Fredric Jameson E-Book

Sean Homer

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 452

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This is the first comprehensive analysis of the work of Fredric Jameson, one of the most important cultural critics writing today. Homer provides a clear exposition and appraisal of Jameson's theories and an assessment of his contribution to contemporary cultural theory.

Leseprobe

FREDRIC JAMESON

Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism

Sean Homer

Polity Press

Copyright © Sean Homer 1998

The right of Sean Homer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1998 by Polity Pressin association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Sartre: From Situation to History

1 The Dialectics of Form

The Logic of Form

The Logic of Content

Metacommentary

2 History: The Political Unconscious

Marxism and Historicism

History as Political Unconscious

History as Narrative

History as Whose Narrative?

3 The Politics of Desire

Ideologies of Pleasure

Ideologies of Desire

The Production of Desire

Versions of a Libidinal Apparatus

The Dialectic of Ideology and Utopia

4 Postmodernism and Late Capitalism

The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

The Periodization of Late Capitalism

Video Art and Postmodern Textuality

Realism – Modernism – Postmodernism

The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism

5 The Spatial Logic of Late Capitalism

The Reassertion of Space in Social Theory

The Phenomenology of Postmodernism

The Social Production of Space

The Semiotics of Space

The Spatio-Temporal Dialectic of Modernity and Postmodernity

6 Marxism, Totality and the Politics of Difference

The Postmodern Critique of Totality

Marxism and Totality

Mediation and Reification

The 'Third World': Identity and Difference

Conclusion

Marxism and/or Postmodernism?

Mediation and Cultural Politics

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book is the product of many intellectual and personal encounters over the last ten years or so; unfortunately I can only acknowledge the most recent debts here. First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to Eugenie Georgaca and Nick Stevenson for the time they have taken away from their own work to read and comment on draft chapters. Their detailed criticisms have alerted me to many errors of judgement and have served as a constant reminder of the complexity and overdetermined nature of any theoretical endeavour. Their support and friendship have been invaluable. I would also like to thank Douglas Kellner for his very positive response to earlier drafts of some of this material; his enthusiasm for, and encouragement of, this project has been greatly appreciated. The account of the Marxist Literary Group was written with the assistance of members of the MLG e-mail list; I would especially like to thank Fredric Jameson, Walter Cohen, Paul Smith, Peter Fitting, John Beverley, Tom Moyland, Melani McAlister and all those who took the time to respond to my postings. I am grateful to Rebecca Harkin, Gill Motley and unknown readers at Polity Press for their help, encouragement and advice, and Ann Bone for her suggestions in editing this text. I am particularly grateful to my friends, colleagues and students at the Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield, for providing the intellectual environment in which this project could be realized. Finally, I should like to thank my children, Ella, Alice and James, for their love and friendship as well as their unwavering faith in my ability to finish this book. Needless to say, the ultimate responsibility for the arguments herein is all my own.

The author and publishers are grateful for permission to quote from the following works by Fredric Jameson: The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., © 1981 by Cornell University Press, used by permission of the American publisher, and Methuen, London, also by permission; Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., © 1991, Duke University Press, reprinted with permission, and Verso, London, 1991; Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, © 1971 by Princeton University Press, reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations have been used in references to works by Jameson:

SOS

Sartre: The Origins of a Style

(1961)

MF

Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature

(1971)

PH

The Prison House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism

(1972)

FA

Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist

(1979)

PU

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

(1981)

LM

Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic

(1990)

SV

Signatures of the Visible

(1990)

PLC

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

(1991)

GPA

The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System

(1992)

ST

The Seeds of Time

(1994)

Introduction

Fredric Jameson has been described as 'probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today'1 and he is widely acknowledged as the foremost proponent for that tradition of critical theory known as Western Marxism. Through his early critical surveys on the Frankfurt School and the Hegelian tradition of dialectical criticism in Marxism and Form (1971) to those on Russian formalism and structuralism in The Prison House of Language (1972), Jameson has perhaps done more than any other figure to contribute to the renaissance of Marxist criticism in the US since the early 1970s. These two early books represent key texts in the dissemination of continental theory and Western Marxism in the North American academy, where these traditions were at the time still relatively unknown. These books were also central to re-establishing Marxism and specifically Marxist cultural theory as one of the most challenging and radical currents of contemporary critical practice competing within the universities. With the publication of The Political Unconscious (1981) and his first sustained engagement with post-structuralism and Althusserian Marxism, Jameson emerged as a major theoretician in his own right. The Political Unconscious established him as one of that small group of international theorists whose work defines the parameters of contemporary theoretical debate. Jameson's reputation as one of the most significant theorists working today was further enhanced with the publication of his seminal essays on postmodernity in the early 1980s, culminating with the monumental study Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). His analysis of the spatio-temporal dynamics of postmodernity and its cultural logic has provided some of the most influential, as well as the most controversial, ideas produced on this theoretically and textually saturated subject. His work in the 1990s on globalization and geopolitical aesthetics has only served to confirm Jameson's status as a singularly unique and audacious critic as he attempts to map the cultural and political implications of capitalism's universalizing logic.

