- Jameson analyzes the threat posed by understanding history solely from a synchronic perspective, which views situations statically without considering their development over time. Focusing only on structures risks naturalizing them and eliminating the possibility of change. - The document discusses the concepts of defamiliarization, how habitual perceptions can be disrupted to see things in a new light, and Orwell's arguments that political language can corrupt thought and that conscious effort is needed to improve writing. - Key terms are introduced, such as synchronic vs. diachronic perspectives, ostranenie or defamiliarization, and how concepts from different thinkers relate to questions of language, perception, and politics.

1. Lecture 10: Cui bono?
English 192
Summer 2013
20 August 2013
“I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the
divan and couldn’t remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since
these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not
remember – so that if I had dusted it and forgot – that is, had
acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If some
conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be
established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking on
unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many people go on
unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.”
— Leo Tolstoy’s Diary, entry of 1 March 1897.

2. “Bradley’s elegant formulation warns us of the
self-defeating price to be paid for any truly
thoroughgoing exercise of systemic thinking in
history; and this, whether we have to do with a
relatively contemporary (structural) conception
of the synchronic (or of totality, or of the mode
of production, or the Foucauldian episteme), or
simply (as in Bradley) of some state a/state b
progression, or indeed with some more general
sense of the present as an immense and
interrelated web from which not even a dead
butterfly can fall at the peril of the whole.”
(Jameson 87)

3. “I think that the attack on ‘causality’ as such is
misplaced; Kant has taught us (along with many
others) that in a sense cause and causality are
mental categories, about which it makes no
sense to assert that they are either true or false.
It would be more plausible and useful to think of
causality as an essentially narrative category […]
In other words, as the number of things that
historical inquiry is willing to accept as
determinants increases – gender relations,
writing systems, weaponry – each becomes a
candidate for a new version of that ‘ultimately
determining instance’ or cause which in its turn
dictates a new historical narrative, a fresh way of
telling the story of the historical change in
question.” (87-88)

4. ● Jameson’s concern here is to raise the possibility
of meaningful change (the realization of the
Utopian impulse) in the face of what seem to be
totalizing systems locking the existing world into
place.
● Part of this explanation involves treating the
historical (diachronic) understanding as rejected not
for being inaccurate, but for being threatening due to
its complexity and the consequent difficulty of
understanding this perspective.
The threat of the historical perspective

5. “A proliferation of narratives […] emerges which raises
the terrifying specter of postmodern relativism and which
is scarcely reduced by assigning each one its specific
sub-field and then attempting to reconstruct some new
and more ‘complex’ or ‘differentiated’ discipline as a whole
[…] From a limited series of conventional and
reassuringly simple narrative options (the so-called
master narratives), history becomes a bewildering torrent
of sheer Becoming, a stream into which, as Cratylus put it
long ago, one cannot even step once.
“It then proves reassuring to abandon these diachronic
dilemmas altogether, and to turn towards a perspective
and a way of looking at things in which they do not even
arise. Such is the realm of the synchronic, and we may
well ask ourselves what replaces narrative here and what
representational forms are available to articulate this new
systemic view of the multiple coexistence of factors or
facts.” (88-89)

6. “synchronic history of this kind has nothing to do
with a present, eternal or otherwise, and is not to
be grasped in terms of lived or existential time.”
(89)
“the more airtight the synchronic system laid in
place all around us, the more surely history itself
evaporates in the process, and along with It any
possibility of political agency or collective anti-
systemic praxis.” (89)
“the seemingly very different concepts of writing
and time are in reality profoundly complicitous
and interrelated: whether the very idea of
language is the result of an incapacity to think
time coherently or the other way round, we do
not have to decide.” (99)

7. Points to take away from Jameson
● Utopian literature is a subgenre of SF; Utopian
thought and the Utopian impulse are, for
Jameson, basic components of what it means to
be human, and operate on large and small
scales throughout human history.
● The question of what we desire is also central to
questions of how we understand who we are.
● SF is a genre in which we have unique
opportunities to examine the wishing component
of human identity, in part because it offers
expansive opportunities for wish-fulfillment.

8. ● To understand a situation synchronically is to see it as
it exists at a certain point in time, seeing its parts in
relation to each other.
● To understand a situation diachronically is to
understand its history and development.
● These terms are adapted by Jameson from Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure.
● As with so many other things in life, it is necessary to make a
choice here: it is not possible to do an adequate job of both at
the same time. The two viewpoints are mutually exclusive.
● Jameson’s adaptation of the terms intends for us to
understand the history of a situation, because focusing on its
structure without a sense of its history leads to a belief that
structures are unchangeable, which is historically false.
● In fact, the default understanding of a situation as synchronic
is a motivated interpretive choice, for the reasons we have
talked about today.

9. “This is clearly a question that needs to be enlarged
to include Science Fiction as well, if one follows
Darko Suvin [in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction],
as I do, in believing Utopia to be a socio-economic
sub-genre of that broader literary form. Suvin’s
principle of ‘cognitive estrangement’ – an aesthetic
which, building on the Russian Formalist notion of
‘making strange’ as well as the Brechtian
Verfremdungseffekt, characterizes SF in terms of
an essentially epistemological function […] – thus
posits one specific subset of this generic category
specifically devoted to the imagination of alternative
social and economic forms.” (xiii-xiv)
Glancing back before we move on …

10. Defamiliarization (ostranenie)
● This is one of the key terms of Russian
Formalism (an early 20th century literary
movement) that attempts to distinguish what
makes “literary” language different from
“ordinary” language.
● Literary language is taken to operate so as to
disrupt ordinary language and habitual modes
of perception.
● The effect is understood to be produced by
“artistic devices” (plot, rhythm, syntax, etc.).

