Technology as an allegory of social relations

An interview with Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson is a professor for comparative literature at the Duke University in Durham/USA and well-known for his analyses of postmodern culture. Especially his text The cultural logic of late capitalism, written in the year 1984, has made a great impact on cultural studies all over the world. Mr. Jameson was a guest at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, Germany. The interview took place on the 5th of February, 2001.

Frederic Jameson: I think it's very characteristic that in those days I said "multinational", because as yet a new word hadn't appeared and the phenomenon perhaps hadn't developed it so fully that we now call "globalization". What I want to add to my description of those days is that postmodernity is absolutely inseparable from globalization. That's the other side of postmodernity. And although some of my features, for example "spatiality" and "unmappability", tended in that direction, I think now, though we have the word "globalization" and the phenomenon, we can better understand, what it is that postmodernity is the culture of, and it's precisely the culture of globalization.

Frederic Jameson: These theories of Foucault or of Deleuze all tended towards my third maxime, namely the unrepresentability of subjectivity. I'm not sure that "decentered" necessarily means anything philosophically. Foucault remained a modernist and had a very mystical aesthetic view of this unconscious of language that we arrive at, when we leave consciousness and centered subjectivity behind. Deleuze had a more interesting notion of the dissemination of subjectivities in this decentered manner, but I've always felt that there were two ways of decentering. One goes towards this individualistic representation of the lonely subject which is decentered. And the other goes in the direction of the collective. It seems to me now we can understand much better with globalization, but also with the new technologies, how the subject isn't dissolved exactly, but spreads itself out into innumerable networks which are precisely those of other subjectivities. And that in fact perhaps even our individual subjectivity is itself really a collective phenomenon. So I would push this description of contemporary postmodern subjectivity in the direction of the collective rather than in that of the individual decentered subject.

Frederic Jameson: Well, that's the other thing one must talk about. What was very useful in France in the structural-psychoanalytic period was that they began to speak of subject-positions. Then suddenly people realized that we all occupy innumerable subject-positions. That for example to talk in politics: a black person in the United States is not just a black, but also a woman and maybe there are sexual things, gender things and so on. We all occupy multiple subject-positions. I find that a very useful description as well.

Frederic Jameson: I think this turns around the concept of "abstraction". Abstraction was very important in the modernist period as well, but that was abstraction from the visible objects as in cubism and so forth. I think we know now with finance capital a new form of abstraction which is the image as the abstraction of reality. The seeming return of the postmodern to more realistic kinds of art as opposed to the great modern art is not a movement away from abstraction, but towards a completely new type of abstraction which is that of the image. And it seems to me that that becomes the central issue and phenomenon of postmodern art. That's why that it is no longer so much in the language arts that these abstractions are found, but in the visual arts and in the spatial arts.

Frederic Jameson: I think absolutely there's a connection there. Perhaps my original term was poorly chosen, because we do make maps. My point was that it was cognitively unmappable, because the map itself is not a genuine representation. It is a substitute for representation. All of these models you're speaking about are attempts to overcome the problems of linguistic representation with something visible.

What I meant originally by global mapping was to sense, how this new system holds together that somehow economically and even politically and socially it seems to be too vast. One could have a more satisfying idea of how things function in the era of the nation state or in the era of imperialist networks. One could see them in front of one or one could seek them out and make more realistic models. Or you can look at the technology of the modern as opposed to the technology of the postmodern. The technology of the modern is visible. It's engines, it's the airplane and so on. But the technology of the computer is not visible, it isn't anything one can look at. The new novelists in science fiction - I suppose people know about "cyberpunk", those are very interesting books - they are attempts somehow to overcome the unrepresentability of this new cybernetic globalized world. And like all works of art, there are both successes and failures.

Frederic Jameson: I think one must distinguish that from the so called reflexivity of the older modern works, which often talked about the very book they were writing, which often designated themselves as works of art. They did that, because as objects they were in a certain isolation socially, they had to make their own propaganda and designate themselves as the new work of art. What is broken down, is the frame of the work of art itself. All of that ist breaking up into the world. And therefore the predominance would not be painting, but the installation for example. These are now much more spatial works of art, which spill out into the outside, which don't really know to distinguish an inside, an autonomous aesthetic, from an outside which should be the rest of the world that it's in. This is rather to be considered - that is not a new idea - the breakdown of the work of art as an object and its dissemination out into its context.

Frederic Jameson: A lot of histories of ideas have often taken technology or science as a kind of ultimately determining instance. I think that's a mistake in the sense that we always secretely, maybe without knowing it, think of technology as an allegory of social relations. And these allegories can be of various kinds, especially in the modern period the airplane, the steamship, the automobile were figures of enormous energy. Today the technology of the computer is rather this figure of networks. But I think it always also means a new model of human relationships. One must always look at technological descriptions in order to detect that layer of allegory of social relations that they accordingly to me always contain.

Frederic Jameson: It's certainly the emergence of a new kind of collectivity. What kind, how one can use that, we don't know. We are just in the transition period, in the moment of emergence. But certainly this makes all kinds of things possible, which were absolutely unthinkable in the modern period. It has a different kind of temporality. There is an instantaneity to abolish a space. It makes finance capital possible, transfers of money. But it also makes all kinds of collective relations possible that were not possible before. Before, if you thought of collectivity, we had to think of lot of people together somehow or maybe linked by the radio. But now there is a whole new set of relations, and we haven't begun to see what that means for us, in the good or in the bad sense.

Frederic Jameson: I'm a Marxist, and I think that the ultimate realities are economic and social. And that's why I see technological celebrations of that kind as also being allegories of some sort. When people say postmodernity is over, they mean certain postmodernisms that were associated with certain types of art or style (esp. architectural style). Obviously those things changed, and certain postmodernisms have been left behind. But I would say postmodernity as such has only begun to develop, and Gibson is describing a part of that or trying to represent it artistically.

Frederic Jameson: Of course, the key word is "contradiction". Any of these systems, and our own in particular, knows a specific contradiction, which it then tries to resolve, and it's a struggle to resolve it. Progressive forces try to resolve it in the collective way, the other forces try to resolve it in the way of the capital. The crucial point here would simply be the private property of information. It's very difficult to own intellectual property now in the cybernetic age. That's a very fundamental contradiction of capitalism. They must try by state power to control the property of these things, or else this becomes a force which breaks that open and in effect in certains ways abolish this private property. So that's a very interesting contradiction, which is hardly resolved.

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