Within the United States Jameson is a central figure in contemporary theoretical and cultural debates, his work providing an essential point of reference for Marxist and non-Marxist critics alike. He has received relatively little critical attention within Europe, however; one does not find for example the sheer welter of Readers or introductory and expository texts that one does for Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault and most other major continental theorists.2 How can we account for this relative paucity of critical attention to Jameson, particularly in Europe? He is undoubtedly a difficult theorist to read and I have not tried to evade or gloss over these difficulties in this study, but is he really any more difficult than either Derrida or Lacan? Theory is now ubiquitous within the academy and most academics are at least familiar, if not altogether comfortable, with the presentation of complex and at times bizarre notions in difficult languages and opaque styles. And yet Jameson can still be seen as too difficult to include on many undergraduate courses, while students who profess not to understand the first chapter of The Political Unconscious one week can be found quoting freely from Of Grammatology or Écrits the next.

There would appear, therefore, to be a deeper logic at work here, one which involves, on the one hand, the historical specificity of Jameson's own discourse and, on the other, the political fate of Marxism itself. Jameson has consistently argued for the importance of retaining a conception of history and above all a sense of the historicity of our own political and theoretical practice. It is somewhat ironic, then, that his own work is frequently criticized for being too historically and culturally constrained. Jameson's view of Marxism and the emphasis he puts on particular philosophical dilemmas such as reification and the subject-object split, as well as his stress on the unifying characteristics of class and totality, are frequently perceived from a European perspective as specifically North American preoccupations. Thus his overriding concern with the universalization of capitalism and with thinking or representing the totality of the world economic system cannot be separated from his position as a theorist within the only country, the United States, that can at present aspire to global hegemony.

I shall return to these criticisms in relation to history and narrative, to postmodernism and spatial theory and finally in relation to the questions posed for Marxism by contemporary cultural politics. It is worth recalling at the outset, however, that – as Slavoj Žižek has also taken to reminding us – the rejection of totalizing theory in favour of concepts of heterogeneity and difference is itself a peculiarly Eurocentric ideology.3 The post-structuralist critique of Marxism, and specifically Hegelian Marxists such as Jameson, rests on the assertion that Marxism represents an overly totalizing theory and thus reduces difference and specificity to identity and homogeneity. There is clearly justification for this criticism in relation to the more reductive and deterministic forms of Marxism. However, capitalism is undoubtedly a universalizing system; it increasingly structures every aspect of our subjective experience, while at the same time, and most visibly since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, it can be seen to be embarking on a new wave of global expansion and standardization. The rejection of Marxism's totalizing narrative from the post-structuralist perspective of difference and heterogeneity may on reflection come to be seen as somewhat precipitate.

This is not to suggest, as will be evident from the various criticisms I advance throughout this study, that Jameson's work is unproblematic in this respect; but it is to accept that the systemic and structural characteristics of capitalism remain as fundamentally important today as its nomadic, heterogeneous, schizophrenic logic. Jameson's perspective on global capitalism is, to be sure, historically and culturally specific. However, it is the very uniqueness of his historical position, as a cultural theorist within the first country to approach global political and cultural hegemony, that makes it possible for him to write against the main current of much contemporary theory. Jameson's attempt to trace the sedimented representations of an unrepresentable social totality – to dialectically think both the structural and the fragmentary, the systematic and the reifying nature of capitalism – is indeed a scandalous and inconceivable endeavour from the perspective of continental Europe or the UK today. But therein lies its significance and challenge for contemporary political, cultural and social theory.

Among certain strands of contemporary post-Marxist social theory we are now informed that any theory having recourse to economic and class determinates is a priori taken as essentialist, reductive and ideologically bankrupt.4 Yet it seems somewhat perverse that, at the very moment when the political right, from the US and UK in the 1980s to Russia and Korea in the 1990s, openly acknowledges the primacy of the economic in social and political matters, large sections of the radical and 'cultural' left should abandon this traditional terrain of critique altogether. Contrary to some of the more inflated claims of the postmodernists concerning free-floating signifiers, new technological revolutions and notions of hyperreality, the economic would appear to be more and not less determinate of social relations today than at any time in our previous history. The lessons Jameson has to teach us, therefore, on certain fundamental questions of the relations between politics, culture and the economic may be more timely than we care to recognize.

Again this is not to suggest that the Marxist left can simply brush aside the critiques of postmodernism and post-Marxism and assert that its own analysis of history and society is axiomatically correct. Many of the criticisms of the orthodox left from the perspectives of gender, race, sexuality, ecology and other so-called 'marginal' political formations remain substantively valid. The question, however, is whether or not this rules out the Marxian critique and 'traditional' socialist politics per se. This study originated with the view that Jameson's work makes significant advances in formulating a viable Marxist critical practice that can at once accommodate and address many of the criticisms of orthodox Marxism and at the same time retain Marxism's key analytic categories. To put it another way, the present political imperative for a Marxist or the radical left is not to sunder the relations between culture and the economy as the post-Marxists would have us do, nor alternatively to blandly reassert the primacy of economic determination as orthodox Marxism does; rather the task is to develop a theory flexible enough to articulate the increasingly complex mediations between a global economic market and our discrete, fragmented, cultural experience. Jameson provocatively and controversially entertains the possibility that such a discourse is not only desirable but feasible.

