Rumors spread that a place in the Zone could grant those who went there their deepest wishes, and people started to pay “stalkers” to guide them to it. We meet one such stalker, the protagonist, in his squalid home. (We never learn his name, and we only know him by his calling.) As he prepares, his wife tries to dissuade him, saying he’ll be sent back to prison, but this time will get ten years rather than five. She accuses him of making her prematurely old and blames him for their daughter’s condition. Claiming that every place is a prison for him, he breaks away and leaves her yelling after him. We hear a train pass by as she falls to the floor, hysterically writhing and crying.

Stalker comes upon the first of his two current clients outside a dilapidated bar. The client, a writer, is flirting with a fashionably dressed woman, who, he tells Stalker, has bravely agreed to come with them, and whose name he forgets. We can use the contrast between the two women—Stalker’s temperamental wife and his client’s forgettable fashion plate—as a figure for the book’s contrast between the high-modern and postmodern eras similarly to Jameson’s use of two paintings from their respective periods—Vincent Van Gough’s “A Pair of Boots” and Andy Warhol’s“Diamond Dust Shoes” [5]. The book notes the centrality of commodification [6] in the latter work, a commodification which modernist works resisted, before noting three more differences:

The first and most evident is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the Postmodernisms …

Then we must surely come to terms with the role of photography and the photographic negative in contemporary art of this kind; and it is this, indeed, which confers its deathly quality to the Warhol image, whose glacéd X-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content … but [is a matter] of some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself -- now become a set of texts or simulacra -- and in the disposition of the subject.

All of which brings me to a third feature to be developed here, what I will call the waning of affect in postmodern culture. [7]

After telling the young woman to leave and reproaching the writer for drinking, Stalker enters the bar and sees his second client, a physicist. The writer stumbles in, complaining about the mess (the bar walls are grimy and its floor is covered with puddles), orders beer, and tries to introduce himself. Stalker interrupts him, giving him the nickname, “Writer” and his other client, “Professor.” Writer, answering Professor’s question about his work, says that it is about his readers, and, to Professor’s comment that there’s nothing else worth writing about, says, “It’s not worth it to write at all.”

This discussion of what writing is worth leads to another point of Jameson’s book, how communication, verbal and otherwise, has progressed from the extreme individual styles of the high moderns, such as Faulkner, to fragmentation, in which artists are reduced to cobbling together pastiches [8] of previous styles, transforming a world “into sheer images of itself” filled with what Jameson calls, "‘simulacrum,’ the identical copy for which no original has ever existed.”

Appropriately enough, the culture of the simulacrum comes to life in a society where exchange value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use value is effaced, a society of which Guy Debord has observed, in an extraordinary phrase, that in it "the image has become the final form of commodity reification" [9]

Learning that Professor is a physicist, Writer says that his work must be boring: “The search for the truth. … You dug at one place – aha, the nucleus is made of protons! You dug in another place – what a beauty: triangle ABC is equal to the triangle A′B′C′.” He contrasts Professor’s search with his own, in which something happened to the truth as he was digging – “it appeared to be a piece of … sorry, I will not say what.” Professor advises him not to think so much about success or failure, but Writer asks why, if nobody reads him after a hundred years, he should write at all. This reference to the need for an Other to generate any kind of meaning links to a psychological aspect of our book:

What we generally call the signified -- the meaning or conceptual content of an utterance -- is now rather to be seen as a meaning-effect, as that objective mirage of signification generated and projected by the relationship of signifiers among themselves.

…thus,

With the breakdown of the signifying chain [that postmodernism engenders, one] is reduced to [a schizophrenic-like] experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time. [10]

Writer asks Professor what he wants from the Zone, and Professor dodges the question and returns it to Writer, who says that he is looking for inspiration. Stalker tells them it is time to go, and they get into a “land rover”/jeep. Through a series of dark alleys in a town of abandoned, broken-down buildings, Stalker puts himself and his clients through numerous maneuvers to elude the police, and has Writer get out at one point to act as a lookout. Soon after Writer says there is no one coming, the jeep narrowly evades a policeman, and Stalker again reproaches him. After this close call, Writer confesses to Professor his doubts about his own motives, remarking, “It’s all these empirical things: if you name them, their meaning disappears, melts, vaporizes… like a jellyfish in the sun. … [for instance, what if m]y consciousness desires the victory of vegetarianism in the whole world, but my unconsciousness dreams about a piece of juicy meat”?

We can use the vivid imagery of Writer’s words and the setting through which he and his comrades escape danger to enter the Zone as a memory image and place for Jameson's next point: The slogan, “difference relates” can sum up this schizophrenic experience described above, an experience … which one could … imagine in the positive terms of euphoria”, … giving postmodern phenomenon such as photorealism the power of make even urban squalor

a delight to the eyes when expressed in commodification, and … an unparalleled quantum leap in the alienation of daily life in the city can now be experienced in the form of a strange new hallucinatory exhilaration… [11]

The men get back to the jeep, wait for the guards to open the gate for a locomotive, then speed through, and the police open fire. The men find a trolley and mount it while still being fired upon. Stalker advises the others not to scream if they are hit – “when it gets quieter, crawl back to the cordon. You’ll be picked up in the morning.” We can contrast the fearful activity of this scene with another example of the simulacrum, the statues of Duane Hanson, in which

The ultimate contemporary fetishization of the human body… takes a very different direction … [which simulacrum serves to derealize] the whole surrounding world of everyday reality. [12]

We see the men, having dodged the police, take the trolley on the long ride to the Zone. We’ll take this time to meditate on the book’s description of “that enormous properly human and anti-natural power of dead human labor stored up in our machinery.” Jameson distinguishes three “quantum leaps in the evolution of machinery under capital:”

Machine production of steam-driven motors since 1848; machine production of electric and combustion motors since the 90s of the 19th century; machine production of electronic and nuclear-powered apparatuses since the 40s of the 20th century … These are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital.

