by Douglas Kellner http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html
Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) is
generally considered to be one of the foremost contemporary Marxist literary
critics writing in English. He has published a wide range of works analyzing
literary and cultural texts and developing his own neo-Marxist theoretical
position. In addition, Jameson has produced a large number of texts criticizing
opposing theoretical positions. A prolific writer, he has assimilated an
astonishing number of theoretical discourses into his project and has
intervened in many contemporary debates while analyzing a diversity of cultural
texts, ranging from the novel to video, from architecture to postmodernism.
In his first published book
Jameson analyzed the literary theory and production of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Written as a doctoral dissertation at Yale University, Sartre: The Origins
of a Style (1961) was influenced by
Jameson's teacher Erich Auerbach and by the Stylistics associated with Leo
Spitzer, focusing on Sartre's style, narrative structures, values, and vision
of the world. The book is devoid of the Marxian categories and political
readings characteristic of Jameson's later work, but read in the context of the
stifling conformism and banal business society of the 1950s, Jameson's subject
matter (Sartre) and his intricate literary-theoretical writing style (already
the notorious Jamesonian sentences appear full-blown) can be seen as revealing
an attempt to create himself as a critical intellectual against the conformist
currents of the epoch. One also sees him already turning against the literary
establishment, against the dominant modes of literary criticism. All Jameson's
works constitute critical interventions against the hegemonic forms of literary
criticism and modes of thought regnant in the Anglo-American world.
After intense study of
Marxian literary theory in the 1960s, when he was influenced by the New Left
and antiwar movement, Jameson published Marxism and Form, which introduced a tradition of dialectical
neo-Marxist literary theory to the English-speaking world (1970). Since
articulating and critiquing the structuralist project in The Prison-House of
Language (1972), Jameson has
concentrated on developing his own literary and cultural theory in works such
as Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Socially Symbolic Act (1981), and Postmodernism,
or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). He has also published several volumes of essays--The
Ideologies of Theory (vol. 1,
Situations of Theory, and vol. 2, Syntax of History, both 1988). Two other
books, Signatures of the Visible
(1991) and The Geopolitical Aesthetic
(1992) collect studies of film and visual culture, while The Cultural Turn (1998) presents Selected Writings on the Postmodern,
1983-1998. . Studies of Theodor W.
Adorno, Late Marxism (1990) and Brecht
and Method (2000) continue his intensive work in Marxist theory and
aesthetics.
No early/late dichotomy in
Jameson's publications presents itself as a viable hermeneutical device for
interpreting his works as a whole, other than the obvious distinction between
his pre-Marxian text Sartre and
his later writings. Rather, what is striking are the remarkable continuities in
Jameson's works. One can pick up his articles or books from the early 1970s
through the late 1980s and discover strong similarities in their concerns,
style, and politics. Indeed, one gets the feeling in reading Jameson's
two-volume collection of essays The Ideologies of Theory that they could have all been written yesterday, or
in the recent past. Yet, as Jameson notes in the introduction to these essays,
there is a fundamental shift of emphasis in his works that he describes as
a shift from the vertical to the horizontal: from an interest in the multiple dimensions and levels of a text to the multiple interweavings of an only fitfully readable (or writable) narrative; from problems of interpretation to problems of historiography; from the attempt to talk about the sentence to the (equally impossible) attempt to talk about modes of production. (Ideologies 1:xxix)
In other words, Jameson's focus has shifted from a vertical emphasis on the many dimensions of a text--its ideological, psychoanalytic, formal, mythic-symbolical levels--which require a sophisticated and multivalent practice of reading, to a horizontal emphasis on the ways texts are inserted into historical sequences and on how history enters and helps constitute texts. Yet this shift in emphasis also points to continuities in Jameson's work, for from the late 1960s to the 1990s he has privileged the historical dimension of texts and political readings, bringing his critical practice into the slaughterhouse of history, moving critical discourse from the ivory tower of academia and the prison-house of language to the vicissitudes and contingencies of that field for which the term "history" serves as marker.
