Jameson, Althusser, Marx

An Introduction to 'The Political Unconscious'

William Dowling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000156065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Retorica

Frederic Jameson is widely regarded as one of the most original and influential Marxist critics of the last decades. His most controversial work, The Political Unconscious, had an enormous impact on literary criticism and cultural studies. In Jameson, Althusser, Marx, first published in 1984, Professor Dowling sets out to provide the intellectual background needed for an understanding of Jameson's argument and its broader implications. He elucidates the unspoken assumptions that are the foundation of Jameson's thought – assumptions about how the nature of language, of interpretation and of culture – and shows how Jameson attempts to subsume in an expanded Marxism the critical theories of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan and of structuralism and poststructuralism in general. This lively, concise book will be welcomed by anyone interested in current theoretical debates, in Marxist criticism, and in the wide-ranging implications of Marxist cultural theory for the social sciences, the arts and the study of history.

1

Dialectical Thinking

As anyone who has attempted to grasp its argument knows, The Political Unconscious is a work that makes few concessions to the uninitiated reader. Several reasons for this have already been mentioned: the density of Jameson’s argumentation and the willed opacity of his prose do not arise from intellectual perversity but from the demands of a very ambitious philosophical program, and they are inseparable from its ambition. Yet beyond those immediately obvious obstacles to an easy comprehension of Jameson there is another: understanding the argument of The Political Unconscious involves understanding what can only be called a style of thinking, a way of viewing culture and society and history that is uniquely his own. It is Jameson’s style of thinking that I have chosen to call dialectical.

To describe as dialectical the thinking of a Marxist critic, and perhaps after Raymond Williams the best-known Marxist critic writing in English, may seem to be treading on the margins of tautology, and yet I think there is a real value in describing Jameson’s style of thinking that way. For though it is true that Jameson’s thought always participates in the philosophical tradition originating with Hegel and running through Marx and Engels to such “hegelian” Marxists as Lukacs and Gramsci, it is also true that Jameson has forged within this tradition a powerful instrument of dialectical analysis that, though he is sure to be imitated sooner or later, so far remains his own. This has to do with Jameson’s perfection of what I shall later on be calling negative dialectics, but in the meantime it may explain why I wish to begin not with a systematic exposition of Jameson’s theory but with two examples of his style of dialectical analysis.

The first example consists of Jameson’s extremely compressed remarks on the history of painting, dropped almost parenthetically—though his main point here will expand to shed a thousand illuminations in a later discussion of Conrad —in the long introductory chapter (“On Interpretation”) in which he sets forth the abstract principles of his system. Yet it is typical of Jameson that these few remarks should contain, beneath the surface of several incidental observations on the history of painting, a sustained meditation on human history — or, as Jameson will usually style it, History, the capital H signalling not simply the long record of dominations and oppressions and abominations that is the story of humanity, but also the source of all that misery in a Necessity that in a properly materialist philosophy has the force of fate or doom. To grasp the point of Jameson’s remarks on painting is in this sense to grasp his vision of man in history.

The extreme compression of Jameson’s remarks, however, means precisely that the outlines of this larger vision are not to be glimpsed directly in his observations on painting, but become visible only when viewed within the context of his total system. In particular, this means that we must begin by relating these few remarks on painting not to actual paintings as they hang in museums or to the history of painting as related in conventional textbooks but to (though this is unstated) a time before painting, a certain golden and irrecoverable moment in the human story when the visual arts did not yet exist. For paintings and statues and artifacts, like all aesthetic objects in Jameson’s view, can only come into existence through a process of alienation and estrangement within human society. In an unfallen social reality there is no painting because there is as yet no need for painting.

The name of this unfallen social reality in traditional Marxism is primitive communism, and Jameson adopts the name so readily that it is easy to miss the sense in which it carries for him a burden of significance that it lacks in previous Marxist philosophy. Jameson’s vision of primitive communism, though it begins in the notion of a stage before relations of domination emerged in human society, has clear affinities with the pagan myth of a Golden Age of Saturn in which property was common and slavery or subservience nonexistent, with the Christian myth of the Garden of Eden, even, on a more abstract level, with Hegel’s notion of Being as yet un-negated and estranged from its own self-identical nature. Jameson would admit and even welcome these affinities, with the proviso that such myths are (for Marxism) precisely stories told by people living under relations of domination to defuse or “manage” the intolerable contradictions of the societies they inhabit.

