CHAPTER 3: "PSYCHOLOGY: Emotional Infrastructures." To be honest, I am not sure I successfully followed the argument here, but I think here Jameson takes his best shot at explaining why you can toggle back and forth between Freudian reading and Marxist reading without necessarily becoming incoherent. (Incoherence remains a risk, though--do not attempt on heavy meds.)
Near the end of the chapter, Jameson observes: "And this is also the moment to affirm the fundamental argument in play here, which has hitherto only sporadically surfaced: the identification between the system of emotions in question and the structure and dimensions of the collectivity in which individuals feel and identify them" (77). That is (I think he is saying) the history of human emotions tracks with the history of class conflicts. He goes on to mention the differences between "the psychology of country people" and "those of the big city with its anonymity and labyrinthine space" and (in more detail) the transition from the emotions of the Greek city-state to those of Christianity ("the elaboration of a new kind of universal religion"), a transition which he later says resembles that of "the contemporary supersession of the national by globalization" (79). When the organization of our collectivities changes, our emotions change.
Hmm. Really? Maybe. I don't know.
Chapter 4, "Psychoanalytic: Hamlet with Lacan," is the reason I plunked down my one-nickel-shy-of-thirty-dollars for this book. Jameson on Hamlet--who could resist? I was not disappointed. If there is a secular equivalent of the sacred texts upon which patristic exegesis ruled that four distinct interpretations could be stacked, it is Hamlet. "[W]e pause only to wonder what it is about this peculiar object that arouses so many different readings in the first place," as Jameson notes in his opening paragraph. He awards Lacan "a certain priority" in his journey through the landscape of Hamlet criticism (83), but folds in a lot else (e.g., Shmitt, Benjamin, Empson, Hazlitt, de Grazia) on his way to concluding that the crowning (anagogical) reading of the play aligns with Marxist understanding ("transition to modernity [capitalism]"), but also grants authority to the play's metatheatrical dimension, its figurings of desire, and its relations to Tudor-Stuart politics.
Whether this will catch on among Shakespeare people, I can't say, but it was a fascinating read.
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