…Jameson goes on to describe late capitalist machinery, such as television and the computer, as reproductive rather than productive,

and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself. [13]

When the men reach the Zone, the film, à la The Wizard of Oz, changes from black and white to color. Stalker remarks on their arrival, “How strange! The flowers do not smell.” (This would be a good place to transition to Jameson’s analysis of the postmodern Bonaventure Hotel [14] in Los Angeles, whose visitors, as he says, are “in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself.”)

Stalker explains that his former teacher, “Porcupine,” had trampled down some nearby flowers long ago, but that their smell had remained for years. When asked his teacher’s reason, Stalker says he doesn’t know, but believes that something broke inside him, speculating that the Zone had punished him. He asks Professor to tie white gauze streamers to some metal nuts, and then goes for a walk, telling the others to stay near the trolley. Writer asks Professor why anyone would want to be alone in such a place, and Professor answers, “He’s a Stalker.” He tells some of their guide’s personal history, including that he had been jailed several times, and reveals that his daughter is a mutant, a victim of the Zone, “presumably without legs.” He elaborates on what Stalker had meant by the Zone’s punishing Porcupine, saying that the teacher had become very rich one day after returning from the Zone and had hung himself a week later. The camera cuts to Stalker entering a field and shows a deserted building in the distance. Stalker kneels, then lies face down in the tall weeds, letting a millipede walk across his hand, turns over on his back and closes his eyes. I’ll leave to my readers the fun of finding parallels between the Zone and our book’s description of the hotel, beginning with its entrances, all

rather backdoor affairs: the gardens in the back admit you to the sixth floor of the towers, and even there you must walk down one flight to find the elevator by which you gain access to the lobby. … [such unmarked ways seemingly] to have been imposed by some new category of closure governing the inner space of the hotel itself…

…to its “disjunction from the surrounding city” to the escalators and elevators, which not only replace movement,

but also, and above all, designate themselves as new reflexive signs and emblems of movement proper (something which will become evident when we come to the question of what remains of older forms of movement in this building, most notably walking itself). Here the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbolized, reified, and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own: and this is a dialectical intensification of the autoreferentiality of all modern culture, which tends to turn upon itself and designate its own cultural production as its content…

…to the ease with which one could get lost there, especially in its lobby,

positioned between the four symmetrical residential towers with their elevators … I am tempted to say that such space makes it impossible for us to use the language of volume or volumes any longer, since these are impossible to seize. Hanging streamers indeed suffuse this empty space in such a way as to distract systematically and deliberately from whatever form it might be supposed to have, while a constant busyness gives the feeling that emptiness is here absolutely packed, that it is an element within which you yourself are immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume. [15]

Professor and writer discuss the history of the Zone and speculate why aliens would have bestowed such a gift on humanity. Stalker’s voice off-screen answers, “to make us happy.” As he comes into view, we hear a strange wailing sound, and Professor wonders if someone lives there. Stalker says that that is impossible and that it is time to go, warning them of danger if they fail to follow his directions closely. He points to a pole, tells Professor to go first and Writer to follow his footsteps. This first leg of their journey brings us to Jameson’s conclusion of the hotel’s description, which notes that it’s

postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment—which is to the initial bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of spacecraft to those of the automobile—can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. [16]

The men encounter a bus with human remains inside. To Writer’s frightened questioning, Stalker says that when the Zone was created people had thought that someone was trying to occupy the country and that he remembers as a child watching their loading at the station. He casts one of the gauze-flagged nuts, it falls into the grass between the remains of war machines, and Stalker tells Professor to go where it had landed and has the Writer follow him. The reference to war recalls Jameson’s next example, Michael Herr’s book, Dispatches, about his experience in Vietnam—the first postmodern war. Herr described erotic memories of choppers,

hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an intruder.

…and Jameson comments on the chopper:

In this new machine, which does not, like the older modernist machinery of the locomotive or the airplane, represent motion, but which can only be represented in motion, something of the mystery of the new postmodernist space is concentrated. [17]

When the three men reach the nut, Stalker points out the building where the room is, but says that they cannot go there directly. To Writer’s protest that it’s just a couple of paces away, Stalker answers, “but the paces must be extremely long,” and throws the nut in another direction. We’ll let the alien space of the Zone stand for the cultural realm’s loss of distance and autonomy from the social realm in postmodernism, a loss coinciding with

the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital [which] ends up penetrating and colonizing those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity… [N]ot only punctual and local countercultural forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it. [18]

Writer continues to argue, declaring that he will go directly to the room by himself. After emptying Writer’s liquor bottle and noting that the Professor is a witness to Writer’s leaving of his own free will, Stalker lets him go, warning him, if he senses anything strange, to come immediately back. As we watch Writer slowly advance toward the building, we hear a voice that seems to come from nowhere – “Halt! Do not move!” Stalker asks Professor why he said that, and Professor replies, “I thought it was you.” Writer runs back. The confusion, possibly a trick of Stalker’s or Writer’s, can express the paradox Jameson describes of attempts of postmodern cultural production to

be read as peculiar new forms of realism (or at least of the mimesis of reality), while at the same time they can equally well be analyzed as so many attempts to distract and divert us from that reality or to disguise its contradictions and resolve them in the guise of various formal mystifications. [19]