The second aspect of the relative lack of critical attention Jameson has received in Europe is a consequence of the fate of Marxism itself. While Marxism and work within a Marxist problematic has undergone a significant revival in the US since the early 1970s, in continental Europe there has been an unremitting 'demarxification', to use Jameson's term, of political and cultural theory over the same period. Since mid-1970s, Marxism has been displaced by a series of alternative theoretical discourses: structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and postmodernism to name just a few. According to Perry Anderson this topographical shift of the predominate centres of Marxist intellectual activity from Germanic and Latin Europe to English-speaking countries cannot simply be explained away by reference to Marxism's 'intellectual defeat at the hands of a superior alternative'.5 Indeed, close scrutiny of the encounter between Marxism and continental philosophy reveals it to have been rather negligible and of insufficient depth 'to present any real challenge to a historical materialism confident of itself'.6

The declining influence of Marxism within European radical and critical theory cannot be accounted for intrinsically, therefore, in terms of the history of ideas, but must be seen in the context of politics and society at large. Eurocommunism, Maoism and Trotskyism all in their different ways suffered political defeat in the 1970s and proved unable to meet the aspirations of a generation radicalized through the student protests of 1968 and the emerging new social movements. These defeats raised questions of concrete political strategy which European Marxism failed to address adequately. Jameson's project, therefore, is instructive in the sense that it developed in an entirely different context, one in which Marxism was not the predominant conceptual or political paradigm. Indeed, Jameson's reflections on the possibilities for a Marxist cultural politics and the need for a sympathetic dialogue with non-Marxist theory may be more appropriate for a readership in the 1990s than in the 1970s, when a more self-confident and robust cultural left still dominated the theoretical scene.

Jameson, as I shall discuss below, has consistently argued for an open, pluralistic, Marxist political and cultural discourse. Marxism, he contends, is not so much a self-consistent, internally coherent, philosophical position, but rather it functions as a corrective to other forms of thought, as the de-idealization of bourgeois philosophy and theory. Thus Jameson can appropriate and incorporate the insights of alternative and non-Marxist theory while retaining Marxism's overarching historical narrative. Jameson effectively ascribes local or contingent validity to many of the postmodern and post-structuralist critiques of Marxism while in turn foregrounding the limitations and historical constraints of their positions. In short, Jameson has rigorously and persuasively sought to produce a sophisticated, non-reductionist, non-mechanistic form of Marxism able to meet the challenge of providing an understanding and critique of contemporary society and culture, of addressing the critique of post-Marxist theory and, finally, of reasserting Marxism's traditional emancipatory narrative. I shall be considering the extent to which Jameson achieves this goal.

I have suggested that Jameson is a difficult theorist to read; this is in part a question of style and his particular adherence to a dialectical tradition of thought that remains alien to many students brought up on the playful, fragmentary and aphoristic styles of postmodern textuality. Jameson is an unashamedly systematic thinker who constantly strives to enact or encapsulate the movement of the dialectic within his own texts. Over the last thirty years he has produced a body of work that combines a formidable degree of philosophical breadth, political integrity and intellectual rigour. His great philosophical-literary models remain Sartre, Lukács and Adorno, but he is equally at home engaging with such figures as Lacan, Derrida and Baudrillard. Moreover, he presents an astonishing range of cultural analyses from 'high' literature to science fiction, from popular music, film and video to painting, sculpture and architecture. Jameson will slip from a discussion of Heidegger to pop art and Hollywood film with an ease that is at once breathtaking and unsettling. The conjuncture of radically divergent, and even antagonistic, theorists and ideas within his work provocatively challenges many of the complacent assumptions and pre-set ideas concerning the nature of Marxism and the discrediting of its sociocultural critique today. Jameson's oeuvre presents one of the most sustained and unequivocal arguments for Marxism's continuing relevance to the field of cultural politics today. His achievement is once again to remind us that the much heralded 'death of Marxism' is somewhat premature.

The aim of this book is threefold. First, it is to provide, as comprehensively as possible, an introduction to Jameson's work as critic and theorist. Secondly, it is to situate Jameson's theoretical and political project in relation to the philosophical traditions from which his work emerges and within which he continues to operate and develop. I work through such influential figures as Sartre, Hegel, Adorno, Lukács, Althusser, Lacan, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Mandel and Lefebvre, focusing on Jameson's specific interest in their work and how he incorporates such a diverse body of theorists into his own Hegelian-Marxist framework. At the same time I have sought to situate Jameson's own texts historically. Finally, this book seeks to advance a critique of Jameson's work. I focus on six key areas: issues of form; the representation of history; the politics of pleasure and desire; postmodernism as a cultural logic of late capitalism; globalization and the spatial theory of postmodernity; and finally his conception of the social totality. In each of these areas I identify the problematic, analyse Jameson's own intervention and then draw out some of the theoretical and political implications of his dialectical and incorporative procedure.

Jameson, correctly I believe, insists on the continuing relevance of 'traditional' Marxist concepts of history, class struggle, commodity fetishism, reification, utopianism or transformative politics and the totalizing nature of late capitalism. Marxism has not been invalidated through post-structuralist and deconstructive critiques, nor has postmodernism discredited its hist-orical and emancipatory narrative. On the other hand, the radically changed political and theoretical climate has meant that Marxism has had to rethink and reconceive many of its foundational tenets. Jameson's work has been central to this project and the force of many of my criticisms derives from his attempt to subsume and reconcile often contradictory theoretical positions within a Hegelian-Marxist framework. Jameson's work, however, remains exemplary in its integrity and commitment to formulate a radical, pluralistic and non-dogmatic Marxist cultural practice and politics appropriate to advanced capitalism in the closing years of the twentieth century.

