Jameson’s Postmodern idea that we have no history, was like pulling teeth for me. The class discussion was helpful, but I still didn’t feel like I was “getting it”. . . until I started reading Zizek. Thats right, Zizek helped me. ha. seriously though, the reading for Eng 330 has been my most frustrating class until now. Zizek is giving me some parallels through which, although most likely completely unaccurate, have seemed to help me make sense of Jameson’s thoughts on the PM. Here goes: Ideology is the same as a metanarrative. competing ideologies function as competing metanarratives. Zizek says that we cannot understand the past because we look at it through our own ideology (metanarrative) which cannot be the same ideology the past was looked at through when it was in fact the present. We can never see history accurately, not because there are too many movies about Titanic, but because the ideologies that existed during that time no longer exist in the exact form….. Therefore: Lacan’s idea of the REAL is what all those postmodern people are pointing at and can never outright say because to say it would be impossible.
