the contingency of cheese.pdf

8/11/2019 The Contingency of Cheese.pdf

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The contingency of cheese

On Fredric Jamesons The Antinomies of Realism

David Cunningham

Fredric Jameson has been a busy man over the lastdecade. As well as two massive tomes on sciencefiction and modernism, combining republished essayswith extensive new material, there has been a trilogyof books on Hegel and Marx which have soughtto defend dialectical thinking from its discontents

both internal and external to the Marxian tradition,amounting to a late burst of productivity that threat-

ens to put if not Stakhanov then at least Slavoj iekto shame. For the most part these books have tendedto focus on the reiteration of already fairly well estab-lished theoretical claims. However, Jamesons latest,The Antinomies of Realism, looks like something rathernewer.*

The book is, if nothing else, timely, appearing inthe context of a resurgence of both practices anddiscourses of realism across the arts, from the much-celebrated tele-roman The Wire(about which Jamesonhas written elsewhere) to the late Allan Sekulas pho-tographic epics to, say, Lav Diazs extraordinary four-

hour film of Filipino urban life and global capitalism,Norte, The End of History in what I have describedpreviously as a remobilization under changed histori-cal circumstances of the totalizing and connectingvalues of realism.Jameson makes little explicit allu-sion to such contemporary instances for reasonsthat can no doubt be related to his unwillingnessto relinquish that personal albatross which is theconcept of postmodernity and, apart from a final

chapter on the historical novel and one brief excur-sus on Alexander Kluge, The Antinomies of Realismsticks pretty resolutely to the nineteenth century.Nonetheless, in terms of a contemporary academicdiscourse on realism, the book can certainly be readas a contribution to a wider attempt to begin undoing

a caricatured straw man version of the form and itsassociation with a simple referential naivety thetransparent window on a stable world marshalled bysome Fhrer-like omniscient narrator popularized

in literary theory by the likes of Catherine Belsey andColin MacCabe.

Of course, if the most famous of Jamesons exist-ing problematics postmodernism was explicitlyconstrued as a third, successive term to realism andmodernism, then there is an evident logic in the

writing of a big book on realism that would followon from the work on postmodernism of the 1980s

and 1990s, and the subsequent rereadings of modern-ism in the last decade: A Singular Modernity (2002)and The Modernist Papers (2007). More importantly,precisely as a hitherto absent term, it is this firstmoment that has, I think, often implicitly appearedto provide the principal frame for marking out a storyof progressive lossin Jamesons work. Realism, whichstill imagined (however mythically or precariously)that it could access some perspective of totality, andwhich was marked as in its Urtext Don Quixote bythe emergence of the secular referent, is displaced inturn, first, by modernism (which experiences the loss

of such totality and concreteness as loss, and hence astragedy or avant-garde possibility) and then by post-modernism (for which the modernization process iscomplete and nature is gone for good). Among otherthings, this tripartite narrative has had the advantageof placing Jamesons own work within an eminentlineage, as the apparently rightful successor toLukcs and Adorno the great theorists of realismand modernism, respectively while, at the same

time, aligning all three with his notorious period-ization of the three stages of capitalism adaptedfrom Ernest Mandels 1972 book Late Capitalism. Ifpostmodernism is thus, according to such a schema,the cultural logic of late capitalism, realism wouldequate to a classical or market capitalism albeit at a

fairly late moment which will, Jameson writes in thePostmodernismbook, probably not involve problemsof figuration so acute as those we will confront in thelater stages. Indeed, such problems will only become

* Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, Verso, London and New York, 2013. 326 pp., 20.00 hb., 978 1 78168 133 6. Page references tothis edition appear in the main text.


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visible in the next stage of modernism/monopolycapitalism, in what he defines precisely as a crisisin realism generated by the gap between individualand phenomenological experience and structuralintelligibility present within an expanding imperialsystem and metropolitan life.

Since the 1970s, Jameson has done his best to

purge his work of the more straightforwardly human-istic tone that his articulation of these intensifyingproblems of figuration sometimes had in his earlyMarxism and Form, where the loss of some truefeeling of concreteness, of filled density of being,and our inability to realize the Hegelian vision oftotality, is presented as a judgement on us and onthe moment of history in which we live. But the

underlying force of the periodizations proposed haveremained firmly rooted in Lukcss assertion thatwhatever loss might be at stake here finds its source

not in authors fundamental intentions, but in thegiven historico-philosophical realities with which theauthors were confronted.So, for instance, the his-torical novel to which Jameson returns in the finalchapter of The Antinomies of Realism will becomea progressively impossible genre in the course of thetwentieth century by virtue of a growing incapacityto access the retrospective dimension indispensableto any vital reorientation of our collective future,but as such will also, in a text like E.L. Doctorows

Ragtime(1975), register, in new artistic ways, the more

general loss of the historical referent and its dissolu-tion into some vast collection of images.

That a certain realism remains something of anecessary yardstick against which to get the measureof subsequent historical developments is fairly clearhere; as it is, for example, in Jamesons influentialnotion of an aesthetic of cognitive mapping, whichnames the equally impossible attempt to over-come, from within (post)modernity, the profoundgap between the local positioning of the individual

subject and the totality of economic and class struc-tures in which such a subject is situated. For, as Ihave argued elsewhere, although Jameson tends tofocus the discussion on architecture or film, its mostevident kinship lies with the problem of the novel as

impossible epic form as it is set out in Lukcss TheTheory of the Novel, and to which Lukcss own laterwork on realism was partly intended as a revisionaryresponse.

The first surprise inAntinomies of Realismis, there-fore, that this epic conception of realism tied,

as it is, to a commitment to a concept of totality,of which perhaps Jameson has been the principal

proponent within anglophone Marxism shouldappear to play such a marginal role within the book;at least until its second half, where Jameson turnsto the more canonically epic forms of war narrativeand the historical novel, and even there often onlyin oblique fashion. (Indeed, as we shall see, Balzac,commonly thought of, not least by Lukcs, as the

greatest embodiment of such a novelistic will tototality, is largely consigned to a kind of prehistory ofthose antinomies of realism with which this new textis concerned.) The association of realism with someform of explanatory power or grasp of social truth,dear to much of the Marxist tradition but now, nodoubt, perceived as rather too mired in antiquatedpolitical debates is conspicuous by its absence.

