The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique

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THE SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF FREDRIC JAMESON

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SUNY SERIES ON THE SUBLIME

Rob Wilson, editor

CHAPTER TITLE

THE SUCCESS

AND

iii

FAILURE

of

FREDRIC JAMESON

Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique

STEVEN HELMLING

S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y

OF

NEW YORK PRESS

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Earlier versions of some sections of this book appeared in Postmodern Culture as follows: “The Desire Called Jameson,” 5.2 (January 1995). “Jameson’s Lacan.” 7.1 (September 1996). “Jameson’s Postmodernism: Version 2.0.” 9.2 (January 1999). “Brecht Our (Post-) Contemporary.” 10.2 (January 2000). “Failure and the Sublime: Jameson’s Writing in the ’80s.” 10.3 (May 2000).

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STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, ALBANY © 2001 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production and book design, Laurie Searl Marketing, Michael Campochiaro

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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CHAPTER TITLE

for Merrick and for Banu

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CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, ix CHAPTER ONE FREDRIC JAMESON The Success and Failure of Critique, 1

CHAPTER TWO THE DIALECTIC OF THE SCRIPTIBLE Barthes and Adorno, 21

CHAPTER THREE HERMENEUTIC AND/OR CRITIQUE, 47

CHAPTER FOUR “DELIBERATE FAILURE” Wyndham Lewis, 67

CHAPTER FIVE “INEVITABLE FAILURE” The Political Unconscious, 83

CHAPTER SIX FAILURE AND THE SUBLIME Postmodernism, 103 vii

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER SEVEN JAMESON POST-POSTMODERNISM The Success and Failure of Theory, 127

CODA BEYOND SUCCESS AND FAILURE Brecht and Method, 149

WORKS CITED, 161 NOTES, 167 INDEX, 179

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks first of all to Eyal Amiran and James English, who, as past and present editors of the electronic journal, Postmodern Culture, gave my first efforts to write about Jameson the encouragement of (virtual) print; Eyal Amiran read portions of the manuscript with a care well above the call not only of duty, but of friendship. David Cowart and Bob Perelman also read parts of it, and gave me the benefit of their comments. Fredric Jameson answered queries and helped in other ways as well. Thanks also to Rob Wilson, who “discovered” the manuscript for SUNY Press, and to James Peltz, SUNY’s acquisitions editor. Their promises of a quick decision process sounded too good to be true, but weren’t. Laurie Searl, the production editor who saw the book into print, was unfailingly patient and generous with her help. Merrick Johnson saw me through the writing of this book; I wish she were here for its publication. I thank her, and the other women in my life: Jane Watt, Cary Johnson, and Banu Öney.

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Chapter One

Fredric Jameson

The Success and Failure of Critique

The American cultural system affords its intellectuals no eminence of prestige and controversy comparable to that of Derrida in France, or Habermas in Germany; but if it did, one of the few Americans who could plausibly be put in their league is Fredric Jameson. He wrote his first book, Sartre (1961), at 26; as a devotee of Sartre’s existential phenomenology, just then incorporating Sartre’s new allegiance to Marxism, Jameson was perhaps better positioned than almost anyone in America to respond knowledgeably and critically to the arrival here of that intellectual ferment usually subsumed under the rubric of “theory.” The challenges posed in turn by structuralism, deconstruction, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and so on, quickly generated ardent pledges of allegiance from smitten disciples, indignant jeremiads from affronted traditionalists, and innumerable handbook guides for the perplexed. Among aspirants to theory, most cleaved to one vocabulary, method, or “master,” forsaking all others; even the giants noticed their rivals chiefly to step on them. (Derrida’s deconstructions of his contemporaries usually leave them looking naive and futile; Habermas’s potshots at theory in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity proved an embarrassment even to many of his disciples.) Only Jameson accepted the challenge of attempting to do justice 1

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to the full range of theory. In a prolific stream of essays and books, he took on all the theory discourses, testing them in their own and in each other’s terms, synthesizing, “transcoding,” putting each to the proof of the others, and putting each to work with the others, in ways that made him, by his mid-forties, recognized by fans and detractors alike as among the most ambitious and widely-ranging culturecritics of his academic generation. So: an eminently successful project, and career—and hence, in part, my title. But I had better begin by explaining that this study does not offer an inventory of Jameson’s work with a judgment of success or failure attached to each item (though it will be apparent that I think some of Jameson’s efforts more compelling than others). A book as brief as this can sketch only the broad outlines of Jameson’s accomplishment, and I foreground the success/failure problem because it seems to me to generalize a problematic whose projection, over the course of so diverse and prolific an oeuvre, into so many local particularizations, has too often obscured the larger coherences. To call the success/failure problem itself a “dialectic” suggests how comprehensively it extends into every paradigm (most dramatically, that of “the sublime,” in senses to be indicated shortly) by means of which Jameson labors to grapple with the larger dialectic itself—to grapple with it, which must also be, he insists, to enact it in the writing of “dialectical sentences.” Hence the interest for this study, the heuristic point d’appui, of Jameson’s writing as writing: the success/failure problem agitates virtually every sentence Jameson writes; whatever else a given text of his might be about, it is always also about this. It is his constant subtext, preoccupation, even “self-consciousness,” for it is the question of critical ambition itself: what can critique (that is, effort like Jameson’s own) do or be in our period? What successes can it aspire to? To what failures is it peculiarly liable? How does critique’s written-ness, its status as “a kind of writing,” figure into these questions? How, if at all, can merely “textual effects” render or participate in the dialectic of historical processes critique aims to illuminate? Most pointedly, for a Marxist critic, how can a “revolutionary” critique be said to succeed in a period when revolution itself is failing? Such anxieties express preoccupations peculiar to our moment, from the stratospherically speculative (the implication of “critique” itself in logo-, onto-, theo-, phallo- [etc.] -centric subject/object metaphysics) to the grittily earthbound (the devolution of the U.S.S.R.). But the question of the success or failure of Marxism has invited, or challenged, the largest criteria of measure ever since Marx: the intellectual ambition of Marx himself, the global scope of his interests, from the beginning inscribed within the tradition that bears his name a grandeur (or grandiosity) of program that aspires to encompass every domain of knowledge, to realize itself as the “untranscendable horizon” of all scientific, cultural, social, his-

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torical, and political inquiry. Nor is “inquiry” all, for Marxism takes on other burdens, other difficulties, besides those of the study: the aspiration to shape political action, and thus to assist the coming-into-being of the historical process itself. And Marxism shoulders moral burdens also, of concern, even anguish about the plight of the oppressed, as well as burdens that are “moral” in another sense, the sense that connects less with “morality” than with “morale”; for it is almost impossible to name or even imagine a Marxist text devoid of any hortatory subtext, without any rhetorical or libidinal investment in the task of moving its readers or hearers. (Here, too, Marx is the great original: he asks to be read as a scientist, not a moralist, but we would not readily credit any Marxism that shows itself to be deaf to the moralist and ironist audible in Marx’s potent rhetoric.) As if these programmatic difficulties were not already exorbitant, other ironies and contradictions have made the terms in which Marxist critique can be said to succeed or fail problematic since Marx. The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, for example, specifies that revolutionary effort cannot content itself with understanding the world, but must aspire to nothing less than changing it; while another of Marx’s familiar quotations advises that consciousness does not determine, but is determined by, material conditions. For critique, the first of these pronouncements imposes an imperative that the second renders futile—a contradiction that has been fertile for critical and Marxist discourses generally, and, in ways I hope to illuminate in this study, for Jameson in particular. The point is that the labor of a Marxist intellectual cannot be easy. It involves extraordinary, even prohibitive, difficulty of many different kinds: difficult texts, difficult issues, difficult problems, a (very) difficult history, difficult political conditions, difficult rhetorical burdens—a dauntingly overdetermined multiplicity of ways, in short, in which Marxist critique might succeed or fail. I evoke these difficulties here as a first index of this study’s chief focus, the motivations animating the notorious difficulty of Jameson’s writing. Every commentator on Jameson acknowledges this salient quality of his prose, though only Terry Eagleton, so far as I know, has considered it at any length, and that in a fashion interesting (and interested) enough that I have written about it elsewhere.1 It is my premise here that Jameson’s importance as a culture-critic is less in his (supposed) conclusions or arguments than in the subtle and complicated mediations of his writing itself. Jameson’s prose is masterful in its encyclopedic command of dauntingly complex materials, yet its effect is less of mastery than of being mastered, as if the predicaments of our historical moment are transmitting their force to every sentence he writes—and this, in my view, is Jameson’s peculiar “success,” what makes his writing potent and compelling even for many who do not share his Marxist commitment.

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That the writing must be the condition of this success, Jameson himself prescribes. He projects critique as an “impossible task,” and insists that it be written in “dialectical sentences” that not merely analyze or expound, but enact, perform—indeed, suffer—the contradictions of their subject matter, the predicaments of society and culture in general, and the “inevitable failure” of the socialist tradition in particular. Such a “dialectical” project labors under a kind of failure imperative: it can succeed only by failing, and by failing only in especially and appropriately demanding and difficult ways.2 It must evoke the difficulties it aspires to solve, but to the extent that any solution it proposes seems to succeed, the statement of the problem will seem to have failed, by underestimating the problem. And in the context of the historical intransigences of “late capitalism,” no critical gesture could be more unseemly than seeming to succeed: a critique too readily satisfied with merely critical success might seem (“false consciousness”) deluded by its own false consolations for the revolutionary movement’s realworld failures—“an imaginary solution to a real contradiction.” So much, and it is very much indeed, does Jameson stake on the writing of “dialectical sentences”—a sine qua non, he insists, throughout his career and in more than one vocabulary, of the kind, or tradition, of critical work within which he projects his own ambitions, and against which he tests or takes the measure of critical ambition in general. I will have more to say in the following chapter about Jameson’s imperative to “dialectical writing” and his models for it, preeminently Barthes and Adorno; for now, suffice it to say that by the “dialectical” Jameson intends, first of all, a resistance to a certain familiarization or overfamiliarization, a “freezing over” or “thematization” (P 91; LM 182) of the hardwon insights of critique into clichés or platitudes—in Lukácsean terms, a “reification” of critical labor. For Jameson, if Marxism as a mental operation is to be characterized as a kind of permanent “inner revolution,” then it is clear that every systematic presentation of it falsifies it in the moment in which it freezes over into a system (M&F 362).

Jameson’s “dialectical prose” aspires to preserve Marxism from such falsifying systematization, sustaining or enacting in its word-by-word “working through” that “inner revolution” of which he here speaks. Jameson indicates the success or failure at stake in such a program when he goes on to explain that only such vigilance can resist “the transformation into one more ideology of that [that is, Marxism] which was in its very structure a refusal of all ideology as such” (M&F 362).3 The foregoing should already have begun to demonstrate how the largest intellectual/moral dimensions of the “failure imperative” pulse through the minutest

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capillaries of Jameson’s written corpus, the thrusts and qualifications, assertions and “refusals,” of those long, relentless, tortuously complicated “dialectical sentences” of his. It is his announced program, continuously put to the proof of his writing practice, to sustain a continuum, a constant intermediation, between macrolevel-context (nothing less than “totality”) and microlevel-text. In the agitated medium of his prose, the motif of “failure” exfoliates with Protean prolixity, in manifold guises and variations, always encoding in one form or another the promises and the perils of critical ambition itself. Hence my premise that the richest access to Jameson is by way of his prose. To begin with, Jameson himself so foregrounds the question of how “dialectical” writing should be written as to make it puzzling that his commentators give it so little attention.4 Some of them assume (not incorrectly) that readers will benefit from being helped past Jameson’s prose to a speedier grasp of what it is saying; William Dowling’s primer on The Political Unconscious served this needful purpose for many back in the early days of trying to cope with Jameson. More ironically, especially the Marxists among Jameson’s commentators seem to miss the degree to which Jameson’s investment in the way his writing is written (to recall Gertrude Stein) works against what they take to be the conventions of his (and their) genre. Marxist critique since Marx mixes the motives of polemic and analysis to produce a carapace of fighting words, the harder-line the better: the implicit imperative is that whatever “line” is taken should be made as “hard” as possible.5 Jameson’s work is not devoid of these impulses; they are, in the terms of his own discussion of genre in chapter 2 of The Political Unconscious, part of critique’s unavoidable historical and ideological “sediment.” But his larger aim is less to fortify analytical positions in which like-minded Marxists might shelter, than to survey all the arguments and methods available, rotating them critically, testing, probing, pressing each (typically) to its point of failure, in order to assess what sorts of use it may serve, or what ideological sequelae it might entail, for “dialectical” effort like his own. In short, the kinds of success Jameson pursues, as well as the kinds of failure he risks, are very different from those usually taken to be characteristic of critique generically. Which suggests that among Jameson’s ambitions is to help in the remaking of “critique”—a period preoccupation, of course. “Critique” is a word much problematized lately, and I will have more to say in chapter 3 on Jameson’s own reservations about it in both its Kantian and its Marxist senses. But perhaps now is the moment to acknowledge a dissonance in my preference, at least initially, for “critique” as an umbrella term for Jameson’s work over such alternatives as “theory.” Here as with other terminologies in this study, the dissonance is calculated to allow the older vocabulary to foreground problems supposedly “overcome” in the

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new. “Critique” gave way to “theory,” for example, because “critique” bore ideological inscriptions, allegedly unsuspected by earlier generations, that “theory” had at last unmasked. But does that mean “theory” has succeeded where “critique” had failed? Has “theory” solved the problems incumbent upon “critique,” or simply refused them? If the former, can such a success afford to think itself so simply liberated from longstanding problems? And if the latter, is that declaring victory or acknowledging defeat? Such questions hover whenever Jameson “transcodes” between one interpretive or analytic vocabulary and another, testing one against the other, finding in each the other’s limit, making of each the other’s critique. And here another inflection of “failure” appears, for what is a method’s “limit” except the (critical) point at which it fails? (“Transcoding” is a fair synecdoche for Jameson’s project at large; his work has served many as a sort of Rosetta stone of theory; and broadly speaking, the power of his work springs from the tension between his formative affinities with the phenomenological tradition and the newer vocabularies and thematics of structuralism and poststructuralism against which he tests and prolongs them.) Yet Jameson himself does not foreground the “critique/theory” binary. Whereas Derrida, for example, is at pains to insist that deconstruction is not critique, not even (therefore) critique of critique (for example, Points 357), Jameson more ambiguously allows that his project aspires to something other than critique, without ceasing to be critique. (Hence his endorsement of Adorno’s formula of “immanent critique”: critique from within, “homeopathic” critique that renounces the claim, the hubris, of a critical “subject” to have gotten outside of, or meta- to, what we can then no longer call its “object.”) Which helps sustain a sort of optical illusion about Jameson’s work, and the genre cues it emits: his manifest ambition looks like making bold to offer a solution to every possible problem; but the actual effect of his effort is rather to problematize, as richly—as problematically—as possible, every possible solution.6 Hence perhaps the simplest kind of “failure” Jameson risks: that of disappointing reader expectations. Fire-breathers keen on polemical slam-bang will find respectful considerations of class enemies from T. S. Eliot to Northrop Frye; connoisseurs of careful analysis will find analysis itself interminably (or terminally?) problematized; the frankly puzzled will find their puzzlement compounded; the programmatizers, wanting defensible positions, will find “positions” shunned as “thematizations.” And for any of these, no less than for the novice seeking only a first-hand look at the work of an acclaimed culture-critic, the expectation of mere expository clarity can seem almost willfully outraged. Even the adept must find Jameson’s prose more than intermittently exasperating—but to adapt Woody Allen, if it’s not

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exasperating, you’re not doing it right. To engage with Jameson you must accept that the exasperation is of the essence of the experience—even one of the peculiar enjoyments, or rewards—of reading him. I am not asking the skeptic to admire Jameson’s expository failures just because Jameson tells us they are calculated; the skeptic may judge that they are miscalculated, or that the ambition itself is misconceived. But I hope the point clarifies Jameson’s way of seeming bold and risktaking at some moments, diffident and evasive at others; and in any case, our judgments for and against his effort can only benefit from a clearer sense of what he is and is not trying to do. I have been elaborating a multifold rationale for approaching Jameson by way of his prose style rather than his “arguments” or “positions.” Readers of a certain type may already be sharpening knives for a deconstruction of what they will think an emergent binary of “style/content” or (in more up-to-date parlance) “textual/thetic”—an opposition that often extends itself, by an almost irresistible dynamic, as far as “aesthetics/politics.” But while it is Jameson’s writing I foreground here, a glance at this book’s table of contents should disclose that my organizational strategies are broadly thematic. I do not discount the points Jameson argues; rather my aim is to approach them by way of his writing, as produced by his writing practice and qualified by it, the better to clarify not so much what his positions are, as the provenance—the meaning, effect, motivation—of their unclarity, of their difficulty, of the evident marks of struggle they bear upon themselves. What needs attention, in my view, is less what Jameson is saying, than what the way he writes is doing to what he is saying. Which of course requires minute attention to what he is saying as well. I neither bracket “content,” nor claim that Jameson does. Indeed, it is Jameson’s constant premise that any such binary as “writing/argument,” “style/content,” or “aesthetics/politics,” however instrumentally necessary at some moments of the critical process, will reify, diminishing our participation in the continuing dialectical process itself if our fix(ation) on or in it prevents our yielding to its passage further to the moment in which its differences are aufgehoben in a more “totalizing” apprehension. Take “aesthetics/politics,” for example: the mystifications of an “aesthetic ideology” that declares art “autonomous” from politics and history are by now a commonplace not only of Marxist but of Left- or Left-liberal discussion generally; but Jameson’s practice equally admonishes the Left-zealot whose righteous contempt of “the aesthetic” only inverts the fetishism of her bourgeois opposite number—as if art really were apolitical. Just as the sheerest lyric is implicated in the political by reason of its social context, so any work of critical writing is condemned to the condition of the aesthetic by reason of its written-ness. For Jameson, among the aims of “dialectical criticism” is to elicit all the manifold ways

