Fredric Jameson

Adam Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781134608829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This book has been designed as a bridge to Jameson's work for undergraduates. This series is truly comprehensive, covering key ideas, intellectual, social and historical contexts and the impact of the thinker's ideas. These are usually the subjects of separate books Adam Roberts really knows how to write for a student audience Jameson is another very trendy postmodernist, but his work grows out of marxism, so he appeals to theory teachers of the old and new schools and appears on plenty of courses as a result The book has a large amount on `The Political Unconscious' - Jameson's most widely taught text

KEY IDEAS

1
MARXIST CONTEXTS

Jameson is first and foremost a Marxist thinker, and the bulk of his work has directly or indirectly engaged with the traditions of Marxist thinking in the twentieth century. Some of his books have functioned as both primers in and critiques of the major Marxist philosophers: Marxism and Form (1971) was, for many American readers, the first serious work of scholarship to introduce them to the important Marxist critics Theodor Adorno (1903–69), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), and Georg Lukacs (1885–1971). The Political Unconscious (1980) includes lengthy discussions of the Marxism of Louis Althusser (1918–90), amongst others. The more complex Late Marxism (1990) remains one of the most sophisticated and challenging analysis of Theodor Adorno’s writing we have. The best way to read both of these books is to have some sense of the terms of the Marxist debate, and that is what this chapter sets out to provide.

Before embarking on that project, though, it is worth touching on one key issue to which we will return. Karl Marx’s writings and theories have been debated and discussed by a great many people, and there are various sometimes conflicting interpretations of what he is saying. Jameson can be positioned within these currents of debate, as can any Marxist, but it is worth saying why it is worthwhile doing so: Jameson himself early in The Political Unconscious advises readers to ‘pass over at once’ the first chapter if they are uninterested in the internal debates of Marxist criticism (PU: 23). Yet without some understanding of the ways Marxist thought have developed since the days of Marx it is not possible to have a thorough sense of just how significant Jameson’s own interventions in those debates have been. It is also worthwhile admitting my own positions in these debates, because my own biases are liable to shape my account of Jameson’s position. The most significant contested area with which Jameson’s Marxism can be identified has to do with the issue of totality. To use the jargon, there are Marxists who are called ‘Hegelian’ after the nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770– 1831), and who believe that we need to understand the whole picture, the entire system as a totality; there are also Marxists sometimes called ‘Althusserian’ after the twentieth-century French thinker Louis Althusser (1918–90), who consider this sort of ‘totalising’ oppressive. If this seems a little obscure, then the terms are explained below in more detail, after a brief elaboration of certain key Marxist concepts. It is worth noting, however, that Jameson is usually seen as a Hegelian Marxist, an inheritor of the traditions of Lukacs and Adorno and more or less hostile to an Althusserian approach. My own position is more Althusserian, which partly explains why I detail Althusser’s contributions to the debate here; but I should also add that it seems to me that Jameson is a much more Althusserian thinker than he is usually seen as being. This discussion is crucial to an understanding of many of Jameson’s works, but it also has acute relevance to his entry into the debates on postmodernism in the 1980s. Many were surprised that a thinker so wedded to ideas of ‘totality’ should have been so deeply engaged with the phenomenon of postmodernism, which is (amongst many other things) characterised by a distrust of ‘the whole picture’ and a love of fragmentation and dislocation. This is something I deal with in more detail in Chapter 6; at the moment it is enough to acknowledge that Jameson’s Marxism is not so straightforward as a ‘traditional Hegelianism’. In what follows I have held over more detailed discussion of Jameson’s debts to Lukacs and Adorno to Chapter 3, where they can be keyed to more specific accounts of Marxism and Form and Late Marxism.

MARX

Karl Marx (1818–83) was a critic of political economy and a philosopher whose analyses of what he called ‘Capitalism’ have proved enormously influential. For most of the twentieth century, many millions of people have lived under regimes that claimed to be derived from his teachings, and it can be hard to separate out what Marx wrote and theorised from the baleful manner in which his ideas have been put into practice all around the world. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there has been a sense that ‘Marxism’ has now been discredited, which, if it were true, would make a thinker like Jameson nothing more than an out-of-date curio. But ‘Marxism’ is something very different from the reductive political programmes that have been derived from Marx’s writings; as he himself said in later life, to his collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–95) ‘all I know is that I am not a Marxist’.