If, then, The Antinomies of Realism often readslike an idiosyncratically structuralist book of sorts,as much as a discernibly Marxist one, the specific

diachronic analysis offered in the books first halffocuses not on questions of totality, but principally onnineteenth-century realisms self-destructive internaltensions, in such a way as (our second surprise) toreconceive it as closer to a kind of modernism-in-the-making. Far from a moment of stability of meaningagainst which later developments might be histori-cally judged, realism appears here, instead, as already to borrow a phrase from Jay Bernstein an artbound to its own impossibility.

The affective turn

The Antinomies of Realism is divided into two parts,with introduction but no conclusion, the second ofwhich is presented as three more or less discreteessays. The central proposition underpinning thecritical readings of the first section, which accountsfor about two-thirds of the book, is that nineteenth-century realism is best understood as the dialecticalproduction of a precarious and historically specifictensionbetween two interwoven forms and modalities

of time: on the one hand, story or narration or,more precisely, the French rcit, which foregroundsthe telling of the tale as such (10) and, on the other,what is defined at various points as the descrip-tive or the scenic, but which most often, and most

strikingly, is referred to as affect. While the formercontinues to extend a tradition of narrative form thatincludes folktales, ballads and broadsheets, diariesand letters, and the existing history of the novel itself(8), and that retains a force in the twin menaces ofmelodrama and the Bildungsroman (fascinatingly

tackled in the books seventh chapter on the dis-solution of genre), the latter appears, according to


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Jameson, as some historically new (and newly dis-ruptive) element that, foregrounding the affective,introduces a heterogeneous and expanded presentthat continually breaks apart the chronological tem-porality in which rcitis unfolded an insurrection,as Jameson puts it, borrowing a phrase from Kluge,of the present against the other temporalities (10):

What we call realism will thus come into being inthe symbiosis of this pure form of storytelling withimpulses of scenic elaboration, description andabove all affective investment, which allow it todevelop towards a scenic present which in reality,but secretly, abhors the other temporalities whichconstitute the force of the tale or rcit in the firstplace. (11)

It is the ineliminable revolt of these new impulsesagainst the will to meaningful shape found in thercit that will thus make realism, for Jameson, an

inherently unstable form from its beginning, whoseemergence and development at one and the sametime constitute its own inevitable undoing (6).

Bookended by two initial chapters attempting totheorize the distinct poles of realisms antinomy,and two chapters which chart its disintegration intothe swollen or blank unidentified third person (byway of style indirect libre or Henry Jamess point ofview) (174), the book pursues a series of four casestudies, beginning with a chapter on Zola and thecodification of affect, in which it is argued that,

by contrast to Balzac or Stendhal, Zola introducesinto the novel a new autonomization of the sensory(55). Subsequently, Jamesons dialectic is developedthrough readings of Tolstoy, where the antinomiesof narration and affect are played out in a tensionbetween plot and scene; the Spanish novelist PrezGalds, in which this develops into a deterioration ofprotagonicity, whereby what might once have beenthought the digressions of sub-plots involving minorcharacters gradually come to take over the fore-

ground of the novel (96); and, finally, George Eliot,in a rather brilliant reading concerning the ways inwhich her novels undo the generic constraints ofmelodrama through the dissolution of its central cat-egory of evil into affects present of consciousness,

which may know bad faith but cannot experienceitself as being evil as such.

As always, Jameson is an immensely impressiveclose reader. However, it is fair to say that the over-riding emphasis on affectin theorizing and knittingall of this together appears as something of a sur-

prise. Much of Jamesons initial reputation derived,in the early 1970s, from his critical mediation of

new European theoretical trends, from Sartre andGerman Critical Theory to Russian formalism andFrench structuralism. This was followed by thework on postmodernism, which sought, in part, tohistoricize various strands of contemporary Frenchpoststructuralist theory (Lacan, Deleuze, Lyotard,Baudrillard) as representative of a cultural logic of

late capitalism still best understood in Hegelian-Marxist terms; that is, through the maintaining ofa dialectical conception of totality against whichthose very same theorists had framed their work.This strategy of incorporating often very differenttheoretical idioms, not so much through critique asthrough their translation into other, more amena-ble registers, is one to which Jameson has broadly

remained faithful since. Still, Jamesons recourseto the terminology of affect theory may be his mostambitious attempt at such transcoding to date.

The use to which Jameson puts this in The Anti-nomies of Realismis most clearly unfolded in the Zolachapter, which implicitly draws upon a dominantcontemporary association of the affective with aturn away from the various linguistic and semioticparadigms of structuralism and post-structuralism,but which is here historicized in terms of theemergence of nameless bodily states which can bedocumented in literature around the middle of thenineteenth century. In this Second Empire or Vic-torian affective turn, Jameson writes, the body thus

comes to be opposed not only to allegory or symbolbut to language as such (32). While Jameson suggeststhat Flaubert and Baudelaire can stand as markersfor such a transformation of the sensorium (32), it isin Zola, and particularly in La Ventre de Paris (1873),set in the Parisian market of Les Halles, that anexcess of the sensory becomes autonomous; that isto say, it begins to have enough weight of its own tocounterbalance the plot (50). This is a process whichultimately tends to release its sensory material from

any specific viewer or individual human subject, fromany specific character to whom the function of obser-vation has been assigned (56), in what, I guess, wemight understand as a momentary affinity of subjectand object. This is exemplified in the celebrated

symphony of cheeses, which, despite its rather half-hearted framing in the novel as some metaphor forthe rancid gossip of two female characters, opens up with its eighteen varieties of cheese described overseveral pages onto what Jameson terms a liberationfrom meaning in which affect, freeing itself from

any narrative motive, acquires its own temporalityof a massively extended and impersonal present (64).