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aesthetic production (or cultural production at large, including critique itself ) can be, cannot help but be, must be, but also can only imperfectly be, “political” by reason of its determination in and by historical processes—whether it owns or repudiates those determinations, and out of whatever ideological allegiances. Thus Jameson’s version of the phenomenological effort, from Hegel to Heidegger and Sartre, to, as it were, re-noumenize phenomena, or re-ontologize the aesthetic (with the caveat that Jameson projects that effort not as a doctrinal premise, an imperious correction of Kantian error, but as, again, an “impossible task,” a Sisyphean labor, conflictedly fraught with desire and anxiety, whose stakes—and whose potential for sublimity—are encoded in the utopian hope that Sisyphean struggle might now and then yield, however momentarily, some Promethean result). But, to back up slightly, all this means that Jameson’s “dialectical” way with a binary involves two moves that can seem incompatible: 1) the opposing terms are, as we saw a few pages ago, invoked against each other, each marking the other’s limit or point of failure; or, contrarily, 2) the opposition itself is reframed, “totalized” (or deconstructed!), that is, its opposed terms shown to be not really separable—the opposition itself, the very oppositionality of its opposed terms, is shown to fail. What determines the choice between these moves at a given moment, on a given page, is the role, the actantial function (so to speak), that the binary is just then playing in the drama of Jameson’s patiently turbulent sentences. Is the binary structuring the critical method or program, or does it structure the issue or crux the program is trying to “solve”? Is it, in short, part of the problem, or part of the solution? In such situations, the “failure imperative” usually dictates that the outcome obey or confirm the premise (or “motivation”) of “impossible task” and “inevitable failure”: the aspirations of critique will be checked by the intractability of the problems it engages. (As is true in many other productions of “theory,” of course—but I am trying to suggest why Jameson’s deconstructions of binary cruxes feel so different from, say, Derrida’s, though not so different from, say, de Man’s.) Hence the power and ubiquity of “ideological closure” as Jameson’s figure for everything “dialectical criticism” is up against. Like its Kantian avatar, the problem of solipsism, “ideological closure” is one of those intellectual constructions that is self-reinforcing: the premises that make it thinkable in the first place seem to make it an unbanishable specter haunting thought ever after. But, to recall the title of the last chapter of The Political Unconscious, Jameson’s work maintains the hope that there is a “dialectic of ideology and utopia.” If ideology sustains itself on antinomic logics of “closure,” utopia seeks alternative strategies that afford or promise, or at least license hope of a break, breach, or opening in structures, closures, prison-houses that had seemed escape-proof. Utopia must aspire—it can

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only aspire (it can do nothing else; it can do nothing more than)—to sublate ideology’s antinomies. This vocabulary (“sublating antinomies”) is meant to recall Kant and Hegel—for my sense of how Jameson’s writing works turns on issues for which these two make a suggestive binary. Where Kant makes “antinomy” a kind of nomos in itself, Hegel’s “contradiction” makes an opportunity of a principled antinomianism. (Think of Hegel’s “identity of identity and non-identity” or “identity of subject and object” as sabots tossed into the looms of Kantian antinomy, and Hegel may begin to seem a figure proleptic of Derridean “play,” without the Derridean coyness.) I hope it goes without saying that “Kant” and “Hegel” here stand not for systems or doctrines, but rather for tones, moods, affects: libidinal resources (or predicaments) as these are mobilized and make themselves felt in the “textual effects” of Jameson’s writing—including “the sublime,” whose connotations of the antithetical, of catastrophic reversal, of antinomies “sublated,” aufgehoben, Jameson’s writing of the 1980s will mobilize as Hegelian resources in the “dialectical” struggle against the ideological reifications wrought by Kantian analytic. But Jameson’s elaboration, in the “Postmodernism” essay preeminently, of a specifically Hegelian “sublime”—on which, more shortly—is only one instance or “moment” of his career-long engagement with Hegel. The persistence of Jameson’s Hegelianism, against the grain of a diversely anti-Hegelian age (Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida) is a topic worth more space than I can give it here. Jameson has hailed, then prophesied, a Hegel revival throughout his career, early (M&F ix) and late (LM 241, ST 3, CT 73–92, “GPI” 75–6). For my purposes here, Jameson’s stubborn allegiance to Hegel illuminatingly instantiates, first, the success/failure problem, for Jameson, in an anti-Hegelian time, inverts Hegel’s supposed “failure” as a “dialectical” enactment of the “failure imperative,” thus implicitly redeeming it as a kind of success (M&F 44–9; more on this in the following chapter). The indictment that casts Hegel as a Panglossian ideologue of reactionary “optimism” (“History as slaughterbench” and “Golgotha of the Spirit” notwithstanding),7 may apply to the post-1816 Hegel, court philosopher to the restored Prussian state; but Jameson’s Hegel aligns rather with Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, which credits the younger Hegel’s potent vision of “the negative” with giving radical social theory (Marx and after) its birth.8 Jameson’s Hegel is the prophet of the necessity (in the Hegel quotation Slavoj Zizek has appropriated for the title of a recent book) of “tarrying with the negative” (Phenomenology of Spirit 19). It is in the spirit of “tarrying with the negative” that Jameson projects his various Hegel-inflected imperatives: not as sure-thing recipes for critical success, or foolproof dialectical panaceas, but rather, on the contrary, as burdens to be borne,

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“impossible tasks” whose “inevitable failure” attests, in Hegel’s formula, “the labor and the suffering of the negative” (PU 284).9 The pathos of such a project as, for example, resisting “thematization” is that it is a doomed wish, not an assured goal: Jameson must traffic in “positions,” his writing must suffer “thematization,” just as T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney has got to use words when he talks to you. In 1971, in response to Susan Sontag, Deleuze/Guattari and others clamoring “against interpretation,” Jameson advised that “we are condemned to interpret at the same time that we feel an increasing repugnance to do so” (IT1 6), and this hair-shirt ethos animates Jameson’s critical programs generally. If “theory” typically denounces “totalization” as the (Hegelian) wetdream of a crypto-totalitarian will-to-power, Jameson recasts it as a necessary facing-up to the nightmare of the “total system” we inhabit (LM 26–7; P 331ff ). If Hegelian historicism is “demystified” as a sinister conjuring of “master narratives,” Jameson’s “Always historicize!” is advice for an underdog revolutionary tradition—for the slave, not the master—and the narrative it uncovers, that of “the determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history” (PU 102), is the reverse of triumphalist. (Note that this comment, from 1981, renders an adverse judgment on the Russian Revolution ten years before the break-up of the U.S.S.R.) In Jameson, “providential” metanarratives invert nightmarishly (as when the “subject of History” turns out to be neither Absolute Spirit nor the proletariat, but “capital itself ” [P 410; cf. IT2 72, PU 93n71]). If recent narrative theory tends to project narrative as such as “deterministic,” Jameson’s response less contests those narratological premises than exploits them to dramatize, even magnify, his own projection of the “ideological closures” a historicizing, that is, narrativizing critique must face. And metanarrative apart, Jameson is alive to another resonance of Hegel’s “historicism,” one Hegel summons in the word “vanishing”: History as simply that implacable resistless force before which all seeming fixities must transform and disappear. Jameson’s 1973 essay, “The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller” [IT2 3–34], for example, broods over Weber’s brilliant, but timebound, explanatory category, “Protestantism”; but the libidinal force of the essay’s prose is to agitate the anxious subtext that Marxism and its conceptual instruments, too, might be “vanishing” (and not in the withering-away or beginning of history sense so optimistically projected by Marx). One of Jameson’s oftenest quoted remarks—for many it serves as a sort of motto for his work generally— mourns that “History is what hurts” (PU 102). History giveth, and History taketh away—and if the axiom, ambivalently, stirs both hope and despair, Jameson’s evocations of “historicizing” problems and/or solutions usually accent the desperation rather than the hopefulness. Not for nothing are “tragic” and “stoic” terms of praise in his assessment of Lacan (IT1 98, 112)—terms whose bleakness suggests

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something of the motivation, both as thematic investment and as “textual effect” or writing practice, of Jameson’s projection of “the sublime.” Jameson’s wish to exempt himself (and Hegel) from charges of a facile optimism has more specific ideological motivations as well. The official Hegelianism of Soviet Marxism inscribed an official optimism, a dogma of “inevitable success” from which Jameson’s own rhetorical imperative of “inevitable failure” registers an emphatic dissent. Thus Jameson reads Althusser’s anti-Hegelianism as a coded anti-Stalinism (PU 27n12);10 for Western (that is, Hegelian) Marxists, a pessimistic reading of Hegel was meant to countervail the fraudulent party-line optimism (Adorno is the best example, Lukács the most problematic). Which of course raises a question about Marx himself: Marx is among the greatest of triumphalist rhetoricians, yet Jameson typically mobilizes him, too, for “pessimistic” (rhetorical) purposes. Read by that light, Jameson’s “Hegel” begins to look like a figure for the “optimism,” the utopian hope that, in connection with Marx, Jameson reflexively renounces. (Jameson has recently hinted as much in a passage preferring “the Marx of the Grundrisse . . . more than of the more triumphalist passages of Capital ” [“AEM” 172].) And I will add that the enthusiasm Jameson displays for Hegel, career-long, is nowhere matched in his work by a comparable enthusiasm, I mean a libidinal enthusiasm, a palpable excitement, for Marx. If Jameson’s “Hegel” is a vehicle for the repressed utopian moment in Marx, Jameson’s “Marx” may figure, reciprocally, as a screen for or repression of a much more immediate and profound engagement with, even something like a “guilty pleasure” in, Hegel. Jameson cites Lyotard’s phrase, “the desire called Marx,” but part of the mystique of that desire, for Jameson and many others, is (to recur to what will become a familiar formula), its “impossibility.” In Hegel Jameson evidently beholds something more like “the lineaments of gratified desire.” The “stoic” or “tragic” effect, or affect, of Jameson’s prose, its frequent tone of melancholy and anguish, also implies an oblique critique of (or at least takes pains to differentiate itself from) much of the “theory” with which many associate Jameson. Much of the theory mood of the late 1960s and 1970s was set by slogans and code-words of release and consummation—“plaisirs du texte,” “jouissance,” “écriture,” “polyglossia,” “carnivalesque,” “free play,” “infinite interpretation,” “decentering”—not to mention the almost infinitely extensible list of apocalyptic “end of(s)”: end of metaphysics, end of “man,” end of history, of the subject, of literature, of philosophy, critique, Marxism . . . Jameson shares the utopian longings of theory, but his own more fastidiously pained writing implicitly renounces such enthusiasm as at best premature, at worst an unseemly bourgeois complacency while the revolution still suffers its time on the cross (see “The Ideology of the Text” [1976], IT1 17–71). Theory’s fetishization of “play,” its largely unwitting

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reinscription of a neo-Schillerian “aesthetic consciousness,” receives its critique in Jameson’s very tone, in “the labor and the suffering of [Jameson’s] negative.” Schiller elsewhere gets his due, in Jameson’s pages on Schiller’s most consequential Western Marxist disciple, Herbert Marcuse (M&F 83–116); but the difficulty, the askesis, of Jameson’s writing effects a kind of prophylaxis against the naivetés or complacencies to which the rhetoric of plaisir and jouissance has been all too liable. But on the other hand, “pessimism” too can become a trap, a “false consciousness,” a defeatism that forecloses revolutionary or utopian possibilities.11 Jameson worries about this dilemma of left criticism, too, citing (for example) Sartre’s caution that “Vice . . . is a taste for failure” (PHL 178), or Baudrillard’s taunt that “the Left wants to lose” (P 333)—admonitions the more pointed for a writing that labors (suffers) under a self-imposed “failure imperative,” and what Jameson will eventually protest as the “winner loses logic” (P 5) it entails.12 Must analysis of ideological closure become confirmation of it? Jameson’s “what hurts” ethos evokes this anxiety almost continuously; but he also occasionally warns against letting it pass all the way over into a kind of “post-Marxism” (for example, his remarks on the Marxist architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri [IT2 37–9, P 60, CT 177–83]). Here “post-Marxism” is a Marxism too gloomily persuaded of its own inevitable failure; worse yet, of course, is the kind that prematurely, and with audible satisfaction, speaks of Marxism as finished, a phase we have outgrown (IT2 133; on talk of Jameson’s own supposed “post-Marxism,” see his comments in P 297–8, adapted from Kellner 369–71; on “post-Marxisms” as a recurring feature of Marxism’s agon with capitalism, see “AEM” passim). But it is time to bring these rather abstract Hegelian overdeterminations back to bear on the textures of Jameson’s writing itself. I will forego the comparison/contrast of Jameson’s “dialectical sentences” with Hegel’s own;13 but I will recall that it was Hegel who first put the problem of how “dialectical” writing should be written on modernity’s agenda. Jameson has recently traced the situational origins of . . . theoretical discourse in the general crisis of philosophy after Hegel . . . [which inaugurated] a way of describing the philosophical dilemmas it renders as a kind of ‘form-problem,’ whose resolution is sought in a certain set of procedures, or rather, in a certain set of taboos (“MPL” 79–80/31–2).

Note that thus put, the “form-problem” involves a success/failure dynamic: the potential hubris of theory’s “procedures” chastened by the specter of its “taboos.” Hegel’s “Preface” to the Phenomenology announces a philosophical project, and prose, aimed at “freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity . . . to bring fixed thoughts into a fluid state” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 20)—an obvious

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avatar for Jameson’s critical or dialectical ambition as writer, to undo “reification” or “thematization,” which is to say, to undo, breach, or open the “closure” of ideology itself. The irony—the so-fertile “contradiction”—is that Jameson’s prose must labor as mightily to evoke the “fixity” as to undo it. It is as if, stylistically, his “dialectical sentences” must enact Lukács’s thesis in History and Class Consciousness according to which Kant is the “bourgeois” philosopher whose “analytic” mastertrope of steady-state “antinomy” only the Hegelian “dialectic” can reframe as social “contradiction,” temporalizing, historicizing, and thus restoring the possibility (and the “Freedom”) of change to what Kant had eternalized as static and immutable “Necessity.” In Lukács, Kantian “antinomy” is a virtual figure for “reification”; Hegel himself had assimilated it to the merely “reflective” impasse of “bad infinity.”14 But, again, these Kant/Hegel binaries (antinomy/contradiction, analytic/dialectic, ideology/utopia) function in Jameson as terms less for a solution of the problems of critique and of culture, than for the statement, the fuller problematization, of them—as well, indeed, for the evocation of something more affective and more tangled, at once the felt anguish of the ideological problem and the urgency (promise, hope, desire) of the utopian solution. This tension operates everywhere in Jameson, though the emphases fall differently in different works, in different phases of his career. Think, for example, of The Prison-House of Language (1971), whose titular metaphor warns against precisely the trap of “ideological closure” such later works as The Political Unconscious (1981) will gloomily confirm. (Jameson even cites, as a telling symptom, structuralism’s “unhappy consciousness on the stylistic level” [PHL 209]; in The Political Unconscious, he will prescribe such a textual effect—a “vision” of “inevitable failure”—as a sine qua non of critique as such [PU 101–2].) The chapters to follow will narrativize or historicize this career-long process, tracing a trajectory from the relative “optimism” of, for example, Marxism and Form (1971), dating from a period when capitalism seemed shakier than at any time since the 1930s, to the darker “stoic” or “tragic” effects (the “stylistic unhappy consciousness”) of The Political Unconscious (1981) and other of Jameson’s late-1970s to early-1980s writing, written when the ravages of Brezhnev, and the portents of Reagan/ Thatcher, were becoming clear. (An irony here is the coincidence of the Soviet bloc’s decline and fall with the success of Jameson’s own professional fortunes.)15 Overlaying this historicizing scheme is the narrative of Jameson’s changing genre motivations: Marxism and Form is a work of (utopian) homage to canonical Western Marxists; the later works brood on the premise of cultural production precisely as instantiation of “ideological closure” itself. By the end of the 1970s, in works like Fables of Aggression (1979) and The Political Unconscious (1981),

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Jameson is projecting “ideological closure” as seamless, and its unbreachability as an article of faith (or rather despair), a motivation, a premise, indeed, as we have seen, a “vision” incumbent on “dialectical” effort as such (PU 102). Under the compulsion of such “visions of Necessity,” the “failure imperative” becomes a kind of “necessity-effect,” and Jameson’s writing, both in theme and practice, suffers an increasing desperation till, in the crucial “Postmodernism” essay (1984), Jameson himself protests its “winner loses logic” (P 5). The “stoic” and “tragic” impasses of “inevitable failure” and “impossible task” have become intolerable, and it is at this juncture in Jameson’s career that “the sublime” appears in his writing, both as a richly, if conflictedly, fertile figure or vehicle for various thematics of “the postmodern,” but also as a “textual effect” of the Jamesonian scriptible or “dialectical sentences” in which those thematics must achieve or assay their verbalization in written form. In the “Postmodernism” essay, Jameson projects the classical Burkean and Kantian “sublime” as, at once, a figure of critique’s predicament and of its “relief ” in “euphoria” and “joyous intensities” (P 28–9)—a move that compounds a Kantian (antinomic) “sublime” with a “subl(im)ation” bearing inflections from the Hegelian to the Freudian and beyond. “Postmodernism” was read by many as a sort of manifesto, an announcement that bad old modernism was dead, and we, its former hostages, were now liberated to pursue new and unprecedented prospects of jouissance. But “the sublime” the essay conjured, and the hopes and dreads invested in it, were more conflicted than that; and within a decade, Jameson would again be talking darkly of “The Antinomies [my emphasis] of Postmodernity” (ST 1–71). I read “the sublime” in Jameson’s oeuvre as what Kenneth Burke would call a “summarizing term”: it culminates Jameson’s longstanding preoccupation—his version of theory’s “crisis of representation”—with the problem, the “impossible task,” of representing the unrepresentable. From Marxism and Form on, it is the program of his “Marxist hermeneutic” to evoke “the [vast text of the] social,” the “absent [expressive/structural] cause,” the “totality,” for which Jameson, throughout his career, invents, borrows, or adapts such figures as “ideological closure,” “History itself,” “the [Lacanian] Real,” “the political unconscious,” the “world system” or “administered universe”—even, indeed, as if on some plane meta- to all of these, the dialectic itself. Of all these figures of the “unrepresentable,” “the sublime” offers a sublimation—at once a culmination and a relief—of critique’s dilemmas of representation, and of the success/failure dialectic or “winner loses logic” in which critique is fatedly entoiled. “The sublime” brings to Jameson’s chronic preoccupations a quite new inflection: formerly, for all the impossibility of the task of presenting the “absent,” representing the unrepresentable, Jameson maintained, in the writing, something of that “linguistic optimism” he singles out