Sartre: From Situation to History

Jameson's formative political experience was marked by two interrelated events, the aftermath of McCarthyism and the emergence of the New Left. The key figure in his early political and philosophical development was the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Jameson's first published work, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961), originated as his doctoral thesis in the late 1950s, a period when New Criticism was still hegemonic in the United States.7 One of the principal contenders against this conservative hegemony was the phenomenologically informed criticism of George Poulet and J. Hillis Miller, while the first works of what we now call 'theory', specifically the early Roland Barthes and some of Adorno's work, were only slowly becoming known and had as yet to make a strong intellectual impact. Jameson's own existential phenomenological study, therefore, was part of a wider attempt within the academy to radically break with the dominant critical paradigm of a conservative New Criticism. The study of Sartre, though, rather than the more pure phenomenology of Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, is significant in one respect. As Frank Lentricchia has observed, the impact of Sartre on literary criticism in the US was at the time rather small; he was not an obvious choice for a phenomenologically informed literary criticism.8 Furthermore, Sartre was by the late 1950s emerging as the most radical of the existential phenomenologists. The choice of Sartre, therefore, would suggest a more overtly political intent than an initial reading of The Origins of a Style might convey.

The figure of Sartre has had an enduring influence on both Jameson's theoretical and political development. The chapter on Sartre and history in Marxism and Form is by far the most extended analysis of any single theorist in the book, while the existential analysis of Conrad's Lord Jim in The Political Unconscious or Jameson's defence of the concept of totalization in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism attest to Sartre's continuing influence. Moreover, Sartre's conceptual framework can be seen to inform a number of Jameson's own theoretical formulations. Philip Wood, for example, has drawn attention to the striking similarity between Jameson's conception of three concentric horizons of interpretation in The Political Unconscious and Sartre's 'hierarchy of significations'.9 Jameson's insistence on history and political interpretation as 'the absolute horizon of all reading and interpretation' also has more than a mere echo of the Sartre of Search for a Method.10 In addition, Jameson's continuing commitment to an analysis of lived experience and the central role he accords to consciousness in such notions as 'cognitive mapping' betray the persistence of the central themes of classical existentialism in his thinking.

There is a deeper sense, however, in which Sartrean theory can be said to be embedded in Jameson's texts and political project, that is, through the problematic he first encountered in his engagement with existentialism. As Jameson himself has described it, 'the "conversion" to "Sartreanism" was itself always rather different from more conventional modernist conversions of either the aesthetic or the philosophical type'.11 Unlike Kantianism, Heideggerianism or even, more recently, the deconstruction of Derrida, a commitment to Sartreanism was 'more a matter of a general problematic than of agreement with Sartre's own positions'.12 In a personal account of his own existential moment and its relationship to his later understanding of Marxism, Jameson has described Sartre as a role model of the politically engaged intellectual: 'for a whole generation of French intellectuals, but also for other Europeans, most notably the younger British left, as well as for Americans like myself, Sartre represented the model of the political intellectual, one of the few role models we had, but a sufficient one.'13

Sartre was, as Douglas Kellner has pointed out, Jameson's 'original choice', that is, the initial gesture or unjustifiable decision which, in existential terms, inaugurates one's 'project'. Kellner goes on to observe that in the 1950s Sartre was received in the United States as an exemplary figure of the 'individualist radical intellectual' and a 'rebel against convention of all sorts'.14 In adopting Sartre as a role model, Jameson was signalling his own radical, non-conformist aspirations, while at the same time adopting a role model who, to the end of his life, remained staunchly individualistic. Sartre perhaps more than any other figure on the left came to symbolize the figure of the intellectuel engagé, the committed intellectual who sought to intervene politically but from outside any mass political organization or traditional party structure. Sartre's search for a viable form of Marxism, both politically and theoretically relevant to contemporary France and divorced from the dogmatism of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, resonates strongly with Jameson's view of Marxism elucidated in Marxism and Form. For Jameson, Marxism is not a rigid system one applies to a given state of affairs but a situated discourse, an open and flexible body of thought that develops according to the specific historical circumstances. It is perfectly consistent, writes Jameson, 'with the spirit of Marxism – with the principle that thought reflects its concrete social situation – that there should exist several different Marxisms in the world today, each answering the specific needs and problems of its own socio-economic system' (MF, xviii). As with Sartre, therefore, the task was to develop a viable form of Marxism appropriate to the needs of contemporary North American society and the 'unique questions raised by monopoly capitalism in the West' (p. xviii).

As its title suggests, the Sartre book is concerned with the development of a particular writer's style. Even in this early work, though, Jameson's conception of style is neither individualistic nor purely aesthetic but is conceived as a historical phenomenon. Style, according to Jameson, is not simply a question of personal expression or a purely literary effect but, in its modern sense, a given style can be seen to take on a significance above and beyond the meaning of the text or the individual sentence itself. As readers, our sense of a particular unique style is cumulative, the gradual assemblage of fragments, words, phrases, sentences and books which come together to give the impression of a unique style as a coherent entity, but one which is nowhere present in its full effects. This particular attention to style is itself a modern phenomenon, where we have come to expect a radical disjuncture between new styles of writing and older forms of literature. On the other hand, there have been moments when what Jameson calls, in Sartre: The Origins of a Style, 'the inherited form and the style that fills it in spite of itself with more modern content' coexist in a work. Such a moment, writes Jameson, 'reflects not so much a weakness of the writer's talent but a new problematic moment in his situation, a moment of crisis in the history of the development of writing itself (SOS, vii). Sartre's literary achievement was to articulate just such a moment.