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There is a somewhat obvious, if slightly facile,objection to such propositions nonetheless trickyto negotiate for all affect theory that, as somehowliberated from meaning, in its gesture towards someseparation from language or the sign, all affect stillhas to be, at some level, rendered meaningful inorder to be intelligible at all. Indeed Jameson himself

makes something like this point in an earlier readingof the affective content of Baudelaires Chantdautomne, in an essay originally published in 1985and repackaged in 2007s The Modernist Papers, whichnotes how the poems feeling of some kind, strongand articulated, yet necessarily nameless in becom-ing transmuted into a verbal text ceases to be affective in any sense of the word: The problem is

that language never ceases to attempt to reabsorb andrecontain contingency it always seems to trans-form that scandalous and irreducible content back

into something like meaning. I will come back tothis reading in a moment and to the identificationof affect and contingency that it entails but itis fair to say that Jameson deals with this dilemmaprimarily by insisting that, in literature at least, affectcan thus precisely only ever be thought dia-lectically. Indeed, this will be a central plankin the books larger endeavour to reaffirm thevalidity of dialectical thought in general.

One way of understanding Jamesons ownprivileging of the realm of affect is in the

context of a certain argument with Lukcssaccount of realism, which often appears tobe going on, subterraneously, throughoutthe book without ever coming into focus assuch. As is well known, the latters stridentseparation of Balzacian realism from Zolasnaturalism took much of its inspiration froman 1888 letter by Engels in which he dismissesall the Zolas passs, prsents et venir when meas-ured against the realistic history of French society

provided by Balzac (cited 270). This is extended byLukcs into a distinction between narration anddescription, first proposed in an essay published inthe 1930s, where Zolas obsession with monographicdetail is contrasted with the capacity of Balzacs

novels to make us experience events which areinherently significant because of the general socialsignificance emerging in the unfolding of the charac-ters lives. As he puts it, in what is in this context anevidently resonant phrase: description contemporizeseverything, rendering the world as a series of static

pictures or still lives.If the chapter on Zola standsout in The Antinomies of Realism, it is in part, then,

because of the evident attempt to redeem him fromLukcs critical judgement.

At the same time, in subst ituting affect fordescription as the privileged term or, more accu-rately, in effectively running the two together part,I suspect, of what Jameson is also seeking to do hereis to complicate what he, elsewhere in the book, sug-

gests is an almost axiomatically conservative bent inall realisms a vested interest, an ontological stake,in the solidity of [bourgeois] social reality (5) towhich the affective might offer some strange resist-ance. (It is noticeable, if so, how close this comes toeffectively reversingLukcss argument vis--vis narra-tion and description.) This would be Jamesons moresocially concrete version of the Barthesian argument

regarding the readerly text, or, for example, Lyotardsclaim that, in seeking to stabilize the referent, real-ists can only come to be apologists of what exists.

Jamesons rewrite of this would then see in realismsvery origins that force which will, in opening uponto a new present of consciousness, finally escapethe control of narrative, and ultimately result in thetorn halves of modernism and mass market fiction.

Such a split is a fairly familiar theme in Jame-sons work. Still, it is not always clear exactly what,

in the case of realism, the dialectical opposite ofaffect actually is. The above would certainly suggestnarrative. But most directly if most briefly thebodily feeling of affect is also opposed, following ReiTerada, to emotions, which are on Jamesons account

always named, and hence semiotically systematized(32). In the 1985 reading of Baudelaires poetry, thiswas the point at which nameless feeling becomeslost to the older psychological lexicon (full of namesfor states of mind we recognizein advance). The keyproposition seems to be then that, as named, such

feelings are effectively reified. This is one way inwhich an ontological stake in the solidity of social


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reality is manifested (5). Affect becomes an imma-nent form of dialectical resistance to such reificationand, consequently, the indicator of a commitment tothe new (experience) as a moment of non-identityor singularity which is, by definition, not-yet-named.The larger historicalclaim underlying this is one setout more explicitly in the essay on Baudelaire where

Jameson proposes what he describes as an outra-geous generalization, namely that before Baude-laire and Flaubert there are no physical sensations inliterature. Or, as he puts elsewhere in the same essay,it is onlyin such mid-nineteenth-century writers thatwe find the simultaneous production and effacementof the referent itself grasped as what is outside oflanguage, what language or a certain configuration

of language seems to designate, and yet, in the verymoment of indication, to project beyond its ownreach. Here the referent is, in fact, simply the body

itself [or]sensation.

The first sign of trouble to note in this historicalperiodization is that, in the essay from the mid-1980s,this is explicitly designated not as the moment ofrealism but instead as the historical situation ofnascent high modernism; high modernism presum-ably constituting something like the cultural logicof so-called high capitalism, rather than, as yet,monopoly capitalism (Jamesons second stage).Thesecond is that where, in this earlier essay, Jamesonthus already rehearses his (anti-Lukcsian Lukc-

sian) argument concerning Balzacs distance fromsuch free-floating bodily perception, it is precisely, ifimplicitly, because of the latters identification with anow-already-waning form of realism. In such terms,Balzac is, as Jameson wrote in 1985, representative ofan earlier historical situation in which

even where we are confronted with what looklike masses of sense data [as in] Balzac, withhis elaborate descriptions, that include the verysmell of his rooms those apparently perceptual

notations, on closer examination, prove to be somany signs. In the older rhetorical apparatus, inother words, physical sensation does not meet theopacity of the body, but is secretly transparent,and always means something else moral qualities,financial or social status, and so forth.

In The Antinomies of Realism, this argument heavilyindebted to Auerbach becomes the claim (in areading of the description of the boarding house in LePre Goriot, 1834), that what looks like a physical sen-sation is actually already a meaning, an allegory: the

description is not the evocation of an affect, for onegood reason: namely that it meanssomething (33).

La modernit

My point is not to show that what seems new in The

Antinomies of Realism in fact reiterates (if deepensconsiderably) arguments first made by Jamesonsome thirty years ago. Rather, what is interesting

is the slippage surrounding the distinction betweenrealism and modernism, and the relation of both to

modernity, which this apparent break with Balzacsmeaning involves. Immediately following his Auer-bachian interpretation of Le Pre Goriot, Jamesoncites Barthess insistence, in The Reality Effect, uponthe irreconcilable divorce between lived experienceand the intelligible which characterizes modernity(33). Experience and sensory experience in par-ticular is, Jameson continues, in modern timescontingent: if such experience has a meaning, weare at once suspicious of its authenticity (34). (Incontrast stands Lukcss rather torturous attempt to