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as the effect, the “style” indeed, of his first model Jean-Paul Sartre (S 208). As “ideological closure” became more oppressively his topic, the accents turned “stoic” and “tragic,” but still without foregoing some sense of “linguistic optimism” persisting. With “the sublime,” the crisis of representation at last suffers the antinomic non plus, the limit beyond which, if he cannot interpret what he cannot represent, Jameson must (if only temporarily) abandon hermeneutic itself. Characteristically, though, Jameson sounds this moment of anti-hermeneutic rather in the register of despair than of that “bliss” conjured by anti-hermeneuts from Barthes and Deleuze/Guattari to Susan Sontag. Since “the sublime” is a salient term of this study’s title, let me underline a crucial caveat: I present Jameson’s “sublime” as one phase—a crucial and in many ways culminating one, but still only one phase—of a long and diverse career. I do not mean, always and everywhere, to reduce (or inflate) Jameson’s success/failure dialectic to “the sublime.” “The sublime” connotes as theme, and performs as textual effect, an affect of bewildering engulfment, of boundaries overrun; my resort to a “narrativization” here, taken in full cognizance of narrative’s quaint outof-date-ness, is meant to assign the thematic of “the sublime” its proper “moment” in Jameson’s career, to keep it from overflowing what came before it, and what comes after (for a return to hermeneutic and related problematics does indeed transpire, as we shall see, in Jameson’s writing of the 1990s). On the other hand, “stoic” and “tragic” are not terms strictly discriminable either as meanings in Jameson’s usage, nor as moments of any narrativization of his career; their accents appear passim, and bleed into each other ad lib. Likewise “linguistic optimism,” always in tension with them, and only the more dialectically so with “the sublime,” since the latter, in the unstable way of Freud’s “antithetical” motifs, can function at one moment as the absolute other of linguistic optimism, at another as its very euphoria or intensité. I stage the collision of “ideological closure” with “the sublime,” then, as one of the more extreme (even “sublime”) episodes in the drama of Jameson’s oeuvre, because its vocabulary and connotations gave Jameson the highest voltages he had yet found with which to cathect a conflict that had been chronic and recurrent from Sartre (1961) on: the drama of the “failure imperative” itself, of the antinomic rigor of Kantian problems in unremitting agon with the dialectical (Hegelian) “neutralizations” necessary for “the production of utopian discourse” (IT2 75–102); the success and failure of critique itself as a “utopian discourse”; of “dialectical analysis,” of “Marxist hermeneutic,” of “transcoding,” “cognitive mapping,” and sundry other Jamesonian projects of various scopes and longevities; of elected heroes (Sartre, Barthes, Adorno, Lacan, even Wyndham Lewis)—of whatever vehicle is carrying the weight of Jameson’s own critical ambitions at a given

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moment, in a given book or essay, on a given page, in a given sentence. Which is why the career-narrative I have been outlining will function in this book less as a “thesis,” a “conclusion” all evidence will be marshalled to confirm, than as a premise, or point of departure, against which Jameson’s ambitions, continuously evolving, continuously projecting for themselves ever more exorbitant criteria of success and failure, will be put to the test, or rather shown to be putting themselves to the test, of those “dialectical sentences” Jameson is always writing. It is hard to know how to name the satisfactions of reading those sentences. “Eloquence” hardly sounds right, especially given Jameson’s affinity for avantgarde repudiations of art, beauty, and the like, “as usual,” his sympathy with “antiaesthetics” from Flaubert, Dreiser, and Lewis to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, video art, and beyond. My own sense of Jameson’s intellectual formation in the 1950s leads me to associate the peculiar energy of his writing with the reckless precisions of Glenn Gould or the dishevelled elegances of Franz Kline. Jameson’s prose can look slap-dash, but don’t be fooled: a comparison of, for example, earlier and later versions of the “Postmodernism” essay discloses that Jameson revises heavily, and in such a way as to augment polysemy, suggestiveness, and penumbral “effect” to the disadvantage of such conventional stylistic desiderata as expository clarity or cadenced closures.16 So Jameson’s is an “eloquence” whose distance from eloquence-as-usual is part of its point, and if “eloquence” seems not the mot juste, Jameson himself suggests an alias drawn from the opening pages of Roland Barthes’s S/Z: the “scriptible”—a word perhaps calculated to evade the connotations both of “eloquence” and of that other Barthesian word whose appropriation by “theory” Jameson so clearly regrets, “écriture.” I want to close by quoting a passage which displays the self-consciousness, and the libidinal volatility, of the success/failure theme, a passage in which Jameson evokes Barthes in a way that at once offers homage to Barthes, acknowledges—or claims—Barthes as a model (so that what the passage says about Barthes it also invites us to measure against Jameson himself ), and rewrites Barthes, to evoke a Barthes virtually remade in Jameson’s own image. Moreover, the passage broods over the word “scriptible ” itself, in a way that both asserts its attraction for Jameson as a reader, and confesses scriptibilité as an ambition of Jameson’s own as a writer. “Eloquence” or not, the passage is by any standard (and the relevant standards would include Adorno, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida, as well as Barthes) a pretty fancy piece of writing, and I don’t see how we can credit any reading of Jameson that fails to recognize that something like a kind of eloquence is here as in so many places in Jameson, very self-consciously the aim. The passage comes from the “Introduction” to Jameson’s 1992 collection of essays on film, Signatures of the Visible :

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Barthes thought certain kinds of writing—perhaps we should say, certain kinds of sentences —to be scriptible, because they made you wish to write further yourself; they stimulated imitation, and promised a pleasure in combining language that had little enough to do with the notation of new ideas. But I think he thought this because he took an attitude toward those sentences which was not essentially linguistic, and had little to do with reading: what is scriptible indeed is the visual or the musical, what corresponds to the two outside senses that tug at language between themselves and dispute its peculiarly unphysical attention, its short circuit of the sentences for the mind itself that makes of the mysterious thing reading some superstitious and adult power, which the lowlier arts imagine uncomprehendingly, as animals might dream of the strangeness of human thinking. We do not in that sense read painting nor do we hear music with any of the attention reserved for oral recitation; but this is why the more advanced and rational activity can also have its dream of the other, and regress to a longing for the more immediately sensory, wishing it could pass altogether over into the visual, or be sublimated into the spiritual body of pure sound. Scriptible is not however the poetry that actually tries to do that (and which is then itself condemned to the technical mediation of a relationship to language not much more “poetic” than the doctrine of the coloration of orchestral instruments and the specialized, painfully acquired knowledge of their technologies); it is the prose stimulated by the idea of sound, or the sentences that something visual—unfortunately, our only word for it is the image—calls into being by suggestion and by a kind of contamination. We don’t write about these things, it is not a metaphorical representation that the sensory pretext summons but rather something related by affinity, that prolongs the content of the object in another, more tenuous form, as though to prolong a last touch with the very fingertips (SV 2–3).

This is emphatically not academic prose as usual; if it were, for one thing, a much shorter excerpt would have sufficed to communicate its point. But the point here is that there is no (single) “point,” though the passage at first seems on its way to making one (something about Barthes’s notion of reading); rather, by the time we come to “that adult and superstitious power,” the dumb animals wondering at human abilities they can only dream of, while the humans for their part idealize the animal sensuality from which they feel cut off, we are clearly reading a prose concerned not to préciser, as the French say, an expository nuance but rather to evoke a desire whose dwelling place, we are told (and this is almost the one thing in the passage that could be thought of as “statement”), is not precisely in language (ponder the heretical implications of this, in our age of the “linguistic turn”) but somehow alongside it, not properly “linguistic” but paralinguistic, inhabiting a sort of

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penumbra of language, a shadow or force-field within which, or to the extent of which, those “outside senses” (“visual” and “musical”) continuously try to “tug” language out of the accustomed courses of an ambit determined by the semantic’s tragic mis-taking of itself for the somatic . . . A kind of poetry? No, the passage goes on to stipulate that the scriptible is precisely not “the poetry that actually tries to do that,” but is rather a “prose stimulated by the idea” (not the sensory experience?) of a sound or a vision, hinting self-consciously here at a (Luciferian/Baudelairean) impurity (“contamination”) profaning the very ethos of the binaries (human/animal, idea/senses, abstract/ concrete) that had underwritten the effects of the preceding paragraph, to evoke a beyond, or a both/and, where ideas and the senses somehow achieve a contact otherwise impossible, a touch otherwise categorically proscribed. This is a longing palpable as well in Late Marxism, a longing for a (Hegelian) tertium quid, a near-Platonic chora or “substance” of resolution, for a progress or at least the glimpse of a possibility beyond the antinomies of sensual and intelligible, perceptual and conceptual, particular and abstract, whose terms have dominated (and sundered) our culture’s thought and feeling for two centuries and more, severing “the aesthetic” from “ontology” (except, indeed, when either is being denounced as an unwitting version of the other), rather than enabling some “reconciliation” or Aufhebung of their dilemmas, limitations, foreclosures. (Hegelian associations here inflect Worsdworthian ones.) An impossible desire, of course; even more impossible a task—which is presumably why “We don’t write about these things”: though here Jameson is, writing about them, deploying the word “image ” (in italics) only in default, as he complains, of a better one, the whole ending on a complexly elegiac note, “as though to prolong a last touch with the very fingertips.” Longing, regret, nostalgia, “inevitable failure” sheerly as mood: the sorrow of that “last touch with the very fingertips” compounded by its mere figurality (if the fingertips are “very,” the touch itself is only an “as though”)—surely this is a scriptible with little of Barthes’s insouciance and exuberance; and that very distance attests the passage’s suggestiveness as a kind of program piece for a Jamesonian scriptible that yearns for an effect unique and unprecedented (and impossible), some intellectual-imaginative-affective “flow” or intensité never before cathected in prose or verse, like the light that never was on land or sea, right down to the Wordsworthian (con)fusion of longing for what never will be with nostalgia for what never was. And all this announced as the (impossible) ambition, confessed as the (unrealizable) desire, of a project not generically “literary” but rather critical : we are, after all, reading the introduction to a collection of essays on film. Some will complain that this is making too much of a purple passage; but I don’t see how a sensitive reading of Jameson can avoid asking what, in a passage

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like this, the nostalgic, sorrowful tone of the announcement of program imports for the program itself. Is critique a diminished thing if it fails of the effects Jameson proposes for it here? But just what is it that motivates these effects? Or, more pertinently, which is motivation, which device? Isn’t the ineffability the point? Aren’t these effects projected as impossible to begin with?—and isn’t the evocation of that impossibility, that impotence, that necessary failure, precisely the measure of the passage’s power and “effect”?—in short, its peculiar, unlooked-for success? Jameson’s writing seems to me to dramatize itself continually with agitations of this sort, and increasingly as his career proceeds. However fine the cut between (call it) utopia and ideology, Jameson’s resourceful prose endeavors to belabor every infinitesimal, every transferential relay of that difference or différance, that continuum/discontinuum dividing but also joining desire and terror, success and failure—orchestrating a continual slow-motion turbulence of immovable ideological objects in agon with irresistible utopian force. Which is why (again) I project “success or failure” in Jameson not as a chronic theme, a libidinal rhythm or refrain, or a thetic QED to be underlined as often as possible, but rather as the largest terms possible in or against which Jameson dramatizes his own project, testing, trying, interrogating the very possibility of critique in the sentence-bysentence activity of (his) writing it and (our) reading it—a resourceful, ingenious, continuously surprising proof or probe of the chances of critical (“dialectical”) thinking itself, in a writing whose improbable (impossible?) success is to make of its own failure the most trenchant possible critique of culture.

Chapter Two

The Dialectic of the Scriptible

Barthes and Adorno

The first sentence of Jameson’s first book (Sartre [1961]) features the word “sentence,” the fundamental semanteme of discourse (as opposed to language, in which the correlative function belongs to the sign).1 For Jameson, the sentence is the elementary product or manifestation of the writing activity, whether conceived as the labor of an author to achieve a “style” (as with Sartre in that early book), or, as in the more mediation-haunted constructions of Jameson’s later work, as the conflictedly determined (overdetermined) epiphenomenon of (and aleph to) the whole base-andsuperstructure pyramid of which it is, however transiently, at the moment of its writing, at the moment of its reading, the apex. The “sentence” is a salient motif in Sartre and Marxism and Form; in the essays of the 1970s, preeminently “The Ideology of the Text,” Jameson associates “the sentence” with Roland Barthes’s “scriptible ”; and the two terms henceforward often function as leitmotifs signalling each other’s presence. In The Political Unconscious, Jameson’s most determined effort to pass beyond the level of “manifest” content to the “latent” determinants, the “absent cause(s),” of that book’s eponymous “political unconscious,” “the sentence” and the scriptible recede; but they reemerge in Postmodernism (one of the book’s chapters is called “Sentences”) and in the recent essay, “The Existence of Italy” (SV 155–229). 21

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Obviously “the sentence” is a rich motif in Jameson’s work. I want here to focus Jameson’s projection of “the sentence” as the most immediate locus of the activities of writing and reading in and for themselves, not as indices or symptoms pointing elsewhere (though they do, and for Jameson analysis must eventually encompass that “elsewhere”), but as themselves constituting, so to speak, the lived experience, the vécu, of intellectual and critical labor. As we have seen, Jameson adapts Barthes’s term, the scriptible, from the opening pages of S/Z, where it is distinguished from the lisible ; and this binary of Barthes’s is an obvious analogon of Jameson’s distinction of a “dialectical” from a “reified” or “reifying,” “thematized” or “thematizing” prose. (The motif, widespread in our period, recurs under a number of aliases: Bakhtin’s “monologic/dialogic,” Lacan’s “enoncé/enonciation,” Derrida’s “thetic/athetic,” deMan’s “theory/reading,” even—with some qualifications—Bloom’s “weak/strong,” among others. Lacan’s primly ironic adversions to the New Testament serve as a reminder that the problematic at issue can be traced at least as far back as Paul’s binary of “spirit/letter.”) Barthes projects “reading” as itself a kind of “production,” and thus a kind of “writing,” of the text, and he prizes the scriptible as inviting, allowing, or requiring that activity from the reader, an opportunity or prerogative the officiously lisible text preempts by being written so “consumably” as to read itself, thus doing your reading for you. Jameson literalizes Barthes’s conceit to make the “writing” that the reader “produces” not merely the reading of the scriptible text but the actual writing of the reader’s own (new) text or “sentences” in response to it: “[Barthes’s] notion of the scriptible [involves] sentences whose gestus arouses the desire to emulate it, sentences that make you want to write sentences of your own” (IT1 21). The scriptible is thus an affair of transactions between texts, a kind of “intertextuality” that retains what many invocations of “intertextuality” calculatedly evade: not only, as we have seen, an insistence on something “outside the text,” but also an implication of influence (“the desire to emulate”), and a suggestion of something (extratextually) physical, some bodily “gestus,” in its workings. (After Barthes’s death, Jameson would eulogize him for having “taught us to read with our bodies—and often to write with them as well” [IT2 69]—a passage we will consider extensively below.) Moreover, Jameson invokes the scriptible in connection with writers he particularly admires—for instance, Barthes himself—so that this “intertextuality” involves not merely transactions between texts, but also between (another category “the ideology of text” proscribes) writers (a.k.a. the “author function”). That Sartre was, for the young Jameson, such a writer, his first book abundantly attests; by the same token, Sartre makes a good cautionary example against any too-simple notion of Jameson’s scriptible as “influence,” since obviously

THE DIALECTIC OF THE SCRIPTIBLE

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Jameson has never aspired to “emulate” Sartre as a dramatist, fictionist, or philosopher, nor even as a literary-cultural critic or polemicist, if that would mean Jameson’s producing work “like” Sartre’s. On the other hand, Jameson plainly admires in Sartre the embrace that can stretch from literature to philosophy and politics—the power to write stories and plays (Nausea, No Exit ) that give flesh and blood to philosophical and political apprehensions; and equally the readiness, in works of philosophy, to exercise novelistic powers of observation, inference and judgment (not to say imagination), as in the discussion of the “bad faith” of the waiter in the second chapter of Being and Nothingness. Indeed Sartre’s existentialism is for Jameson, far beyond his 1961 study of Sartre, an exemplary effort to join the philosophical acuities of a phenomenological Marxism to the moment-by-moment experience of the vécu—a program whose revolutionary possibilities underwrite that “linguistic optimism” that Jameson would later characterize as Sartre’s “omnipresent subject” (S 208; see especially the chapter of Sartre called “Transformations” [S 89–110]). Such ambitions, such possibilities, such effects obviously also animate Jameson’s own practice of the scriptible: not to choose between but to join (as in the passage quoted at the close of the preceding chapter) the high intellectual abstraction of the philosopher with the passional affect of the imaginative writer. And “the sentence”—the scriptible—is the agency of that embrace, the means or medium by which a writer like Sartre, or Jameson, gets from one place to the other; hence the ease with which the foregoing paragraph moved—indeed, the inevitability with which it was impelled—from the microlevel of the sentence to the largest ambitions both of Sartre and Jameson. Clearly this is an apprehension of the scriptible quite the reverse of that which would in its name fixate on the pleasures of the moment-by-moment motions of “the sentence” to the exclusion of larger considerations. (The code-word for this kind of aestheticizing, as against scriptible, is écriture. As much as he esteems Barthes, Jameson reproaches such aestheticization in S/Z itself in “The Ideology of the Text” [IT1 20].) On the contrary, Jameson takes the sentence as the aperture, the way of access, opening onto the larger determining contexts and conditions of the cultural surround, the symptomatic tip of the iceberg of the entire political unconscious—and this presupposition holds throughout his work, however the figure or the space of that larger totality might change. Let us quote in full here that first sentence from Sartre: The Origins of a Style : It has always seemed to me that a modern style is somehow in itself intelligible, above and beyond the limited meaning of the book written in it, and beyond even those precise meanings which the individual sentences that make it up are designed to convey (S, vii).

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“Style” is, of course, indissociable from “the sentences” that manifest it; but Jameson stresses here that even so, it is not reducible to them, or identifiable with them: its reach extends “above and beyond” its merely textual embodiments. In Sartre, indeed, “style” finally means something like the total meaning or (better) the cumulative authorial “gestus,” the characteristic movement, the (as it were) authorial carriage, the verbal body language, of an oeuvre—a way of conceiving literary labor (and success) rooted in the thematics of the writer as culture-hero, a producer of “works”—indeed, in all its most fully-blown romantic/modernist senses, an “author.” Jameson’s next book, Marxism and Form, shifts vocabulary from “style,” whose code says “author,” to “form,” which belongs rather to a “work,” and, in Jameson’s reading, registers the “objective” determinations of the cultural surround, that is, the role in the work of, so to speak, the not-author. Nevertheless a tendency to heroize favorite authors persists throughout Jameson’s work. The encounter with structuralism registered in The Prison-House of Language confronted Jameson with an anti-Sartrean, anti-phenomenological current of thought that declared the “death of the author” and brandished the slogan “from work to text” (in this, one of Jameson’s heroes, Barthes, was leading the attack on the other, Sartre); and henceforward what had seemed a virtue in a writer like Sartre would figure as rather a symptomatic inevitability—Balzac’s “libidinal investment or authorial wish-fulfillment,” for example (PU 155), Gissing’s “authentic ressentiment” (PU, chapter 4, passim), Conrad’s “will to style” (PU 225)—and along the same lines, Jameson advises in numerous places (for example, PU 124–5) that polemicizing against “the subject” or “the author” does not license analysis to behave as if these categories have been disposed of, and are no longer necessary and inescapable cruxes for critique. These moves amounted to retaining the “author” under the sign of the negative when others were proscribing “the author” altogether (as if a prescriptive selflessness—or abolition, or decentering, of the subject—were as easily said as done, a delusion Jameson cautions against [PU 125]).2 But my point for now is the much simpler one that particular writers remain “libidinal investments” of Jameson’s own, and to that extent the terms in which he considers them offer suggestive indices as to how, at a given moment, he conceives his own ambitions as writer and critic. Later chapters will consider Jameson’s transactions with various exemplars of hermeneutic, analytic and/or critical method, but the very model of how Jameson’s work responds to his enthusiasms for exemplary precursors is the scriptible itself, that is, Jameson’s passion for the writing, as writing, of various figures—the style and content (so to speak) of this passion, as well as its motivations and its consequences for his own writing.