The crucial point about Marx’s philosophy is that it is a materialist philosophy, which is to say rather than being concerned with philosophical abstracts like ‘truth’, ‘beauty’, ‘spirit’, and the like, it is always concerned with the actual world in which people live and, more specifically, has engaged in an attempt to make the world a better place in which to live. ‘The philosophers,’ Marx wrote in 1845, ‘have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx: 158). The world needs to be changed, according to Marx, because society is inequitable and oppressive, and millions live in misery and poverty when they need not do so. Philosophers, he argues, ought to work out why society works so badly to be able to suggest ways to make it work better, and in order to do that they need to determine the organising principle behind society. Marx was very clear on what he thought this organising principle was: economics. In the preface (for instance) to his monumental analysis of capitalism, called Capital, he declares ‘his ultimate aim. . .to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society’. In The German Ideology he describes his proposed alternative to capitalism in these terms: ‘Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of men. . .its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic.’ Clearly, there is a lot more to society and culture than just economics, but Marx believed that all the things we observe in human life, from poverty and wealth to religion, art, politics, and even sport, are all determined by the economic relations between people. ‘Determined’ means that these things derive from economic roots, so that if you analyse them in enough depth you will eventually discover that they are the expression of underlying economic relations. For example, a priest in a religion might claim to have nothing to do with economics or politics but instead to be focused on spiritual things; but Marx argued that this was just a kind of smokescreen. Religion, Marx thought, was designed to distract people from the miseries of their life, to stop the working classes rising up against the injustices of the world by indoctrinating them into obeying authority (with ‘God’ as the ultimate authority figure) and by promising a better life after death (so that they wouldn’t rock the boat in this life). In this respect Marx thought all religions were like a drug, stupefying the populace – ‘religion’ as he famously remarked, ‘is the opium of the people’ (Marx: 115). So, although religion doesn’t admit this on the surface, its real nature is determined by economics, or more precisely by the need to make capitalism work more smoothly.

Although Marx wrote little by way of literary or cultural criticism, we can see how the same principle might be applied to art. All art grows out of economic realities: artists are real people who live out economic relations with other people. Some art tries to disguise this basic fact, and creates an imaginary universe in which these economic factors – class, money, oppression, and so on – miraculously do not apply. Other art – for some Marxists, better art – makes people aware of the realities of society. The point is that, for Marx, the root of all human behaviour was in the way the different classes, and in particular the middle classes or bourgeoisie on the one hand and the working classes on the other, have competed for money, or, in economic terms, for the ‘means of production’, for the factories and resources that create wealth.

BASE, SUPERSTRUCTURE AND IDEOLOGY

The model Marx developed to express these relations in society was that of base and superstructure. The ‘base’ of all societies, according to Marx, is economic: baldly, it is all about money and who owns the means to make money. Out of this base grows or is constructed a ‘superstructure’ that is ‘determined’ by this base. In other words, the shape the ‘superstructure’ takes always depends upon the shape of the base. The ‘superstructure’ consists of things like the forms of law and political representation of the society: so, for example, an economic base that is all about private property and owning things is going to produce a superstructural set of laws that are primarily designed to protect property. But the superstructure also includes things like religion, ethics, art and culture, which is one reason why Marxist theory has been so influential in literary studies. These are things that Marx defined with a term crucial to an understanding of Jameson: ideology.

IDEOLOGY

For Marx, ‘ideology’ was ‘false consciousness’, a set of beliefs that obscured the truth of the economic basis of society and the violent oppression that capitalism necessarily entails. Various people believe various things: for instance that the fact that some people are rich and some people poor is ‘natural and inevitable’; or that black people are inferior. The purpose of these beliefs, according to Marx, is to obscure the truth. People who believe these things are not going to challenge or even recognise the inequalities of wealth in society, and so are not going to want to change them. For Marx, the task was clear: to disabuse people of their ‘false consciousnesses’ so that they could see the injustices of society for what they are – both appalling and curable. Subsequent Marxist thinkers have refined Marx’s original simple conception of ‘ideology’, and the term has become increasingly important in Marxist literary theory. Ideology becomes the system of ideas by which people structure their experience of living in the world; this is not something straightforwardly ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but rather a complex network of relations and attitudes. ‘Ideology’, then, includes both obviously ‘wrong’ systems of thought like racism, but also more complex aesthetic and cultural responses. The decision to drink Pepsi rather than Coke is ideological in a Marxist sense because it is shaped by some significant economic forces (both companies have a lot of money invested in trying to persuade you to do one or the other); but clearly the preference for Pepsi is not ‘wrong’ in the same way that racism is wrong. A contemporary critique of ideology like Jameson’s is less concerned with identifying right and wrong, and more interested in teasing out the ways culture and art affect and even construct individuals’ sense of themselves. In the words of Louis Althusser, ideology is seen more as ‘a “representation” of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (Althusser: 155). It is no longer possible simply to step outside ideology and see it as false; Jameson understands that all of the terms in which we understand our existence are ‘already soaked and saturated in ideology’ (GA: 2). Whether we think of ourselves as family members (daughters, sisters, and so on), as ‘citizens’, as ‘workers’ (which is to say, whether it is our job that most importantly defines who we are for ourselves), as ‘students’, as ‘music-lovers’ or ‘sportswomen’, or whatever – in all these cases, and in any others we could name, these categories (family, work, leisure) have already been defined by ideology in a complex relationship with the economic dynamics of late capitalism.