Writer asks his companions which one of them told him to stop, and Professor mocks him, thinking he did it to save himself from feeling cowardly. Angered, Writer asks Stalker why he had emptied his bottle. Stalker replies that the Zone is “a very complicated system ... of traps, let’s call it, and all of them are deadly. I do not know what happens here, when humans are away, but if only people appear here, everything starts moving.” This description, evoking Jameson’s description of postmodernism, can suggest the conclusion of this chapter, that:

The political form of Postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale. [20]

We can introduce Jameson’s chapter on the specific case of video, the primary medium of postmodernism, with an exchange between Writer And Stalker. Stalker remarks that the Zone may seem capricious, “but in every moment it is such as we made it ourselves ... with our inner state.” With this reflective description we can conjure some aspects of video as distinct from film:

Streaming,

in a situation of total flow, the contents of the screen streaming before us all day long without interruption (or where the interruptions -- called commercials -- are less intermissions than they are fleeting opportunities to visit the bathroom or throw a sandwich together), what used to be called "critical distance" seems to have become obsolete…

…The structural exclusion of memory,

nothing here haunts the mind or leaves its afterimages in the manner of the great moments of film…

…and experimentality.

Released from all conventional constraints, experimental video allows us to witness the full range of possibilities and potentialities of the medium in a way which illuminates its various more restricted uses, the latter being subsets and special cases of the former. [21]

Writer quips that the Zone lets good people pass and cuts the head off the bad ones. Stalker replies that he is not sure what gauge the Zone uses, but suspects that it favors the unhappy. He then warns that the Zone could easily kill even the most unhappy who don’t know how to behave. He remarks that the Writer was lucky that it warned him -- “it may have happened otherwise!” This odd criterion, along with Stalker's warning of unpleasant consequences and Writer’s recently having avoided them, can help us follow Jameson’s shift to an unpleasant affect on encountering postmodern experimental video – boredom, which

becomes interesting as a reaction to situations of paralysis and also, no doubt, as defense mechanism or avoidance behavior. Even taken in the narrower realm of cultural reception, boredom with a particular kind of work or style or content can always be used productively as a precious symptom of our own existential, ideological, and cultural limits, an index of what has to be refused in the way of other people's cultural practices and their threat to our own rationalizations about the nature and value of art. [22]

Professor suddenly decides to wait until Writer comes back, “made happy,” but when Stalker says that if he doesn’t come with them, they all must go back, he changes his mind. We can let Professor's attempt to cease his quest and his reversal prod us to remember that:

a voluntary attention is demanded by the total flow of the videotext in time which is scarcely relaxed at all, and rather different from the comfortable scanning of the movie screen, let alone of the cigar-smoking detachment of the Brechtian theatergoer. [23]

After intermission the film shows Stalker’s two clients unwinding, then reacting to an off-screen call from their guide. Writer dreads that he will get another “sermon.” We cut to Stalker praying silently (Tarkovsky gives us the content of the prayer in a voiceover) for his companions to believe and to “become as helpless as children.” Stalker muses, “When a tree grows, it is tender and gentle, and when it is dry and hard, it dies…suppleness and weakness express the freshness of living.” Such helplessness links Jameson’s examples of the subjects of early photography, who had to be immobilized for their images to be captured, and the

spectators of video time … immobilized and mechanically integrated and neutralized [24]

When Professor and Writer reach Stalker, who tells him they have to move on, Professor protests that he had not known that they were going and had left his backpack behind. Stalker refuses to let him return, reminding him that the places in the Zone shift from moment to moment. We can again use the Zone, in its strange space/time relations, this time to stand for video, which

manages to produce the simulacrum of fictive time … the only art or medium in which this ultimate seam between space and time is the very locus of the form, and [whose] machinery uniquely dominates and depersonalizes subject and object alike… [25]

During Stalker’s and Writer’s progress through a watery tunnel, they notice that the Professor has gone. Writer asks if they can wait a little, but Stalker says that that is impossible. “Every minute everything changes.” Jameson’s book reflects a similar continuing theme of changeability and the actions of the searchers affecting the changes:

whatever a good, let alone a great, videotext might be, it will be bad or flawed whenever such interpretation proves possible, whenever the text slackly opens up just such places and areas of thematization itself. [26]

Stalker and Writer come to a room where a live coal smolders underwater, and we can hear voices offscreen. When Writer questions him, Stalker exclaims that he had already explained it to him – “It’s the Zone, do you understand? The Zone!” This scene can recall the conclusion of our present chapter in a passage which explains how early capitalism turned human understanding from magic to science:

because of the corrosive dissolution of older forms of magical language by a force which I will call that of reification, a force whose logic is one of ruthless separation and disjunction, of specialization and rationalization, of a Taylorizing division of labor in all realms….