find in realism an epic elevation of chance to theinevitable.) The larger context for this specificallymodern sense of contingency would be Barthessinfluential account of the effective codification ofnovelistic form in what he calls the great storytellersof the nineteenth century through their adoptionof the rcit. This is the basis for Barthess famousanalysis of the pass simple, which supposes a worldwhich is constructed, elaborated, detached nota world which is thrown, displayed, offered [jet,tal, offert], and in which actions are freed of thetrembling of existence, having the stability and thepattern of an algebra: the world may be filled withpathos, but it is not abandoned, since it is a clusterof coherent relations. (Or, to paraphrase Nietzschesoverfamiliar quip, realism may have killed God, but

it failed to kill grammar.) As Barthes concludes, thepass simple reassures us as to the possibility ofcommunication: The rcithas a name, it escapes theterror of a speech without limits. Here, then, weperhaps find one explanation for Jamesons focus on

the namedemotion.If the resistance of affect to narrative propulsion is

also the resistance of affect to language, as Jamesonsuggests, it necessarily poses new representationaltasks in the effort somehow to seize its fleetingessence (31; my emphasis). But a slightly crude ques-tion would then be: why not simply call this affectiverevolt of the present modernity: la modernit thetransitory, the fugitive, the contingent? In many

respects, this would seem to best reflect better thanaffect at any rate a certain, specifically French

confusion of the historical coordinates of realism andmodernism more generally, given their overlap in the


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standard pedagogical periodization of these termsaround the late 1840s1870s, in the era of Baudelaire,Manet, Flaubert, Zola and Lautramont, and in thedisenchanted world of Marxs all that is holy isprofaned or Baudelaires loss of a halo.

In his book The Modern Epic, Franco Morettimakes the intriguing suggestion that if what we

tend to call modernism is really just a chapter inthe far broader history of Western modern ity, whatdelayed its full flowering was above all the form ofthe novel as perhaps not exactly a conservative, butcertainly a moderating, form: as a symbolic brakeupon modernity. Morettis own chief example isthe Bildungsroman, but the point presumably holdsfor the mainstream of classic nineteenth-century

realism also.This is why eighteenth-century novelslike Tristram Shandy or Jacques le fataliste can oftenseem more modern(ist) than anything written in the

century after.A similar point is suggested in GabrielJosipovicis more recent analysis of the naivet (inthe Schillerian sense) of Balzac and Dickens, whichfinds (too simplistically, I think) the root of theirstrength and magisterial authority in their inabil-ity or unwillingness to question what it is they aredoing, by contrast to a properly modernist doubtabout imposing a shape on [the world] and giving ita meaning that it doesnt have.Realism is, in thissense, as Bernstein says, less a matter of makinglikenesses of the world as it is a complex matter of

thefitnessof the wholly human powers of art in rela-tion to a particular, wholly human and secular socialworld. It is the lack of fit that makes modernismnecessary, but also makes it an art of failure.

But this would then be itself the substance ofJamesons point that realisms only ultimate outcomecould be to destroy realism itself. In contriving somedelicate dialectical balance between narrative coher-ence and contingency, so as to put in place a new setof precarious conventions for the novel, it can only

finally confront the contingent (or arbitrary) natureof these conventions themselves, which thus cometo seem necessarily unrealistic: realisms ultimateadversary will be the realistic novel itself (162). Thisis why so many familiar modernist critiques of

realism, from Woolf to Gide to Beckett, turn on theaccusation that in giving coherence to a finally inco-herent reality it is precisely not realistic enough.

The major rationale, I think, for The Antinomies ofRealisms privileging of affect is the way it thus pre-cisely reconnectsrealism with modernism, and with a

broader question of contingency.Oddly enough, inthus placing the likes of Balzac outside the picture,

at some level this repeats Lukcs himself, since thelatters critique of Zolas and Flauberts naturalismrests precisely on its continuity with modernism(particularly Joyce and Dos Passos), as opposed towith realism proper. This may be one reason why, asJameson notes in passing in the Postmodernismbook,naturalism has always presented peculiar problems

for literary history.

These are problems, however,that Jameson brackets here by simply reabsorbingthem into realism itself.

Yet if realism is connected to modernism around ashared problem of contingency, it is hard not to thinkthat affect would thus be, at best, most plausiblythought of as one particular manifestation, or type,of such a problem, rather than its master term. It is

here that the broader Hegelian-Lukcsian account ofthe novel as impossible epic of a modern bourgeois orcapitalist world of prose a world of finitude and

mutability, of entanglement in the relative fromwhich the individual is in no position to withdraw seems most clearly to reassert itself. (The long anddifficult section on immanence and transcendence,which begins the second half of the book, appears tobe designed, in part, to grapple with this.) If Epischis immanent, in the sense that meaning is inherentin all objects and details, all its facts, all its events(21011), then contingency marks the loss of suchcapacity to presume that reality has its meaning, itsdeeper reason for being, within itself. This is what

the early Lukcs termed (negatively) transcendentalhomelessness or (more positively) the productivityof spirit.Auerbachs similar comment on modernistwriters, in the final chapter of Mimesis, that theyhesitate to impose upon life, which is their subject,an order which it does not possess in itself is, inthis sense, crucially the result of tensions internalto realism itself. And just as modernism can thusbe brought closer to a certain realism, so Ulysses, forexample, can be at least in part interrogated with

the categories and within the limits of realism (216).

Problems of history

The disturbance of established periodizations in TheAntinomies of Realism is not unproductive and, if

nothing else, it provides yet another version of thefamiliar argument for which Flaubert, say, may beunderstood as realist, modernist and (if we must)postmodernist all at once (178). Going in the oppositedirection this would, then, no doubt relate also toJamesons previous attempt to identify both a mod-

ernist and a postmodernist Baudelaire in the 1985essay from which I have already extensively quoted:


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the Baudelaire inaugural poet of high modernism(of a today extinct high modernism, I would add),and the Baudelaire of postmodernism, of our ownimmediate age, of consumer society, the Baudelaireof the society of the spectacle or the image.Yet, asJameson brings realism closer to modernism, so theseparation invoked here is a hard one to maintain.