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Again, the scriptible implies no simple or narrow kind of “influence,” and the point is confirmed by a moment’s consideration of some of the other writers Jameson especially likes. Barthes, for example, to whom Jameson acknowledges “a heavy debt” in the “Foreword” to Sartre (S xii): no particularity of Jameson’s verbal style or mannerism would ever “remind” anyone of Barthes; in the passage quoted at the close of the preceding chapter, for example, a passage that launches itself with an evocation of Barthes himself, Jameson’s prose evinces a “gestus ” or body-language very different from any to be found in Barthes’s own prose. Nor is Jameson’s enthusiasm for this or that writer’s scriptible predicated on ideological sympathy, as witness his taste for Heidegger; the case of Barthes is exceptional only in the extent to which Jameson has committed his ideological reservations to the record (see “The Ideology of the Text” and “Pleasure: A Political Issue”), alongside his homage and his admiration. So the scriptible entails neither verbal nor ideological resemblance— although there is the weird case of Wyndham Lewis (on which, more later) to suggest that the two possible kinds of resemblance may even enter into an inverse relationship, for while Jameson calls Lewis a “fascist,” the “sentences” he writes about Lewis come closer than Jameson elsewhere ever does to actually aping those of their subject: The style of Lewis . . . blasts through the tissues of his novels like a steam whistle, breaking them to its will. For the mechanical, the machinelike, knows an exaltation peculiarly its own: “a motor-car roaring at full speed, as though bearing down on the machine-gun itself, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,” cried Marinetti, in words that echoed around the world like the pulsing telegraph waves upon the emblematic globe of the old newsreels . . . (FA 25)

One might, granted, take the nostalgia of that last image as camp, rather than straight, but that is still short of calling the passage a parody of Lewis, or saying that the book as a whole is some sort of exorcism-by-parody of Lewis. Jameson’s own word “pastiche” might, however, do (if we may bracket the derogatory connotations it bears in Jameson’s usage), as indicating an homage to a “style”—in the extended sense of that first sentence of Sartre—that yet declines to take on the baggage of the stylist’s “content.” Jameson theorizes postmodern “pastiche”—“a neutral practice of mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse . . . Pastiche is thus blank parody” (P 17)—as a symptom of contemporary reification; his own practice, in the Lewis book, is of course more self-conscious than that he indicts as cultural symptom in Postmodernism; commodifying pastiche involves a sort of deadness to “content,” and consequently an

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inability to satirize it; whereas in Jameson’s transactions with Lewis what is at stake is a very calculated distance between the ideology of Lewis’s verbal energy and Jameson’s own—not a missed chance at satire, but an effort at a very nuanced and discriminated hommage. So, again, simple stylistic “resemblance” is not in question here. But one thing the Jamesonian scriptible does apparently entail—indeed, the first thing most of us think of when we think “Jameson”—is “difficulty”: Jameson’s prose is notoriously heavy going, and in this it does resemble or even exceeds his precursors/exemplars. Here, too, Jameson’s tastes (to call them that) are indicative: for instance, again, his always-respectful references to Heidegger, a case highly questionable on purely ideological grounds. (“I know I will be misunderstood,” writes Jameson, “if I add that I have a sneaking admiration for Heidegger’s attempt at political commitment, and find the attempt itself morally and aesthetically preferable to apolitical liberalism” [P 257].) The “question of Being” Heidegger poses in the opening lines of Being and Time yields hundreds of pages of obscurity that must surely, in their own day, have seemed a limit point for philosophical “difficulty.” And as important as the difficulty itself is that it is programmatic: Being and Time, for example, poses its question under the aegis of an epigraph from Plato recommending “perplexity” as a sign that “thinking” is treading something like the right path—a path whose (in)direction for Heidegger must be away from Cartesian certitudo. (Observe the contrast of Jameson’s enthusiasm for Heidegger’s difficulty with his coolness to Heidegger’s two incongruously lucid legatees, HansGeorg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.) Or compare Jameson’s regard for Lyotard’s sublimely screwy Libidinal Economy (1974): for years Lyotard refused to reprint that “book of evilness,” as he called it,3 but on the evidence (which includes Jameson’s “Foreword” to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition) it seems to be the only work of Lyotard’s for which Jameson feels real libidinal or “writerly” enthusiasm. Or such an over-the-top, kick-out-the-jambs, post-1960s blowout as the Deleuze-Guattari Anti-Oedipus (1972): it is via the latter’s rough and tumble polemic for how a text works rather than what it means that Jameson deploys the distinction so neatly worked out in terms of Erklären/Verstehen by Paul Ricoeur— even in a chapter, the program piece to The Political Unconscious, concerned to valorize “interpretation” against such “anti-hermeneuts” as Deleuze and Guattari themselves (PU 21–3). And likewise Jameson’s praises of another, very different, virtuoso of “difficult” prose, Jacques Lacan; I will have more to say below about his invocation of Lacan’s “discourse of the analyst”; here it will suffice to cite his praise of Lacan’s “L’inconscient, c’est le discours de l’autre” as “a sentence [my emphasis] rather than an idea, by which I mean that it marks out the place of a meditation, and offers itself as an object of exegesis, instead of serving as the expression of a


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single concept” (PHL 170–1). Some of Jameson’s enthusiasms are more guarded or qualified than these—Foucault, for example, the power and interest of whose writing as writing Jameson acknowledges, but whose disdain of Marxism Jameson disapproves. His wariness of Derrida partakes of his reservations about écriture and “textuality,” on which more in a moment. And of course, many of Jameson’s enthusiasms (Lukács, Marcuse, Greimas) have nothing to do with their writing, with the scriptible in its stronger senses, at all. But however indispensable the scriptible might be as a condition of any achievement Jameson might credit as a success, there are also pitfalls: ways in which the ambition to such “writerliness” may go wrong, may fail. A dangerous “dialectic of the scriptible ” impends insofar as “resistance to thematization” can take forms that Jameson disapproves, and from which he is at pains to distinguish his own “writerly” efforts. Some among his contemporaries sought to prevent the reduction to mere “content” by making as if to abolish “content” itself, for instance, the neo-aestheticism that celebrates écrire as verbe intransitif. Jameson warns against that old story (the ivory tower as “prison-house”) throughout his writings of the 1970s. Closer to the quick, he does not want his scriptible taken for merely another version of écriture—especially since the coiner of both terms (and of other formulae dear to ideologues of the text, like Écrire: Verbe intransitif ? itself ) was Jameson’s own Roland Barthes (Barthes, Rustle of Language 11–21; on Jameson’s efforts to preserve Barthes against those who read him this way, more below). But throughout his career, Jameson cautions against any account of representation, any methodology of analysis or interpretation, that makes language or “text” the limit of what can be discussed, thus bracketing “the referent” (history, politics, economic relations, the social). For Jameson, precisely to restore or evoke the determination of those extra-representational forces on social and private experience generally as well as on particular cultural productions must be the ultimate aim of any critical reading; and not merely to evoke but actually to enact these determinations on and in the writing itself is likewise fundamental, determining, for the ambition of his own critical or hermeneutic scriptible. Thus far, Jameson himself indicates the ways a critical or dialectical scriptible may succeed or fail. But in the actual writing, the allure of possible accomplishment and the peril of possible pitfalls manifest themselves in agitations not so readily schematized. I want now to read some of Jameson’s early work on Barthes and Adorno, with an eye to how his treatment of two of his most important early models (announced as such in the “Foreword” to Sartre [S xii]) imply not only the ambitions of Jameson’s own early work, but his projection of the prospects, the possibilities of success or failure, of critique generally. The kinds of success Jameson ascribes to Barthes and Adorno are very different, as we shall see; but

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these early discussions also project the possibilities of critical success and failure in terms (and in tones) very different from what we find in Jameson’s later work. In the earlier work, the tasks may be daunting, but the enthusiasm generated by a Barthes or an Adorno (as by Sartre earlier) makes their accomplishment seem feasible, and well worth the risks of failure; later the impossibility of the “impossible task” will loom larger, will seem less figurative, with effects both for the style and the substance of Jameson’s later writing. In 1972, Jameson’s pages on Barthes in The Prison-House of Language (145–61) project a bracingly sanguine assessment of what critique might do and be, and the possibilities Barthes is praised for opening are all but explicitly possibilities Jameson proposes for his own work to assay. And notably, Barthes’s achievement is projected, throughout, as inseparable from his prose style. Jameson foregrounds the power of Barthes’s sensibility to discern, and of his writing to evoke on the page, a doubleness or ambiguity in the textures of “the signified” itself that extends beyond mere language, and that (with a Barthes’s insight) “can make itself felt as a kind of density and resistance beneath the transparency of the signs” (PHL 147), giving access to a “vertical dimension” that extends deeper than “the older critical terminology of the unconscious” to reach into the further depths of “the body”: “for Barthes indeed the body is the very source of style itself as a private phenomenon, as obsession, and [quoting Barthes] ‘the decorative voice of unknown secret flesh’” (PHL 151). The whole discussion, notable for its extensive quotations from Barthes, and for the Baudelairean floridity of the quotations it chooses, is at pains to demonstrate that Barthes’s style “is an attempt to lend a second voice to the signified, to articulate its organization before it finds its final and official version in the primary signifier itself, in the text” (PHL 152–3)—terms that anticipate Jameson’s later talk of resisting “thematization” in suggesting that the real life of what language tries to communicate will already have been betrayed by the time the impulse achieves “its final and official version” in textual form. More to the point, the terms in which Jameson valorizes Barthes’s project are palpably the terms in which we are invited to read Jameson’s own writing, for Jameson’s prose is clearly aiming to adopt and fulfill what he here identifies as Barthes’s program—not a style “like” Barthes’s style, but rather a style trying to achieve something like what Barthes’s manages to achieve: in [Barthes’s] sumptuous and perverse style, in which the ideas are not so much unfolded as laterally evoked by the very materiality of vocabulary itself, what comes into being are unstable conceptual entities, the very forms of the signified itself, as they darken the other side of language, constantly dissolving and reforming be-


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fore our eyes. The very function of the style’s artificiality is to announce itself as a metalanguage, to signal by its own impermanency the essential formlessness and ephemerality of the object itself (PHL 154).

A passage like this prompts the reflection that Jameson’s later parody/pastiche binary (P 16–9) elides or represses a “utopian” tertium quid, a kind of verbal-imaginative-intellectual “emulation” that registers neither satirical critique (like parody) nor the narcissism of dissociated, affectless technique for its own sake (like pastiche) but an “emulation” that honors by reinventing its original, and for which there is for now no better name than the scriptible itself. More problematically, though, the terms of this evocation/emulation of Barthes’s scriptible are notably at odds with those of structuralism itself, the very terms that give Jameson’s book its title, according to which language, the domain of the signifier, is a prison-house, the text is that which has no outside (let alone, as in the passage, an “other side”), and the signified is merely an “effect” of the signifier, not a transverbal entity or agent capable of “darkening” the signifier from that “other side” beyond or behind it. Jameson had earlier evoked the “transparency of the signs” (PHL 147); the structuralist rather deems language’s “transparency” an illusion, in (binary) relation to which any putative “opacity” (or “materiality”?) would be merely another “effect.” And consider Jameson’s use here of “metalanguage,” which quite inverts its usual connotations: the term usually means a second-order language expressly designed to get above or outside some primary language; the very possibility of such a thing is a notoriously complicated problem for structuralism and was a major crux in the coupure between structuralism and poststructuralism. But in Jameson’s usage here its implications are altogether different: not an instrumental conceptual construct enabling “subject” to better manipulate “object,” but rather a verbal or linguistic gestus or “participation” (or methexis, a word Adorno borrows from Plato)4 answering to some more intuitive, risky kind of attention to things (Jameson will later invoke the Lacanian “Écoute” [IT1 115])—not the tool of an analytic will-to-power but the trace of a unique and momentary passage resulting rather from some surrender, some readiness to yield, to submerge, to sink below language’s deceptively ordered surfaces, while nevertheless retaining a hyper-selfconsciousness about doing so.5 “Metalanguage,” in short, as not a “language beyond” but a “beyond language”—effectively erasing the difference between language and metalanguage to the extent that language is already metalanguage, beyond itself, “language beyond language,” a sort of buzzing epiphenomenon, an auratic pneuma-soma that only spectrally outlines, without ever fully embodying or quite containing, the impulses of the signified, “the essential formlessness and

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ephemerality of the object itself ”—a sort of Barthesian désir mantled with the mysteries of Heideggerian Being. Thus does Jameson enlist Barthes in a protest against structuralist “prison-house” conceptions of language, and in a discussion ostensibly figuring Barthes as an exemplar of structuralism. But the discussion proceeds to a shift in emphasis, from language generally to that special (and historical) disposition of language that is “style.” For Barthes, the historical advent of “style” is virtually coincident with that of high “literature” itself, and hence for a century or so literature has been entoiled in an effort to escape “literature,” first by increasingly rigorous exercises of style (Flaubert), more recently by even more exorbitantly ascetic renunciations of it (Robbe-Grillet), what Barthes calls “white [or “zero degree”] writing” (PHL 155–6). Jameson characterizes the latter in terms that might be thought applicable to some of his own writing, especially of the later 1970s, “in which an austere neutrality and stylistic asceticism would be charged with the absolution of the guilt inherent in the practice of literature” (PHL 158). This “guilt of art” motif will recur in Jameson’s work through Postmodernism and Late Marxism. But Jameson advises that “absolution” from the coils of language and literature via “white writing” can never be more than temporary; the “utopian” and “political” potential of the initial makingstrange, will, with the passage of time, eventually (all too soon) be domesticated, re-familiarized, “for writing cannot stay white, what began by being a blankness of manner little by little turns around into a mannerism, absence of sign”: the “connotational” effect by which, Barthes observes, the passé simple says “I am Literature” becomes “a sign itself ” (PHL 157–9). This familiar cultural syndrome, whereby a “strange-making” innovation fatedly becomes in its turn just another stale convention, is a frequent theme in Jameson; it is part of what he means by “thematization,” and it exemplifies a dialectic virtually definitive of our culture’s avant-garde(s), whereby the very success of a cultural or aesthetic innovation insures and accelerates its eventual failure. (Had it failed initially, in the sense that no one responded to it, it would never incur the subsequent fate of becoming clichéd. Hence, for instance, Jameson’s enthusiasm for Wyndham Lewis: since Lewis was never canonized, his modernism remains pristinely subversive in ways Jameson dares hope may prove proleptic for postmodernism [FA 1–23]. Jameson cannot therefore altogether regret that “I have never been able to transmit my enthusiasm for Lewis to anyone, I’m not quite sure why” [Diacritics 74]). In thus recapitulating the argument of Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero, Jameson foregrounds an alternative Barthes attests not by precept, but by example: that is, in the very act of rehearsing Barthes’s advocacy of “white” or “zero degree” writing as a response to the “guilt” of literature, Jameson valorizes (something al-


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together different), Barthes’s own “sumptuous and perverse” practice of style. To a degree this move involves Jameson’s genre: as if “critique” need not (yet, in 1972) burden itself with the obligation assumed by the novel to dissociate itself from “literature.” The motive of escaping literariness, and the possibilities of critique as a vehicle for that ambition, are issues that will recur below; for now, recall the poststructuralist objection (for example, Derrida’s) that no writing can be “white” to begin with: Jameson elides this more disabling objection, preserving a margin of possibility for “style,” and (interestingly) a temporal one—that interval when an aesthetic innovation can have its effect, before its domestication by its own success re-”familiarizes” it. Barthes will later, in S/Z, theorize this process of literary “connotation” by which literature seeks ever new ways to say “I am [or am not] Literature,” and how such connotation commences to connote not the thing itself but its mere “effect”; here, however, in the Prison-House of Language, Jameson can still invest hope in some possibility, however transient or circumscribed, of stylistic (or anti-stylistic) revolution. But what hope, exactly? Jameson seems to close the door on “white writing” as a means to the aim Barthes proposes for it, namely “absolution of the guilt of literature”; but is that to say that a different stylistic practice would better accomplish that aim, or that the aim itself is misconceived? Perhaps it is Jameson’s deference to Barthes that keeps this question latent, or perhaps it is rather some wariness that here is a “thematization” that had best be avoided. But at stake are large questions: how, and at what, might literature generally, and (closer to the bone for Jameson himself ) critique in particular, succeed or fail? Absent any “answer” from Jameson to these questions, we must infer what we can from Jameson’s appraisal of the stylistic practice of Barthes, and from the gestus of Jameson’s own scriptible, the, as it were, “body language” of his writing style, taking “style” (again) in that enlarged sense opened in the first words of Sartre. What goes without saying—but let’s say it—is that Jameson’s manifest enthusiasm for Barthes’s writing means that he considers Barthes to have succeeded at something eminently worth trying for, something presumably larger than (however rooted in, and apparently conditional upon) that Barthesian effect Jameson praised above, that physicalization of language and intellect so as to rejoin their energies with those of “the body” (which in Jameson’s account assimilates Barthes to Sartre himself ). It is important to remember that the “Barthes” in question here is the early, political Barthes of Writing Degree Zero, which Jameson would later (1983) characterize as “still situated within an essentially Sartrean problematic, that of What is Literature?,” and sharing Sartre’s “vision of history as a nightmare of blood guilt” (IT2 68). In this connection of “style” with “guilt,” Jameson accepts the Barthesian (and Sartrean) premise that style carries with it historical baggage that

