Proustian art recuperates fragmentary present experience through linguistic expression, not memory

Evidence

Yet for Proust art finds its immediate justification in the ontology of time, in a darkness of the present instant very similar to that described by Bloch. In Proust also the present only gives us the raw material of genuine experience, and not experience itself. For whatever reason—the over-intellectualization of modern life, a too intense and willful hyperconsciousness about ourselves—real life seems able to take place only when we are least expecting it, only when, so to speak, we happen to be looking in another direction. Thus, in our world and our society, experience is given as necessarily fragmentary; it is never lived with that full and genuine self-consciousness which Bloch attributes to that ultimate adequation of subject with object; and the task of art and language is to recover this wholeness of experience, or rather to make it possible for the first time. Thus in no sense can Proustian art be said to be memory-oriented, to be obsessed with the past and its restoration: rather, that past is itself structurally deficient, ontologically inadequate, and it is only at the moment of expression through language that it can really be lived as though for the first time. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 298

Categorization

• XREF: Links Bloch’s Utopian adequation of subject and object to Proust — a genuinely dialectical pairing showing how Jameson re-tools Bloch for literary criticism. Connects to Adorno’s reading of Proust and to Benjamin’s concept of experience (Erfahrung). — connects to: Conceptual art’s operation spatializes lived experience; Loss of temporal coherence in the subject produces fragmentary, aleatory cultural forms. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 95; Memory poetically completes the past self with a plenitude of being (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that Proust’s art is not memory-oriented but forward-looking — that the past is ‘structurally deficient, ontologically inadequate’ and only becomes real in expression — reverses the standard reading and does real dialectical work.

Broader Connections

• Memory poetically completes the past self with a plenitude of being #contradicts (0.82)
• Conceptual art’s operation spatializes lived experience #qualifies (0.78)
• Loss of temporal coherence in the subject produces fragmentary, aleatory cultural forms. #complicates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 95
• Linguistic thoughts can be heard as sounds rather than meanings #expands (0.75) — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 221
• Schizophrenic temporality makes present experience overwhelmingly vivid and material #complicates (0.72) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 367