… and the continuation of the process:

Yet the force of reification, which was responsible for this new moment, does not stop there either: in another stage, heightened, a kind of reversal of quantity into quality, reification penetrates the sign itself and disjoins the signifier from the signified. Now reference and reality disappear altogether, and even meaning -- the signified -- is problematized. We are left with that pure and random play of signifiers that we call Postmodernism, which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts -- such is the logic of Postmodernism in general, which finds one of its strongest and most original, authentic forms in the new art of experimental video. [27]

As the travelers emerge from the tunnel, they practically bump into Professor. When Stalker asks how he had gotten ahead of them, he replies that he had only returned to where he had left his backpack. Stalker infers that Porcupine had hung a metal nut there as a trap, and marvels that the Zone had let them pass. Writer taunts Professor for going back for his “underwear,” and Professor rejoins, “[D]o not poke your nose into others’ underwear, if you cannot understand.” This retort can return us to Jameson’s next chapter, in which he notes North Americans’ attitude to food and architecture before postmodernism:

until very recently they have not wanted—for good reason!–to think much about what they were eating; and as for built space, there too a protective narcosis has long reigned, a don't-want-to-see-it, don't-want-to-know-about-it attitude that may, on the whole, have been the most sensible relationship to develop with the older American city. [28]

Stalker tells them to rest, and as they try to get comfortable Writer continues to speculate about what Professor thought was so important to go back for. Believing Professor is trying to experiment on the room, he jibes, “[L]et’s stuff our rucksack with various manometers and crapmeters, let’s get into the Zone illegally... And let’s verify all the miracles of the place with algebra.” The impossibility of studying the Room, especially with anything that would fit in a backpack, directs us to the perplexing goals of postmodern architecture – to abolish the distinction between the inside and outside:

(all the modernists ever said about that was that the one ought to express the other, which suggests that no one had yet begun to doubt whether you needed to have either of them at all in the first place).

…and to feed our appetite for photography:

Downtown conditioned reflexes turn [a postmodern building] drab before you remember its photo; the classic Southern California construction site tarnishes its image and imprints the usual provisionality, which is supposed to be a fine thing in a "text" but in space just another synonym for shoddiness. [29]

Professor tells Writer that he would make his mark more successfully on lavatory walls than on paper. Such a goad drives home Jameson’s next point – that postmodernist architecture places components of older forms, such as “lintel, dormer, and dome … standing out from their former supports, as it were, in free levitation” -

as though their secondary syncategoremic function had become for an instant the Word itself, before being blown out into the dust of empty spaces. [30]

...Jameson broadens the architects’ term for such placement, “wrapping,” to a theoretical level, noting the disposability the term expresses and applying it to literature as “textuality.”

Back in the Zone, Professor accuses Writer of pomposity, trying to award mankind with pearls of his “bought inspiration.” Writer scoffs that he doesn’t give a fig for mankind “I’m interested in only one person. That’s me.” With this response we can ponder the following question about postmodernism and its rejection of modernism’s originalities:

To what degree can we still describe the originalities of spatial construction in the postmodern, when this last has explicitly renounced the great modernist myth of producing a radically new Utopian space capable of transforming the world itself? [31]

To Professor’s further provocation, Writer decides he doesn’t want to argue with him – “In arguments the truth is born.” Such an epigram can head Jameson’s discussion of architecture as text, in which he finds architectural analogies for various parts of speech, but cannot find one for the sentence itself, leading him to speculate on the origins of language and its possible evolution, an evolution that

is still conceivable and entertains a vital relationship to the Utopian question about the possible modification of society (where that is itself still conceivable). Indeed, the forms taken by just such debates will seem philosophically receivable or on the contrary antiquated and superstitious in strict proportion to your deeper convictions as to whether postmodern society can be changed any longer or not. The Marr debate in the Soviet Union, for example, has been classed with Lysenko as a scientific aberration, largely owing to Marr's hypothesis that the very form and structure of language itself altered according to the mode of production of which it was a superstructure. [32]

When Writer asks Stalker what his other clients had wanted, Stalker replies, “happiness.” Writer asks if Stalker had wanted to use the room himself, and Stalker answers that things are OK for him as they are, then looks for a place to lie down in the debris-strewn landscape.  The debris are redolent of the “junk” materials which a well-known postmodernist architect, Frank Gehry, used in building his own house, “dialoguing” with an old house by building the new one over it. Two parts in particular, a corrugated metal frame and “tumbling cube” of a skylight,

make up the "wrapper"; they violate the older space and are now both parts of the newer construction and at distance from it, like foreign bodies. They also correspond, in my opinion, to the two great constitutive elements of architecture itself which in his postmodern manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi disengages from the tradition in order to reformulate the tasks and vocation of the newer aesthetic: namely, the opposition between the façade (or store front) and the shed behind or the barnlike space of the building itself. But Gehry does not remain within this contradiction, playing each term off against the other to produce some interesting but provisional solution. Rather, it seems to me that the corrugated metal front and the tumbling cube allude to the two terms of this dilemma, which they attach to something else -- the remains of the older house, the persistence of history and the past: a content which can still be seen through the newer elements, literally, as when the simulated window opening of the corrugated wrapper discloses the older windows of the frame house behind them. [33]

Writer, although falling asleep, keeps talking, asking Professor what would happen if his wish gets granted and he returns to their “godforsaken city” as a genius. Since a man writes because he constantly needs to prove his worth to others, if he knows for sure that he is a genius, why should he write? We’ll set the paradox of the Writer’s transformation and return against the paradox of Gehry’s space, which, Jameson claims,

…confronts us with the … impossibilities (not least the impossibilities of representation) which are inherent in this latest evolutionary mutation of late capitalism toward "something else" which is no longer family or neighborhood, city or state, nor even nation, but as abstract and nonsituated as the placelessness of a room in an international chain of motels or the anonymous space of airport terminals that all run together in your mind. [34]