Primitive communism is not a myth in the sense that a Golden Age or a Garden of Eden is a myth, then, because it is an actual state of human society directly inferable from the impersonal laws of History; so much is orthodox or traditional Marxism. And it should also be said at once, since primitive communism serves for Jameson so powerful a heuristic function (that is, it is the ideal standard against which he measures all later stages of fragmentation and alienation), that it is for him something actually to be found in the world. In the era of bourgeois capitalism, of course, primitive communism has the status of a near-mythic memory, but it may be glimpsed in the immediate distance behind the remaining tribal societies of the modern age or behind the bodies of myth studied by anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss, and may actually be embodied in a limited and imperilled way in, for instance, the pygmy society that was the famous subject of Colin Turnbull’s study The Forest People.

Yet the importance of primitive communism for Jameson is less that it now exists in a few remote forest clearings than that it may be posited as a once-universal stage in human existence, and what is in turn significant about this for Jameson as a student of culture is the mode of perception, the way of being in the world, that primitive communism may be imagined to represent. Here is Jameson’s first crucial point of departure from traditional Marxism, for which primitive communism is significant mainly as an economic stage or mode of production, the state that exists before division of labor emerges (History proper beginning in the moment men set out to hunt while women stay home to cure hides) to set mankind off on the road of precapitalist accumulation that will ultimately generate capitalism. For Jameson, on the other hand, primitive communism is equally important as what Wittgenstein was the first to call a “form of life,” and it must be grasped as such to follow his arguments.

Yet this is impossible to imagine directly. There is a moment of what poststructuralism calls aporia here, an irresolvable bind or logical paradox that teases and frustrates the mind with its very irresolvability. For the unhappy fact is that as creatures of History, locked away in the private and separate and lonely worlds of our own consciousness—the separation and the loneliness having been produced by the implacable market forces of a capitalism that constitutes human beings as individual units or “subjects” in order to function as a system—we cannot imagine what it would be like, in the purest sense, to think collectively, to perceive the world as a world in which no such thing as individuals or individuality existed, to think not as “a member of a group” but as the group itself.

This is the moment of aporia or paradox, then: when I am in a group I cannot conceive of myself, no matter how closely I am bound to its members by ties of love or habit or shared interest, as thinking “as the group.” The best analogy for what Jameson has in mind for such collective thinking— an analogy caught in St. Paul’s vision of the Christian Church as a mystical body, and subsequently taken over by mystical thinkers through Blake and beyond—is the way any individual in this fallen social reality inhabits his or her body. For there is a sense in which I think of my arms, legs, fingers, toes, and so on as having an existence apart from me; I recognize, for instance, that should my left leg be amputated the being or subject I call “I” would continue to exist. At the same time, when I use my arm and its hand and fingers to do something, to hit a tennis ball or pour a glass of milk, I do not think of myself as giving a command to an Other, but simply as inhabiting my body as my own physical space in the physical reality of the world.

By the same token, when I say “I ran away” I do not ordinarily mean “I gave orders to my body to run away” but something much more like “I-that-am-my-body ran away.” If we could transfer this way of thinking to a social collectivity we would have something very close to what Jameson means by primitive communism, a state in which all members of society — men, women, children, young, old, strong, weak— look out on the nonhuman world from a collective mind that recognizes no more difference between individual members of the group than I recognize between my arms, my legs, my hands, etc. But we cannot in any real sense do this, and indeed (the moment of aporia again) I am using the language of a fallen social reality even to speak of a “group” here. In primitive communism as Jameson conceives it no concept of the group as such could exist, any more than I can consider my arms, my legs, and other parts of my body a group, as though I were to say “the whole group of us ran away: my legs did the pumping, my arms did the flailing, my eyes did the navigating,” etc.

