Fredric Jameson

Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism

Sean Homer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745616865, 9780745616858
• eBook ISBN: 9780745667232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

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...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Dialectics of Form
• 2 History: The Political Unconscious
• 3 The Politics of Desire
• 4 Postmodernism and Late Capitalism
• 5 The Spatial Logic of Late Capitalism
• 6 Marxism, Totality and the Politics of Difference
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index