Indeed, the obvious problem with it is already identi-fied, in fairly straightforward terms, by Moretti (inhis chapter on Ulysses and the Twentieth Centuryin The Modern Epic), which begins with a series ofcitations from Zolas The Ladies Paradise: All true, asMoretti puts it of Jamesons celebrated analysis of theBonaventura, apart from the novelty of the thing in this as, perhaps, in everything the postmodern

is just one more step along a route traced long ago it was already like that in Zola: does the mismatchbetween subject and object really begin with post-

modern hyperspace [or] Zolas department store?There is little need to run through, yet again, these

arguments concerning the periodizing hypothesis ofthe postmodern, which have long since passed theirsell-by date; although we might wonder, as PeterOsborne recently has, if, like modernism or modernity,the era of high capitalism is thus quite so extinct asmight be supposed.Nonetheless, it is worth notingthat, apparently unlike postmodernism, realism andmodernism can only ever be said, both of them, tobelong to modernity; something which evidently

causes Jameson more than a few dilemmas. Of course,for many of us, the most sensible conclusion is thensimply to admit that modernity is inescapable andto desist from speculations about [its] end. Thepoint is not a new one. Still, if Jamesons dialecticof realism is indeed some belated acknowledgementthat things were, at least in some degree, already likethat in Zola that we are dealing here with forms ofintensification and expansion rather than of epochalbreaks this suggests some largely unacknowledged

effect of retroactivity in the privileging of the termaffect, in which it is only now that its centrality tothe novel of the second half of the nineteenth centurycan become historically intelligible. Something likethis seems to be tacitly recognized in the books

second chapter, in which Jameson recalls his ownassociation of postmodernism with a contemporaryor postmodern perpetual present which is, he nowsuggests, better characterized as a reduction to thebody: the isolated body begins to know more globalwaves of generalized sensations, and it is these which,

for want of a better word, I will here call affect (28).No doubt this incorporates a point about the rationale

for some contemporary affective turn itself (althoughit also seems to me to risk reinscribing a rather tra-ditional mindbody dualism). But it simultaneouslyopens up some odd historical wormhole in Jamesonsfamiliar account of (post)modernity as a world ofsurfaces, libidinal intensities and the lived experienceof a perpetual present. The delirious multiplicity of

Zolas meaningless cheeses (62) certainly sounds alot like the Jamesonian postmodern in this respect.All of this might help to explain the most striking

aporia of all in The Antinomies of Realism, whichis the lack of any solid account of why exactly thishistorical affective turn takes place when it does.It is, Jameson writes early on in the book, towardsmid-century, let us say in the 1840s of the bourgeois

era, that such linguistic demands begin to becomeaudible and inescapable, at least for the most alertarts that scan the era for the new (31). But why?

Every form, Lukcs asserts, is the resolution of afundamental dissonance of existence.What, then,is the historically specific dissonance to which theseantinomies of realism respond?

Lukcss own canonical answer in Narrate orDescribe? revolved around the caesura of 1848:unlike Balzac or Stendhal, Zola and Flaubert startedtheir creative work after the June uprising in a firmlyestablished bourgeois society, in a historical situationin which an earlier claim of the bourgeois class toembody a universal emancipation had dissipated.

But this narrative of a loss of totalizing perspectiveplays no obvious role here; at least until the issueof collectivity the story of the Many rather thanthe One (222) explicitly returns in the final twochapters on war and the historical novel. Instead, inline with the autonomization of the sensory desig-nated by affect, Jameson focuses on the role of whathe designates the bourgeois body as it emergesfrom the outmoded classifications of the feudal era(32). This sounds a Foucauldian note, but it remains

substantially undeveloped. Moreover, quite why thisbourgeois body should emerge specifically aroundlet us say the 1840s is far from clear.

One evident omission in this regard which Ihave, unfortunately, insufficient space to write about

here is any explicit mention of photography inJamesons account of the development of realism. TheAntinomies of Realismdoes make a convincing link todevelopments in painting of the period, noting notonly the painterly eye deployed in Zola (56) but itscorrelation to the way in which time is famously

eternalized in Monets impressionism (41). (Thereis an interesting critical engagement with Michael


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Frieds work on nineteenth-century painting, and itsideas of instantaneousness, presence and theatrical-ity, going on at various points.) However, if what is inquestion in the 1840s and after are the most alert artsthat scan the era for the new (31), one might certainlyexpect this new to include the most radical trans-formations of the era in modes of representation

and image production. Yet, the parallel suggested byPaul Valry, in a celebrated 1939 talk, between theemergence of photography and the descriptive genreof realism developed in the recent work of NancyArmstrong and Jennifer Green-Lewis is one thatJameson follows Lukcs in ignoring.39 The passingcomment that in contemporary stories objectstend to be far more contingent, resembling Barthes

punctummore than they do hisstudium (23), suggestsa different avenue might have been taken here.

To think further about what is at stake in the

vaguely identified moment of let us say in the 1840s,one might start by considering, alongside Jamesonsreading of The Belly of Paris, two rather differentanalyses of Zola. The first would come from Auer-bachs reading of Germinal (1888). Here Auerbachfocuses on Zolas description of a working-class ballat the end of a weekend. (The passage runs overtwo pages in Mimesis.) Like Jameson (and Lukcs),Auerbach emphasizes the purely sensory aspects ofZolas literary portrait, which reveals a decidedlypictorial vein: The flowing beer, the haze of sweat,

the grinning and wide-open mouths likewise becomevisual impressions; acoustic and other sensory effectsare also produced. Yet, if there is certainly contin-gency here Hegels prose of the world as well asa pictorial temporality and sensory immediacy, it isnot exactly meaninglessin the sense in which Jamesonseems to understand the purely bodily affect. For, asAuerbach asks,

What sort of an orgy is it which reaches its endso early? [The passage begins It was ten oclock

before anyone left.] The coal miners have to be outof bed early on Monday morning, some of themat four oclock And once we have paused, thereare many other things that strike us. An orgy, evenamong the lowest classes, calls for plenty. Andplenty there is, but it is poor and frugal nothingbut beer. The whole thing showshow desolate andmiserable the joys of these people are.

What is being described in this passage may, then, beunreservedly translated into sensory terms by Zola,but it is in the service of showing (rather than strictly

telling) a desolate truth about, in this instance,proletarian life.

The second passage comes from Zolas The LadiesParadise (1883), this time as cited in Morettis TheModern Epic:

Nothing but white, and never the same white,every shade of white, heaped up on one another,contrasting with and complementing one another,until they merged into the brilliance of light itself.