It is only with the emergence of relations of domination, then, and the underlying economic forces that inexorably produce them, that there begins the long process of social transformation that brings us at last to the terminal estrangements of late capitalism, each of us locked within the solitary prison of his or her own mind, our minds themselves the effects or products of a global market system that in the name of efficiency or “rationalization” breaks everything down into units and assigns those units an interchangeable value. Yet even in the first moment of estrangement, that first tribal moment when the social collectivity begins to separate into individual members or units, the world loses something of its fullness, its presentness as a world, what Jameson will call its richness or its vividness or its color. Thus even the perceptual world is implicated in the newly fallen social reality to which primitive communism gives way.

To speak of the world’s losing fullness or vividness or “color” in the fall into alienation and estrangement is to run the risk of sounding merely impressionistic or vaguely mytho-poeic, and in fact Jameson runs this risk quite cheerfully, seldom pausing to say just what he means in using such terms. And yet his meaning is perfectly rigorous. Obscurity arises only because the context of such remarks must be reconstructed from points Jameson makes elsewhere and in other connections. Let us begin, then, from the simple intuitive notion that a fragmentation of anything like a “collective mind” must to some degree impoverish the perceptual world for those individual subjects who inhabit the new reality that ensues—to just the degree, let us say, that my loss of sight or hearing or taste must impoverish that fuller reality I knew when my senses were unimpaired. This is part of what Jameson has in mind, but only part.

There is something much more complicated at work as well because, as we shall shortly see in another connection, the fall from primitive communism into alienated or estranged individuality is accompanied for Jameson by an interior fragmentation, a process through which the senses become estranged from one another and begin to function autonomously—in just the same way as individuals in the world ushered in by capitalism will not only function independently but learn to congratulate themselves on their “freedom,” “autonomy,” and the like—and through which, as well, the various functions or levels of the mind become similarly estranged and independent in their working, with the purely abstract or rational level splitting off from the emotional, the empirical or descriptive faculty alienated from the perception of meaning or value, and so on.

This notion of an interior fragmentation lends Jameson’s thought much of its sometimes bewildering complexity, for at least since Kant we have known how inseparable are reality and perception, and Jameson’s argument will always demand that we hold in a simultaneous focus a world objectively estranged or fragmented and a perception of that world, existing in the mutually estranged faculties and senses of the “individual mind,” just as powerfully constituted by the alienation of its elements from one another and from the whole. Nor will Jameson allow us the comfort of choosing one process of estrangement over the other, as though, for instance, the fragmented world of our interior perception were merely an irremovable lens through which we were compelled to look out on a world actually coherent and whole. What historical materialism teaches is, to the contrary, that the process of alienation is universal and all-pervasive, and that unless this is understood there is no understanding History as such.

The matter of the world’s losing its color, then, must be explained in a way that takes the universality of alienation into account, an explanation that must in turn begin in the interior separation of the purely rational faculty from the rest of the mind in the first fall out of primitive communism, but that will then see in the triumphs of empirical science in the seventeenth century the first great expression of autonomy on the part of that power of abstract reasoning which, along with the rise to dominance of the bourgeoisie and an emergent capitalism, ushered in the era of human history we still inhabit. In this context Bacon’s Novum Organum may be read as the declaration of independence of an abstract power of Reason become wholly autonomous, and Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton as the agents of its new autonomy.

To observe that the world that came into existence with Newton’s Principia is colorless, then, is to say something at once rigorous and precise. For from classical or Newtonian mechanics to quantum theory and beyond, physics has gained the power of describing the world in abstract or mathematical terms (mathematics being for Jameson the very type of an ideality that can operate only through a denial of concrete reality) only to the degree that it is literally colorless, an endless dance of particles that underlies and sustains this more cluttered reality we inhabit. The same is true, for both Marx and Jameson, of human society as described by economics, whether the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith or contemporary econometrics, where lived transactions among living beings are reconstituted as impersonal market forces that may in turn be rendered in purely mathematical terms. The colorlessness of the world of the empirical sciences, then, is what Jameson has in mind when he envisions the first fall out of primitive communism as beginning the process through which the world begins to be drained of its fullness, its vividness, and its color.

