Friday, January 30, 2009

Week 4: Dick, Jameson (Again)

So much commentary has been devoted to the work of PK Dick (even Jameson's AOTF accords three entire chapters) that I hesitate to venture any global comments in such a confined space. After all, what could I add—even to Jameson and this week's supplemental readings, much less the still-growing literature on Dick?

So I will restrict myself this week to three areas:

1. Regarding Dr Bloodmoney, I will focus on a single exchange between Jameson and Holliday on the role of nuclear holocaust in the Dick canon.

2. Next I will wrestle a bit with Greimas's semiotic square and ponder why Jameson is so enamored of this construct.

3. Finally I will share some emerging thoughts from my research for our first brief paper, in which I've chosen to take a closer look at Ernst Bloch.

I. DR BLOODMONEY AND THE BOMB

In her essay on "Masculinity in the Novels of Philip K. Dick," Holliday (2006) engages in a long excursus on "how atomic explosion figures into the drama of masculine crisis" and subsequently "challenges Jameson's enunciation of the problematic [explosion] in Dr Bloodmoney" (p. 286).

Jameson (2005) posits that "what is unique about the atomic blast as a literary event" in the work of Dick is the cataclysm's ability to, in the minds of readers, "prevent the reestablishment of the reality principle and the reconstitution of experience into the twin airtight domains of the objective and subjective" (p. 351). Unlike devices that Dick uses in other novels—drugged hallucinations, schizophrenia, fourth dimensions—to defamiliarize readers, nuclear holocaust is a "collective event about whose reality the reader cannot but decide" (p. 286).

Holliday has a point in arguing, contrariwise, that "Dick finally does not express atomic detonation as totalizing in this novel" (p. 286). In time, as the last line of Dr Bloodmoney states, "the city was awakening, back once more into its regular life." Dick himself, in an afterword the author wrote in 1980, states:

So in writing Dr Bloodmoney in 1964 I may have erred in many of my predictions, but upon rereading the novel recently I senses a basic accuracy in it—an accuracy about human beings and their power to survive. Not survive as beasts, either, but as genuine humans doing genuinely human things. There are no supermen in this novel. There are no heroic deeds. There are some very poor predictions on my part, I must admit; but about the people themselves and their strength and tenacity and vitality . . . there I think I foresaw accurately. Because, of course, I was not predicting; I was only describing what I saw around me: the men and women and children and animals, the life of this planet that has been, is, and will be, no matter what happens. I am proud of the people in this novel.

Yet I also believe Holliday (2006) is engaging in a conceit when she insists "there is no sense in which we can really understand those events [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as totalizing. It is the ideology of the Cold War that imposes the notion of totalization, and for that reason we should be especially suspicious of it" (p. 286). She relativizes nuclear holocaust by suggesting it is a "speculation [that] is not substantively different from other possibilities of total destruction, such as ozone depletion and global warming" (p. 287).

Thus Holliday (2006) asserts, "The atomic detonation in Dr Bloodmoney I would argue functions as an important site for an exploration of the masculine subject in crisis" (p. 287). The reason Jameson misconstrues the detonation as a totalizing event, she declares, is "because in 1975 [when Jameson was writing] nuclear detonation was situated ideologically as the ultimate collectively understood utterance, [so that] for Jameson it is then the final assertion of the symbolic (p. 287).

To my mind, her assertion indulges in the conceit of retroactively rereading contemporary sensibilities into historical actions. According to Holliday's bio on the Internet she earned her BA in 1990, which suggests she came of age in the 1980s as the Cold War was winding down. But only someone who lived through the Cold War, as I did from the late 1950s onward, can understand its totalizing grip on the popular imagination of that era.

(As an aside, we can be glad for that totalizing grip. It was only because US and Soviet leaders took seriously the threat of MAD, mutual assured destruction, that the world was saved from the nuclear World War III depicted in Dr Bloodmoney.)

So I would argue, contra Holliday, that Dick (writing in 1964) was more likely than not to have perceived nuclear holocaust as a totalizing event. That he would have seen atomic bombing through the lens of his times is further suggested by the fact that Jameson, writing (in 1975) near the same historical moment, also saw it that way.

(Of course, it's relevant to ask: Why was Dick so hopeful in his 1980 afterword? At that time, more than 15 years after writing Dr Bloodmoney, Dick was at the height of what Jameson [2005, p. 363] called his "religious" phase. The Dick of 1964 was writing just two years after the Cuban missile crisis; the Dick of 1980 was writing in an era of strategic arms limitation talks.)

Yet I am willing to concede that Holliday's proposal may be a reading that allows Dr Bloodmoney to continue speaking to the issues of our own day.

II. THE SEMIOTIC SQUARE

When I read Jameson's musings on the Semiotic Square developed by Greimas, three thoughts immediately came to mind:

> This seems like a riff on Peirce's famous Semiotic Triangle.

> If so, I'll bet Greimas devised his Semiotic Square for purposes of linguistic analysis rather than literary criticism.

> And if that's the case, and Jameson is "appropriating" the Semiotic Square for literary (and Marxian) criticism, is he being true to Greimas or simply latching onto a highfalutin heuristic he can adapt his own way?

You can make up your own mind by checking out a nice online article that describes the original Semiotic Square as devised by Greimas:

http://www.signosemio.com/greimas/a_carresemiotique.asp

Personally, after reading this online article, I get the feeling that the Semiotic Square is really designed for linguistic analyses of words and concepts—rather than characters, motifs, or plot elements in a literary text.

So in my view, Jameson is extending the Square beyond Greimas' original conception. Of course, building on and extending the work of others is fine and can result in new insights. But it remains to be discussed (perhaps we could do so in class) whether Jameson's extension is a legitimate one.

Now, if I understand the Square properly then, if I insert myself as the Subject, I could construct my identity through oppositional analysis:

1. Mark
2. antiMark
3. Not-Mark
4. Not-antiMark

Or if I wanted to do a linguistic analysis on a concept important to my dissertation, namely how Nazi Germans identified themselves, the Semiotic Square might suggest:

1. German ("culture-creating"; i.e., Aryan)
2. antiGerman ("culture-destroying"; e.g., Jewish, Bolshevist)
3. Not-German ("culture-using"; i.e., inferior races)
4. Not-antiGerman (antisemitic, anticommunist)

Or in line with my ethnography of American fundamentalist religion, which I blogged about last week, the Square might suggest:

1. Believer ("Christian")
2. antiBeliever ("liberal," "atheist")
3. Not-Believer ("unbeliever," "seeker")
4. Not-antiBeliever ("conservative," "decent")

But some things bother me about the Semiotic Square . . .

> Doesn't it establish binaries as the means for constructing identity?

> Isn't that a distinctly modernist mode of thinking?

> But then again (as suggested by my report last week on positivism and historicism), isn't Jameson's Marxism is a distinctly modernist philosophy?

III. NEW KID ON BLOCH

For my first brief paper I'm doing some reading on Ernst Bloch, whose works on utopia figure in the early chapters of Jameson.

I'll have much more to say after the paper is done. But in brief, Bloch (a Marxist) suggests utopias are products of cultural "surpluses" or the dreams and aspirations not satisfied by the current order. You can read a nice online article on Bloch's magnum opus, The Principle of Hope, at:

http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell1.htm

AND NOW A BONUS . . .

Here is a link to the report on Positivism that I presented last week:

http://people.clemson.edu/~mlward/rcid805/Positivism%202/index.htm

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