Untitled - witz cultural

332HYPERTEXT 3.0 of modern physics," appears in what he calls "that technological determinismof which Macluhanism [sic] remains the most interesting contemporaryexpression, but of which certain more properly Marxist studies like WalterBen;'amin's ambiguous Baudelaire are also variants." In response to the factthat Marxism itself includes "models which have so often been denounced asmechanical or mechanistic," fameson gingerly accepts such models, thoughhis phrasing suggests extraordinary reluctance: "I would want to argue thatthe category of mechanical effectivity retains a purely local validity in culturalanalysis where it can be shown that billiard-ball causality remains one of the(nonsynchronous) laws of our particular fallen social reality. It does littlegood, in other words, to banish 'extrinsic' categories from our thinking, whenthey continue to have a hold on the objective realities about which we plan tothinki' He then offers as an example the "unquestioned causal relationship"between changes in "the 'inner form' of the novel itself" (25) and the latenineteenth-centuryshift from triple-decker to single-volume format. I findthis entire passage very confusing, in part because in it fameson seems to endby accepting what he had begun by denying-or at least he accepts what thoselike Mcluhan have stated rather than what he apparently assumes them tohave argued. His willingness to accept that "mechanical effectivity retains apurely local validity in cultural analysis" seems to do no more than describewhat Eisenstein, Chartier, and others do. The tentativeness ofhis acceptancealso creates problems. I do not understand why fameson writes, "I wouldwant to argue," as if the matter were as yet only a distant possibility, when theend of this sentence and those that follow show that he definitely makes thatargument. Finally, I find troubling the conspicuous muddle of his apparentlygenerous admission that "it does little good . . . to banish 'extrinsic' categoriesfrom our thinking, when they continue to have a hold on the objectiverealities about which we plan to think." Such exrrinsic categories might turnout to match "the objective realities about which we plan to think," or again,these objective realities might turn out to support the hypothesis containedin extrinsic categories, but it only mystifies things to describe categories ashaving "a hold on . . . objective realities."Such prose from fameson, who often writes with clarity about particularlydifficult matters, suggests that this mystification and muddle derivesfrom his need to exclude technology and its history from Marxist analyses.We have seen how hard fameson works to exclude technological factorsfrom consideration, and we have also obsewed that they not only offer nothreat to famesonian Marxism but even have potential to support it.6 fame-