The Content of Form

Yesterday I suggested that programs like Eastenders and Coronation St. embody a certain fantasy of community, of an older form of social and economic relations - a closed community, focused only on itself, face-to-face and self-sufficient. I suggested that these features of the soap were largely imposed by the form itself rather than being thematic preoccupations. This could also have been put the other way around: if, in order for certain kinds of story to get off the ground you must construct something like a hermetic village, then this also implies that the actual everyday life of contemporary capitalism - characterised by dispersal, atomisation, spectacular 'communities' - is radically incompatible with certain kinds of storytelling and certain story-shaped experiences. Anyway, the implicit point of what I was saying, that interpretation should pass beyond the content to the form, is something I would want to underline. Now, I find a loosely related point in Jameson's Marxism and Form. He's talking about representations of the scientist's laboratory in those old 50's disaster films, wherein he sees a kind of

'collective folk dream about the life style of the scientist himself: he doesn't do real work, his renumeration is not monetary or at the very least money seems no object, there is something fascinating about his laboratory (the home workshop magnified to institutional dimensions, a combination of factory and clinic), about the way he works nights (he isn't bound by routine or the eight-hour day), his very intellectual operations themselves are caricatures of what the non-intellectual imagines brain work and book-knowledge to be. There is, moreover, the suggestion of a return to older modes of work organisation: to the more personal and psychologically satisfying world of the guilds, in which the older scientist is the master and the younger one the apprentice... What I want to convey is that none of this has anything do do with science itself, but is rather a distorted reflection of our own feelings and dreams about work alienated anf non-alienated: it is a wish-fulfillment that takes as its object a vision or ideal of what Marcuse would call 'libidinally gratifying' work. But it is of course a wish-fulfillment of a particular type, and it is this structure that is important to analyze.'

By that last sentence I take Jameson to mean that this is not just some free-floating universal wish, but a wish produced by and reflecting specific historical conditions in which work is typically impersonal and alienated, wherein one is essentially an instrument within a bureaucratic structure, implementing directives that cannot be tied to any specific individual. Whether that structure happens to be that of a private corporation or a state organisation matters little. The fantasy of work he descries is therefore like the photographic negative - a precise inversion - of this alienated world, so that the latter can as it were (and as FJ might say) be read off from it in reverse. It is not just a fantasy but the fantasy of this situation.

Now the other, perhaps rather obvious point that Jameson raises, is the relation between fantasy and ideology. The science fiction movies of which Jameson, after Sontag, speaks, are of course part and parcel of the ideology of the Cold War. This Cold War story is their ostensible 'content'. What Jameson suggests is that this ideological content is almost an alibi or rationalisation, the proverbial piece of meat thrown to the guard dog. Meanwhile, the real and deeper fantasmatic content is smuggled in, and assumes the inconspicuous semblance of the scientist's laboratory and the forms of work made possible thereby. This is a recurrent Jamesonian motif: the ideological content, in order to be binding, must have some disavowed fantasmatic kernel embedded within it.

The model or template here is taken from Freud's interpretation of dreams and the distinction between manifest and latent content. Jameson, who has given (or perhaps restored) to this distinction a political edge, is suggesting that this 'latent' fantasy typically embeds itself in form of the film/ novel etc, while the content sells us the ideological dummy. Content based analysis therefore misses the point entirely, failing to see that the content is a mere form, and that the form has a content of its own.