One therefore reads Jameson
as a (still open) totality, as a relatively unified theoretical project in
which the various texts provide parts of a whole. Jameson has
characteristically appropriated into his theory a wide range of positions, from
Structuralism to poststructuralism and from psychoanalysis to Postmodernism,
producing a highly eclectic and original brand of Marxian literary and cultural
theory. Marxism remains the master narrative of Jameson's corpus, a narrative
that utilizes a dual hermeneutic of ideology and utopia to criticize the
ideological components of cultural texts, while setting forth their utopian
dimension, and that helps produce criticism of existing society and visions of
a better world. Influenced by Marxist theorist Ernst Bloch, Jameson thus has
developed a hermeneutical and utopian version of Marxian cultural theory. (See
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Marxist Theory and Criticism.)
Jameson's first three major
books and most of his early articles involve the effort to develop a literary
criticism that cuts against the dominant formalist and conservative models of
New Criticism and the academic Anglo-American establishment. Marxism and
Form can be read as an introduction
to the new versions of Hegelian Marxism that began to appear in Europe and the
United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet as Jameson presents some
of the basic positions of Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Bloch,
Georg Lukács, and Sartre, one finds his own concepts and positions emerging
from the analyses. In particular, he makes clear his attraction both to
Lukácsian literary theory and to his version of Hegelian Marxism, an allegiance
that remains with Jameson in his later works.
Lukács's work on realism and
on the historical novel strongly influenced Jameson's way of seeing and
situating literature. While Jameson never accepted Lukács's polemics against
modernism, he appropriated key Lukácsian categories, such as reification, to
describe the fate of culture in contemporary capitalism. The Hegelian markers
of Jameson's work include the contextualizing of cultural texts in history, the
broad historical periodizing, and the use of Hegelian categories. Dialectical
criticism involves the attempt to synthesize competing positions and methods
into a more comprehensive theory, as Jameson does in The Prison-House of
Language, where he incorporates
elements of French structuralism and Semiotics, as well as Russian Formalism,
into his theory. In The Political Unconscious he draws on a wide range of theories, applying them
to concrete readings that relate texts to their historical and cultural
context, analyze the "political unconscious" of the texts, and depict
both ideological and utopian moments of texts.
Dialectical criticism for
Jameson also involves thinking that reflexively analyzes categories and
methods, while carrying out concrete analyses and inquiries. Categories
articulate historical content and thus must be read in terms of the historical
environment out of which they emerge. For Jameson, dialectical criticism thus
involves thinking that reflects on categories and procedures, while engaging in
specific concrete studies; relational and historical thinking, which
contextualizes the object of study in its historical environment; utopian
thinking, which compares the existing reality with possible alternatives and
finds utopian hope in literature, philosophy, and other cultural texts; and
totalizing, synthesizing thinking, which provides a systematic framework for
cultural studies and a theory of history within which dialectical criticism can
operate. All these aspects are operative throughout Jameson's work, the totalizing
element coming more prominently (and controversially) to the fore as his work
evolved.
During the 1970s Jameson
published a series of theoretical inquiries and many more diverse cultural
studies. One begins to encounter the characteristic range of interests and
depth of penetration in his studies of science fiction, film, magical
narratives, painting, and both realist and modernist literature. One also
encounters articles concerning Marxian cultural politics, imperialism,
Palestinian liberation, Marxian teaching methods, and the revitalization of the
Left. Many of the key essays have been collected in The Ideologies of Theory, which provide the laboratory for the theoretical
project worked out in The Political Unconscious and Fables of Aggression. These texts, along with his essays collected in Postmodernism, should be read together as inseparable parts of a
multilevel theory of the interconnections between the history of literary form,
modes of subjectivity, and stages of capitalism.