11. “Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to […] give the
charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a
feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the
mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to
the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an
inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the
film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet
see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor
understand.” (S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817)
“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and
makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it
reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations
clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds
of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials
of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over
all thoughts and actions with which it coexists.” (Percy
Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” 1821)

12. “Habituation devours works, clothes, furniture,
one’s wife, and the fear of war. ‘If the whole
complex lives of many people go on
unconsciously, then such lives are as if they
had never been.’ And art exists that one may
recover the sensation of life; it exists to make
one feel things, to make the stone stony. The
purpose of art is to impart the sensation of
things as they are perceived and not as they
are known. The technique of art is to make
objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to
increase the difficulty and length of perception
because the process of perception is an
aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”
Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917)

13. Eric Blair (“George Orwell,” 1903-1950)
● Best known for Animal
Farm (1945) and Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949).
● Several of his coinages
from 1984 have entered
popular usage, including
“Big Brother,”
“thoughtcrime,” “thought
police”; he also coined the
term “cold war” in an
essay, “You and the
Atomic Bomb” (1945).
Press photo of Blair, 1933

14. “Politics and the English Language” (1946)
“Most people who bother with the matter at all
would admit that the English language is in a
bad way, but it is generally assumed that we
cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
[…] Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief
that language is a natural growth and not an
instrument which we shape for our own
purposes.” (127)
“Now, it is clear that the decline of a language
must ultimately have political and economic
causes: it is not due simply to the influence of
this or that individual writer.” (127)

15. “the English language […] becomes ugly and
inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the
slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us
to have foolish thoughts.” (128)
“no modern writer of the kind I am discussing—no
one capable of using phrases like ‘objective
consideration of contemporary phenomena”—would
ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and
detailed way.” (133)
“By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you
save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your
meaning vague, not only for your reader but for
yourself.” (134)
Language and Thought

16. “The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual
image. When these images clash—as in The Fascist
octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is
thrown into the melting-pot—it can be taken as certain
that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the
objects he is naming; in other words he is not really
thinking.” (134)
“When one watches some tired hack on the platform
mechanically repeating the familiar phrases […] one
often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a
live human being but some kind of dummy. […] And
this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that
kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward
turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises
are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not
involved as it would be if he were choosing his words
for himself.” (136)

17. “the work of prose construction”*
“modern writing at its worst does not consist in
picking out words for the sake of their meaning
and inventing images in order to make the
meaning clearer. It consists in gumming
together long strips of words which have
already been set in order by someone else, and
making the results presentable by sheer
humbug.” (134)
*
Orwell 130

18. Some primary faults of bad writing
(for Orwell)
● “staleness of imagery [and] lack of precision”
(129)
● “banal statements […] given an appearance of
profundity” (131)
● “slovenliness and vagueness” (132)
● “words […] used in a consciously dishonest
way” (133)

19. Motivated bad writing
“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out
of politics’. All issues are political issues, and
politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly,
hatred and schizophrenia.” (137)
“If thought corrupts language, language can also
corrupt thought. […] The debased language that I
have been discussing is in some ways very
convenient.” (137)
“one ought to recognise that the present political
chaos is connected with the decay of language,
and that one can probably bring about some
improvement by starting at the verbal end.” (139)

20. Writing advice
“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he
writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
What am I trying to say? What words will express it?
What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this
image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will
probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more
shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably
ugly?” (135)
“What is above all needed is to let the meaning
choose the word, and not the other way around.”
(138)
“one can choose—not merely accept—the phrases
that will best cover the meaning.” (139)

21. “I think the following rules will cover
most cases:” (139)
i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of
speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii.Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii.If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv.Never use the passive where you can use the
active.
v.Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a
jargon if you can think of an everyday English
equivalent.
vi.Break any of thee rules sooner than say anything
outright barbarous.

22. Karel Čapek (1890-1938)
● Born in Malé Svatoňovice,
Bohemia.
● Studied at Charles
University, Prague, and at
the Sorbonne.
● Best known for R.U.R. and
his SF novels, including
War with the Newts
(1936).
● Increasingly known as an
anti-fascist critic as
Europe drew closer to
World War II.

23. “Robot”
● The word originally makes its
way out of Czech and into
other languages via Čapek’s
1922 play.
● From the Czech robota,
“forced labor, drudgery, hard
work.”
● Cognate with other central
European words, such as
German Robot, a now-archaic
system of serfdom by which
tenants owed landowners a
certain number of days of labor
in a year. Robby the Robot in MGM’s
Forbidden Planet (1956)

24. Media Credits
● Orwell’s press-card photo is out of copyright because it
is an anonymous work first published in 1933. Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:George_Orwell_press_p
hoto.jpg
● The photo of Karel Čapek is out of copyright because it
was published anonymously and taken no later than
1938. Source:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karel_
%C4%8Capek.jpg
● The screen capture from Forbidden Planet is copyright
MGM; I believe that a low-resolution capture of part of
one frame from for teaching constitutes fair use. Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Robbie_Forbidden_Plan
et.jpg