Jameson 3 (New frontiers for the dispersion of culture?)

Jameson 3 (New frontiers for the dispersion of culture?)
7.8.08

The severest point of change to which Jameson returns again and again in his writings on postmodernity is the becoming-culture of everything. He also refers to the complete merger of culture and economy, refereing thereby to a broad process of commodification. Since his postmodernity is constitutively spatial (a feature masked, he argues, by the visual spectacles of postmodernity), the most significant feature of the expansion of capital in postmodernity (which J also calls the third phase of capitalism) is its territorialization of the globe itself, its exploitation of land as new markets, and including its expansions into (production of and then expansion into) what J calls "cyberspace," which he describes as an information space. He often points to contemporary art to exemplify this claim: there is no longer, he argues, any art produces outside of the vast and varied processes of commodification (as there were, he argues, at the turn of the 19th c.). But also to the way that corporations (which we might formerly have thought were more or less purely on the side of the economy) benefit from, extract from, learn from, steal from, thrive on, depend on...culture and cultural production (e.g. fashion companies employing cool hunters, see: Gibson's Pattern Recognition).

But S. Shaviro argues in a recent blog post (from a series of extracts from his forthcoming book on Aesthetics, see: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=646) that capital can never be all that there is, even though it "is the milieu that all our thoughts and actions presuppose, the environment to which they all refer, the context in relation to which they alone have meaning." It can never be all because capital is not self-generating, not auto-poetic; it needs people as resources to exploit and as consumers to buy. It also needs new raw materials to convert into markets. The "monstrous body of capital" or body without organs can never be complete in itself. Reciprocally, D&G figure humans as parasites on the body of capital or the socius.

In the equivalence between Capital, body (without organs) and socius, we can hear echoes of J's constitutive postmodern merger of culture with economy, the dissemination of culture to all parts of the globe, and the coeval dissemination of capital (commodification) to all parts of culture. But, J argues for a total merger while Shaviro theorizes capital as a set of processes never complete in itself, a process that is constitutively parasitic, or, better for the comparison with J that I'm after here, territorializing. Is there a contradiction here? Or is Jameson's total dissemination of culture compatible with, even reliant upon, Shaviro's version of capital as forever-imcomplete, constitutively incomplete?

I've also been reading Lewis Hyde's work in progress on creative commons (http://www.warholfoundation.org/paperseries/article8.htm, http://www.lewishyde.com/progress.html), in which Hyde argues that there is a trackable trend in contemporary culture to relegate the protection of creative culture to the market and to thereby steal from, and gut, the creative commons (obviously he's not the only one to make this argument, but from what I've read, I can't yet tell how or where his work diverges from, say, Lessig's, although in places, Hyde's emphasis on the non-incompatibility of market forces and creative commons sounds like Lessig's Libertarian slant). Thus, the commodification of the human genome project jeopardizes the potentials of human genome science by yolking all innovation to profit, thereby foreclosing on any chance that a nonprofitable discovery, or a discovery whose profitability are simply unknown and unknowable, might be pursued. Hyde's stuff is well written, and I'm looking forward to his book, which he promises will be a parallel historicization of 1. the commons and 2. the creative individual. But so far it's all a pretty standard creative commons defense (like my essay "What will happen next?" in that sense).

Still, his essays make me think about something like creativity or the creative mind or innovation or potentiality itself as the latest frontier, or gap, of the sort Shaviro theorizes from his cross-reading of D&G and Marx. The latest itch of capital. Boltanski and Chiapello's work on The New Spirit of Capitalism offers very broad-scale support for this idea (being parasitic on avant garde culture, capitalism was, throughout what J calls the end of modernism, already capitalizing (on) potentiality as such). Deleuze's essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control" makes a cognate argument via D's retooling and updating of Foucault's concept of biopolitics.

Of course, this wouldn't surprise Jameson. In his discussion of the waning of affect, and his idea that the modernist Sublime has been replaced in postmodernity by theory, he is clearly pointing to some of the impacts of postmodernism on the human body, the sensorium, and more broadly, on the horizons of personhood itself. He refers negatively to the same problem (postmodernity's impacts on personhood) with his ideas about our disorientation in space and consequent need for cognitive mapping. Nor would drawing the recent changes to copyright and patent law into this discussion be dischordant with J's overall sense of the defining changes of postmodernity.

But there might nevertheless be value in charting the micro-movements in what J refers to, very broadly, as the total dissemination of commodity culture. Such micro-movements might materialize significant details which nuance our understanding of the overall process by establishing any number of relations with the overall trend: from contradiction to affirmation to exemplification to counter-models, etc. And (to think J and S together) we might think of these micro-movements within the wider flow as exactly the kinds of gaps that Shaviro describes in his version of capital as the "monstrous body," socius, or body without organs.

Along these same lines, Beacon charts the further excursions of capital: into the very idea of searching itself, the retrieval of knowledge, the potentiality of knowledge as such, the very idea of finding out, formulating questions, the very thought that the world contains an answer, that it's possible to know [something]. The value of placing this description within the broader changes outlined by Jameson, understanding it as a micro-flow within the wider flow of commodity culture, would be that any resistance I might find Beacon to offer up in this context could not be divorced from, or set in opposition to a more pessimistic Marxist account. Utopianism could not be set in opposition to critique because optimism and pessimism would both be set in motion within the broader currents of capitalist territorialization. Capitalism becomes the terrain, the field of operations, the conditions, not the force to be resisted (what is to be resisted, then, sits below capital and capitalism as such; this placement is one of the sought-after effects of Jameson's work on postmodernity: namely, to produce a clear-eyed description of capitalism today so that we can stop the residual form of utopianism which says that capitalism itself can still meaningfully be resisted, tout court, even though it's obvious that it bears responsibility for all sorts of lived misery).