Jameson's theoretical
synthesis is presented most systematically in The Political Unconscious. The text contains an articulation of Jameson's
literary method, a systematic inventory of the history of literary forms, and a
hidden history of the forms and modes of subjectivity itself, as it traverses
through the field of culture and experience. Jameson boldly attempts to
establish Marxian literary criticism as the most all-inclusive and
comprehensive theoretical framework as he incorporates a disparate set of
competing approaches into his model. He provides an overview of the history of
the development of literary form and concludes with articulation of a
"double hermeneutic" of ideology and utopia--which critiques ideology
while preserving utopian moments--as the properly Marxian method of
interpretation.
Jameson employs a
Lukács-inspired historical narrative to tell how cultural texts contain a
"political unconscious," buried narratives and social experiences,
which require sophisticated literary hermeneutics in order to be deciphered.
One particular narrative of The Political Unconscious concerns, in Jameson's striking phrase, "the
construction of the bourgeois subject in emergent capitalism and its
schizophrenic disintegration in our own time" (9). Key stages in the odyssey
of the disintegrating bourgeois subjectivity are articulated in George Gissing,
Joseph Conrad, and Wyndham Lewis, a story that will find its culmination in
Jameson's account of postmodernism.
Indeed, Jameson's studies on
postmodernism are a logical consequence of his theoretical project. He
presented his first analysis of the defining features of postmodern culture in
an essay "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" (a 1982 lecture),
published in Hal Foster's collection The Anti-Aesthetic (1983). Eventually, he synthesized and elaborated his
emerging analysis in the article "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism," which more systematically interprets postmodernism in
terms of the Marxian theory of capitalism and as a new "cultural dominant"
(Postmodernism 1 ff., expanded from the essay by the same name).
Within his analysis, Jameson
situates postmodern culture in the framework of a theory of stages of
society--based on a neo-Marxian model of stages of capitalist development--and
argues that postmodernism is part of a new stage of capitalism. Every theory of
postmodernism, he claims, contains an implicit periodization of history and
"an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of
multinational capitalism today" (Postmodernism 3). Following Ernest
Mandel's periodization in his book Late Capitalism (1975), Jameson claims that
"there have been three fundamental moments in capitalism, each one marking
a dialectical expansion over the previous stage. These are market capitalism,
the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called
postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital"
(35). To these forms of society correspond the cultural forms realism,
modernism, and postmodernism.
The important essay "The
Existence of Italy" (in Signatures of the Visible) further develops this problematic, as does the
conclusion to Postmodernism and the studies in The Cultural Turn. Jameson emerges as a synthetic and eclectic Marxian
cultural theorist who attempts to preserve and develop the Marxian theory,
while analyzing the politics and utopian moments of a stunning diversity of
cultural texts. His work expands literary analysis to include popular culture,
architecture, theory, and other texts and thus can be seen as part of the
movement toward Cultural Studies as a replacement for canonical literary
studies.
Douglas Kellner
Notes and Bibliography
See also Marxist Theory and Criticism: 2. Structuralist
Marxism and Postmodernism.
Fredric Jameson, Brecht
and Method (2000), The Cultural Turn (1998), Fables of Aggression: Wyndham
Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979), The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and
Space in the World System (1992), The Ideologies of Theory: vol. 1, Situations
of Theory, vol. 2, Syntax of History (1988), Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the
Persistence of the Dialectic (1990), Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century
Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971), The Political Unconscious: Narrative
as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984), Postmodernism, or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), The Prison-House of Language: A
Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972), Sartre: The Origins
of a Style (1961), Signatures of the Visible (1990).
Steven Best and Douglas
Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (1991); Critical Exchange 14 (1983, special issue on Jameson); diacritics 12 (1982, special issue on Jameson); William C. Dowling,
Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to "The Political
Unconscious" (1984); Hal Foster,
ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983); Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson, Marxism,
Hermenuetics, Postmodernism; Douglas
Kellner, ed., Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique (1989); New Orleans Review 11 (1984, special issue on Jameson); Michael
Sprinker, Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of
Historical Materialism (1987).