Jean-Francois Lyotard- The Postmodern Condition; Frederic Jameson- The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
These two texts continue the discourse initiated previously by the Frankfurt Schoolers regarding the relationship between art and commerce. Jameson feels more pertinent to what I'm doing than Lyotard, but they're both important and usually looked at together. I'll do Lyotard first.
On legitimation of knowledge, carried out by language games:
“What is needed if we are to understand social relations in this manner, on whatever scale we choose, is not only a theory of communication, but a theory of games which accepts agonistics as a founding principle” (Lyotard).
Linguistic games pop up over and over in the Invisibles- I'll cover the specific instances in the other post. What is important to draw out of this is that he's moving the post-structural idea of language governing the world from the subjective to the social. That is, Derrida's idea of language structuring reality has to do more with the individual's relationship to "the world", whereas this focuses on how language wholly governs every social action between two or more individuals. Language gives form to reality in a slightly different way here; he raises the example of the rector or university dean saying "The University is open," but it wouldn't be true if he hadn't said it, or if someone else said it, etc. This only works because other people buy in to the legitimacy of this linguistic interaction.
On grand narrative/historical metanarrative:
“The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation” (Lyotard).
I agree with this notion of postmodernism not ascribing to any grand narratives of societal progress or validation of the self or anything like that, but I wonder where the line is drawn between smaller narratives and grand narratives, and Lyotard isn't very clear. I guess this is covered on a micro level by the overarching story of the Invisibles being kind of lame, and the demands of individual issues or 3- or 4-issue arcs always taking precedence over the main narrative, to the point where the last issue itself is a complete departure from the rest of the story. On the other hand, the work "participates" in a larger narrative of British writers putting out extremely literate and creator-owned work through major American publishing houses, thus messing with the mechanics of the culture industry.
Which leads me to Jameson!
“One fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms enumerated above [is] the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply ‘quote’ as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance” (Jameson).
Obviously as a literary superhero comic book the Invisibles is implicated in this erosion of the dichotomy between high and low culture. It also interrogates the concept in a lot of ways, and hopefully by the time I write the post on the other blog I'll have found and pulled some nice pages to support this.
“Our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation […] the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonising those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity […] Not only punctual and local counter-culture 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” (Jameson).
I think this one speaks for itself. It feels intuitively true and it makes things both easier and harder for me; it's tough to reconcile the book's anti-capitalist attitudes with the reality of its ontological status as a late-cap art-commodity, but at the same time it's easy to just kick out of the question and say that because nothing can escape the system, nothing has a responsibility to try. Besides, I think the book has a pretty sophisticated attitude about capitalism, as I'll hopefully show on the other page.
Citations:
Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Frederic Jameson. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso, 1991
