Friday, March 5, 2010

S-03 Jameson

I thought it was interesting how Jameson (being a Marxist) links the way that we perceive our surroundings to forms and stages of capitalism. The stage that we are in right now is late-capitalism. He seemed to say the least about this stage of capitalism. For the stage right before late capitalism, which he refers to as " the stage of imperialism" our personal experiences become disconnected from the "economic and social forms that govern that experience". I believe that Jameson here is hinting at his idea of totality. That everything we experience in the world is connected (via capitalism) but it is so vast that we can not possibly understand or comprehend it. We can only see parts of the system and therefore we lack the complete picture. I wonder if in the stage of late capitalism we are coming closer to perhaps developing a means to represent this totality as we have become interconnected through the world wide web. We are now in the position to view, understand map information that we were never able to. We are being exposed to ideas and information that may bring us closer to understanding the world in which we live. Jameson says that these " new and enormous global realities are inaccessible to any individual subject or consciousness not even to Hegel". It seems that he is suggesting that there is no possible way in which we can become familiar with the complete picture. That we can only hope to map parts of the total. Going back to the break between human experience and reality, Jameson's ideas make sense. When ones experience excludes information on the reality of the immediate objects with which one interacts, it is relitavely impossible to map reality. The question here for me is whether or not in the stage of late capitalism we are more in touch with the real. Jameson suggests that our inability to map what is total and real also comes from the fractional nature of the subject. This fractioned subject is becoming even more fractioned with the growing presence of technology in our lives. There is no unity of subject.
If there is one thing that I would like clarified it would be what the ideal space is. If we are a part of an abstract space that is a result of a fractioned subject is that a positive or negative thing?

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