Thursday, July 3, 2008

Jameson 2 (What kind of fragments are search queries?)

Do the fragments [Jameson, "Culture and Finance Capital"] in Beacon [the serialized queries] emit meaning as a kind of reflex of re-narrativization, as Jameson says of postmodernist fragments? I.e. as stereotypes do, each of which reflexively calls up an entire world, an entire narrative without ever needing to materialize that world, that story (pastiche is J's favorite po-mo tactic of re-narrativization)? I don't think so. I think they're broken, although not necessarily as modernist fragments were broken. Modernist fragments of meaning (e.g. its abstractions) were critical, negative; they referenced the object to be criticized by severing its legibility, its legible relations to that world (of history painting, of narrative fiction). They accumulated into texts that were illegible, partially legible, alienating, aggressive. This aesthetic strategy mirrored a world that had become alienated, like aesthetic fragments. Subjectivity was so fragmented. Experience was fragmented. The body's experience of space and time was fragmented. In J's description of postmodernity, we experience a oneness with the world because all of the fragments (aesthetic, experiential, ordinary) are referentially replete like stereotypes are: they call up everything one needs to receive a full narrative, they fill in the blanks, make us believe that everything we need for understanding is present. Aesthetic fragments no longer need to mirror this world; they are no longer separate from it. "The Cultural Turn" marks the complete merger of aesthetics with the life of capital, and thus the closing of the Historical gap between experience and aesthetics. Beacon's fragments seem to be neither modernist nor postmodernist: they are severed, but not alienating; they are referential, replete, they seem to amount to something like a theory, a sociology, a representation of a public, but they don't get there, they tease with proximity and meaning, but only tease. The broken calligram. What might this imply about the economy of which they are a part? And what is their relation to that economy (if the economy of modernity is mirrored by the aesthetics of modernism, and if the economy of postmodernity has merged with the aesthetics of postmodernism)?

In any case, this sounds like a good articulation of my problem: what larger life do search queries point to, IF they're fragments, and how does this relate to the present economy? OR, if they're not fragments because search engines point to a new horizon of un-representability [data over theory], then what relations do they have to the world they reference [if 'reference' is the right word for their relation to the world]?

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