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compromises its utopian aspirations—not only in the sense that it defeats them outright, but, more insidiously and demoralizingly, that it haunts utopian desire itself with the possibility of “false consciousness,” of harboring “imaginary solutions to real contradictions.” The “guilt” in this discussion is class guilt, in which style is implicated by reason of its functioning in literature as a marker by which “a work chooses its basic audience” (PHL 156); Jameson’s examples—the mass market “best-seller,” the proletarian “communist novel,” and “official avant-garde literature”—anticipate his later protests against the self-commodifying ethos of “full postmodernism,” by which the consumer-citizen takes it as a privilege to cooperate actively in his or her “interpellation” by a commercial system constantly refining its subdivision of target audiences into ever more sharply defined market niches (see, e.g., chapter 8 of Postmodernism). In Postmodernism, indeed, Jameson will make explicit what he leaves implicit here, the extension of this “guilt” from literature and art to “theoretical discourse” (like his own) as well (P 391–9). Here, though, the point is left hanging. Invoking the “guilt” of literature, of course, conjures with a moral extremity that burdens the scriptible in dramatic ways—and, by that very token, it also opens, for the practice of the scriptible, opportunities for drama. Which makes, when the possibilities of the scriptible are joined with the aspirations of critique, for a vast enlargement of the terms in which critical ambitions—like Barthes’s, or Jameson’s—can succeed or fail. In the present case: if Jameson characterizes “white writing” as an effort at “absolution of guilt,” his own preference for the Barthesian excess of “style” might be taken to imply that “absolution” is itself an ideologically misconceived project: that is, that its “success” would actually be a moral failure, insofar as the guilt of our history is one from which, on Jameson’s Marxist terms, no “absolution” can be possible—not, at least, short of the revolution—and for which any “absolution” could only be a bourgeois lie, or delusion, “an imaginary solution to a real contradiction.” But if absolution from guilt is impossible, that very impossibility is what generates and sustains certain powerful kinds of rhetorical/libidinal tension and force—and indeed, of pathos—for the kinds of critical writing Jameson applauds in Barthes. For Barthes does not try to absolve himself or his project from the “guilt” of the capitalist condition; on the contrary, he defies it, pronouncing a peccavi in which the confession of guilt is also a kind of boast, a gesture of transgression that at once confesses the pain of alienation from the regnant social order and declares a subversive non serviam to the ideology or belief system that maintains and inflicts that regime of pain. It is also—transvaluation of values—a flat refusal of certain kinds of guilt altogether (an assertion that such and such “guilty” pleasures are not sinful at all), which means that insofar as, in our cultural context, absolution


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from guilt is only purchased at the cost of confessing complicity in it, Barthes refuses absolution itself; his writing’s conjuration of guilt, its calculated aura of corruption and taintedness, do not, after all, seek any accommodation with prudes. It bids not for absolution, but for vindication, now, nothing less than a sort of “permanent [intellectual/libidinal] revolution” staged in the eternally suspended present of reading/writing. Barthes’s drama of transgression offers its own “negation” of the normative community, and equally makes appeal to dissidents—like Jameson, like ourselves—who, thus addressed (“interpellated”?) feel ourselves, for the moment, in greater or lesser degree, members of another, more utopian or libidinal social body. Indeed, this explicit politicization of the libidinal body could be said to constitute Barthes’s unique position in that long and peculiarly French tradition (Sade, Baudelaire, Gide) of l’immoraliste (so different from the moralism of AngloAmerican radicalism); just as, equally, it is Barthes’s potent sexualization of the body politic that makes him, even more than Sartre,6 the inevitable matrix for a discussion of what apparently most compels Jameson in the reading and writing of the scriptible, that possible “utopia of style” (PHL 158) itself. But the motif of utopia compels only to the extent that it bears upon itself the stigmata of our dystopian (“ideological”) condition; it displays these wounds, indeed, as guarantee (never airtight, to be sure) against the charge of false consciousness. Hence an interesting comment on “style” further along in The Prison-House of Language, in which Barthes figures as instantiation of a condition of structuralist writing styles: whether hermetic or white, whether the high style and classical pastiche of Lévi-Strauss or the bristling neologisms of Barthes, whether the self-conscious and over-elaborate preparatory coquetterie of Lacan or the grim and terroristic hectoring of Althusser—there is in all these styles a kind of distance from self, what one would like to call an unhappy consciousness on the stylistic level. By the terms of their own system they can never accede to the calm density of such a primary language as that of Hegel; and the professional duality of the Structuralists (who are both Structuralists and specialists in one particular discipline) only reflects this initial stylistic and ontological dispersal (PHL 209).

The passage poses, again, the task or hope (possible or impossible?) of rejoining elements whose “dispersal” figures as a sign of our reified times (Jameson’s oft-repeated premise goes without saying here, that Marxism is the “untranscendable” totalization within which alone such a reunification would be possible). That the dispersal is “stylistic and ontological” makes it at once immediate and ultimate, and would seem to make practices of “style” central to the predicament itself no less than to any critical or therapeutic response to it.

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As for the “calm density of such a primary language as that of Hegel,” could one substitute the name of Sartre for Hegel in that formulation?—for one way of reading the structuralist rejection of Sartre is as a judgment (adverse) that his consciousness was not “unhappy” enough: his elaborate if finally rather pat moralism of the self (“existential psychoanalysis,” Freud without the unconscious, impeccability, the choice, condemned to freedom, and so on) of course fully acknowledged the awfulness of our time; but did it not propose rather too satisfactory, too heroic, too complacent, even, finally, too self-congratulatory (not to mention too “subject-centered”) a “solution” to it? I raise these questions as a way of access to some of the complications attendant upon the question of the ways in which critique might succeed or fail. For on the one hand, the “stylistic unhappy consciousness” Jameson posits could be read as a failure to achieve a Hegelian calm density (or primariness) of language; on the other, such a (“happy”?) linguistic consciousness (or “linguistic optimism”) might more immediately signal a gross failure to reckon adequately with conditions (ours) of cultural contradiction in which “happiness” itself would be an unforgivable moral lapse (the brief many still carry against Hegel himself—including Sartre indeed, who objects to Hegel’s “optimism,” both “epistemological” and “ontological,” and concludes that “Hegel’s optimism results in failure” [Being and Nothingness 294–8]). Jameson leaves these possibilities in suspension, mediating between them only by means of style, by the motions and energies, the rises and falls, the excitements and disappointments, of his own sentences. The point is not to bring Jameson down at one pole or the other of the problematic within which, in a given passage, he circles, but rather to assess how the movements of his writing probe the limits of that problematic, and register the pressures that impel motion in one or another direction within it. For obvious reasons, Barthes (not Sartre) has seemed the figure with whom to begin this demonstration; and the Barthes in question is, again, the early, political Barthes: The Prison-House of Language predates by two years Le Plaisir du texte, the Barthesian manifesto, in America perhaps the best-known of his works, which would transform the terms of the discussion above quite decisively, as the moralism and prudery against which Barthes so provocatively turned his effrontery suddenly included the political “rigor” of “Left puritanism.” Here was a Barthes who, affirming (so to speak) an at least “relative autonomy” of “pleasure” from history, would refuse to leave joy permanently a hostage to politics (a sort of perpetual unhappy consciousness in the place where perpetual revolution should be) but would instead bargain for what gratifications he could get, reification and the blood guilt of history notwithstanding. I will have more to say later about


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Jameson’s response to Barthes’s development—“What Barthes was, and what he became” (IT2 65) as he put it in “Pleasure: A Political Issue” (1983), in which he maintained that the immense merit of [Le Plaisir du texte] is to restore a certain politically symbolic value to the experience of jouissance, making it impossible to read the latter except as a response to a political and historical dilemma, whatever position one chooses (puritanism/hedonism) to take about that response itself (IT2 69).

For now, I have wanted to stress Barthes as a figure for a libidinal and utopian practice of the scriptible, for the “linguistic optimism” of Jameson’s early career— or rather, for a valiant but doomed attempt in such a direction, an attempt ready to register on its own pulses the “objective” obstacles it meets with and the failures it thereby exposes itself to. A sharp and illuminating contrast to all this is provided by Theodor W. Adorno, whom Jameson coupled with Barthes in the “Foreword” to Sartre by way of acknowledging “a heavy debt.” Adorno is one of only three figures whom Jameson has treated at book-length (the others are Sartre and Wyndham Lewis, an odd trio indeed [the list now includes Brecht]) in a study whose title (Late Marxism, a companion piece to Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism), whose tone (melancholy), and whose very gesture (recommending Adorno when even Marxists had long since written him off ) make it appropriate to think of Adorno as totem in Jameson’s work of the “late” as such—not least because Adorno’s own rhetoric of the non plus is so powerfully terminal, even apocalyptic—or perhaps rather “gnostic” in the sense of Harold Bloom’s deft aphorism that gnosticism ensues upon failed apocalyptic as apocalyptic ensues upon failed prophecy (Poetics of Influence 374). I do not assimilate Adorno’s tone to that “messianism” of Walter Benjamin’s recently revived by Derrida and Jameson, though it might be appropriate for Jameson himself. Compare the wistful turn—“better late than never!”—which closes Jameson’s prologue to Late Marxism; on the preceding page he sardonically refers to “actually receding socialism” (LM 11). Much as the early Barthes figures in Jameson as a more eroticized and theoretically up-to-date Sartre, Adorno stands as twentieth-century exemplar of a specifically (late) Hegelian-Marxist form of “unhappy consciousness.” And stylistic unhappy consciousness preeminently—particularly, as we shall see, in “late Jameson.” But the earlier Jameson’s transactions with Adorno, in Marxism and Form, illustrate another (utopian) facet of the scriptible, as the power of Adorno’s writing as writing seems rather to enact than propositionally to argue a kind of redemption from that “unhappy consciousness” that Adorno so

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powerfully expresses and protests. The power of Adorno’s prose is a constant theme in all of Jameson’s writing about him, from Marxism and Form, in which Adorno figures as exemplary in the “Preface,” as well as being awarded pride of place as the subject of the book’s opening chapter, through Late Marxism itself, Postmodernism, and the later writing (preeminently “The Existence of Italy”) in Signatures of the Visible. In the “Preface” to Marxism and Form, indeed, Adorno’s prose style appears as initial instance of a central premise of the book, that “dialectical thought turns out to be nothing more or less than the elaboration of dialectical sentences” (M&F xii; cf. 53). Hence, among other things, a rationale for the extreme difficulty of writing like Adorno’s: It can be admitted that [the “Germanic ” style of Western Marxist writing] does not conform to the canons of clear and fluid journalistic writing . . . But what if those ideals of clarity and simplicity have come to serve a very different ideological purpose . . . ? What if, in this period of the overproduction of printed matter and the proliferation of methods of quick reading, they were intended to speed the reader across a sentence in such a way that he can salute a readymade idea effortlessly in passing, without suspecting that real thought demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence? In the language of Adorno—perhaps the finest dialectical intelligence, the finest stylist of them all—density is itself a conduct of intransigence: the bristling mass of abstractions and cross-references is precisely intended to be read in situation, against the cheap facility of what surrounds it, as a warning to the reader of the price he has to pay for genuine thinking. The resolute abstractness of this style stands as an imperative to pass beyond the individual, empirical phenomenon to its meaning . . . I cannot imagine anyone with the slightest feeling for the dialectical nature of reality remaining insensible to the purely formal pleasures of such sentences, in which the shifting of the world’s gears and the unexpected contact between apparently unrelated and distant categories and objects find sudden and dramatic formulation (M&F xiii).

The program of Marxism and Form is announced in this passage, and Adorno is made its standard bearer. The book’s Adorno chapter reprises these motifs—the need (in art and criticism) for a “refusal of all habitual response in [the] attempt to reawaken numb thinking and deadened perception to a raw, wholly unfamiliar real world” (M&F 3)—in ways that recall Adorno’s own allegiance (which Jameson only ambivalently shares, or, better, only ambivalently resists) to high modernism. In celebrating Adorno’s power to forge (the chapter’s title) “Historical Tropes,” Jameson’s very language is sufficiently “aesthetic” to prompt Jameson to wariness


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against valorizing Adorno merely as wit and as writer: the question of what motivates the connection an “historical trope” draws between the two or more terms it juxtaposes—is it some “objective” historical reality, or merely the troper’s (Adorno’s, Jameson’s) uniquely brilliant fancy?—becomes a sort of subtext throughout the book and later, expressed in anxieties about the consequences for method and for scriptible of necessity/contingency. (“It is not, I would like to emphasize, a question of taste,” Jameson insists, “anymore than dialectical thinking is a question of opinion ; but it is also true that there can be no reply to anyone choosing to discuss the matter in those terms” [M& F xiii–xiv].) More on this below; for now suffice it to say that most immediately the persistence of this problem evinces (again) Jameson’s readiness to entertain reservations, scruples, anxieties about how his own project, or “dialectical” projects generally, might succeed or fail. But postpone them as we may, such methodological difficulties are already anticipated—on Jameson’s showing, all “dialectical” difficulties are already inscribed— in the labored coils of Adorno’s “dialectical sentences” themselves: It is as though everything in the life work of T. W. Adorno were designed to arouse and exacerbate the very socio-economic phenomenon that it denounces: the division of labor, the fragmentation of intellectual energies into a host of seemingly unrelated specialized disciplines. So it is that Adorno’s critique of modern culture [is] one of the most thorough-going and pessimistic that we possess . . . (M&F 3)

Here is valorized a style of critique that operates not merely to analyze, and precisely not to “solve,” but rather, more conflictedly, to “arouse and exacerbate” the conditions it “denounces”—to announce and protest “unhappy consciousness,” so to speak, by giving it a voice, even a style, and by amplifying it, even exaggerating it, if such a thing is possible. To insist, unflinchingly, on our culture’s ideological and material failures, indeed, to assert them so potently that even the most “numbed” or conscienceless reader cannot help feeling their sting: such are the terms in which to take the measure of the success of Adorno’s (paradoxically, ironically, “dialectically”) failure-obsessed writing, his potent evocation of critical impotence, his highly wrought scriptible of disaster. If Barthes’s appeal for Jameson is his evocation of the utopian, Adorno stands as his exemplar of the antithetical but equally indispensable view, the prospect through the other end of the telescope, the descent into the inferno of the “administered universe,” the imperative searching and sifting through the wreckage of the “damaged life,” the toil, at once elegiac, diagnostic, and polemical, of the “negative dialectic.” In the chapter on Adorno in Marxism and Form, Jameson conceives Adorno’s strategy of the “historical trope” in aestheticizing terms (for example, the

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Poundian “ideogram” [M&F 6]) deriving from Anglo-American high modernism. Jameson projects Adorno’s practice of the “historical trope,” in effect, as a sort of imagist poetics of social and cultural analysis. But this enthusiasm is peculiarly at odds with the stylistic effect suggested above: the “historical trope” juxtaposes “incommensurable realities,” bringing “momentarily” into being “a kind of reconciliation between the realm of matter and that of spirit” in which the “essentially abstract character of the ideological phenomenon suddenly touches earth . . . while there flashes across the material dimension itself a kind of transfiguration” in which matter “finds itself unexpectedly spiritualized” (M&F 8). It would be possible to assimilate these “incommensurable realities” to the “self-difference(s)” adumbrated above in Jameson’s account of Barthes, though here the utopian move is to rejoin them, whereas in Jameson’s account of Barthes the utopian possibility prolonged itself precisely in the persistence of their non-correspondence. But what I want to stress in this passage is its momentary forgetfulness, in this anthem-blast on the note of “reconciliation,” of that “unhappy consciousness” that, for Adorno, critique must never, can never, forget—for how, indeed, is it possible that any “damaged life” ever could forget it? If Jameson here can seem to forget it, it is by reason of his sheer enthusiasm for Adorno, manifest in such antic gestures as his praise of Adorno’s practice of “the footnote as a lyrical form” in a (lyrical) paragraph contained in (yes) a footnote (M&F 9n2). But more pointed is his formulation of Adorno’s effort to “exacerbate and arouse” rather than “reconcile” the contradictions and dissonances that harass him, and with which he wants to insure that art and critique will harass us. Jameson points out (M&F 38) that “reconciliation” is a troubled crux in Adorno, who seeks always to problematize any facile invocation of the Hegelian passage of thesis and antithesis into synthesis. Jameson, indeed, projects Adorno as (admirably) “modern” in the calculation of his effort to “shock,” and in his achievement of effects akin to the “willed ‘ugliness’” of much modern art and literature (M&F 21, 24). As culture-critic, Adorno’s strength (says Jameson) is to theorize the dynamic by which “the contradictions of the age reenter the microcosm of the work of art and condemn it to ultimate failure also” (M&F 37)—the “failure” in question here being the failure of that “deepest and most fundamental promise” of art, “Ohne Angst leben” (Adorno’s version of the Stendhalian promesse de bonheur; M&F 35). Again, a happy “success,” in an era of “unhappy consciousness,” would betoken only an “ideological” failure to reckon with “the contradictions of the age.” On the contrary, the aim of critique, Jameson has more recently urged, is “to intensify their incompatibility and opposition such that we can live this particular contradiction as our own historic form of Hegel’s ‘unhappy consciousness’” (“GPI” 64).


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But granted that this is the condition of all art in our time: must it be the inevitable condition of all critique as well? As we have seen above with Barthes, a formula about “literature” (its implication in the “blood guilt of history”) proved only selectively applicable to critique, whose burdens and prerogatives were projected as at some moments like, at others unlike, those of literature and art; and (again) this set of issues was evoked less than explicitly. But here, throughout, Adorno’s own account of how—in what ways, and at what projects—artworks (especially of music; the demonstration-case is Adorno’s contrast of Stravinski with Schoenberg in The Philosophy of Modern Music) can succeed or fail also suggests terms for how critique itself—Adorno’s, Jameson’s—might succeed or fail. The terms of these judgments are unstable and shifting, but a constant motive is that some kinds of “success”—the kind likeliest to be acclaimed as such by the dominant culture apparatuses—are of interest only as symptoms, if they aspire to no more than a facile manipulation of audience responses; whereas some kinds of “failure”—what the culture apparatuses ignore or shrug off—achieve something more dialectical and authentic precisely because (or to the extent that) they eschew such easy aims to probe, to force themselves up against, the limits of the possible itself. Thus, according to Adorno, Stravinski’s exploitative pastiche succeeds in a merely “psychological” mimesis, whereas Schoenberg more “negatively” and “dialectically” enacts “the contradictions of the age” and art’s principled “failure,” that is, refusal, to (falsely) “reconcile” them. The truest “success,” in other words, results from a calculated, deliberate, and self-conscious embrace of failure—though that way of putting it (indeed, any way of putting it that so baldly uses the word “success”) risks seeming to have mistaken the point of the exercise. As to the question whether these strictures apply to critique as well as to other forms of cultural production, an affirmative answer is implicit in the chapter’s lengthy closing discussion of Hegel, whose projection of “totality” cannot manifest itself on any screen within the range or scope of our vision, and therefore “fails” in the very motion, or ambition, in which it proposes the (impossible) terms of its desired success—in the process, illustrating the paradoxical achievement of a failure whose grandeur outstrips any imaginable success: “So it is no wonder that Hegel’s system fails . . . the real wonder is . . . that it could be conceived and executed even to that degree of concreteness which it still possesses” (M&F 49). Since Hegel, the forces Jameson later calls “reification” have made systematic thought and exposition themselves suspect, “part of the problem, not part of the solution,” too implicated in the “total system” (Adorno’s “administered universe”) to serve as instruments of liberation from it. Hence the rationale for the difficulty of Adorno’s writing: the strength of what Jameson calls its “image [emphasis mine]

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of our historical present” is conditional upon its never being “expressed directly in the form of a thesis ” [emphasis Jameson’s]: “such outright statements, such outright presentations of sheer content, are stylistically wrong, this stylistic failure being itself a mark and a reflection of some essential failure in the thought process itself ” (M&F 53–4). By contrast, Adorno’s athetic prose intervenes as a series of references to a state of things with which our familiarity is presupposed, a reality with which we are presumed to be only too well acquainted. The mode is that characteristic German sarcasm which may be said to have been Nietzsche’s contribution to the language and in which a constant play of cynical, colloquial expressions holds the disgraced world at arm’s length, while abstractions and buried conceptual rhymes compare it with the impossible ideal.

