So much down these mean streets depends upon a marxist wheelbarrow glossed with jargon

[Terrance]

Terrance wrote:
> 
> "On Jargon." Minnesota Review (1977), 9: 30-31.

Jameson is a  literary and cultural critic who is known most widely in
two guises: as America's leading Marxist critic and as a theorist
supreme of postmodernism ... seems  to be a paradox .... etc. 

>From "ON JARGON" 

A number of things have to be touched on in order to explain why
theoretical writing is difficult. For one thing, from a Marxist
viewpoint the truth about social relations and about the place of
culture in them does not lie on the surface of everyday life; it is
structurally concealed by the phenomenon called reification, a
phenomenon generated by the presence of commodities all around us. And,
clearly enough, if commodities are the source of this opacity or
obfuscation of daily life, it will get worse rather than better as
consumer society develops and becomes world-wide. 

... that to call for a "plain style," for clarity and simplicity in
writing, is an ideology in its own right, and one which has its own
history in the Anglo-American tradition. One of its basic functions is
precisely to discredit dialectical writing and to secure the ground for
one or the other versions of British empiricism or common-sense
philosophy. 

The parallel that interests me more ... is that with poetry itself.
Surely one of the unique features of the situation of poetry today--
what we call Modernist and Romantic poetry, as opposed to the fixed
forms and genres of the verse or chant of pre capitalist societies--is
its mission to overcome the reification of everyday language. 

The very difficulty of modern poetry is in direct proportion to the
degree of reification of everyday speech; and the simplicity of much of
poetry today, in the tradition of William Carlos Williams, is itself a
second-degree phenomenon which builds on the complexity of the first
wave of poetic modernism. 

But if this is the case then what is striking is not the vast gap
between theoretical jargon and poetic speech, but rather the similarity
of the situations they face and the dilemmas they have to overcome. The
poets and the theoreticians are both at work desperately in an
increasingly constricted network of reifying processes, and both
violently have recourse to invented speech and private languages in
order to reopen a space in which to breath. That they should not
recognize their mutual interest in each other, that they should, as in
the mirror, take each other's image for that of the Other or the enemy,
is itself only one of the more advanced rules of reification, the way
capitalism works to separate its subject from each other and imprison
them in the specialized compartments of their own apparently isolated
activities. 


Note that  Jameson talks about the truth that lies underneath, is
concealed under the surface. 

A "family resemblance" to  Marx and Schopenhaur and Nietzsche and Freud
and this is Derrida too-- Substrative. 

Truth or indeterminacy (Anaximander) / relativity(Protagorus) aside,
Derrida has his "Dredging Machine, Hollander his "Magic Eyes" and
Melville his "deep diver." 



A JAR GONE POEM FOR FREDDY

My Jar is Gone
I placed it on a hill in Tennessee
but spaces where Jars may breath are broken 
shattered into pieces and parts 
and buried in a land fill in New Jersey 
resurrected
consumed endlessly ...
commodified 
and while you endlessly ostensify, 
replicate, and palimpsest
the differences
the "differences" 
the  différance
by which solidarities and individualities are read,  white-washed,  and
blued
cued and construed
filling rhetorical spaces with a telling order of objects arranged
scaffolded for the erection of world towers 
and trade
staged
upon a hill of broken jars 
gone