The emergence of painting and the visual arts generally, then, may be partly explained by an interior reorganization of the individual in which the sense of sight or vision separates off from the other senses and becomes autonomous. Yet this does not give us the whole explanation, for the process of alienation or fragmentation that begins in the first fall out of primitive communism must end in that more radical historical process that Jameson, following Lukacs, will call “reification”— that is, the total transformation of the world into a sphere where relations among rational or conscious beings altogether cease and there are left only relations among things. Once again, Jameson’s adoption of this term and concept so closely observes the doctrines of orthodox Marxism that it demands a careful scrutiny to discover just where and how it takes on for him a special meaning.

The actual term “reification” was given by Lukacs to what Max Weber had described as “rationalization,” that inexorable process through which the capitalist system breaks the processes of production and distribution down into smaller and more manageable units in the name of a greater and greater efficiency until society as a whole begins to mirror in its structures the lineaments of what began as a process of purely economic specialization. Lukacs elected to rechristen the process, in turn, to signal a dimension of it that Marx had described in vivid and impassioned terms, the terrible grinding forces of a market system in which the labor of human beings became simply one more commodity in a world given over wholly to the production and consumption of commodities, so that men became, in their relations to society and to each other, nothing more than commodities or things. Along with the connotations of a world of “thingness,” then, “reification” implies a world from which the human is being eliminated altogether.

Once again, though, this is to conceive of reification primarily as an economic process, and the economic determinism of Marxism as it developed from the Second International to Stalin’s emergence in the Soviet Union as its “official” theorist (with strong implications of his infallibility as an interpreter of Marx) was to ensure that this would remain the emphasis of “orthodox” Marxism. And Jameson, once again, wants us to bracket or suspend the economic (”determination by the economy,” in Marxist terms) to think about what reification might mean as experienced so to speak from within—that is, not as an underlying economic process but as a mode of experiencing the world. (Not that Jameson in the least wishes to banish the economic; as we shall see, he wants precisely to demonstrate how any such concept as “experiencing the world” is determined by History, and History by the economy “in the last instance.”)

What, then, does it mean to experience the world as a sphere from which the merely human is being drained away and all that is left is things or objects and the relations among them? At the level of relations among people, this seems to invoke the kind of example favored by moral philosophers who are attempting to account for the underlying conditions or limits of ethical behavior. Stanley Cavell’s notion of “acknowledgment,” for instance, seems to turn on just this person/thing or human/nonhuman distinction: if I could plunge an axe into the body of another person with just the same cheerful unconcern as I chop logs for tonight’s fire, I would seem to exist outside anything that could be called, even in the most minimal sense, a human community. If I did this to you I would be seeing you, as I saw the log I was chopping for the fire, as a thing.

If there is no urgent need for a regrounding of ethical categories here, it is because we always retain the option of classifying someone who behaves this way with an axe as psychotic and seeing that he gets proper treatment. Yet it was Marx’s point that there is already this element of the psychotic in any relation of domination, that the relation of the servus to the master in Roman society, of the Negro slave to the plantation owner in America, of the child-laborer (or any laborer) to the factory owner in nineteenth-century Britain, all would have been impossible had not impersonal historical forces been at work to determine that relations among men should give way to relations among things. The note of impassioned moral concern in Jameson’s writing, in the face of Marx’s scorn for anyone weak enough to entertain a merely “moral” impulse, arises from a terrible sense that this same process of reification is now working its ultimate deformations on humanity as a whole.

Here we have the origin of painting in that fall out of collective consciousness that begins in the disintegration of primitive communism, and then, subsequently, the entire history of painting in the process that generates the successive stages of human society and culminates in the stage of late commodity capitalism. In the cave paintings of the old stone age, we have the first outward expression of that interior reorganization of the individual described earlier, of a visual sense increasingly separate from the other senses and increasingly autonomous in its operations, seeking to complete itse...