The passage goes on to raise this (Adorno-esque) description of Adorno’s stylistic achievement to an exponential power, as it were, by invoking the Romantic or modernist view of style (which Jameson rather associates with Whorf and Sapir than Blake or Pound) as not merely a “clothing” or “ornament” dressing up some more fundamental and primary content, but as itself constitutive, a “motivation,” of content itself: there seems to me to be a profoundly stylistic motivation behind [Adorno’s athetic] indirection . . . a kind of stylistic obedience analogous to that which governs the work of art itself . . . here also [in critique as well as in art] the quality of the idea is judged by the type of sentence through which it comes to expression. For insofar as dialectical thinking is thought about thought, thought to the second power, concrete thought about an object, which at the same time remains aware of its own intellectual operations in the very act of thinking, such self-consciousness must be inscribed in the very sentence itself. And insofar as dialectical thinking characteristically involves a conjunction of opposites or at least conceptually disparate phenomena, it may truly be said of the dialectical sentence what the Surrealists said about the image, that its strength increases proportionately as the realities linked are distant and distinct from each other (M&F 53–4).

Consider how calling the textures of language a “motivation” of content differs from calling them its “determinants”: the latter makes us inmates in the “prisonhouse of language”; the former makes us something like (for better or worse, dialectically or ideologically) its architects. But more immediately, this program obviously lays heavy burdens on the aspiring dialectician, at once multiplying and complicating the tasks at which, and the terms in which, dialectical thinking and writing could be judged to succeed or fail—a difficulty at once trumped (repressed? sublimated? aufgehoben?) by the


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failure-imperative, in Jameson’s judgment that the measure of Adorno’s success is precisely the difficulty or impossibility of what he attempts: to offer a theory of the untheorizable, to show why dialectical thinking is at one and the same time both indispensable and impossible, to keep the idea of system itself alive while intransigently dispelling the pretensions of any of the contingent and already realized systems to validity and even to existence (M&F 55).

I have been quoting at (doubtless) excessive length; but perhaps justifiably, if I have conveyed any sense of Jameson’s own reiterated efforts to specify the condition of “dialectical” effort, that is, to indicate the terms in which the ambition to be “dialectical” might be realized or fail of realization. Interestingly, Jameson does not recur, or even allude, to the vocabulary Adorno himself deploys in aid of these discriminations (though it appears elsewhere in the book, and is foregrounded in Late Marxism), that of the “critical negation” versus the mere (ideological) “symptom.” At issue is what sort of relation the work of art seeks to achieve toward its cultural surround. Near the beginning of Marxism and Form’s chapter on Adorno, in a passage setting terms for the problematic engaged by the book as a whole, Jameson explains that Adorno’s “sociological approach” to literary criticism necessarily juxtaposes the individual work of art with some vaster form of social reality which is seen in one way or another as its source or ontological ground, its Gestalt field, and of which the work itself comes to be thought of as a reflection or a symptom, a characteristic manifestation or a simple by-product, a coming to consciousness or an imaginary or symbolic resolution, to mention only a few of the ways in which this problematic central relationship has been conceived (M&F 4–5).

It is the necessity of this relation of the work to its determining “ontological ground” that conditions the production of “form,” and it is on that premise that Marxism and Form proposes literary form as, sentence by sentence, a minutely nuanced registration of, and thus as a uniquely rich way of access to, the ground of the social itself; hence the recurrent insistence that “form” itself is the richest possible “content” available to analysis. The premise will be more elaborately worked out elsewhere, preeminently in The Political Unconscious, in terms that embrace more sophisticated and diverse narratological and semiological models (structuralist, psychoanalytic, [Russian] Formalist, and so on); but here, I want to recur to a question posed above: can, or should, or does critique face different problems and burdens from those imposed on art and literature, or does it labor under the same constraints? Does it succeed or fail otherwise, or in the same wise, as other forms of cultural production? It is

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symptomatic that no more than his discussion of Barthes, does Jameson’s discussion of Adorno raise this question explicitly; in the former case we could infer it only via the contrast (on Jameson’s showing) between Barthes’s account of style and his practice of it; likewise we here resort to Adorno’s contrast of Stravinski’s merely “mimetic” effort (failure) with Schoenberg’s more complexly critical, selfconscious, dialectical operation, simultaneously an enactment and an indictment (or indictment-by-enactment) of a larger cultural failure. Adorno distinguishes Stravinski’s cheap “success,” which is (so to speak) really a failure, from Schoenberg’s complicated failure which is, in the relevant terms, as much a success as our ideological circumstances permit: does this discrimination apply, in the same terms, in the same way, to works of critique? It is a problem circulated widely in our period under the heading “philosophy/ literature,” the initial question whether there is or isn’t, should or shouldn’t be, a difference between “philosophy” and “literature” proceeding to a combinatoire of success and failure, with only those permutations allowed that insure that the project at hand constructs itself as “impossible,” and so fails: philosophy wants not to be literature, but (alas!) is; philosophy wants to be literature, but (alas!) cannot; literature wants to make truth-claims, but (alas!) . . . and so on. Compare the “end of philosophy” motif, which typically appears as either the failure of philosophy to keep itself alive, or the failure of various kinds of anti-philosophy to kill it off. And likewise with the “end of ” whatever else. We have in each case a stand-off between projects: though each might be said to attest the other’s success, neither claims success for itself (no one claims to have successfully perpetuated philosophy, or to have successfully terminated it); on the contrary, both projects dramatize, by bewailing, their own impossibility, and enact, ever more melodramatically, the failure thereby foreordained.7 To put the philosophy/literature question to critique: is critique (can it or should it be or not be) the “other” of literature (or indeed of whatever it critiques, for the question is as problematic for sociologists and economists as for literature professors, musicologists, or art historians)? Jameson’s discussions of Adorno and Barthes imply contrasting answers to this (unasked) question. In the case of Barthes, as we saw, an imperative that Barthes laid on literature (that of achieving a “white writing” as an “absolution from the blood guilt of history”) was a burden notably reconceived when in question was the writing not of “literature” but of critique like Barthes’s (or Jameson’s) own, where “style” was found, less by precept (theory) than example (practice), to have possibilities supposedly foreclosed to it in literature. And paradoxically, Jameson’s embrace of Barthes’s practice of (critical) style rather than his programmatic theory of a (literary) absolution of (or from) style acts to insure for critique not the solution but the persistence of prob-


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lems (and failures) that Barthes explicitly proposed “white writing” to relieve (but for literature, not critique). In the Adorno force-field, by contrast, Jameson assumes that art and critique face the same problems, bear the same burdens, are limited to the same possible kinds of success—so that the failure-imperative burdening art and literature enforces itself upon critique as well. These complementary responses to, or uses of, Barthes and Adorno illustrate the dynamic, or perhaps (better) the dialectic, of the failure-imperative, which obliges critique to take on any burden, confront any difficulty, and the more these are or can be projected as difficult, the better, given that the task is to “exacerbate and arouse” rather than to resolve or “reconcile” such problems. (Implicit here is a [“period”] logic that we will see enforcing itself upon Jameson’s later writing, namely that if “difficult” is good, “impossible” is better.) Moreover, both discussions seem to suggest that the success or failure of a “dialectical” cultural production is not to be predicated on genre: critique does not exempt itself from “the contradictions of the age,” even when or if (as Barthes’s “white writing” suggests) literature itself just might. However they diverge on the possibilities available to literature or art, though, Barthes and Adorno (as Jameson projects them) coincide in assigning an inescapable fatality to critique, which must (in Adorno’s terms) dramatize by reenacting them the failures of the prevailing ideology, or (Barthes’s) assume its own share in the collective guilt. In Jameson’s reading, then, both Barthes and Adorno lay upon critique— that is, on the kind of writing Jameson wants to do—a failure imperative. But any imperative is a criterion of success; in this case, of a success with large, indeed, “ultimate” stakes, whose springs flow from a traditionally Judeo-Christian dynamic that has cast failure, at least certain very special kinds of failure, as a sine qua non of redemption. For Jameson, it is on the scriptible above all that these stakes are staked: their failure or success is an effect—better, an event—of the writing, of the “dialectical sentences,” of their (meta)language and, to deploy a word we have seen Jameson use as a term of praise for both Barthes (PHL 154) and Adorno (M&F xiii), its “materiality.” In connection with Barthes, the term suggests some libidinal-intellectual consummation, a writing and reading with the body (IT2 69); in connection with Adorno, it evokes the otherwise “absent” determinant of the trans-textual, the ungraspable nightmare totality of the social, the “administered universe.” Utopian promise, ideological threat: it’s hardly too much to see Barthes and Adorno, the mere names, between them evoking Jameson’s “dialectic of utopia and ideology.” Jameson is of course alive to the perils involved in any evocation of “utopia,” preeminently that which assures its devolution into another “ideology,” namely the delusion by which wishful thinking might satisfy critical longings with “an

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imaginary solution to a real contradiction”—an instance, again, of “the dialectic of utopia and ideology,” and instantiated, inevitably, in the dialectic of the scriptible. How to preserve the dialectical scriptible from the mere “textual productivity” of écriture is a problem for the writer in the act of composition; but it is also, beyond the writer’s control, a matter of reception: of reading (or being read) as well as of writing. Jameson warns against this dialectic of the scriptible in his work on both Barthes and Adorno. It is not an issue in the pages on Barthes in The Prison-House of Language (1971); but a few years later, Jameson ventilates grave reservations about Barthes’s own implication in what he calls “The Ideology of the Text” (1976), though at issue here is more S/Z ’s methodological fixation on “the sentence” at the expense of larger narrative form(s) than on the question of Barthes’s own elision of “the referent.” Later again however, after Barthes’s death, in “Pleasure: A Political Issue” (1983), Jameson works to restore a fully “political” resonance to Barthes’s most hedonistic themes (on which, more later). If, in “The Ideology of the Text,” Jameson is trying to save Barthes from Barthes’s own aestheticizing tendencies, in “Pleasure: A Political Issue” he is trying to save Barthes from his readers, aestheticizing enthusiasts as well as “political” detractors, who (mis)took Barthes’s project as sheer écriture (exemplary or execrable according to your beholding eye.) Jameson undertakes a similar defense against the dialectic of the scriptible on behalf of Adorno. Again, in Marxism and Form this was not an issue, but it could be said to bestride Jameson’s 1990 study of Adorno, Late Marxism. The book opens with reflection on issues that foreground the importance and achievement of Adorno’s way of writing, and on problems of “narrative,” “musical form,” and “mimesis” in critical writing at large (as problems Adorno both theorized and negotiated in practice). But even as it celebrates these features of Adorno’s work, the book ends with admonitions against taking altogether at face value Adorno’s proclamations of “anti-system” (as in the “Preface” to Negative Dialectic), the avowed commitment to aphorism and the fragmentary (not only in Minima Moralia, but throughout Adorno’s oeuvre), the program so brilliantly announced (and performed) in “The Essay as Form.” No, advises Jameson; Adorno is better seen as “arguing inconclusively against his own esprit de système, rather than (like Nietzsche) expressing some blithe and irresponsible temperamental freedom from the temptation altogether”; a note adds that “self-defeating insistence on the necessarily incomplete nature of all expression is very distant from Adorno’s way of confronting what for him also was a necessary dilemma of the representation of ‘totality’” (LM 247, 261n20). Obviously these admonitions against possible (and frequent) misreadings of Barthes and Adorno are also directives about how not to misread Jameson.


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But there is another direction in which the dialectic of the scriptible may tilt. Jameson’s mot, “the utopia of style,” is suggestive (provided we keep in mind the dialectic in which utopia is always threatened with reversal into ideology) of certain contradictory, but thereby redemptive features of Jameson’s own prose here. For Jameson’s own writing reenacts the exemplary failures he identifies in Barthes and Adorno, thereby securing (or “emulating”) some measure of the success he praises them for. That is, there is an emancipatory leavening or “linguistic optimism” (S 208) in the scriptible that can enact necessity and failure, yet still attest at least some (utopian) possibility of their being overcome. Hence the excitement of Jameson’s early prose: it can project a failure imperative so bracingly as to seem to loosen its strictures. Those labyrinthine sentences, zigzagging between qualifiers and hedges, subordinations and sub-subordinations, feeling their way as if to a period not foreseen when the sentence began, whose surprises prompt fresh departures in their turn, enact the obstacles, limits, or contradictions they pursue and confront, but also, paradoxically, suspend or “neutralize,” ad lib., some of the lawlike force of those very contradictions and limits that ought to have proscribed such suspensions or neutralizations in the first place. Throughout Jameson’s career, such writerly resourcefulness has been at the service of assertions sometimes astonishingly provocative—fascism as utopian (is not fascism the very type of utopia’s other, ideology?),8 ressentiment as “authentic” (is not ressentiment the very type of inauthenticity?), and the like. But my phrase, “the dialectic of the scriptible,” overwrought as it may sound, is meant to suggest what seems to me an important feature of some of the most stirring writers in what Jameson calls “the emergence of that new type of discourse called theory” (SV 68). I am trying to indicate the inadequacies of what usually passes as the most advanced strategy of coping with “theory” writing, which is to deduce (or extort) from the prose style a kind of propositional content and then pass judgment on that. When Frank Lentricchia, for example, pronounces Foucault’s Discipline and Punish a “counter-revolutionary statement,” the appropriate criticism, it seems to me, is to call the remark “undialectical.” To turn a “textual effect” (or “motivation”) so quickly into a Weltanschauung or an ideology seems to me an instance of just what Jameson means by reification.9 This dialectic of the scriptible, however, the liberty of this “utopia of style,” is not a Houdini-stunt operable at will on the enchaining necessities of the failureimperative. As the 1970s wore on, Jameson’s various ambitions or programs increasingly projected themselves in ways that enforced the failure imperative ever more stringently; enough, indeed, that he would eventually need to evade its “winner loses logic” (P 5) entirely, by way of a thematics and practice of “the sublime.” Throughout, there remains always (though it constantly displaces itself into

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new and unexpected localizations) a dissonance or contradiction—or dialectic— between Jameson’s projection of critique’s tasks as “impossible” and a continual energy, even if manifest as sheer doggedness or relentlessness, in attestation of some more utopian hope or promise, or perhaps mere obstinacy. Jameson’s writing of the 1970s becomes the theater of a “stoic” and “tragic” agon (Jameson uses these terms in praise of Lacan [IT1 98, 112]) of utopian energies increasingly stalemated by unbreachable “ideological closure(s).” The next chapter traces this development, by way of one of Jameson’s most central projects, that of a “Marxist hermeneutic,” a program undertaken at an unpropitious moment, just as the implications of the structuralist generation’s slaying of the phenomenological fathers (Jameson’s idol Sartre in particular) were hardening into doxa here in the United States. Still, Jameson implausibly, perhaps foolhardily, but in the event successfully, made a confrontation with structuralism the very vehicle of his effort, an effort cast as an almost exemplary mismatch, an “impossible” transcoding, of new method to old problem, new answers to old questions. What happens when the dilemmas of Ideologiekritik meet those of the hermeneutic circle? Is it possible to get outside ideology? Can Ideologiekritik ever achieve more than a mere (in)version of the ideology it critiques? Is critique itself extricable from a metaphysic or ideology of subject/object? These questions, and the gridlock (impossibility, failure) into which the available structuralist and poststructuralist alternatives conduct them, occasion some of Jameson’s most sustained and resourceful efforts.

Chapter Three

Hermeneutic and/or Critique

The redemptive (or however we are to name the) energies of “the scriptible ” imply, of course, only one of the programs Jameson’s work proposes for itself. Another, comparably comprehensive though more programmatic, is that of a “Marxist hermeneutic,” a phrase first prominently foregrounded in Marxism and Form (1971), in which an extended chapter gathers separate discussions of Benjamin, Marcuse, and Bloch under the heading “Versions of a Marxist Hermeneutic.” Not, of course, that the other figures discussed in the book— Adorno, Lukács, Sartre—fail of either Marxist or hermeneutic purpose; the point only underscores that the “dialectical criticism” the book calls for obviously includes, or is proposed as the condition of, “a genuine Marxist hermeneutics ” (M&F xv). “Hermeneutic,” or more colloquially, “interpretation,” is likewise a central preoccupation in The Prison-House of Language (1972), and the important contemporaneous essay, “Metacommentary” (1971); and it remains the orienting ambition of The Political Unconscious, as announced in the program chapter (less a reprise than a dilation of “Metacommentary”), “On Interpretation.” What makes the “hermeneutic” called for in Marxism and Form specifically Marxist is its address to “the social” as a whole, the sociomaterial background from 47

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or against which the literary text emerges, by which it is conditioned or determined, which it confusedly and incompletely and not altogether consciously (anticipations here of The Political Unconscious) both reveals and conceals, whose determinants it both manifests and represses. This is a constant theme throughout Marxism and Form ; here is a fairly typical passage from the Adorno chapter: in a classic essay on society Adorno shows not only how every possible idea we form about society is necessarily partial and imperfect, inadequate and contradictory, but also that those very formal contradictions are themselves the most precious indications as to how we stand with respect to the concrete reality of social life at the present time. For society is clearly not some empirical object which we can meet and study directly in our own experience: in this sense the neopositivistic criticism, which considers the idea of society an inadmissable abstract construct or a mere methodological hypothesis with no other kind of real existence, is justified. At the same time society— precisely in the form of such an impossible, suprapersonal abstraction—is present in the form of an ultimate constraint upon every moment of our waking lives: absent, invisible, even untenable, it is at the same time the most concrete of all the realities we have to face, and “while the notion of society may not be deduced from any individual facts, nor on the other hand be apprehended as an individual fact itself, there is nevertheless no social fact which is not determined by society as a whole” (M&F 57).

The passage Jameson quotes is from Adorno’s essay, “Society,” whose first translation into English was by Jameson himself; the same passage is quoted again later in the book (M&F 343)—sufficient indication of the centrality of this theme of the “hermeneutic” effort to trace in the manifest text the latent workings of that “ultimate constraint,” in order to infer or extrapolate from it, indeed, to make present, visible, palpable that “absent, invisible, even untenable” determinant, “the most concrete of all the realities we have to face.” A further account of “Marxist hermeneutic” later in the book exemplifies the way, as so often in Jameson, a program for how to read or interpret (texts, culture, society) encodes how Jameson wants or hopes to write and to be read. Here he projects “dialectical criticism” as struggling in the coils of a contradiction intrinsic to its condition, that it is bound to remain an abstraction, inasmuch as it is nothing but an ideal cross section of the existential density of history itself—the isolation of a single plane or level of reality, where the latter is understood both as the ideal sum of all such levels and as that ultimate, unthinkable totality which can never be thus additively reconstructed through the operation of pure thought alone. Hence the final moment in the process of dialectical analysis, in which the model strains

HERMENEUTIC AND/OR CRITIQUE

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to return to that concrete element from which it initially came, to abolish itself as an illusion of autonomy, and to redissolve into history, offering as it does so some momentary glimpse of reality as a concrete whole (M&F 312).

