Overlapping/transcoding

Overlapping: one way, I'd argue, we can understand Jameson's crucial notion of transcoding–a notion he is right to consider as the asset and task for theory, its one and only unquestionably valuable (and, or rather, because collectively shared) procedure. For transcoding means not just the convergence of two discourses, but a distinct but provisional attempt to subordinate another discourse (to overlap, such that not only lines but planes are, from a vantage point, seen as related), and lift the inferior elements up onto a different level--not primarily through judgment, of course, but through the act of translation. Or rather, through mediation, that unpopular holdover from dialectic which is surprisingly absent in our critical realm, filled as it is of virtualities and immanence (which are indeed immediacies beyond immediacy, relating to themselves not through the lifting up and destruction of content but by juxtaposition or through the suffusion of a gathering-dispersing power).

For questioning this absence is really what is going on in transcoding: Jameson is encouraging not only that we relate discourses (as if he were merely endorsing some sort of empty interdisciplinarity) but that in doing so we feel the immense complexities of mediation, which our fear of teleology itself has reduced to a simple passage between where we are and what we already know is right (i.e. what in our judgment must be excised or left out, not negated, from what we know). In short, when we mediate, we see that whatever judgment is indeed present in the process, on whatever basis we need to destroy something in order to bring one discourse into another, we must posit explicitly as coming from the procedure itself--not in order to smuggle it away in that procedure, but to show that such elimination or such selection (for that is what it is, we need not be afraid of it) was necessary in order to produce a certain result.

Indeed, such smuggling-away is precluded by the fact that it is mediation we are involved in: since the focus is on the results, what we do is merely show that such and such a selection is indeed tied to such and such results. But the process as a whole allows these results, then, to be seen together, as an ensemble, which at the same time as it attributes the cause of this ensemble to various selections, does not allow us to get sufficiently worried about selection itself as their origin, or what necessitates their presence on this new level or not: those origins are now viewed in terms of the ensemble, of the new level, such that we can get past sophists who would merely insist that because the object had a cause, its origin is to that extent (and no more) contaminated, because we can see how a selection might have its reasons in the ultimate coherence it gives to its product. In short, what Jameson would make us see is that a certain homogenizing tendency of theory is itself combated precisely through mediation, and thus that overlapping itself is not just the flat relation of two forces in the guise of discourses, but can take place on different levels.