Jameson's close reading of Sartre's style has all that we have now come to expect from a Jamesonian analysis: the attention to form as well as content, the subtle philosophical understanding and Jameson's own elegant prose. What is missing from the analysis and the study as a whole is any attempt to embed the analysis of texts in their own historical moment. Paradoxically for a philosophy grounded on the situatedness of consciousness and action, Jameson's analysis is surprisingly ahistorical. The failure to historically account for the conditions of possibility of this crisis of narratability is not simply a methodological failing on Jameson's part, it rather demarcates one of the limitations of existentialism itself. Retrospectively we can now see that individual biography was not only Sartre's preferred form but also the ultimate limit of the Sartrean system itself,15 and it is this limit that defines the horizon of Jameson's own study with its pervasive meditation on the relationship between consciousness and things. The study never makes the next move to situate these philosophical concerns in their social and historical context. As Jameson observes, most of Sartre's work stops just at the point where 'the problem of the individual life can no longer be isolated from the society in which it is to be lived, and is suddenly subordinated to history and social change' (SOS, 7). The theoretical limit Jameson first encountered in the work of Sartre of how to begin to articulate the complex relationship, or mediations, between individual experience, history and social change delineates the problematic of much of Jameson's subsequent work – in other words, how can we begin to theorize isolated cultural artefacts in relation to wider historical forces and individual agency in an increasingly globalized system.

There is more than a sense of circularity to Origins of a Style, as Jameson himself acknowledges; Sartrean existentialism and phenomenology provided both the object of the study and its methodology. The categories Jameson employs in his analysis are the self-same categories through which Sartre elaborated his own philosophy: the 'instant', the 'act', the 'event', the Took', the 'situation', etc. Thus Jameson reads Sartre's plays as a formal embodiment of Sartre's founding opposition between subject and object. Paradoxically, on the one hand Jameson is placed in the position of vigorously defending the distinction between the philosophical and the literary and dramatic texts, insisting that Sartre's plays can only be thought of as 'idea-plays' if we accept that 'the "ideas" of this philosopher's play[s] are wholly different in quality from the thoughts developed in the philosophical works' (SOS, 3). On the other hand, Jameson seemingly unproblematically shifts register from the fictional texts to the philosophical works in order to validate his interpretation, and with very little attention to the distinction between the quality of the ideas involved. Indeed, when this is coupled with the overall valorization of language to the detriment of other formal considerations,16 one is left with the strong impression that Adorno's criticism of Sartre's work as merely 'thesis plays' and 'philosophical novels' is strongly founded.17 Similarly, we find that Jameson's analysis of temporality in Le Sursis (The Reprieve) will be 'familiar to readers of Sartre's philosophic works', where it can be found 'unashamed and unconcealed' (SOS, 61). There is a remarkable self-referentiality to this study as Jameson moves between Sartre's literary production and the philosophical works but never moves beyond Sartre's corpus. Kellner interprets the lack of citations and references to other critics in Jameson's text as a manifestation of the phenomenological desire for the thing-in-itself, eschewing other methodological approaches and approaching the object of study without preconceptions.18 The methodological double-bind presented by The Origins of a Style is also instructive in another sense. First, as I have suggested, it points to the limitations of existentialism itself; secondly, it can be seen to inscribe the historical determinates, or conditions of possibility, for Jameson's own text.

Distanced from their own national traditions and resources, American intellectuals looked to Western Europe for role models, and for Jameson this meant initially the figure of Jean-Paul Sartre and later the Frankfurt School. In this respect Jameson's path to Marxism was part of a generational shift, a generation 'whose members moved to the most radical alternatives within contemporary politics and theory'.19 On the one hand, the turn to Western Europe signalled the 'isolation of the radical intelligentsia in the McCarthyist era and its aftermath which lacked a tradition at hand which could be brought to bear on its cultural concerns, or which could politically mobilize it or offer models of radical self-identification',20 and on the other, it signified a search for new theoretical resources appropriate to the given historical moment. For Jameson, then, the path through Sartre and the New Left to Marxism was not simply a case of following the trajectory of Sartre's own political thought. On the contrary, Jameson's 'conversion' to Marxism was more a consequence of his encounter with a particular problematic at the limits of existential phenomenology, a problematic of human agency and social change, of the isolated cultural artefact and its place in history. This problematic could be successfully articulated and resolved only if Sartre's own discourse could be reinserted into history itself, and for this Jameson required a more fully dialectical view of history and historical agency. Reading Jameson contextually, writes Kellner, one 'encounters a young literary critic radicalized by study in Europe during the 1950s and by the political movements of the 1960s, turning to Marxism as the solution to his own theoretical and political dilemmas'.21 In the following chapter I will examine Jameson's attempt to resolve some of these dilemmas through a systematic reading of some of the major figures of the Western Marxist tradition. I situate this work in relation to the academy and the formation of the Marxist Literary Group, and finally I delineate Jameson's initial formulation of dialectical method, that is to say, 'metacommentary'.

