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noahregained's review against another edition
4.0
I left more tabs in this book than any other. I would guess I spent something in the neighborhood of 30-45 hours reading it. On walks the last few nights, my thoughts have been worming through a couple of concepts which describe the difficulty of a text better than the vulgar “this book is difficult.” Jameson is rather more than a “difficult” writer— he is an *obfuscating* author, one who produces the obfuscation of his concepts through writing. Jameson is not an obfuscated writer (like a microbiologist, who must refer to phenomena outside of the domains of normative experience using the exact names of microbes who are only perceptible using an instrument of research), nor is Jameson a differencial writer (like Deleuze or Derrida, for whom signifiers are always active engines of the amorphous, novel, and positive; such that their literal or syntactical error in writing is a means of production, where production is more important than sense or where “nonsense is the sense event”).
Interestingly, or diabolically, Jameson is an obfuscating writer writing on one of history’s greatest obfuscating writers. Adorno meant for his texts to resist consumption, and Jameson has echoed this point just as well as he has echoed Adorno’s style. Both authors have made the four-clause sentence a default, and it is trivial to locate an 8-line paragraph from either writer which can be easily distilled into 2.
I will add some notes direct from the text some time soon- it has a very obscure progression and an interesting relationship with its subject matter. In a certain sense, the subject matter is most meaningfully the dialectical confounding of concepts, readings, interpretations, periods, and practices that might have some vulgar sense into richer, truer conceptions.
The concept of heteronymy guides this writing to great places, heteronymy leads the text to be deeply unerring in its treatment of nature and history, the creative event of aesthetic experience and the non-aesthetic elements which ground the experience, and most eminently the object and subject. The accompanying concept of part-whole relationship, of mediation, is a source of soreness. So far as there is a conclusion, it might be the soreness which mediation brings to collective consciousness; so far as the aesthetic is the soreness of the relation between subjective reason and the other, so far as class conflict is the soreness of the relations between production. The identity of identity and non-identity is my very tenderness.
Interestingly, or diabolically, Jameson is an obfuscating writer writing on one of history’s greatest obfuscating writers. Adorno meant for his texts to resist consumption, and Jameson has echoed this point just as well as he has echoed Adorno’s style. Both authors have made the four-clause sentence a default, and it is trivial to locate an 8-line paragraph from either writer which can be easily distilled into 2.
I will add some notes direct from the text some time soon- it has a very obscure progression and an interesting relationship with its subject matter. In a certain sense, the subject matter is most meaningfully the dialectical confounding of concepts, readings, interpretations, periods, and practices that might have some vulgar sense into richer, truer conceptions.
The concept of heteronymy guides this writing to great places, heteronymy leads the text to be deeply unerring in its treatment of nature and history, the creative event of aesthetic experience and the non-aesthetic elements which ground the experience, and most eminently the object and subject. The accompanying concept of part-whole relationship, of mediation, is a source of soreness. So far as there is a conclusion, it might be the soreness which mediation brings to collective consciousness; so far as the aesthetic is the soreness of the relation between subjective reason and the other, so far as class conflict is the soreness of the relations between production. The identity of identity and non-identity is my very tenderness.
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