Writer and Professor turn their argument to world matters: Writer, noting that science merely helps people work less and eat more, claims that art, as an unselfish occupation, is superior. Professor points out that people are still starving – So who is more selfish? The expansion of the discussion can move us to Jamesons’ broadening of the disorderly aspect of Gehry’s house to characterize postmodern life:

Indeed, one is tempted (without wishing to overload a very minor feature of Gehry's building) to evoke the more general informing context of some larger virtual nightmare, which can be identified as the sixties gone toxic, a whole historical and countercultural "bad trip" in which psychic fragmentation is raised to a qualitatively new power, the structural distraction of the decentered subject now promoted to the very motor and existential logic of late capitalism itself. [35]

Stalker falls asleep and dreams of his wife quoting the book of Revelation and gloating at the description of the rich and powerful asking mountains and rocks to fall on them to escape the wrath of the Lamb. We’ll use Stalker’s dream to envisage the servant’s bedroom that Gehry has retained intact from the previous house – a bedroom he preserved to represent:

a whole range of other very different and nonarchitectural phenomena in postmodern art and theory: the transformation into the image or simulacrum, historicism as a substitute for history, quotation, enclaves within the cultural sphere, and so forth [36]

He wakes, and, looking at Professor and Writer, whispers a quote from Luke 24: “and when they were talking and discussing it together ... and He came up to them, went with them, but their eyes were held, so that they did not recognize Him.” The quote can help us picture a modernist interpretation of the Gehry house’s illusions and contradictions – illusions and contradictions that force “one to continually question the nature of what one sees, to alter the definition of reality, in the end, from the memory of a thing to the perception of that thing." Jameson disagrees with this interpretation:

Such formulations, with their familiar stress on the vocation of art to restimulate perception, to reconquer a freshness of experience back from the habituated and reified numbness of everyday life in the fallen world, bring us to the very heart of the essential modernism of Macrae-Gibson's aesthetic. … It is not clear, to put it crudely and succinctly, why, in an environment of sheer advertising simulacra and images, we should even want to sharpen and renew our perception of those things. [37]

Stalker picks up the argument Professor and Writer had engaged in before they all had fallen asleep.  He brings up how music is the art least connected to our experience, yet “penetrates into the very soul,” unites and shakes us. Seemingly purposeless, it, like everything, has its own meaning. On the mystery of art and its purpose we can follow Jameson’s next question;

[c]an some other function [than the previously rejected modernist one] be conceived for culture in our time? [38]

We see the men at a door looking down a dark tunnel. Over Writer’s objections, Stalker has them draw straws to decide who will be first to walk through it. Although an odd choice, we can use the term “draw” for the first of two kinds of reification in which postmodernist architects engage:

The project, the drawing, is … one reified substitute for the real building, but a "good" one, that makes infinite Utopian freedom possible. The photograph of the already existing building is another substitute, but let us say a "bad" reification—the illicit substitution of one order of things for another, the transformation of the building into the image of itself, and a spurious [commodified/consumable] image at that... [39]

Writer calls behind him that he has found another door, and Stalker tells him to go through it. Writer, frightened, takes out a handgun. The gun can embody contradiction – in this case, a contradiction that Jameson, contrary to Macrae-Gibson's Malevichian [40] theory, lies between

The increasingly abstract (and communicational) networks of American reality beyond [LA], whose extreme form is the power network of so-called multinational capitalism itself…

…and the

Third World side of American life today—the production of poverty and misery, people not only out of work but without a place to live, bag people, waste and industrial pollution, squalor, garbage, and obsolescent machinery. [41]

After Stalker talks him into dropping the gun, Writer goes through the door. Stalker has him climb a ladder at the far end of that room and tells him to wait. As Professor and Stalker follow, Stalker says he hopes Professor doesn’t have anything similar, to which Professor replies that he has only an ampule of poison “sewn in … just in case.” When they get to the top of the ladder, Stalker sees that Writer is still walking, and calls for him to stop. This scene, something of a cliffhanger, seems a good place to finish this chapter of our book, which concludes that a sign that the contradiction referenced above has been resolved would be in

the new intermediary space itself -- the new living space produced by the interaction of the other poles. If that space is meaningful, if you can live in it, if it is somehow comfortable but in a new way, one that opens up historically new and original ways of living -- and generates, so to speak, a new Utopian spatial language, a new kind of sentence, a new kind of syntax, radically new words beyond our own grammar -- then, one would think, the dilemma, the aporia, has been resolved, if only on the level of space itself. I will not decide that, nor dare to evaluate the outcome. [42]

We see Writer lying in large puddle near a well. He gets up and speaks, spitting out bitterness about his profession, starting with the quote at the top of my entry, asking why he writes if he hates to write, and comparing the occupation to hemorrhoids. He mourns his former belief that his books would help people, and says that people will forget about him two days after his death, concluding, “I wanted to remake them, but I myself was remade—in their own image! Earlier the future was only a continuation of the present, and all the changes loomed somewhere behind the horizons. And now the future became one with the present.” We can use writer’s tirade, with its pathological and intersubjective themes, to evoke similar themes in Jameson’s next chapter, on the novel, for which he uses Claude Simon’s Les Corps Conducteurs (1971) as an example:

Art … yields social information primarily as symptom … it tells of contradictions as such, which constitute the deepest form of social reality in our prehistory and must stand in for the “referent” for a long time to come. 

