We read a translation of kasha ("The Flaming Cart," translated as "All She Was Worth," pretty decent detective novel), which was fun and good, and had a lengthy discussion about Japan's economy in the bubble era. The current reading is...ah...
"Postmodernism, or,
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Fredric Jameson"
Thirty-eight pages, with large sections yellowed out (i.e. not essential for reading), but since I'm a completist I went to the optional section.
Wow...just...well, here's a section:
Jameson obliges us by theorizing that VanGogh was remarking on the struggle of peasants in a capitalist world, instead of being a notorious weeaboo who could channel his ADD into pretty pictures.We will begin with one of the canonical works of high modernism in visual art, Van Gogh's well-known painting of the peasant shoes, an example which, as you can imagine, has not been innocently or randomly chosen. I want to propose two ways of reading this painting, both of which in some fashion reconstruct the reception of the work in a two-stage or double-level process.
I first want to suggest that if this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges.
More fun happens when Jameson tries to explain hows come many of VanGogh's paintings are very colorful when at heart he was a Marxist; Jameson argues that this was an act of 'utopian compassion.'
Then there is some Heidegger, and then af;afopy1q0tyq90zLOOPY LUUP
There may be a time to mention that I think Andy Warhol could have been impaled on that telephone pole spike with little loss for humanity, although perhaps not for The Humanities.
CUT!in Magritte, the carnal reality of the human member itself, now more phantasmic than the leather it is printed on. Magritte, unique among the surrealists, survived the sea change from the modern to its sequel, becoming in the process something of a postmodern emblem: the uncanny, Lacanian foreclusion, without expression. The ideal schizophrenic, indeed, is easy enough to please provided only an eternal present is thrust before the eyes, which gaze with equal fascination on an old shoe or the tenaciously growing organic mystery of the human toenail. Ceserani thereby deserves a semiotic cube of his own:
And that's one of what I would consider the highly intelligible (although "Lacan" remains as mysterious and as deficient of intrigue as before) passages in the work. I more or less was aware I'd be getting into this, but it's preposterous all the same.
Comments? Requests to see more of the horror (I'm sure it's widely available, but my copy is annotated with the PICTARS).
I'm sure it'll be a good class again once this is over and everybody runs around doing highly postmodern things, like toting around all the required reading under their good arm.
Fruit trees in this world are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out of poor soil; the people of the village are worn down to their skulls, caricatures of some ultimate grotesque typology of basic human feature types. How is it, then, that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees explode into a hallucinatory surface of color, while his village stereotypes are suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and green? I will briefly suggest, in this first interpretative option, that the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure color in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture, an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses, or at least of that supreme sense -- sight, the visual, the eye -- which it now reconstitutes for us as a semiautonomous space in its own right, a part of some new division of labor in the body of capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them.
The humorous thing about the passages is that the words aren't chosen randomly, but compactness is a poor argument for writing as he has here.
Anything on the less complex side? Or is it all mostly highly specialized? 
