Modes of Reading – Seminar Handout
Week 3 – Jameson and Marx
Can the Postmodern be Political? – The Politics of Space, Time, and the Global Market
Housekeeping
-
Reading has (apparently) changed – see new schedule overleaf
Next essay due Term 3, Week 2, 30th April, 2013
Lit theory component lecture – venue change – H051
Room change for office hour H528
Nathan Barley (2001) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhAr_UeroCk
Fredric Jameson
“There is an agreement that the older modernism functioned against its society in ways which are
variously described as critical, negative, contestatory, subversive, oppositional and the like. Can
anything of the sort be affirmed about postmodernism and its social moment? We have seen that there
is a way in which postmodernism replicates or reproduces - reinforces - the logic of consumer
capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that
logic. But that is a question we must leave open” (Jameson, 554).
“Always historicise!” (The Political Unconscious)
“A model of political culture appropriate to our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial
issues as its fundamental organizing concern.”
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
“Moments are the elements of profit” (Capital, Vol. I)
“The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial
from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their
interests. Its further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labour. At the
same time through the division of labour inside these various branches there develop various divisions
among the individuals co-operating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position of these
individual groups is determined by the methods employed in agriculture, industry and commerce
(patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes). These same conditions are to be seen (given a more
developed intercourse) in the relations of different nations to one another” (The German
Ideology, 35)
Others
“It is space not time that hides consequences from us” (John Berger).
“The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space” (Foucault).
“Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection” (Berger).
“The particularity of the body cannot be understood independently of its embeddedness in socioecological processes If, as many now argue, the body is a social construct then it cannot be
understood outside of the forces that swirl around it and construct it. One of those key determinants is
the labor process, and globalization describes how that process is being shaped by political-economic
and associated cultural forces in distinctive ways. […] But conversely, boiled down to its simplest
determinations, globalization is about the sociospatial relations between billions of individuals”
(David Harvey).
“It is all fine and good . . . to evoke relational conceptions such as the proletariat in motion or the
multitude rising up [but] it is only when relationality connects to the absolute spaces and times of
social and material life that politics comes alive” (Harvey).
“What Harvey calls ‘historical-geographical materialism’, I name ‘eco-materialist aesthetics’ […] But
since I have understood ‘environment’ as being the symbiotic network of the entire human and nonhuman fields of existence, I have collapsed the potentially distinct terms ‘history’ and
‘geography’ into ‘eco-’.” (Pablo Mukherjee)
“It is becoming increasingly obvious that what those who celebrated postmodernism were describing
was in large part simply the effects of the universal market system: which, like any totalising
system of value, tends to throw all others into doubt and disarray” (David Graeber)
Question
Fredric Jameson believes that post-modernism gives the reader "an experience of time and space
respectively".
How does Sam Selvon use time and space in The Lonely Londoners and how does this demonstrate
the situations of the characters, particularly Moses and Sir Galahad, effectively?
New timetable
Week
Reading
Lecturer
II.3


Selvon
Fredric Jameson (Lodge 542)
Pablo Mukherjee
II.4


Selvon
Laurence Buell (Lodge 665)
Pablo Mukherjee
II.5

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)
Rashmi Varma
II.6
READING WEEK
NO LECTURE
II.7


Kureishi
Edward Said (Lodge 21)
Rashmi Varma
II.8


Kureishi
Stuart Hall (Lodge 36)
Rashmi Varma
II.9


Kureishi
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Feminism Without Borders"
Rashmi Varma
II.10
NO LECTURE