I indulge this lengthy quote because the ambition, or hope, registered in that last sentence relevantly figures the grand (or grandiose) gestus, the commitment to an agon whose projection as impossible entrains, and stakes all, on a success/failure dialectic whose only appropriate measure is to be found in the experience of the writing/reading itself. But amid these energies of sound, tone, and rhythm, I want also to underline the theme of the imperative to (try to) grasp something “absent,” to restore or delineate or make visible something concretely and objectively and determiningly there yet available only latently in the manifest texts of culture. This “absent” will remain a potent presence in Jameson’s work for years to come. As my language of “latent/manifest” anticipates, this figure, under the name “absent cause,” or more sweepingly, “the political unconscious,” will receive a psychoanalytic inflection in Jameson’s book of that title; it will subsequently, in the 1980s writings collected in Postmodernism, be cathected, as the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” with all the agitation attaching to a “sublime” Jameson will characterize as “unrepresentable.” But there is a further complication generated by Jameson’s “hermeneutic” program. I mentioned in my introduction that one of the subtler achievements of Jameson’s “Marxism” is to have largely removed itself from the arena, and thereby exempted itself from the coarsening and simplification, of the polemical; in this connection, Jameson’s “Marxist hermeneutic” involves an unemphatic softening of the program almost inevitably associated with Marxist discourse as such, that of “critique” (implicitly, always, what the German specifies as Ideologiekritik ). The very word “critique” usually bears, even when deployed by non- or anti-Marxists, an implication (consonant with Marx’s own practice) of ideological unmasking and exposé ; more rarely, the word operates the rather different connotations it bears from Kant. If my own experience is any guide, one can read Jameson for some time before realizing that “critique” is a term he shies away from, and increasingly so as his career proceeds. Just recently he has denounced (as something like an “ideology” of critique) the “vulgar” expectation that after critique has exposed falsities, “the sequel . . . will be [their] replacement by something better, truer, etc.” (“MPL” 77/28). Still, the impulse, if not the word, pervades Jameson’s work, however chastened by our period reservations about “subject/object” dichotomies, “false” (versus “true”?) consciousness, and other metaphysical or ideological baggage associated with “critique.” The subtitle of The Prison-House of Language, indeed,

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“A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism,” deploys the word more in its Kantian sense, of ascertaining the limits of the new Continental methodologies, than in the (more polemical) Marxist sense of exposing their “ideological” distortions—although this impulse is there too, as the “prison-house” metaphor attests. As for the “dialectical criticism” called for in Marxism and Form, it will prove to conflate the “critical” with the “hermeneutic” in ways subversive of “critique”-as-usual. Yet whatever scruples Jameson’s vocabulary expresses, the impulse to critique obviously persists in his writing; it remains, always, an important part of the work his writing is doing, or trying to do. And, again, I continue to speak of Jamesonian “critique” on the premise that this dissonance from Jameson’s own usage may illuminate, better than the vaguer grab-bag term “theory,” some of what is at stake in his program and his characterizations of it. We can begin with an instance of this tension between “hermeneutic” and “critique” that seems telling for the shape of Jameson’s career as a whole: Jameson’s initial projection of his “hermeneutic” program comes in a book whose aims are rather celebratory than “critical” in the colloquial sense. Like Sartre, Marxism and Form is offered frankly as homage to figures Jameson reveres, and hopes to recommend to a public (in 1971) largely unacquainted with them. It is not merely that figures who differed sharply from each other (Adorno and Lukács, for example) are posed, as it were, in shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity;1 the book advocates a [Marxist] “political hermeneutic” as “the means for maintaining contact with the very sources of revolutionary energy during a stagnant time, of preserving the concept of freedom itself, underground, during geological eras of repression” [M&F 84]). Of course, the book also proposes—how not, with heroes like Adorno, Lukács, Marcuse and Sartre?—“critical” tasks for its “hermeneutic” to perform, objects upon which its operations will be antagonistic rather than appreciative; but the benefit Jameson hopes for from the exercise will be not a mere rectification of error, but “an almost ontological restitution” (M&F 401) of “absent” sociomaterial determinants, the latent social content of the manifest social text—a formulation that readers would very shortly thereafter learn to distrust as fatally tainted by a “logocentric” mystique of presence, or (a bit later) by an “aesthetic ideology.” As Jameson’s career progresses, his impulse seems to shift away from celebration (of Sartre, the Western Marxists, the Russian Formalists and the structuralists) to something more “critical” in all the senses we are elaborating. In The Political Unconscious, both canonical novelists on the one hand—Balzac, Conrad—and contemporary theorists on the other—Frye, Althusser, Greimas—are shown as unwittingly constrained by the “ideological closure(s)” within which their efforts are determined. Fables of Aggression, as we shall see, is a liminal case, because in it


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Jameson means at once to celebrate Lewis’s scriptible and to critique Lewis’s ideological commitments. Yet as this orientation toward “critique” (both of particular figures and of “ideology” itself ) becomes firmer, the word “critique” and its cognates (such as “critical”) increasingly disappear from Jameson’s writing. Why that should be so, just what is at issue between “hermeneutic” and “critique,” we may best evoke by way of the mid-1960s Gadamer-Habermas debate, which turned on what would soon become the familiar topos of “inside/outside” (or more classically for the hermeneutic tradition, Zugehörigkeit/Verfremdung).2 Gadamer’s Truth and Method projects the hermeneutic task as an affair of an interpretandum “outside” being “appropriated” or brought within the interpreter’s “inside” (the latter thereby undergoing some beneficial enlargement), to result in what Gadamer strikingly calls a “fusion of horizons.” Habermas repudiates Gadamer’s programmatic inwardness, on the grounds that from any “critical” point of view (and for Habermas, any “Marxism” worthy of the name must be “critical”), the “hermeneutic” project can only figure as an effort to enter, to get “inside,” the “hermeneutic circle,” whereas the role, indeed, the very condition of critique must be to get “outside” it. Habermas projects the “hermeneutic circle” as a liability, of the type Jameson will later figure as a “closure,” by contrast with the properly “alienated,” “distantiated,” “defamiliarized” or “estranged” vantage that is the sine qua non (according to Habermas, his Enlightenment loyalties evident fifteen years in advance of his controversial contribution to the postmodernism debate)3 of any project of critique. Moreover, for Habermas, if “critique” involves getting “outside,” then “hermeneutic,” avowedly a project of getting “inside,” is not merely unsuited to Ideologiekritik, it stands as virtually a figure, model, example, or instance of ideology itself, a willful self-mystification—part of the problem, not part of the solution, in the old phrase, or, in an older one, the disease for which it purports to be the cure. Gadamer answers that Ideologiekritik never appears as a post facto retrospect “outside” the tradition it critiques, but is “always already” an element, a subtradition, “inside” it: potentially effective, indeed, only to the degree that it is so. Paul Ricoeur entered the debate to propose the mediation he would elsewhere figure as “the hermeneutic arc” (or “arch”), by which Ricoeur, spatializing Gadamer’s typically temporal figures, arrays in a continuity, as gradients on a spectrum, the binary terms (inside/outside, Verstehen/Erklären [“understanding/explanation”]) on which Habermas’s ethos of “critique” depends. (Habermas’s own later talk of “intersubjectivity” and “communicative rationality”—indeed, of a “depth hermeneutics” affording “explanatory understanding”—effects a like accommodation with Gadamer and Ricoeur; the “debate” was never as belligerent as some readers have wanted it to be.) In any case, the moral seems to be that the binaries structuring

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the Gadamer-Habermas debate, and recent discussion of “hermeneutic” generally—indeed, the development of the human sciences since Dilthey—require mediation in practice. Hence, perhaps, Jameson’s preference for the term “commentary” (as in “Metacommentary”), implying a practice that can suspend or synthesize the polarization of such binaries (“explanation/understanding,” “critique/hermeneutic”) as the condition for realizing their differences as “dialectical.” See, for example, the last pages of The Prison-House of Language, which open the provocative prospect of “the Structuralist procedure as a genuine hermeneutics ” (PHL 216)—provocative in that structuralism arose quite specifically as a repudiation of phenomenological (and hermeneutic) aims and methods. Yet Jameson keeps this tension or dialectic curiously covert; he never programmatically announces it. The closest he comes is in connection not with the Gadamer-Habermas debate, but with Heidegger—though less, I think, on ideological grounds (though Gadamer is no Marxist, while Ricoeur is—worse yet!—a Christian),4 than on literary ones: as scriptible, the “sentences” of both Gadamer and Ricoeur work to soothe and harmonize difficulties and contradictions, rather than (Jameson’s penchant, both as writer and as reader) to dramatize and complicate them. Gadamer’s “sentences,” or Ricoeur’s, in short, are not the kind that prompt Jameson’s “emulation,” though I suspect his resistance to these two is motivated as much by an attraction to them, a need to resist their seductions, as by any simple “critical” disapproval. (As for the Marxist Habermas, about whom Jameson has little to say,5 the “difficulties” of his prose attest a sheerly instrumental writing practice striving for obedience only to the convolutions of a highly abstracted and generalized process, or rather result, of thinking—a prose with nothing of the interest of the scriptible about it at all.) In the phenomenological/ hermeneutic tradition, Jameson’s preferred model is Heidegger; but where Gadamer and Ricoeur keep the Heideggerian faith by expounding and, as it were, lucidifying the master’s calculatedly obscure utterance, Jameson rather “emulates” him in a writing practice that aspires to something like the intractability and difficulty—and interest—of Heidegger’s own prose style. And scriptible apart, Jameson also approves Heidegger’s Destruktion or Abbau of the “subject/object” binary (and other metaphysicalisms) on which the ethos of critique, whether Enlightenment or Marxist, depends—a problematic that will recur below, in connection with Lacan’s “discourse of the analyst” as it figures in Jameson’s 1978 essay “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (IT1 75–115). But before passing to that, and thence to Fables of Aggression (1978) and The Political Unconscious (1981), I want to pause over some of Jameson’s essays of the 1970s, considering them in the context of the arrival of structuralism in America and the developing divide between it and poststructuralism. In these essays


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Jameson continues to test the hermeneutic/critical dialectic, the tension or contradiction between the “inwardness” of the hermeneutic project and structuralism’s more “objective” or “critical” aspiration to make of the sciences de l’homme something more “scientific” and “explanatory” (erklärende) than the “interpretive” (verstehende) hermeneutic and phenomenological tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften and “philosophical anthropology” descending from Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Weber, with its existential developments in Heidegger and Sartre. Part of the interest here is that among the parties to this century-long dispute is traditional (or paleo-) Marxism itself, with its ethos of “objectivity,” “materialism,” and “science”—“vulgar Marxism,” as Jameson calls it following the lead of Sartre’s efforts to renew Marxism in The Problem of Method and The Critique of Dialectical Reason. Indeed, it is easy to imagine Marx himself satirizing the Dilthey tradition, quite in the fashion of Adorno in The Jargon of Authenticity, as a specimen of “the German ideology.” Hence the interest of the encounter (or standoff ) between Jameson’s Sartrean, which is to say phenomenological and Hegelian, Marxism, and the structuralist Marxism (anti- all of the above) of Althusser, Macherey, Balibar, etc. Hence, also, indeed, Jameson’s enthusiasm for Hegel, whose mediation of “inside” and “outside” sustains a sense of “objectivity” quite different, indeed, dialectically distinct from any sense it bears in any materialism—including that self-styled “dialectical materialism” that nevertheless deploys the word “objective” in a sense closer to Spencer, Huxley and Russell (not to say Bentham) than to Marx and Hegel. And hence Jameson’s own continuing dialectical stretch between, on the one hand, a Marxist Erklären (“explanation”), that strives for an analytic and critical distance between itself and its object, and on the other a more inward, “interpretive” and “historicizing” relation to “untranscendable” or “absolute” (hermeneutic, ideological) “closures,” whose goal is an “appropriation,” a “fusion of horizons,” an “understanding” (Verstehen) in something of the spirit of Heidegger’s adviso in section 32 of Being and Time that “What is decisive is not to get out of the [hermeneutic] circle but to come into it in the right way” (Heidegger, 195). But the governing binary in all this, inside/outside, or Zugehörigkeit/ Verfremdung, transmitted its agitations beyond the discourses of the hermeneutic tradition and its quarrels with structuralism. It also proved a crux sufficiently pervasive to serve (sometimes under the alias of “same/different”) as a pivot for the developing opposition of “structuralism” and “poststructuralism.” If structuralism seemed to offer a new way for critique to get “outside” its object, poststructuralism may be said to have elaborated itself from a skepticism of this hope. Structuralism projected “language” as synecdoche for the interpretandum of human sciences

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inquiry; to which poststructuralism responded with a deconstruction of the inside/ outside binaries that sustained structuralism’s effort to privilege itself as a metalanguage, a critical language “outside” and thus independent of the structuring system prevailing “inside” the target- or object-language. Jameson’s own reservations about structuralism give this problematic a distinctive inflection. He figures the inside/outside problem in the metaphor of the “prison-house of language,” and argues that the structuralist focus on language’s internal systematicities dangerously (ideologically) brackets “the referent” (that is, “History”), or reduces it (under the name of “the signified”) too literal-mindedly to a mere “effect” of the “signifier” (PHL 105–10). Thus the structuralist, aspiring to an Archimedean vantage removed from the carceral “structure” he would survey, is delivered rather to the office of a penal system bureaucrat, a gaoler effectively no less a prisoner in the ideological closure of the prison-house than the inmates themselves.6 But armed with these cautions, in his writings of the 1970s—The PrisonHouse of Language as well as such essays as “Metacommentary” (1971), “The Ideology of the Text” (1976), “Figural Relativism; or, the Poetics of Historiography” (on Hayden White, 1976), “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1978), and “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis” (1978)—Jameson pursues structuralism and its implications with an ardor and intelligence that can leave no doubt of his enthusiasm for and interest in its possibilities. The structuralist dream of the meta- solicits Jameson’s hope even as he cautions against the ruses by which its actual terminus might be a rude awakening (or worse, a protracted dogmatic slumber) in the ideological holding-pens of the infra-. For example, read together, as Jameson’s own table of contents in volume 1 of The Ideologies of Theory invites us to do, the essays on Hayden White (“Figural Relativism; or, The Poetics of Historiography” [1976; IT1 153–66]) and Kenneth Burke (“Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis” [1978; IT1 137–52]) amount virtually to a casebook on the possibilities and the perils of trying (succeeding or failing) to achieve an analytic vantage “outside” the constraints of what is to be analysed: White is preferable to Burke, we read, in a passage drawing the comparison directly, in that his schematizations (“something like a linguistic infrastructure”) permit “kinds of hermeneutic ‘second [-degree]’ or ‘symptomal’ readings” foreclosed to the more “anthropomorphic” strategies of Burke’s “dramatism” (IT1 155–6); and this criticism of Burke is further developed in the later essay, “Symbolic Inference,” to the effect that Burke’s “dramatistic metaphor” is so close to its tenor, so nearly “inside” it, as to incur all of its ideological liabilities (IT1 151). Yet even so, and even while praising White’s commitment to the project of “ideological analysis,” Jameson complains that White’s


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exclusive focus on texts and textual effects—what Jameson calls his “figural relativism”—limits his analytic usefulness beyond or “outside” that domain, in the extratextual field of the referent. White manages, that is, to achieve a more useful critical distance from his ideological object, more successfully get “outside” it, than Burke does; yet in another way his failure is that he doesn’t get “outside” enough, that he too complacently accepts his circumscription (or “imprisonment”) within the textual field, not to say “the ideology of the text,” that he himself delimits. (This assessment of White is markedly brightened in Jameson’s more enthusiastic reconsideration of Metahistory in his 1987 “Foreword” to Greimas’s On Meaning.) For Jameson’s work of this period culminating in The Political Unconscious and prolonged in rather more desperate form in Postmodernism, the most important locus of the inside/outside crux is that announced in the subtitle of the essay on Kenneth Burke, “ideological analysis.” Classically, the word “ideology” meant the critical study of the way systems of ideas, habits of thought and language, condition or constrain—indeed, “construct” or reify—reality and the perception of it; it soon came to designate the object, rather than the method, of such inquiry; in any case, the problem has a long (and, recently, accelerated) history of generating contradictions and problems for itself.7 It’s not merely, as with the old joke about my religion and your superstition, that my materialist analysis might look to you like sheer false consciousness; more problematic is that if ideological cultural determinants are presumed to be all-pervasive, percolating into the very capillaries of subjectivity, the unconscious, libido, and the rest, then how can analysis (especially after Nietzsche and Freud) get “outside” them to achieve a “critical” perspective on them? The anti-foundationalism that has been virtually resistless for a generation now has effectively disabled any construction of “ideology” as “false consciousness” by embarrassing critique’s claim to a “true consciousness”; and contemporaneously the repudiation of Hegel and of phenomenology has discredited, indeed, has effectively proscribed, any vocabulary of “consciousness” as such. There is a pathos in thinking of these obstacles as the background or context of Jameson’s development, committed so powerfully from the beginning to the Hegelian, Sartrean, and phenomenological premises that “History” (in the antihistorical guise of structuralism-and-after) was to sweep so decisively into its capacious dustbin even as he himself was investing so heavily in them. From Sartre on Jameson’s interest has been in figures (whether artists or critics) and intellectual currents (whether aesthetic, philosophical or social-scientific) whose impetus has been adversary to, “critical” of, the cultural surround. From the beginning and under various names, he has pursued the project he only gradually came to call (and the italics are Jameson’s own) “ideological analysis ”—“the appropriate designation,” he adds, “for the ‘method’ specific to Marxism” (PU 12). Here again, the structuralist

