And if you would like to play that game, allow me to step in for a round or two. Yes, Vincent Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Boots.” I see them. They example a life lived, perhaps a hard life lived, but one that is Here and present, real, of the soil, human, rooted, organic. I see blood coursing through veins and laughter on Saturday evenings, and hunger overcome with a snatched feast, a moment of pleasure, a good drink, joy in an infant’s smile. For infant’s did smile. I historically know that they did. There is the “cat massacre” of Robert Darnton as a group of apprentices make fun of their master, murder the household and neighborhood cats, and mock through mimic the master’s wife. I see the satisfaction of root and rock, of toil, of harvest, of reaping that which one assiduously sowed in spring. I see love and sex and marriage and conflict and doubt and assurance and heartbreak, true heartbreak and backbreaking labor, yes, the stuff of human life.
E. P. Thompson might see in these boots the Luddite resistance or the organization through forced association against an oppressor of a working class, a unified and conscious whole broiling in a world of subjugation, pressure and tension. Some suggest we ease off the elitist projections of the presumed general angst and supposed universal torment of humankind and see instead what I know Van Gogh, who created the work, saw himself: a life lived, lived hard, but lived within the matrix of human complexity, desires, satisfactions and disappointments. In short, the real organic quality of life lived by a first world developer of Nantucket capitalist retreats, by the laboring classes striving for some finger hold of sanity in their lives, Chinese shoe-sewers in Nike factories, striking longshoremen in Oakland who earn well over a hundred thousand dollars a year, bus drivers, school teachers, millionaires, and tyrants. No human being, not a meditating Buddhist seated upon a mossy knoll nor a Bill Gates discussing yacht co-ownership with Donald Trump, who can escape Being. And for Van Gogh, and for me, these shoes, hard-worn shoes, lived shoes, represent what it means to be a human being. Something else jigging through the postmodern world right now, and it is not conservative smugness at an NRA convention, it is not shrill declarations of doom from the left, and it is not even Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’s “third way.” What’s happening is a complex, striated, convoluted, disparate, heterogeneous conglomeration of a rising awareness that we are a global humankind. It does not even matter whether or not the networks are fully integrated yet, or that the globalizationist and anti-globalizationist who battle in Seattle miss the mark with their various stridencies, or that Tsing sees these global connections as necessarily frictive – which they can be, in both constructive and destructive ways. What matters is that there is an awareness, a consciousness of globalization, of connectivity, whether by forest dwellers in Borneo or porn stars in the San Fernando Valley. This awareness of being whole is representative of a new understanding which requires fresh definitions of what is. Van Gogh’s boots represent humanity, rich and poor and those strugglers in between. Those boots do not represent oppression or inequality. They display the hard activism and subversion of all attempts to restrain or limit a human soul. They are jokes at the expense of overseers. Slave songs on Sunday afternoons. Lawrence Levine’s American during the Great Depression, they are hobos living on the margins of labor manipulation, they are environmentalists in San Francisco at their celebratory barbecue after winning a court case, and they are even Warren Buffet’s or Andrew Carnegie’s belief in their positive role in an American global world.
Consider the extent to which Jameson’s postmodernism is Eurocentric. It comes out of the Euro-American academic tradition, follows a historical trajectory out of the Enlightenment through Modernity and is built on a repudiation of the modern. And the modern is Eurocentric to its core. It seems to me that the postmodern he discusses and the late capitalism he references has a locus in Europe and an outlook that arranges itself eastward, from the West, toward the Other. As deconstructive as its possibilities are, this Eurocentric theory merely subjugates and classifies in its own way, providing new categories of inclusion and exclusion, though Jameson argues that the postmodern is defined by its depthlessness. But the expansive fragmentation that occurs within a postmodern paradigm is merely a new set of categories, defining, ordering, and limiting as it claims to expand, shatter, and ignite new possibilities. I hear Jameson’s voice in his essay and I become aware of New York, London, Los Angeles, and the viewpoint is one which gazes out at the world, over the world, toward an East that it attempts to define, and necessarily include. Jameson’s take on Andy Warhol is distinctly American, and does not include, cannot include, what a Balinese farmer might think of it. Still a dialectic contained within the rarified air of academic discourse, removed from the dirty and disappearing swidden. It is a falutinist discussion about art, and its attempt to corral the political and the economic into its fabric is ridiculous to the laborer, Western, Eastern and all others. The limitations of Theory abound. As Jameson discusses the jargon-laced language of specialization, he pushes farther, and more strenuosity, than most other human beings toward a profound attenuation which threatens deep marginalization rather than constructive inclusion. And the Thing that he describes is no longer a thing, it is outmoded, has faded into its own impossibilities. A new sensibility of inclusiveness, in the cultural, philosophical, political and social realms is necessary. And the thing is, people are engaging this move on their own, without the need for definitional clarity from self-identified, hyper-educated, so-termed experts. It is a simple matter of the human babble run amok. That is postmodernism. It is the attempt to take thoughts to endpoints that can never exist. And conclusions become impossible and even unnecessary. History becomes a fiction, an interpretation-of-the-moment by a subgroup of specialists who have commandeered a paradigmatic shift and utilize its new space until it inevitably runs its course and is replaced by yet another movement or “turn.” Added to that, historical truth has become hyper-commodified along the lines of the rock band, and “alternative” arrives at meaningless. And so what is left? What kinds of stories can be told in a world of fragmentation? It almost doesn’t matter. What matters is the real living that people do as they clear territory for themselves and demand that they be heard, noticed, included. It is agitation beyond the embodiment of words. People in a strip mall in Phoenix, whether eating high-end sushi or mopping coffeeshop floors, do not care about the songs of former slaves nor notions of the postmodern. But they sing their souls loudly. And their ability to locate the Real leads to revolution.
More On The Fucking Shoes:
It appears to me necessary to add a final element on Van Gogh’s boots. Waxed poetic about the manner of humankind and the sweat of peasant and earth. This is a sentimental, modernist interpretation, and I like it. The thing is, the modern can be a part of the fragmented world of the postmodern. The postmodern includes elements of the modern, the Enlightenment, socialism, theocracy, consumerism, corporatism. The post-postmodern ideascapes exist beyond temporal or continental reality and are included within this vision. Capitalists can do what they do, but they cannot possibly do it alone. They are accompanied by the rest of us. And as They, of the megalithic System, appropriates my production, what happens is not the subjugation of my unique vision, but rather an inclusion of it in the grand whole. The All-Mind always exists beyond political economy. As a body is what it eats, so too does a large economic corpus manifest what it consumes. Socialists exist in the new-world democracies, and their visions are not glossed over or erased from the collective, rather they are added to the whole. Tyrants unfortunately are vestiges of an older humanity, and their fortifications are increasingly dismantled by organizations representing human hopefulness. This is a humanistic vision. And it predominates reality more than theoreticians mindful of new language give it credit.