

In Hyperspace: Fredric Jameson on Science Fiction - fitzwatermellow
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/fredric-jameson/in-hyperspace

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chroma
As I read this article, I kept thinking, "This seems like the output of a
postmodernist essay generator." Rarely have I read something containing so
little information while using so many long, overly-complicated sentences with
big, nebulously-defined words.

Philosophy is not my specialty, but I've studied a decent amount of it. I've
read Anselm, Aquinas, Kant, Descartes, Voltaire, Paine, Hume, Bentham, and
others. All of them were more understandable and coherent than this essay.
Seriously, can anyone make sense of this:

> Wittenberg’s is thus a theory of autonomisation (or, as Niklas Luhmann
> termed it, differentiation), and of its internalisation of what mandarin
> scholars used to call extrinsic factors (social issues, content of various
> kinds, the non-literary or extra-poetic).

It's as if the writer was _trying_ to be incomprehensible.

~~~
cokernel
In case it helps, this is literary theory (aka "theory"), not philosophy.
Although there is definitely communication between the two fields, they have
their own traditions and their own vocabularies. One of the more obvious
differences (and here I am comparing with analytic philosophy specifically) is
that literary theory is often quite allusive where an otherwise equivalent
philosophical argument would be explicit. I think the reason for the
difference here is that in philosophy, the goal is clarification of the
argument itself, while in literary theory (from my outside perspective I
believe) the goal is a sustained state of aporia.

Note: I am by no means an expert in literary theory, but I thought I would
give my reading of the sentence you quote.

Jameson is summarizing the previous few paragraphs of the review, where he
describes the "generic problems of political, indeed utopian thought". The
basic problem is this: how do you talk about major changes to the way society
works? At the time period discussed, just as at any other, there were a lot of
big ideas about how society ought to be organized, but they did not come with
instructions for implementation. Wittenberg (according to Jameson) says that
what Wells brought to the table was a literary device to allow an examination
of the alternative organization of society without the need to focus on the
transition between the current society and the imagined one, in a way
dissolving the problem.

"Differentiation" refers to the notion that a society can be viewed in some
ways as an organism which attempts to restructure itself to represent and
respond to its surroundings.

So Jameson is just using a fancy but allusive way of restating and
generalizing the claim that Wells was introducing a new way for society to
talk about changes to itself.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this, and I definitely can't comment
on whether Jameson is characterizing Wittenberg's book correctly, but I think
that's what is being said.