… then distinguishes between

the symptomaticity of high art in the modernist period (in which it stands in radical opposition to the nascent media or culture industry as such) and that of a residual elite culture in our own postmodern age, in which, owing in part to the democratization of culture generally, these two modes (high and low culture) have begun to fold back into one another. [43]

Stalker tells Writer how lucky he is for surviving what he calls “the meat grinder,” exclaiming that he “will live for 100 years!” Adding that Porcupine sent his own brother to die there, Stalker recites a poem that this brother had written, a poem with the refrain, “only that’s not enough” This specter and his elegy resonate with a description of a museum installation by Robert Gober that Jameson describes in the next chapter. He explains the impossibility of seeing the contents as a whole, as all are

distinct artistic materials, which emit their own discordant formal and material voices, also here summon up the ghostly, but social, presence of real human collaborators, who raise again the issues of the subject and of agency, even the false problems of collective subject and individual intention,

…and claims that its interpretation demands an allegorical method, in which

these articles slowly take on the positive and active value of conscious resistance, as choices and symbolic acts that now repudiate the dominant poster-and-decorative culture and thereby assert themselves as something emergent rather than something residual. What was the delectation with a fantasy past now turns out to look more like the construction of a Utopian future. [44]

As they all enter a flooded room, Writer claims that Stalker had given him two long matches and accuses him of playing favorites, and Stalker counters that the nut had shown that only Writer could survive the meat grinder. We’ll use Writer’s accusation of favoritism as an index for Jameson’s next point about the fine arts in modernism:

Like synesthesia in the literary real (Baudelaire), the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk respected the "system" of the various fine arts and paid it tribute in the notion of some vaster overarching synthesis in which they might all somehow "combine" (the theoretical and philosophical parallel to yesterday's notion of the interdisciplinary is striking), generally under the "fraternal leadership" of one of them -- in the case of Wagner, of music. The present installation is, as has been suggested, no longer that, not least because the very "system" on which the older synthesis was based has itself become problematical, along with the claim of any one of the individual fine arts to its own intrinsic autonomy or semiautonomy. [45]

A phone rings, interrupting the argument. Writer answers, cries, “No, it’s not a clinic!” hangs up, continues the argument, then does a double-take. Then Professor, over Stalker’s objection, picks it up and calls a former colleague, saying he found what the man had hidden, and quarrels with him, declaring that he is no longer afraid of him. We can use this declaration to summarize the end of the chapter, in which Jameson discusses painting and photography, arts which, in postmodernism, express the death of the subject, yet in which Jameson sees

something like an unacknowledged "party of Utopia": an underground party whose numbers are difficult to determine, whose program remains unannounced and perhaps even unformulated, whose existence is unknown to the citizenry at large and to the authorities, but whose members seem to recognize one another by means of secret Masonic signals. [46]

Stalker asks Professor what he is planning, and Professor claims that the room is dangerous, asking him to imagine if a potential fuhrer got in, wishing to remake the world. Writer argues that such fears are unfounded, since the wish for a “Kingdom of Heaven on Earth” is not a wish, but an ideology. We can use the calling to remake the world to beckon a story Jameson discusses in his next chapter, a Philip K. Dick story titled, Time Out of Joint, that begins in an idealized version of a small town in the 1950’s – a setting which seems to come from a television series of the era. Jameson states that

[TV Series are] the only kind of art willing (and able) to deal with the stifling Eisenhower realities of the happy family in the small town, of normalcy and nondeviant everyday life. High art apparently cannot deal with this kind of subject matter except by way of the oppositional [47]

Writer describes what he considers more realistic unconscious wishes people might harbor, such as having their boss hit by a car, to which Stalker protests, ‘How can one be happy at the expense of somebody else’s unhappiness?” This question brings up Jameson’s point about how “idyllic” white, middle-class, American life in the 1950’s was -

the gratifications of the new car, the TV dinner and your favorite program on the sofa—which are now themselves secretly a misery, an unhappiness that doesn't know its name, that has no way of telling itself apart from genuine satisfaction and fulfillment since it has presumably never encountered this last. [48]

Writer claims that he knows that Professor plans to destroy mankind “with some kind of unimaginable benevolence,” but that he won’t succeed – Professor may get the Nobel Prize, or something even more incongruous, like the telephone. “You dream about one thing, but you get something different” a twist analogous to the one in Dick’s story:

it transpires, from an increasing accumulation of tiny but aberrant details, that the environment of the novel, in which we watch the characters act and move, is not really the fifties after all (I do not know that Dick ever uses this particular word). [49]

Writer flips a switch and a light turns on. He wonders at all the conveniences in the supposedly abandoned room—phone, electricity, and a number of strong tranquilizers. We can let these incongruities pull us further into Time Out of Joint:

It is a Potemkin village of a historical kind: a reproduction of the 1950s—including induced and introjected memories and character structures in its human population—constructed (for reasons that need not detain us here) in 1997, in the midst of an interstellar atomic civil war. [50]

Stalker suggests they go to room before it gets dark, but Writer, twisting a wire, briefly delays him, alleging that Stalker’s “poetry readings and going in circles” is a form of apology. Having turned the wire into what looks like a crown of thorns he puts it on his head – “I’m not going to forgive you.” This talk of manipulation can pull us yet further:

The village has been constructed in order to trick him, against his will, into performing an essential wartime task for the government. In that sense, he is the victim of this manipulation, which awakens all our fantasies of mind control and unconscious exploitation, of anti-Cartesian predestination and determinism. On this reading, then, Dick's novel is a nightmare and the expression of deep, unconscious, collective fears about our social life and its tendencies. [51]