It began with the dull white of the calicos and hol-lands, the flat white of the flannels and bedlinens;then came the velvets, the silks, the satins, in anascending scale, the whiteness gradually catchingfire to form little tongues of flame at the breaks ofthe folds; and with the transparency of the gauzesthe white took flight, to become free radiance withthe muslins, the guipures, the laces, and above allthe tulles, so light that they were like the farthest,dying note, while the silver of the pieces of orientalsilk sank higher than all in the recesses of the vastbay.

Here, too, then we have the apparent autonomyof sense data, the proliferation of the (unnameably?)different whites that take flight, merge into the bril-liance of light itself, become free radiance. Yet, asMoretti points out, in this case such sensory affectappears, far more directly, in the specific context ofcommoditydisplay, in which, as he puts it, a sheet isno longer a thing, but precisely a stimulus: a blinding,luminous ray. As such, its very meaninglessnessitself acquires a kind of (social) meaning in its aes-thetic functions here. This encourages a rereading of

the symphony of cheeses passage, as one in which thevery resistance to narrative meaning that Jamesonidentifies also marks something of the sensuouslyinvigorating accumulation of commodity goods, orthe abstracting deterritorialization of rural producesent to the metropolitan market and of a progressiveincorporation into a regime of exchangeability.

Realism on the basis of a loss of reality

In developing a more multidimensional and socially

grounded account of realism than can be providedby the emergence of affect alone which risksbecoming a loose signifier for all those forms of non-narrative time that occupy one side of Jamesonsvarious dichotomies one possible direction is pro-

vided by a short essay on Balzac by Adorno publishedat the beginning of the 1960s. In a rephrasing of theopening to Benjamins 1936 The Storyteller essay,Adorno argues that It is precisely because in thebourgeois world one can no longer tell stories aboutthe things that are decisive that storytelling is dying

out. By apparent contrast, Balzac brought society astotality, something classical political economy and


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Hegelian philosophy had formulated in theoreticalterms, down from the airy realm of ideas to the sphereof sensory evidence. However, in doing so, Adornocontinues, he had to (re)produce such a totality by nomeans only [as] an extensive totality the physiologyof life as a whole in its various branches, but also asan intensive totality in the form of a functional

complex: A dynamic rages in it: society reproducesitself only as a whole, in and through the system,and to do so it needs every last man as a customer.And the principal means of this self-reproduction is,Adorno argues, above all money, which, on the onehand, patterns the lives of all the characters in LaComdie humaine, and connects them together, butwhich, on the other, constitutes a veil that Balzac

is unable to penetrate. The credit system links thefate of the one to the fate of the other, whether theyknow it or not. Yet how is the credit system to be

narrated? This is what Adorno terms Balzacs strug-gle to conjure up in perceptible form a society thathas, with the irresistible ascendancy of the exchangeprinciple, itself already become abstract.

This problem of money is one Jameson himselftouches upon in the second half of The Antinomiesof Realism, in both the chapter on war where, inDoblins Wallerstein(1920), money (or wealth) is, verybriefly, presented as that conduit of the affect thatpulses throughout the text (2445) and the chapteron providence and realism, in which the financial

essence of providence is traced in Dickenss BleakHouse(185253) and, particularly, Eliots Middlemarch(187172):

[What] is certainly central in Middlemarch is thecash nexus and the synchronic role of money inthe play of these individual destinies (which bearthe name of a collectivity). The novel is a histori-cal one, no doubt (set in 1830), and the intensifyinggrip of a money economy over the provinces is oneostensible theme the book shares with Balzac. [In] Middlemarchthere is no destiny which is not in

one way or another touched by money. (2234)

But the argument is not taken any further than this.Nor is it related back to the earlier thematics of affect.

Writing in the era in which Middlemarch is set,

Balzac was working, as Adorno notes, at a moment before the era in which Zola would make the webof interconnections of the financial system boththe subject matter and part of the compositionallogic of novels like The Kill (187172) and Money(189091) when the norms of homo economicus

have not yet becomes standardized modes of humanconduct, and it was still possible to combine an

emergent realism with forms of romance (not leastin his representation of the financier or entrepre-neur). Yet, even here, what Adorno calls Balzacs ownardour for concreteness already runs up against theproblem that [i]f the world is to be seen through,it can no longer be looked at. The consequence iswhat Adorno terms a crisis of literary concreteness

itself: Concreteness is the substitute for the realexperience that is not only almost inevitably lackingin the great writers of the industrial age but alsoincommensurable with the ages own concept. Thisis, as he puts it, a realism on the basis of a loss of

reality, from which later, in works like Zolas Ventrede Paris, a very modern conclusion is drawn thedissolution of time and action.

From this perspective, what Jameson terms invest-ments in affect and in such dissolution of timeand action appear precisely as an increasingly

contradictory attempt to hang on to the concrete(or the sensory) in the face of its dissolution as asecure marker of reality. As Adorno puts it, inarchetypal modernist fashion, a certain literaryrealism became obsolete because, as a representationof reality, it did not capture reality.Yet, at the sametime, and only seemingly paradoxically, this crisis ofliterary concreteness is also the anxiety of too muchinfinite (because contingent) detail, and an endlessexchangeability of concrete particulars: the prolif-eration of the concrete reality of those insignificant

gestures, transitory attitudes, insignificant objects,redundant words to which Barthes refers in TheReality Effect, and which appear, as Jameson remindsus, as a resistance to meaning.Significantly, this isprecisely Lukcss critique of Zola, in whose writing,he argues, the apparently all-too-concrete descrip-tive (or affective?) prose of naturalism, and whathe calls the craze for the fleeting moment, maska more fundamental abstraction associated, aboveall, with the bad infinite of the real abstraction of

capital itself. The lack of any natural or intrinsiclimit on what the novel might depict or incorporatehere mirrors a parallel lack with regard to what canbe concretely exchanged in the universalization ofthe exchange value form. One is not required to

follow Lukcss own critical judgements on this which depend on his late romantic conception ofthe possibility of a realist epic poetry in oppositionto capitalist prose to observe that a good part ofwhat he is grappling with here is the ways in whichcapitalist forms come to structure the problem of

reality as an object of representation. Think, again,of the displays of The Ladies Paradise, as well as all


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those piles of cheese, and, of course, the form of thecommodity itself: sensuous things which are at thesame time suprasensible: sinnlich bersinnliche. Itis, perhaps, as such that the unsolved antagonismsof reality return to realism as immanent problemsof form.

