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SIGNATURES OF THE VISIBLE SIGNATURES OF THE VISIBLE FREDRIC JAMESON Routledge • New York & London First published in 1992 by Routledge an imprint of Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc. 29 West 35 Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE © 1992 by Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc. Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the visible / Fredric Jameson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-90012-3 (pb) 1. Motion pictures. I. Title. PN1994.J29 1992 791.43—dc20 92-16583 CIP British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Jameson, Fredric Signatures of the visible. 1. Cinema films. Theories I. Title 791.4301 ISBN 0-415-90011-5 hb ISBN 0-415-90012-3 pbk for Peter Fitting . . . signatures of all things I am here to read . . . Ulysses Contents Introduction 1 Part One 1. Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture (1979) 9 2. Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film (1977) 35 3. Diva and French Socialism (1982) 55 4. "In the destructive element immerse": Hans-Jurgen Syberberg and Cultural Revolution (1981) 63 5. Historicism in The Shining (1981) 82 6. Allegorizing Hitchcock (1982) 99 7. On Magic Realism in Film (1986) 128 Part Two 8. The Existence of Italy 155 Notes 231 Index 251 Acknowledgments The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the follow ing essays: "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture": Social Text #1 (Fall, 1979). "Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture": Screen Education #30 (1977). "Diva and French Socialism": Originally published as "On Diva," So cial Text #6 (Fall, 1982). "In the destructive element immerse": October #17 (Summer, 1981). "Historicism in The Shining": Originally published as "The Shining," Social Text #4 (Fall, 1981). "Allegorizing Hitchcock": Originally published as "Reading Hitch cock," October #23 (Winter, 1982). "On Magic Realism in Film": Critical Inquiry, v. 12, #2 (Winter, 1986). "The Existence of Italy" appears for the first time in this volume. Introduction The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer). Pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body. On the other hand, we know this today more clearly because our society has begun to offer us the world— now mostly a collection of products of our own making—as just such a body, that you can possess visually, and collect the images of. Were an ontology of this artificial, person-produced universe still possible, it would have to be an ontology of the visual, of being as the visible first and foremost, with the other senses draining off it; all the fights about power and desire have to take place here, between the mastery of the gaze and the illimitable richness of the visual object; it is ironic that the highest stage of civilization (thus far) has transformed human nature into this single protean sense, which even moralism can surely no longer wish to amputate. This book will argue the proposition that the only way to think the visual, to get a handle on increasing, tendential, all-pervasive visuality as such, is to grasp its historical coming into being. Other kinds of thought have to replace the act of seeing by something else; history alone, however, can mimic the sharpening or dissolution of the gaze. All of which is to say that movies are a physical experience, and are remembered as such, stored up in bodily synapses that evade the thinking mind. Baudelaire and Proust showed us how memories are part of the body anyway, much closer to odor or the palate than to the combination of Kant's categories; or perhaps it would be better to say that memories are first and foremost memories of the senses, ;