Stalker reproaches Writer and calls to Professor, who has wandered down the hall. We hear a dog whining behind Professor, and he turns toward it, then the camera slowly moves beyond it, zooming in on two corpses in a corner locked in an embrace. With the end of our travelers’ journey, we can finish Jameson’s description of the preceding novel with his note that its structure

articulates the position of Eisenhower America in the world itself and is thereby to be read as a kind of distorted form of cognitive mapping, an unconscious and figurative projection of some more "realistic" account of our situation, as it has been described earlier [52]

Stalker then indicates the threshold – a good place to make the transition in the chapter. Jameson contrasts Dick’s novel, “mobilizing a vision of the future in order to determine its return to a now historical present” with two movies, Something Wild and Blue Velvet. He categorizes both as subverted forms of “gothic” stories, and defines the genre as

…ultimately a class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised: your privileges seal you off from other people, but by the same token they constitute a protective wall through which you cannot see, and behind which therefore all kinds of envious forces may be imagined in the process of assembling, plotting, preparing to give assault [53]

To focus his clients on what will bring them the most happiness, Stalker tells them, “...concentrate and try to remember the whole of your life. When people think about the past, they become better.” With such meditation, one can reminisce about times such as those the central scene of Something Wild bring up,

a class reunion, the kind of event which specifically demands historical judgments of its participants: narratives of historical trajectories, as well as evaluations of moments of the past nostalgically reevoked but necessarily rejected or reaffirmed.

… This reevaluation seems to occur only on the most superficial level, however. The decades that are supposedly evaluated – the fifties and sixties – are presented without reference to what was being revolted against during them; and the only thing that differentiates the hero from his fellow yuppies are his clothes.

At the end of the film, of course, he also sheds his corporate job; but it would probably be asking too much to wonder what he does or can become in its stead, except in the "relationship" itself, where he becomes the master and the senior partner. [54]

Back to our own movie, Stalker tells his clients that, during their preparatory meditations, the most important thing is to believe. Belief being a function of ideology, this counsel guides us to the last movie that Jameson discusses in this chapter:

History therefore enters Blue Velvet in the form of ideology, if not of myth: the Garden and the Fall, American exceptionalism, a small town far more lovingly preserved in its details like a simulacrum or Disneyland under glass somewhere than anything the protagonists of Something Wild were able to locate on their travels … Even a fifties-style pop psychoanalysis can be invoked around this fairy tale, since besides a mythic and sociobiological perspective of the violence of nature, the film's events are also framed by the crisis in the paternal function … [T]his particular call for a return to the fifties coats the pill by insistence on the unobtrusive benevolence of all these fathers—and, contrariwise, on the unalloyed nastiness of their opposite number. [55]

Writer disagrees that he will become better if he reevaluates his life, and declines to enter the room, so Stalker invites Professor to go in. Professor brings out a cylinder and other objects and starts to assemble them, and Writer hails Professor’s “soul-o-meter.” Professor corrects him – it’s “just a bomb.” Professor reiterates his fears about the room, but expresses new ambivalence – it represents some kind of hope, and “one should never perform irreversible actions.” When Stalker tries to take the bomb from him, Writer (over Professor’s objections) attacks Stalker. He calls Stalker a “hypocritical nit” deciding who lives and who dies “dizzy with power, secrecy, and authority!” the actions by these men-of-the-mind can incarnate Jameson’s interpretation of the second film…

this particular parable of the end of the sixties is also, on another metacritical level, a parable of the end of theories of transgression as well, which so fascinated that whole period and its intellectuals. [56]

Stalker, crying, protests that he helps the suffering – those who have no other hope and no one to help them – “and ... I, nit, am able to! … That’s all! And I want nothing else.” Writer apologizes, gently saying that Stalker has no idea about what happens in the Room. He interprets the fate of Stalker’s mentor – what “is in accordance with your nature, your essence, is what comes true here! That essence that you have no idea about, but it sits in you and rules you all your life! You understood nothing, Leather Stocking. Porcupine was not overcome by his greed. He crawled on his knees in this very puddle begging for his brother. And he got a lot of money, and couldn’t get anything else. Because a Porcupine gets everything that’s porcupine-like! And conscience, throes of the soul – it is invented, it's brain work. He understood that and hanged himself.” We can use Writer’s “it is what it is” interpretation of Porcupine’s history as a foil for the interpretations in Jameson’s three examples:

Dick used science fiction to see his present as (past) history; the classical nostalgia film, while evading its present altogether, registered its historicist deficiency by losing itself in mesmerized fascination in lavish images of specific generational pasts. The two 1986 movies, while scarcely pioneering a wholly new form (or mode of historicity), nonetheless seem, in their allegorical complexity, to mark the end of that and the now open space for something else. [57]

Writer clarifies why he won’t enter the room – “I do not want to spill all the trash that has accumulated inside me, on anybody’s head. Even on yours” – and doubts that the room even can grant wishes, asking Professor who told him about the Room and Porcupine, to which Professor answers that it was Stalker, then disassembles the bomb, asking what the point was in coming. The three return to the bar, and Stalker goes home with his wife and daughter.  Lying on the floor, he agonizes about his clients, that “they think every minute how not to be sold too cheap, how to sell themselves for a higher price! That everybody paid them for every movement of their soul!” His lamentations can call to mind Jameson’s remarking the disappearance of the Great Writer, a Greatness for which Jameson credits the means of production in the modernist age, one of archaic holdovers within a modernizing economy. He uses Kafka as an example:

It is then, in Kafka as elsewhere, the peculiar overlap of future and past, in this case, the resistance of archaic feudal structures to irresistible modernizing tendencies -- of tendential organization and the residual survival of the not yet "modern" in some other sense -- that is the condition of possibility for high modernism as such, and for its production of aesthetic forms and messages that may no longer have anything to do with the unevenness from which it alone springs. What follows paradoxically as a consequence is that in that case the postmodern must be characterized as a situation in which the survival, the residue, the holdover, the archaic, has finally been swept away without a trace. In the postmodern, then, the past itself has disappeared (along with the well-known "sense of the past" or historicity and collective memory). Where its buildings still remain, renovation and restoration allow them to be transferred to the present in their entirety as those other, very different and postmodern things called simulacra. Everything is now organized and planned; nature has been triumphantly blotted out [58]

Stalker’s wife helps him up and into bed, then looks at the camera and talks to us about being the wife of a Stalker, saying that “there had been a lot of grief, and it was frightening, and it was shameful. But I have never regretted and I have never envied anybody. … [I]f there was no grief in our life, it would not be better, it would be worse. Because then there would be ... neither happiness, nor hope.” We can use this speech, linking contrasts to hope, to bookmark Jameson’s last chapter, in which he describes the diminishment of “[m]emory, temporality, the very thrill of the "modern" itself, the New, and innovation”

…all casualties of this process in which not only Mayer's residual ancien régime is obliterated but even classical bourgeois culture of the belle epoque is liquidated. [59]

We then see Stalker’s daughter reading a poem contrasting expressions in a loved one’s eyes – one, a “magic play of flames/when suddenly they look up” and the other, “In moments of the passionate kiss/When there through the lowered eyelashes/Burns a dreadful, dim fire of the wish.” With these verses we can turn to Jameson’s contrasts in his last chapter – contrasts between the modernist hermeneutic with the postmodern. In the former, the hermeneutic intervenes to save the day for biblical narratives that seemed to have lost their relevance. These narratives,

including the gospel itself, are no longer to be taken literally -- that way Hollywood lies! …As for the commandments and the ethical doctrine, casuistry has long since settled the matter; they also need no longer be taken literally, and confronted with properly modern forms of injustice, bureaucratic warfare, systemic or economic inequality, and so forth, modern theologians and churchmen can work up persuasive accommodations to the constraints of complex modern societies, and provide excellent reasons for bombing civilian populations or executing criminals which do not disqualify the executors from Christian status…

…Whereas a fundamentalist, such as John Howard Yoder, who insists on the literal reading of the Scripture, is postmodern in that his reading has

a simulated relationship to the past rather than a commemorative one, and … share[s] characteristics of other such postmodern historical simulations. In our own context here, the striking feature of such simulation is in effect the denial of any fundamental social or cultural difference between postmodern subjects of late capitalism and the Middle-Eastern subjects of the early Roman Empire: such fundamentalism thus absolutely refuses what Latour calls the Great Divide, particularly insofar as belief in that distinction authorized and legitimated modernity in the first place, as an experience as well as an ideology. [60]

Stalker’s daughter looks at some objects on a table, and seems to be moving them telekinetically; then we hear a train rumble by the house, its vibrations knocking one of the glasses off and breaking it. Ode to Joy plays. With this finale, we can quote Jameson’s conclusion:

That a new international proletariat (taking forms we cannot yet imagine) will reemerge from this convulsive upheaval it needs no prophet to predict: we ourselves are still in the trough, however, and no one can say how long we will stay there…"We have to name the system": this high point of the sixties finds an unexpected revival in the Postmodernism debate. [61]

P.S. Having written this entry using a former Soviet movie and ending by speaking of the sixties, I’ll include an article that uses the cold-war classic, Dr. Strangelove (1964,) to analogize a current upheaval. I’ll also include a link to various updates on the situation  [62]

 

1. Arkadiy Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky & Andrei Tarkovsky. Stalker (1979.) Script in: The Tarkovsky Zone. September 9, 2006.

2. Paul Krugman. “Why We’re in a New Gilded Age.” in: The New York Review of Books. May 8, 2014.

3. Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 1991 [Chapters written bet. 1984 & 1990] in: flawedart.net.

4. Andrew Hartman. “Neoliberalism and the Spirit of the 60s,” “Review of James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century,” and “The Cunning of History”; Or, the Unintended Negative Consequences of Good Ideas.” in: Society for U.S. Intellectual History. December 17, 2010, November 2, 2010, and March 27, 2009, respectively.

5. Jessica Jane O'Hara. “The classic illustration of postmodern style.” in: Waves and Radiation: English 200. March 18, 2010.

6. “Commodification.” in: Wikipedia. January 25, 2014.

7. Jameson. Postmodernism. in: flawedart.net.

8. “Pastiche.” in: Wikipedia. May 5, 2014.

9a. Jameson. Postmodernism. in: flawedart.net.
9b “Reification (Marxism.)” in: Wikipedia. April 23, 2014.

10-13. Jameson. Postmodernism. in: flawedart.net.

14. “Westin Bonaventure Hotel.” in: Wikipedia. March 15, 2014.

15-39. Jameson. Postmodernism. in: flawedart.net.

40. “Kazimir Malevich.” in: Wikipedia. April 23, 2014

41-61. Jameson. Postmodernism. in: flawedart.net.

62a in: Common Dreams. May 6, 2014.
62b in: imdb.com May 7, 2014.