For French Marxist critic Louis Althusser, ‘ideology’ was in some senses a more important tool of the state than the more conventionally recognised ‘Repressive State Apparatuses’ like the army and the police. This applies in the sense that (for instance) convincing people to believe that they shouldn’t go on strike is much more effective than sending in armed police to break up a strike that has already happened. For Althusser, various ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ or ‘ISAs’ infiltrate our consciousness from the very beginning: he identifies the educational ISA (school and college, which teach us to think in a certain way), the family ISA (which means that merely being born into the standard family conditions our thought), the legal ISA, the political ISA, the trade union ISA, the communications ISA and the cultural ISA (Althusser: 151). If we wanted an example of how this works, we might want to look back at pre-democracy South Africa. South Africa used to be a very repressive state, where a small minority of white people kept the vast majority of black people in disenfranchised poverty. To keep this power, the South African state employed the ‘Repressive State Apparatuses’ that Althusser talks about: a brutal, well-armed police force, prisons, torture, and so on. But they also deployed a great many ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ that were designed to convince black South Africans that they had no right to be unhappy about the misery in which they lived because they were inferior, and simultaneously to justify white South Africans in the belief that they were superior. Educational ISAs taught a particular narrative of South African history, in which white settlers brought ‘civilisation’ to a barbarous black country; the legal ISAs for many years sharply distinguished between white and black human beings; political ISAs gave black South Africans spurious representation in parliaments without real power; communications ISAs like the news tended to concentrate on crime and unrest committed by blacks, creating a climate of opinion that black South Africans were dangerous and needed to be controlled; and cultural ISAs in the form of TV, cinema, novels and other art, valorised whiteness, buying into, for instance, a ‘white’ model of beauty, which is still lamentably widely prevalent in today’s Western cultures, that was opposed to a model of black ‘ugliness’. None of these things were as obviously violent as a South African police truncheon coming down on somebody’s head, but they contributed just as effectively to a culture of violent oppression. A Marxist critic would insist that any cultural text produced in these historical and political contexts needs to be read as ideological.

This attitude to ‘ideology’ and the ‘superstructure’ has profoundly shaped the Marxist traditions of literary and cultural criticism. As Jameson points out, as early as the 1930s Theodor Adorno was appropriating the whole of culture to an analysis of ‘ideology’ in this extended sense. Culture, says Jameson, is ‘to be thought of as something more and other than. . .the false consciousness, that we associate with the word ideology’, and is instead something that possesses an ‘uneasy existence, an uncertain status’:

Adorno’s treatment of these cultural phenomena – musical styles as well as philosophical systems, the hit parade along with the nineteenth-century novel – makes it clear that they are to be understood in the context of what Marxism calls the superstructure. . . . [Such criticism] presupposes a movement from the intrinsic to the extrinsic in its very structure, from the individual fact or work toward some larger socio-economic reality behind it.

(M&F: 4)

Whilst this does not mean that a reading of (say) Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or George Lucas’s Star Wars can be completely reduced to a reading of the ‘socio-economic’ conditions behind them, it does imply that a reading that missed out the ‘base’ would be deficient. It also suggests that critics – people who, like Jameson, spend their time ‘reading’ the texts and artefacts of culture like books and films – can perform a useful Marxist critique of society by analysing the way in which culture operates to establish and maintain ideological relations within society.

Some early Marxist critics worked with the ‘base-superstructure’ model in a way that more recent thinkers have often seen as rather unsophisticated – the label ‘vulgar Marxism’ is sometimes applied to thinkers who apply this more old-fashioned version of Marxist thought. For a vulgar Marxist the relationship between base and superstructure is very straightforward: an oppressive base produces oppressive culture, in which only a few individuals – people who deliberately struggle to produce art that resists the aesthetic consensus of the age – are able to transcend. More recent Marxism, however, has seen the relationship between culture and society in much more complex terms; and in particular it has turned away from imagining that there is a simple causal relationship between base and superstructure. A key figure in this newer development in Marxist theory is Louis Althusser. Althusser (1918–90) was a French philosopher and academic, whose own troubled life – he strangled his wife and ended his days in a lunatic asylum – has sometimes overshadowed the great significance of his thinking. Althusser started writing at a time, the early 1960s, when the excesses of Stalinist dictatorship in the nominally ‘communist’ Soviet Union had done much to discredit Marxism as a political philosophy; what he did was to re-read and revivify what Marx’s actual writings were rather than what other people had made of Marx.

ALTHUSSER AND TOTALITY

Althusser brought to his reading of Marx a mistrust of ‘totalities’, of ways of looking at the world in terms of its entirety or wholeness. In various articles and books of criticism he argued that Marxism needed to be purged of Hegelianism. This might seem a difficult project, because everybody agrees that Marx was profoundly influenced by the great German idealist philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Fri...