Notes 1. I take the latter phrase from Christopher Prendergast, TheTriangle of Representation, Columbia University Press, NewYork, 2000, p. 132. See David Cunningham, Here Comesthe New: Deadwoodand the Historiography of Capitalism,Radical Philosophy180, July/August 2013, pp. 89. For

Jamesons reading of The Wire, see Realism and Utopia inThe Wire, Criticism, vol. 52, no. 34, Summer/Fall 2010.

2. See, for example, Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice,Methuen, London, 1980, and various essays in ColinMacCabe, Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature,Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1985. The keyinfluence here is Barthess distinction between so-calledlisibleand scriptabletexts. See Roland Barthes, S/Z: AnEssay, trans. Richard Miller, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991.

3. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism, Verso, London and New York, 1991, pp.656, ix, 410; Fredric Jameson, Rimbaud and the SpatialText, in The Modernist Papers, Verso, London and NewYork, 2007, p. 240.

4. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-CenturyDialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton University Press,Princeton NJ, 1971, pp. 163, 47.

5. Georg Lukcs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock,Merlin, London, 1971, p. 56.

6. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism, New Left ReviewI/146, JulyAugust 1984,p. 66.

7. Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 41516. This is also why, to putit more provocatively, the fantasy of cognitive mapping

may be said to play here formally if not exactly politically something of the role that socialist realism has in Lukcsduring the 1930s, albeit in a spatialized or synchronicmode.

8. See David Cunningham, Capitalist Epics: Abstraction,Totality and the Theory of the Novel, Radical Philosophy163, September/October, 2010, pp. 1123. In the words ofLukcs, summing up and extending Hegels argument intheAestheticsa century later, the novel is, impossibly, theepic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is nolonger directly given yet which still thinks in terms oftotality. Theory of the Novel, p. 56.

9. Jay Bernstein, Social Signs and Natural Bodies: OnT.J. Clarks Farewell to an Idea, Radical Philosophy104,November/December 2000, p. 26. Bernstein is describing

modernism.10. Indeed, the inventiveness of such translations andthe

intense conceptual problems that they can generate areexemplified in the concept of cognitive mapping itself,which combines Kevin Lynchs phenomenological-humanistaccount of urban legibility with the Althusserian definitionof ideology in order to construct a contemporary articula-tion of what is an essentially Hegelian-Lukcsian notion.See Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 514, 415.

11. Fredric Jameson, Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmod-ernist: The Dissolution of the Referent and the ArtificialSublime (1985), in The Modernist Papers, pp. 225, 229.

12. Georg Lukcs, Narrate or Describe?, in Writer and Critic,and Other Essays, trans. Arthur Kahn, Merlin, London,1975, pp. 113, 116, 144. Similarly, in the famous scene at the

agricultural fair in Flauberts Madame Bovary, what Lukcsterms the setting (or Jamesons scenic present) acquires,

he writes, an independent existence, becoming akin toa mere painting or tableauxseparated off from thesubjective importance of the events (p. 115).

13. Jean-Franois Lyotard, Answer to the Question: What isthe Postmodern?, in The Postmodern Explained to Children,trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas, Turnaround,London, 1992, p. 15.

14. Jameson, Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist,pp. 225, 228, 227.

15. Ibid.; emphasis added. Here, Jameson reads this far more

directly in terms of the already tendential privatizationand monadization of the isolated individuals who used tomake up the traditional publics that confronted Baudelaireand Flaubert, with the result that there can no longer beany confidence in some shared common recognitionofthe mysterious sense data which is the referent of thepoetic text (Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist,p. 230). This conception seems largely absent from the newbook.

16. Ibid., pp. 2289.17. Compare Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of

Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask, PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton NJ, 1953, pp. 46873. AsAuerbach puts it, in Balzacs very detailed description ofthe Vaquer house, with the physical description the moral

atmosphere is suggested (p. 468).18. One could compare here Jamesons readings of Balzac and

Zola with Morettis recent discussion of the different treat-ments of things in Pilgrims Progressand Robinson Crusoe.Whereas, in Bunyan, things become signs because, atbottom, they have never really been things, in Defoe, Morettiobserves, things remain stubbornly material, reflectiveof what Peter Burke calls a rise of literal-mindedness.See Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History andLiterature, Verso, London and New York, 2013, pp. 6061 .However, here, matter of factness is tied more directlyto the business of everyday life, in a strong sense. That isto say, in Crusoethings are mostly reliable, usefulthings(p. 62). There is much realistic detail, concreteness andprosaic precision here, as there is in the eighteenth-century

texts that are the focus of Ian Watts classic The Rise of theNovel, but thus little in the way of what Jameson calls sheeraffect.

19. Lukcs, Narrate or Describe?, p. 112.20. Roland Barthes, Le Degr zro de l criture, cited in Gabriel

Josipovici, Whatever Happened to Modernism?, Yale Univer-sity Press, New Haven CT and London, 2010,18081.

21. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, in ThePainter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. JonathanMayne, Phaidon, London, 1964, p. 13.

22. See Marshall Berman,All That Is Solid Melts into Air: TheExperience of Modernity, Verso, London and New York, 1984,pp. 11520 (on Marx) and pp. 15564 (on Baudelaire). AsGeorge Steiner puts it: Frequently, chronology deceives:Tennyson and Rimbaud are contemporaries. Real Presences,

Faber & Faber, London, 1989, p. 166.23. Franco Moretti, The Modern Epic: The World System from

Goethe to Garcia Marquez, trans. Quintin Hoare, Verso,London and New York, 1996, pp. 1945. See also FrancoMoretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman inEuropean Culture, Verso, London and New York, 1987.Something like this idea also seems to be reiterated in themore recent The Bourgeois, which argues that instead of theturbulence and change that one might expect to find in anineteenth-century bourgeois literature of modernity, theopposite was the case: regularity, not disequilibrium, wasthe great narrative invention of bourgeois Europe. All thatwas solid, became more so (The Bourgeois, p. 15).