1

The Dialectics of Form

Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s Jameson engaged in a series of readings of the major figures of Western Marxism, studies which were subsequently collected together as the early chapters of Marxism and Form.1 This work has been described as the Ur-text for the renaissance of Marxist criticism in the US academy throughout the 1970s; it also maps some of the central concerns of Jameson's theoretical project. The present chapter, therefore, will be largely expository as I introduce the terrain of Hegelian Marxism and, at the same time, seek to clarify and define certain key Jamesonian concepts which find their first formulation in Marxism and Form. It is only with a clear understanding of Jameson's early conception of dialectical method that we will be able to mark the extent to which his ideas have evolved and changed over the years to confront the challenge to Marxism posed by post-structuralism and postmodernism. Marxism and Form is itself in large measure an expository text and there is a tension present, as Terry Eagleton has pointed out, between textual exegesis and critique.2 Jameson's method of 'immanent critique', of the sympathetic working through of an opponent's position has frequently led to a confusion between survey and critique and an identification of Jameson with those very positions he is explicating. In Jamesonian terms, such a confusion between the critic and the object of study will itself only be overcome by more fully historical and dialectical thinking. For reasons of space I will not address this dilemma here, restricting myself, especially in the second and third sections of the chapter, to an exposition of Jameson's ideas and reserving my own critique of his work for the chapters that follow.

I examine Marxism and Form under three general rubrics: the logic of form, the logic of content, and metacommentary. The logic of form considers Jameson's conception of form as in-itself political and ideological. I outline Jameson's critique of the practices of empiricism and logical positivism and, at greater length, his alternative tradition of Hegelian dialectical method; finally I provide an analysis of Jameson's own style and practice of dialectical writing. The logic of content will address what Jameson considers to be a fundamental dialectical law of form, that is to say, a work's ultimate determination by its content. The determination of Jameson's own text, therefore, will involve the historicization of Jameson's own practice and a further examination of the situation of Marxist cultural discourse within the US academy. Finally, I sketch Jameson's initial formulation of dialectical method in his seminal essay 'Metacommentary'.

The Logic of Form

I suggested in the introduction that Marxism is not so much a coherent set of ideas or positions in its own right as a critical or corrective discourse. Marxism operates, according to Jameson, as the rectification of other modes of thought. We cannot, therefore, fully understand a given set of ideas or a text until 'we understand that which it is directed against, that which it is designed to correct' (MF, 365–6). This applies as much to Jameson's own work as to the work for which he provides an introduction and critique. In the preface to Marxism and Form, Jameson identifies his conceptual opponents as that amalgam of 'political liberalism, empiricism, and logical positivism which we know as Anglo-American philosophy' and suggests that it is the critique of this tradition 'which makes up the tendentious part of my book, which gives it its political and philosophical cutting edge' (p. x). Marxism and Form, however, undertakes no such critique in terms of its content; nowhere in this text does Jameson explicitly and systematically contest the ideas and presuppositions of empiricism or positivism. Indeed, Jameson does not even go so far as to identify any particular currents or tendencies of Anglo-American philosophy which he is against. So in what sense can a critique of empiricism and positivism be said to provide the political and philosophical cutting edge of Marxism and Form?

It is in the 'form' of the text that Jameson's critique operates, that is to say, in its particular style of writing and the thought processes that that style entails, or more precisely, that that particular style embodies and enacts. Style, for Jameson, is not merely a matter of adornment, the expression of an individual taste or personal preference, but rather an 'enactment': style is performative. It is in the very form of Jameson's text, in the shape of his individual sentences, through his syntax and punctuation, that he conducts his polemics against Anglo-American philosophy. For Jameson, a particular style or form is inherently ideological and what he rejects in Anglo-American philosophy is its tendency to separate out distinct spheres of social life, through its emphasis on the individual fact or object, while refusing to make connections at the level of the social totality. He writes of Anglo-American empiricism:

The method of such thinking, in its various forms and guises, consists in separating reality into airtight compartments, carefully distinguishing the political from the economic, the legal from the political, the sociological from the historical, so that the full implications of any given problem can never come into view; and in limiting all statements to the discrete and the immediately verifiable, in order to rule out any speculative and totalizing thought which might lead to a vision of social life as a whole. (MF, 367–8)

In place of the anti-speculative and individuating bias Jameson identifies with Anglo-American philosophy, Marxism and Form adumbrates an alternative mode of thought, that of dialectical thinking. Speculative, or dialectical, thought directly challenges those isolating and inhibiting tendencies of empiricism and positivism by foregrounding the essential interrelatedness of events and phenomena. Unlike traditional Anglo-American philosophy, dialectical thought moves from the whole to the part and back to the whole again. Dialectical thought, therefore, forces its practitioner not only to reflect on its own object of study, but also on its own situation and status, and consequently, Jameson argues, to draw unavoidable conclusions on the political level.

The very density and self-consciousness of Jameson's prose eschews the quick and superficial reading and makes serious demands on its readers. In his 1982 Diacritics interview Jameson responded to a question on the difficulty of his style with the observation: 'Why should there be any reason to feel that these problems [of culture and aesthetics] are less complex than those of bio-chemistry?'3 The difficulty of dialectical thought and writing is proportionate to the difficulty of the ideas with which it is dealing; 'real' thought, suggests Jameson, whether it be about bio-chemistry or literature, is difficult and an insistence on the virtues of 'clarity' does not necessarily correlate with greater insight and understanding. The difficulty that many readers encounter with dialectical prose is not so much a stylistic one but rather 'a measure of the unfamiliarity, in our society, of attempts to think the total system as a whole'.4 This is a concept that, as we shall see throughout this study, Jameson's own work will relentlessly pursue, and perhaps more than any other the single concept that defines Jameson's corpus as a distinctive body of work in relation to contemporary theory. If his style is difficult, that difficulty is proportionate to the complexity of the problematic with which he is wrestling, that is, the position and function of culture within the now globalized system of market capitalism. In emphasizing the difficulty of dialectical prose, however, we should not overlook its pleasure, both the pleasure in reading Jameson's texts and, as I shall point out below, the very obvious pleasure Jameson takes in writing them. Before directly considering Jameson's own dialectical style I shall briefly reflect on the process of dialectical thought itself.

