It is with Jameson's page 27 discussion of Lacan and the schizophrenic that I would like to begin my post.
Jameson writes "With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers..., a series of pure and unrelated presents in time. Jameson unpacks such a situation & the feelings that might accompany it as he quotes Renée (in translation): "I remember very well the day it happened. We were staying in the country...Suddently, as I was passing the school, I heard a German Song...at that instant a strange feeling came over me, a feeling hard to analyze but akin to something I was to know well later - a disturbing sense of unreality...I ran home to our garden and began to play "to make things seem as they usually were," that is, to return to reality. It was first the appearance of those elements which were always present in later sensations of unreality...". This description of a feeling (accompanied by the "breakdown of temporality" and the sudden engulfing of the subject "with undescribable vividness") reminded me of Freud's essay on the Uncanny (das Unheimliche).
The German term is particularly important to my linking of these discussions (Schizophrenia/Lacan, Renee, and Freud), as un-heimlich 'translates' first to 'not secret/hidden/surreptitious' and the more deeply embedded word here, 'das Heim', translates as 'home'. With this in mind, 'unheimlich' refers to the eerie sensation of both recognizing and not recognizing something. Finding it not as something like Home but also perhaps more inherently related to the subject. Finding it familiar and foreign (and ultimately finding oneself therein...but that is another train of thought....)... The above-described sensation, "hard to analyze but akin to something I was to know...", seems to be intricately connected to Freud's description.
Jameson references another semiotic & art history buzzword of many years past: the sublime (Burke was writing in the 18th century but the term was particularly popularized in the 19th and 20th centuries) -- a term recalling "an experience bordering on terror, the fitful glimpse, in astonishment...of what was so enormous as to crush human life all together". Again, the term, as with 'Uncanny' or 'schizophrenic' is referencing the indescribable, it is attempting to define and articulate a feeling that resides between those more easily-expressed.
What I am moving towards here, then, is the pattern I seem to see in modernist language and theory to express the inexpressable, to attempt to articulate feelings that shatter normal human perceptions of reality, time, memory, astonishment, fear. Is this the modernist tug towards the academic? Towards the intellectualization of emotion?
If these ('uncanny', schizophrenic, 'sublime') are terms of the past, of the pre-modernist and modernist eras, then what does one look to in postmodern theory? Like with the Bonaventure, does post-modern language "aspire to being a total space, a complete world...".
If so, does this suggest the simplification of theoretical discourse? Can terms that evade direct answer to fundamental questions of "what?" and "how?" no longer be utilized? (I don't think so...but...) What is Jameson suggesting by mentioning these words that compromise human thought by (arguably) inadequately define feeling?
...Am I misreading the text...? (also plausible.)
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