24. It is at this point that one might raise a number of questionsabout the story of narrative formpriorto realism. Jamesons

opening example of what he describes as the purest formof rcit comes from Boccaccios Decameron, where he


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identifies, in the ninth story of the fifth day, a tale thatneeds no showing, no scene, no present of narrativeat all, and that cannot exist in the present, its eventsmust already have happened (or, in other words, that isrestricted to Barthespass simple) (24). But can this reallybe extended to narrative forms more generally before theshattering entrance of affect? It would certainly be hardto incorporate the likes of Swift, Sterne, Diderot, or evenDefoe, into this picture. And, presuming that Jamesondoesnt mean to do so, would it not, in a sense, be more

plausible to suggest that if nineteenth-century realism setin motion the forces of dissolution of a certain narrativeorder, it also effectively invents in Scott, Austen, Stendhaland Balzac that order in the first place?

25. Josipovici, Whatever Happened to Modernism?, pp. 667, 72.26. J.M. Bernstein,Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modern-

ism and the Meaning of Painting, Stanford UniversityPress, Stanford CA, 2006, pp. 1213. Note, however, thatBernsteins principal reference here is seventeenth-centuryDutch painting.

27. See, for example, John Bolin, Beckett and the Modern Novel,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013.

28. In these terms, see, for example, the argument in one essayin The Modernist Papersthat Mallarms dream of The Bookembodies the longing to overcome contingency (or chance,

le hazard) more forcefully expressed in Flauberts famousletter about a book without content (precisely because anyconceivable form of content is also a mark of contingency).Fredric Jameson, Mallarm Materialist, in The ModernistPapers, p. 316.

29. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 181.30. G.W.F. Hegel,Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols, trans.

T.M. Knox, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, pp. 14950.31. Fredric Jameson, Modernism and Imperialism, in The

Modernist Papers, p. 157; Lukcs, Theory of the Novel, pp. 41,33.

32. Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 548, 549.33. Jameson, Baudelaire, in The Modernist Papers, p. 223.34. Moretti, The Modern Epic, pp. 127, 131 n15.35. Peter Osborne, The Postconceptual Condition, or, the

Cultural Logic of High Capitalism Today, Radical Philosophy184, March/April 2014, pp. 1927.

36. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, On Alternative Modernities,in Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed.,Alternative Modernities,Duke University Press, Durham NC and London, 2001, p. 1.

37. Lukcs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 62.38. Lukcs, Narrate or Describe?, p. 118.39. Paul Valry, The Centenary of Photography, in Alan Tra-

chtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography, Leetes IslandBooks, New Haven, 1980, pp. 191-98. See Franois Brunet,Photography and Literature, Reaktion, London, 2009, pp.8083, 11314; Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians:Photography and the Culture of Realism, Cornell UniversityPress, Ithaca NY, 1996; Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the

Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism, Harvard

University Press, Cambridge MA, 2002. As Armstrongnotes, while Lukcs remarks in Zola and Flaubert a suddeninfusion of ornamental detail, immobile background,pictorialism, and photographic authenticity, he payslittle actual attention to the fact that the novels turnto pictorialism coincided with the sudden ubiquity ofphotographic images in the culture at large (p. 5).

40. This might be the moment to mention a rather strikingconjunction with another contemporary account ofrealism that of Jacques Rancire despite no apparentdirect influence either way (but an obviously shared debtto both Auerbach and Lukcs). In his essay The PensiveImage, Rancire also associates Barthess Camera Lucidawith an idea of the image as a unique reality resisting art

and thought what he describes, in relation to Barthessfamouspunctum, as a power of affecting. Comparing,then, Walker Evanss photograph of a section of a woodenkitchen wall in Alabama with a novelistwhom he admired:Flaubert, Rancire notes the ways in which a logic ofvisuality no longer arrives to supplement action, but tosuspend it:

Each of the amorous moments that punctuatesMadame Bovaryis in fact marked by a painting, a smallvisual scene It is as if painting had taken the place

of the texts narrative sequence. what we have isan exchange of roles between description and narra-tion, painting and literature the invasion of literaryaction by pictorial passivity. [a] relationship withoutrelationship between two chains of events: the chainof the narrative directed from the beginning towardsthe end, with intrigue and denouement; and the chainof [sensible] micro-events that does not obey thisdirected logic, but which is randomly dispersed withoutbeginning or end, without any relationship betweencause and effect.

If there is an intriguing proximity between this idea andJamesons antinomies, it is significant that Rancire is alsoconcerned here to destablize rather more radically the

usual divisions between realism and modernism; in hiscase by absorbing both into a more general aestheticregime. See Jacques Rancire, The Pensive Image, inThe Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, Verso,London and New York, 2010, pp. 110, 118, 1234. For somecritical comments on Rancires account of the literaryregime, and its own problems of historical location, seeDavid Cunningham, Flauberts Parrot, Radical Philosophy170, November/December 2011, pp. 4650.

41. Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 51011 (emphasis added), 512. Zolashistorical importance, for Auerbach, is related both to hisprogressive democratizing of the novels subject matter,and break with neo-classical hierarchies, andto his distancefrom the kind of aestheticizing of reality typical, he argues,of other naturalists like the Goncourts (pp. 505-6).

42. Moretti, The Modern Epic, pp. 1256.43. Ibid., p. 126.44. Theodor Adorno, Reading Balzac, in Notes to Literature,

vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Columbia UniversityPress, New York, 1991, pp. 133, 122, 133, 125 , 1234. I leaveaside here the larger argument that I have made previouslyin Radical Philosophythat the theory of the novel mightmore broadly be re-thought as relating to an epic ofcapitalism in something like these terms. See Cunningham,Capitalist Epics, pp. 1123.

45. Adorno, Reading Balzac, pp. 126, 128 (emphasis added),129.

46. Ibid., p. 128.47. Roland Barthes, The Reality Effect, in The Rustle of

Language, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los

Angeles, 1989, p. 146.48. Lukcs, The Intellectual Physiognomy, in Writer and

Critic, pp. 171. Crucially, it is this that Lukcs reads as beingcontinued in Joyces assembling [o] ephemeral thoughtsand feelings and evanescent associations in contact withthe external world, describing all with minute and meticu-lous detail (p. 172).

49. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes,Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 165 . See David Cunning-ham, Floating on the Same Plane: Metropolis, Money andthe Culture of Abstraction,Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 12,no. 1, 2013, pp. 3860.

50. Theodor Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, trans. Rolf Tiedemann,Continuum, London and New York, 2004, p. 7.

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