According to Jameson, the basic story the dialectic has to tell us is that of the dialectical reversal, 'that paradoxical turning around of a phenomenon into its opposite of which the transformation of quantity into quality is only one of the better known manifestations' (MF, 309). Every object can be said to carry within itself that which it is not, that is, it carries within itself its own opposite as an implicit comparison or differential perception which, even if unacknowledged, is always made. In other words, one identifies an object by differentiating it from what it is not, what is known in classical Hegelian dialectics as the 'identity of identity and non-identity'. Jameson sees this paradoxical reversal and transformation as essentially a diachronic process, in the sense that, to gain a full understanding of any given reversal, or set of reversals, we must consistently reground, or reimmerse, the dialectic in history itself. Dialectical thought, therefore, is thought to the second power: it is thought at once about its object and about its own operation and status as thought; it seeks to be both conscious and self-conscious simultaneously. It is that movement that Hegel described as Aufhebung or 'sublation', which at once cancels and preserves its object by lifting it to a higher level of analysis. The classical dialectic operates through this double movement or double negation: first, as we have already seen, by passing over into its opposite, and then by negating this first movement, transcending it and incorporating both elements at a higher level of abstraction, whereby one can see not only what differentiates objects but also what unites them.

Dialectical thinking, then, is systematic thought, thought that not only reflects upon its object of study but also upon its own operations and conditions of possibility; dialectical thought is nothing less than the practice of the dialectical method itself, the perpetual generation and dissolution of its own categories. The dialectical method is inherently relational and comparative. The terms of the dialectic do not exist a priori, as pre-existing categories, but rather emerge from the dialectic's object or content. The dialectical method is not simply a formula or mechanistic operation that we can apply to resolve any given conceptual or textual contradiction; it is intrinsic to the object itself. Thus, argues Jameson, as a method of analysis and critique the dialectic is inseparable from the gradual working through of its own inner logic, through 'a sympathetic internal experience of the gradual construction of a system according to its inner necessity' (MF, xi). The system itself emerges from its object, and thus the whole system correspondingly remains implicit in any given object or indeed at any given moment of the process. Dialectical thought does not simply dismiss other modes of understanding but works through them, revealing them to be inadequate and incomplete, before moving on to a greater level of abstraction. According to Jameson, it is this very abstractness of the dialectical style that forces us to move beyond the individual and isolated phenomenon and apprehend it as part of a network of relations; abstract terminology, he writes, 'clings to its object as a sign of the latter's incompleteness in itself, of its need to be replaced in the context of the totality' (MF, xiii).

Until a given object is situated in relation to the totality itself, it remains partial, fragmentary and incomplete. Herein lies the real difficulty of dialectical thinking and particularly of a dialectical style of writing, 'its holistic totalizing character' (MF, 306). Dialectical thought is totalizing thought, exhibiting an inherent 'preference for the concrete totality over the separate abstract parts' (MF, 45); it consistently makes connections, drawing together the most disparate phenomena and historical moments. This tendency to draw everything together accounts for some of the complexity and density of dialectical prose as well as its breadth, as it ranges over what we had always accepted as distinct and specialized areas of study, revealing hitherto unnoticed connections. At its best this creates what Jameson calls a 'dialectical shock' as the reader is forced into a new perception through the yoking together of what we had previously perceived as utterly distinct phenomena. Such a shock, suggests Jameson, is 'constitutive of and inseparable from dialectical thinking', signalling 'an abrupt shift to a higher level of consciousness, to a larger context of being' (MF, 375); its presence will be the mark of any genuine Marxist criticism.

Dialectical thought, as I have indicated above, is nothing less than the practice of the dialectical method itself, in other words, the elaboration of dialectical sentences. For Jameson, there is an ultimate obligation to 'come to terms with the shape of the individual sentences themselves, to give an account of the origin and formation' (MF, xii) if any concrete description of a literary or philosophical phenomenon is to be complete. Each sentence stands as a figure for the process as a whole, but at the same time we can only grasp the full import of an individual sentence when we situate it in relation to that more elusive and problematic concept of 'totality'. A concrete description of Jameson's own oeuvre, therefore, will sooner or later be obliged to give an account of what Terry Eagleton has called Jameson's 'magisterial, busily metaphorical' sentences.5 This most palpable feature of Jameson's texts, their particularly dense and rhetorical style, has frequently been passed over 'in polite silence or with a shyly admiring phrase'.6 Alternatively, Jameson's style has been interpreted as a sign of a more fundamental and inherent weakness in his work and thought. I will return to this latter criticism below; first, I consider Jameson's own particular style, taking as my initial unit of analysis the sentence and then progressively considering the larger units of composition – the example, the essay and the book.

