Ideological Re-form in Two Recent Films
with the one that is inscribed in ideology and 'takes the form of the aporia or the antinomy' (Jameson, p. 82) and activates a narrative movement of resolution.
In the second horizon, social class becomes the central analytical category. Class is here understood as an effect of social relations, not as groups in isolation from others. Class discourse is thus dialogic and antagonistic. Analysis in this horizon continues to focus on contradiction, but unlike the first moment, where the contradiction was 'univocal', here the text, while retaining its individual structure, is now redefined 'as a parole, or individual utterance, of that vaster system, or langue of class discourse' (Jameson, p. 85). This approach must of necessity 'undermine' the claim to autonomy, self-identity that is made on behalf of the text. This horizon is the space in which the 'reconstruction' of popular culture can take place, as an attempt to recapture and to reaffirm the subversive strategies of the popular, folk, and other marginal cultural forms, their 'systematic deconstruction' of hegemonic forms. On the other hand, the dominant itself can be read, within this horizon, as a ceaseless process of appropriation, neutralization and co- optation of popular forms, the culture of the dominated. This process of 'universalization' of elements drawn from the popular and the marginal is the very mode of functioning of hegemonic ideology (Jameson, p. 86-7).
As an intermediate term that concretizes the linguistic metaphor of langue /parole, Jameson introduces the ideologeme. The class discourse that, figured as a langue, is too abstract and inaccessible, is 'organized around minimal "units" which we will call ideologemes' (Jameson, p. 87). The ideologeme 'is an amphibious formation', manifesting itself on two planes: as a conceptual proposition or idea on the one hand, and as a 'protonarrative' on the other. Individual texts are 'a complex work of transformation' on such ideologemes, and the task of ideological analysis in this horizon involves not only the identification and naming of the ideologemes but also the retracing of the work of transformation performed by the text (Jameson, p. 87).
The third — historical — horizon, is already suggested in the idea of the unifying master code whose terms determine the discursive form taken by ideological conflict. Transcending the other two horizons, on the historical plane the analytical focus is on the historicity of this unity — the appearance of coherence — itself. It is the concept of mode of production that provides the 'organizing unit/ of this horizon. Jameson does not employ this concept in order to develop a typology of cultural forms in which any text can be placed in one or another 'stage' of historical evolution. Such a permanent solution is ruled out by the fact that a mode of production is a theoretical rather than an empirical object — any social formation, as Poulantzas has argued, is characterised by the structured coexistence in specific combinations, of several modes of production.
Thus every social formation will have its own specific combination which will have to be discovered, and every text will be 'crisscrossed and intersected by a variety of impulses from contradictory modes of cultural production all at once' (Jameson, p. 95). The same combination of modes also argues against the assumption of a homogeneous
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