Signatures of the Visible

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by Fredric Jameson

Routledge

Due/Published August 1992, 256 pages, paper

ISBN 0415900123

"The visual is essentially pornographic," writes Fredric Jameson; "films ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body.'' In Signatures of the Visible, Jameson explores film and its culture, thinking through the relationship between the imaginative world on the screen and the historical world onto which it is projected.

Jameson questions the critical-utopian potential of film in our commodified culture, where contests over value, desire, and power increasingly take place in the realm of the visual. In the postmodern world, asks Jameson, can the filmic form replace the novel as the predominant instrument for exploring social reality and social evolution? By seeking the historical dimension of the visual, he evaluates the filmic form as a vehicle for the critique of culture and the diagnosis of social life. Signatures of the Visible pursues this investigation through readings of politics, class, allegory, magic realism, and "the historical" in such films as Diva, The Shining, Dog Day Afternoon, and works by Syberberg, Hitchcock, and others. In a sustained and major essay, Jameson relates filmic phenomena to other cultural and literary traditions and developments, examining the forms of subjectivity required by film and produced in moviegoers. Concluding with proposals for reconceptualizing the periodization of film history, Jameson argues that the only way to think the visual is to grasp its historical coming into being.

One of the cliches about theoretical approaches to popular culture is that too much theory will spoil your enjoyment of it. Jameson's Signatures of the Visible is a living proof of the imbecility of this cliche, so convincing that one is almost tempted to say that today, it is only through his kind of deconstructionist Marxism that one can really enjoy the taste of Hitchcock, Kubrick, Lume. . . . The magic of Jameson's writing, the je ne sais quoi which makes it an instant classic, is the unique combination of the highest dialectical versatility with an almost adolescent sheer pleasure of devouring the classics of popular cinema."--Slavoj Zizek