If we take a sentence from Jameson's analysis of Adorno, we can see how the dialectical system begins to unravel itself from a given point of departure. Jameson describes a passage from Adorno's Philosophie der neuen Musik as an object lesson in dialectical thinking and a poetic object in its own right, a status Jameson's own prose can be said to emulate:

What happens is … that for a fleeting instant we catch a glimpse of a unified world, of a universe in which discontinuous realities are nonetheless somehow implicated with each other and intertwined, no matter how remote they may at first have seemed; in which the reign of chance briefly refocuses into a network of cross-relationships wherever the eye can reach, contingency temporarily transmuted into necessity. (MF, 8)

In a single sentence Jameson momentarily holds together the 'fleeting instant' and the 'unified world', a 'discontinuous', fragmented reality and an intrinsically interrelated universe; each subordinate clause moves from the particular to the universal, from the disparate to the unified, from the part to the whole. Moreover, the sentence does not simply enumerate these moments as a set of static binary oppositions, but grasps them as moments in flux, in process. The sentence rhetorically carries us forward through a series of expanding horizons: an instance, a world, a universe, and simultaneously higher levels of abstraction: a 'fleeting instant', 'discontinuous realities', 'the reign of chance'. There is what Clint Burnham describes, following Sartre, as a certain seriality and inflation to Jameson's discourse, as he takes up examples from other texts and incorporates them into his own, at the same time transforming and amplifying the example, as though through the seriality of discrete images the totality as a whole emerges.7

As so often with a Jamesonian sentence, it pivots on the semi-colon, veering round upon itself. In its first movement, the dialectic of the sentence passes over into its opposite as the ephemeral and contingent comes face to face with the brute fact of necessity. The semicolon signifies that a shift of the dialectical gears has taken place, at once differentiating and binding together the two distinct but dependent halves of the sentence; a connection has been made but these remain determinate parts. Dialectical thought is more than simply a unity of opposites, however, it is thought to the second power, that is to say, it is both reflexive and self-reflexive simultaneously. Thus Jameson's sentence can be seen to provide us with an analysis of Adorno's dialectical style at the same time as it reflects back upon the totalizing nature of dialectical thought. The totality, of which the sentence can be no more than a fragment, is unrepresentable in itself; it can only be articulated in the content of the work as an empty and abstract category, and therefore it can only be realized in the form, in the very structure of the sentence. The transitory character of Jameson's lexis: 'fleeting', 'briefly', 'glimpsed' and 'implicated' foregrounds the very elusiveness of the concept, of our inability to visualize or conceive such a realm except in the most provisional and transitory manner, in the connectedness of it all. The sentence does not insist or belabour the necessity of totalizing thought, or the dialectical unity of part to whole, but operates as a gestalt in which foreground and background oscillate continually. The visual and spatial metaphor refocuses our perception as the eye moves from the isolated fragment to the farthest horizon. Just as Adorno's text for Jameson temporarily transmutes contingency into necessity, his own text transmutes the immediacy of textual analysis into a glimpse of the totality and its own object lesson in dialectical thinking.

Jameson insists on the dialectical imperative towards the concrete, although, contrary to empiricism or positivism, within Hegelian dialectics it is the totality that marks the concrete rather than isolated, individual phenomena. As I shall argue in later chapters, the fundamental misunderstanding of the 'concept of totality' in much post-structuralist and postmodernist thought derives from conflating the concept with the phenomenon itself. The concept of totality is taken to designate a specific entity which is empirically verifiable and ultimately representable. For Jameson, on the other hand, the concept of totality functions as a methodological standard, an unrepresentable horizon which marks the limits of our thought rather than a possibility to be realized. The concept of totality, therefore, is always already inscribed within our discourse as a limit. I have already alluded to one form that this limit takes in the discussion of abstract terminology above; alternatively, this particular limitation of discourse can be traced through the utilization of examples. The example, or rather the necessity of using examples, is a sign of thought imperfectly realized. Examples are 'always the mark of abstraction or distance from the thought process: they are additive and analytical, whereas in genuine dialectical thinking the whole process would be implicit in any given object' (MF, 338). With examples, however, the thought process is rent asunder, on the one hand providing us with a presentation of method, and on the other with a series of discrete objects as examples. It is the very essence of dialectical thinking to overcome this separation between form and content, between the thought process itself and its object of study.

As with the previous analysis of Jameson's sentence, however, we cannot simply wish away this separation by fiat. Jameson's discourse is no less caught up within the reifying logic of capital than any other, and thus the use of examples is unavoidable. To be fully dialectical, therefore, we must attempt to think not only about the specific problem to which we seek a solution but, at the same time, about the situation in which the recourse to examples is unavoidable. The use of an example may provide a shorthand solution to a given problem, as an answer to a specific question, but as a solution it in turn represents a problem in its own right, the necessity of using examples in the first place. At the very time when he is forced to use an example, therefore, Jameson foregrounds the limits of this necessity. Jameson's analysis of the example, by example, forces us to consider the formal procedures at work rather than addressing a specific question. The necessity of utilizing examples itself becomes exemplary of dialectical self-consciousness, of that dialectical imperative to think the limits of one's own position back into the situation under analysis. Jameson's use of the example, as an example of the example, is just one instance of the self-evident relish of his style I alluded to above; one could also cite the long footnote on the formal status of footnotes. Even at his most strenuously dialectical there is always a self-conscious pleasure in Jameson's writing.

I have suggested that, for Jameson, the presence of the dialectical shock is the mark of a genuine Marxist criticism. That is to say, the shock one is forced to acknowledge when what were previously perceived to be utterly distinct phenomena are yoked together through the dialectic. I would now like to extend this notion of the dialectical shock to larger units of composition, and specifically in conjunction with Adorno's conception of the scandalous and transgressive potential of the essay. If we exclude Sartre: The Origins of a Style, all of Jameson's major published works – Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Signatures of the Visible, The Geopolitical Aesthetic and The Seeds of Time – are volumes of collected essays, while the shorter works, The Prison House of Language and Fables of Aggression, are essentially extended essays. In The Jamesonian Unconscious