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possibility is revealing, for the structuralist focus on “representation” promised a newly sophisticated way of distinguishing the (ideological) construction of reality in language from reality itself (“the referent,” in Jameson’s shorthand), but could do so, Jameson worried, only at the cost of relinquishing any grounds for speaking “objectively” of the latter. As emblems of the twin horns of this dilemma, take the early Barthes, whose bravely proffered binary in “Myth Today” (1957) of “myth” versus “history” now seems as wistful and quaint as it once seemed thrilling and exciting; and on the other Lévi-Strauss’s wryly ironic demonstration in his brief against Sartre, “History and Dialectic” (the last chapter of The Savage Mind ) that “history” is nothing more than a “myth” itself. (Lévi-Strauss elsewhere explains that the specifically mythical form of “history” is “politics.”)8 Hence Jameson’s frequent recourse to Althusser’s revision of Lévi-Strauss’s mot about “myth” as “an imaginary solution to a real contradiction.”9 Not only Althusser but Barthes and many others were quick to see this formula’s aptness for “ideology”; Jameson himself, indeed, deploys Lévi-Strauss’s phrase la pensée sauvage as a working synonym for “ideology” and/or “the political unconscious” (for example, PU 80). But Lévi-Strauss’s chronic sarcasm at the expense of modernity’s amour-propre, his compulsion to “deconstruct” (if the anachronism will be permitted) the differences that modernity, with all its rationalistic and scientific ingenuity, has erected to distinguish itself from the primitive and from superstition, magic and the irrational, quite compromise the prerogatives of any critical undertaking, when, indeed, it does not project “critique” itself as no more than an especially telling “symptom” (and Freud will license our thinking of a “symptom” as an “imaginary solution”) of our own culture’s contradictions. What Freud, for example, thought of as his qualitatively new insight on the Oedipus myth, Lévi-Strauss coolly pronounces merely another version or variant of it—which prompts a question about Lévi-Strauss’s own account of the Oedipus myth: is it, too, “merely” another version of the myth? Although “The Structural Study of Myth” leaves that question hanging, in the “Overture” to The Raw and the Cooked Lévi-Strauss shrugs that “this book about myths is, in its own way, a myth.”10 Lévi-Strauss prosecutes almost as a joke what for an Althusser (no less for a Jameson) is no laughing matter, the very possibility of critical validity itself. (LéviStrauss’s shrugging humor has always seemed to me a symptom of the persistence of the supposedly bracketed problem of “the subject” in his work. The same might be maintained of Althusser’s humorlessness.) Althusser’s rescript of Lévi-Strauss’s formula projects “ideology” as (in Jameson’s citation) “a ‘representation’ of the Imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (FA 12; cf. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy 162). The word “representation”—in quotation marks, as if to secure it by one more degree from any possibility of naive confusion


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of signified with signifier—register’s Althusser’s (and Jameson’s) effort (or desire) to get “ideology” externalized, “out ” there, isolated under the lens, in focus, as an “object” available without ideological contamination to the analytic or critical “subject” (or rather, as Althusser would insist on putting it, to the inspection of a “science,” “theory,” or “philosophy” whose potential for a non-ideological knowledge is precisely the extent to which it may be said to be “without a subject”). Althusser means to project “theory,” “philosophy,” and/or “science” as (different names for) the “other” of “ideology,” as possibilities “outside” it, and thus capable of achieving a “critical” view of it. Althusser’s anti-phenomenological case motivates his disarming formula of theory/philosophy/science “without a subject”; Jameson, more conflictedly, retains some allegiance to phenomenological categories, and so he suffers the ideology problem more (so to speak) “libidinally.” He proposes not “critique of ideology,” but “analysis” of it, a program in which the project of getting outside ideology can play as an impossible desire, but in which, complementarily, the condition of being inescapably “contained” inside it may at least possibly be turned to hermeneutic account. At some moments, as in the passage quoted above, Jameson writes “as if ” targeting a given “representation” with sufficient care can indeed ensure the necessary critical distance for an “objective” assessment; at others he emphasizes the analyst’s (that is, his own) implication, not to say “imprisonment,” in the “ideological closure” binding him and his object both, and which he can only thus vainly hope to demystify or expose. If for Althusser the “other” of “ideology” is denominated by some such name as “science,” “theory,” or “philosophy,” in Jameson’s construction, that office is assigned to “utopia”—a term more libidinally, not to say aesthetically, cathected than Althusser’s more chastely cerebral alternates. And Jameson’s “libidinal” effect is surely calculated to evade precisely the aplomb of Althusser’s tidy schematizing, of Lévi-Strauss’s epicurean nonchaleur, of Gadamer’s anodyne sageliness, of Ricoeur’s sedate (not to say sedative) eudaemonism, of Habermas’s neologistic dogmatizing, in favor of agitations and conflictednesses more in the manner of Adorno and Barthes. “Hermeneutic” and/or “critique”: Jameson neither decides for one of these terms in preference to the other, nor attempts a merely additive both/and supposed to offer a symmetrically compensatory “combination” of both. Rather his evocation of these complications puts each of its terms to the test of the other—again, “contradiction” as method— with results that may be called “critical” in both the Kantian and the Marxist senses. Which is to say that Jameson’s code-words or figures for his at once critical and hermeneutic effort push the incommensurables of inside/outside in ways increasingly calculated to augment the sense of contradiction and non plus implicit in or between them: “immanent critique,” one of his favored terms of the 1970s,

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is an example; a more striking one is “Metacommentary,” in which the “meta-” prefix reverses its usual connotations of a second-degree critical distance, a gettingoutside, to stipulate instead an auto-critique, not to call it a self-consciousness, whose very point is to reinscribe the commentary back within the field (horizon, closure) of its supposed “object” (observe the family resemblance with “metalanguage” noted in the preceding chapter). More recently, Jameson has deployed the figure of a critical hermeneutic that must operate “homeopathically” (Kellner 59–60); he has also recommended Adorno’s inscription of a critical “mimesis” for the “individual philosophic sentence” the condition of whose effectivity should be its power to make its object available “to be thought from the inside and from the outside all at once: an ideational content transformed mimetically into a quasinarrative representation” (LM 68; cf. 63–73, 103–10). I risk this perhaps overlong exposition to suggest, or “motivate,” the diversity of inflections the inside/outside binary sustains in, or as the context of, Jameson’s writings of the 1970s generally, and of his conflicted dialectic of “hermeneutic” and “critique” in particular. In Fables of Aggression, The Political Unconscious, and culminating in Postmodernism and other essays of the 1980s, Jameson will increasingly make of this inside/outside dialectic a “problematization” to be played as much for pathos, for (scriptible) “textual effect,” as for analytic acuity. Increasingly, in these writings, “inside” and “outside,” “hermeneutic” and “critique,” will be deployed to insure each other’s failure, and with that, the failure of whatever critical or hermeneutic hope or ambition is invested in them at the moment. If the projected program is to penetrate, to get “inside” History, ideology, the subject, representation, language, narrative, “the postmodern,” “totality,” “the vast text of the social,” whatever, the object of the quest will figure as “absent” and thus unreachable or “unrepresentable,” leaving us, for all our efforts, “outside.” If, on the other hand, the effort is to achieve distance or difference, to get “outside,” then any or all of the above will be figured as a “prison-house,” an “ideological closure,” a “horizon” ever receding before our progress toward it, because it is “untranscendable,” thus leaving us irrevocably “inside.” Alternatively (though less frequently), if we do seem to have successfully gotten inside or outside whatever ungraspable absence or unbreachable closure initially shut us out or in, our efforts will be trumped by the reminder that “inside” and “outside” are only figures of speech, and laden with logocentric ideological baggage; alternatively, if we manage, in good “postmodern” fashion, to poise ourselves equably in the neither/nor of same-but-(self )-different, depthless, finite-but-unbounded spatiality, where all is sheer surface, and inside and outside are in-different, we will be haunted by an awareness of everything our renunciation of modernist temporality and objectivity has deprived us of. Increasingly critique will figure as a no-win, or indeed, a


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lose-lose activity, to which, as in some Beckettian I-can’t-go-on-I’ll-go-on, we are impelled (“despite our repugnance to do so”) not only despite its futility, but because of it. To all this, Jameson’s 1978 essay, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” provides a comprehensive access. Lacan is usually discussed—as is Jameson—in terms of what he has to say, his supposed argument, or “system.”11 But again, our accent here will be on the scriptible —that is, not what Lacan (or Jameson) has to say so much as how he says it. This is not an emphasis or limitation foisted on Lacan, any more than on Jameson: the texts of both take pains to foreground and “motivate” their own expressive peculiarities. As for Jameson’s own direct and career-long engagement with Lacan, its opening gambit, in the pages on Lacan in The PrisonHouse of Language, is the declaration that Lacan’s work offers rather an “initiatory” experience than an expository account; and the point launches an experiential or “dialectical” reading of Lacan whose point of departure is a distinctly off-standard response to what most people take as Lacan’s “programmatic slogan”: “L’inconscient, c’est le discours de l’autre ”: This seems to me a sentence rather than an idea, by which I mean that it marks out the place of a meditation and offers itself as an object of exegesis, instead of serving as the expression of a single concept (PHL 170–1).

But this discrimination of “idea” (or “concept”) from “sentence,” of what is said from how it is said, intends, again, no rigid disjunction of (to use an antique vocabulary) “style” from “content”; on the contrary, the point is that Lacan and Jameson share as a central problematic precisely the indissociability of what Lacan calls the “spirit” that motivates an enunciation and the “letter,” at once spirit’s vehicle and its betrayer, of the énoncé that “it speaks” (ça parle). In what follows, then, I aim not to bracket (Lacan’s) “meaning,” but to highlight what seems to me Lacan’s most immediate interest for Jameson, namely his sense, both as a problem for exposition and as the condition or motivation of his gnomic, enigmamongering prose style, of what Jameson calls “the mystery of the incarnation of meaning in language” (PHL 169). Jameson subsequently elaborates this “mystery” into the antagonism between the inevitability of “meaning,” its social, collective, constructed, conditioned, and thus (for Jameson) ideological character, and a Cartesian ideology of the self or “subject” that is rooted in and implies a speaker’s desire (futile perhaps, but only the more poignant for that) to “mean” things that haven’t been meant before, to make new and “original” meanings, to escape the entrapment (what Jameson calls the “ideological closure”) imposed by the “order of the signifier.” At

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issue is the ways in which how “it” is said may change or affect what is said—an issue, or motivation, fundamental to the deliberate, self-conscious, and exorbitant “difficulty” of both Jameson’s and Lacan’s notoriously idiosyncratic prose styles. Lacan’s writing is exemplary in enacting, or inflicting upon the reader, all the dilemmas outlined above: reading Lacan, your bafflement can’t decide whether you are trying to gain entry to something, or effect an escape from it—even if (or no matter how many times) you’ve already surmised that this is a prose essaying an asymptotic approach to the Lacanian “Real,” whose only relevant measure would be (as Lacan stipulates) the success or failure with which it “resists symbolization absolutely.” Lacan’s writing achieves a verbal condition in which the law of noncontradiction does not prevail, a medium solvent enough to diffuse, but also stiff enough to suspend, every precipitate released into or catalyzed within it. To begin with, though, the insistence on “content” must be reiterated, since so much of Jameson’s effort (whether “hermeneutic,” “analytic,” or “critical”) has been to probe the possibilities of finding linkages (on the model, however much Jameson disdains it, of base-and-superstructure) between what he calls the “logic of content” in a given work and the “ideological closure” it enforces. Jameson’s insistence on “content,” on the “referent,” is one of the larger themes of his critique of “the ideology of structuralism,” or any “ideology of text” that would reduce everything to textuality, “textual production,” écriture, or representation. In this avidity to reaffirm “the referent,” Jameson finds support in the nominally “structuralist” psychoanalysis of Lacan. Structuralist linguistics projects the binary of “signifier” and “signified” as recto and verso of (a third term) “the sign”; but between them the three terms delimit a domain strictly coextensive with the field or problematic of “representation,” with (Jameson worries) no access to any reality beyond it. By contrast, Lacan’s linguistics-influenced, Saussurean, and structuralist account of mental processes nevertheless situates their range from “Imaginary” to “Symbolic” within a larger extra-representational (and extra-psychological) field, that of “the Real,” which (for Jameson) guarantees the “materialism” of Marxism and psychoanalysis both. Jameson argues for a Marxism-friendly Lacan when he pronouces of “the Real” that “It is simply [!] History [capital H] itself ” (IT1 104). Thus does Jameson enlist Lacan in his “materialist” critique of structuralism, and of the danger he regards as inherent in its linguistic or textual focus, of entrapment in its own central metaphor, so that “language” becomes a “prisonhouse.”12 This deployment of Lacan remains constant in Jameson from The Prison-House of Language (1972) through “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1978) and beyond. More elaborate uses of Lacan appear in The Political Unconscious (1981), especially the third chapter, “Balzac and the Problem of the Subject,” which Jameson would later (1986) call an effort at “Lacanian criti-


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cism.”13 By this Jameson meant a criticism capable of achieving mediations between the social and the individual that could draw on psychoanalysis without reducing the social to the categories of individual psychology. For Jameson, Lacan’s structuralist psychoanalysis holds out the prospect of an analytically potent psychology not grounded in categories of Cartesian subjectivity, and thus able to fulfill Althusser’s stipulation (if in a different sense than Althusser intended) in being a psychology “without a subject.” (Compare Jameson’s later enthusiasm for Slavoj Zizek, whose project might be summarized as the elaboration of a specifically Lacanian Ideologiekritik.) Jameson seeks a psychology that would render the representation of “character” in works of fiction amenable to such issues of literary history as “genre” and “form,” and would thus allow the sort of politically and socially informed attention called for in Jameson’s famous imperative, “Always historicize!” (PU 9) The success-or-failure of Jameson’s “Lacanian criticism” in The Political Unconscious I leave to the reader to judge; more pressing here is the way Jameson brings Lacan’s binary of “Imaginary/Symbolic” to bear on the concerns arrayed above in terms of “hermeneutic” and “critique”—a question for which the appropriate initiating emblem will be Hegel. For another of Lacan’s attractions for Jameson is his Hegelianism—a recurrent, if undeveloped, theme in “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan.” It is shrewd of Jameson to have noted that Lacan’s Freud is a Hegelian Freud, in contrast to the Nietzschean Freuds theory has mostly given us. The (Hegelian) point is that for Lacan and Jameson, the “Imaginary/ Symbolic” binary encodes a narrative, modelled on the Hegelian course from “immediate” to “mediated,” of transit from a “lower” to a “higher” state, with the “lower” aufgehoben, cancelled-yet-preserved, in the “higher.” Jameson perhaps overplays his hand here; I do not think Lacan’s “Imaginary” and “Symbolic” quite bear the freight he wants them to carry (though Jameson’s own caution against deploying the passage from “Imaginary” to “Symbolic” as a version of the Lévi-Straussian nature-to-culture motif perhaps says all that needs saying in anticipation of my reservations here [IT1 97]). Lacan, in my view, plays the Hegelian dialectic ironically; hence the continual Schadenfreude of his textual voice, the habitual irony at the expense of “the Symbolic” itself in its very aspiration (“stoic” and/or “tragic,” but either way, doomed) to disintricate itself from “the Imaginary.” To put it another way, although Lacan’s prose is much more difficult to read than Jameson’s, the “difficulties” suffered by or in the authorial voice feel much more “difficult” for the author in Jameson’s prose than in Lacan’s. For all Lacan’s sarcasms at the expense of “le sujet supposé savoir,” it is just such a “knowingness” that Lacan’s prose projects, a knowingness from which the reader is pointedly excluded. (“It” is “this reader” speaking, of course; call him, if

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you like, le sujet supposé ne pas savoir.) Jameson’s, by contrast, projects its “difficulties” as difficulties reader and writer share, and dramatizes the desire to know against the insecurity, or the anxiety, incurred by his (and our) own critical scruples about any seemingly achieved knowledge. No such scruple agitates Lacan’s prose, which is why many find in him less an “ethic” of “stoic” or “tragic” import than an ethos of oracular clowning. (Observe, though, that Jameson’s Lacan keeps open possibilities that a more jaundiced view precludes.) However that may be, Jameson takes Lacan’s Hegelian (and other) flourishes straightforwardly, and thus finds in Lacan’s “Imaginary/Symbolic,” notwithstanding the essay’s earlier denunciation of “ethics,” something like an “ethic”—“an implicit ethical imperative” (in Jane Gallop’s words), “to break the mirror . . . to disrupt the imaginary in order to reach ‘the symbolic.’”14 Indeed, the quasi- or crypto-Hegelian narrativization of this ethic projects a scenario of change and progress, development and Aufhebung: it provides, in other words, for the continual coming-into-being of fresh perspectives, different from or “outside” of those preceding them, and thus allowing for “critical” reconsideration of them. As we shall see, one of the larger “desires” (or more Hegelian hopes) of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act is that the word “symbolic” in that subtitle can bear the capital S of a specifically Lacanian inflection—that is, that “Symbolic” can mean genuinely “critical,” and not merely “ideological” in the sense of “an Imaginary solution to a Real contradiction.” But complications await in the field of what solicits Jameson’s interest as a specifically Lacanian scriptible. And since, for Jameson, interest is proportional to problematicality, we must again acknowledge—indeed, insist on—the inextricability of Lacan’s scriptible from his “content.” This sketch so far, for example, has required brief exposition of Lacan’s “arguments” or “positions”; likewise Jameson’s own discussions of Lacan, except much much more so. Indeed, of the many high “theory” figures and issues Jameson has written about, none, arguably, has so forced him into the expository mode as Lacan. Jameson is not alone in the dilemma that discussion of Lacan is obliged to ascribe something argument- or position-like to him in order to conduct itself at all; hence the irony that Jameson must do this even though his distinction among Lacan commentators is that he appreciates so much more than almost any of them15 that Lacan’s prose is calculated to confound every possible logic of “argument” or “position.” And hence the ironic quotation marks with which Jameson refers to “Lacanianism” (IT1 95)—a term, indeed, that gets funnier and funnier the more you think about it. We return herewith to the problem announced earlier, the desire of the “speaking subject” to speak (or write) a way out of the entrapment, the necessity, the “ideological closure” of “meaning,” or what the later Jameson calls (in a term borrowed from Paul


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de Man) “thematization” (P 91)—a term, in Jameson’s usage, for the form of “thematic reification” or commodification specific to intellectual work as such, and especially properly “dialectical” projects like his own. “Thematization,” indeed, could serve as the “other” of “the scriptible ”—its other in the pointed sense of its antagonist or its special pitfall or danger, the failure specifically threatening it and its possible success. Jameson’s sense of the energies of “the scriptible” in doomed agon with “thematization” may be read as another version of his “dialectic of utopia and ideology”; it can also be read as a version, indeed, a less “irreversible” (that is, less narrative, hence less Hegelian) version, of his account of “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan.” But my point here is that quite apart from any paraphraseable doctrine or portable “thematization” of Lacan—from any “Lacanianism,” in short—Jameson discerns in Lacan’s oracular and evasive, but also ingenious, witty, and energetic prose another instance of a scriptible well worth “emulation,” another exemplar of the effort to evade or disable in advance the “thematizations” any discourse, however “dialectically” written, must suffer in an age of “consumerist” reification. As noted above, Jameson in one of his aspects is an enforcer of “content” on those who would evade it; but his stress on “content” means to facilitate analysis and protest, perhaps even exorcism, of its pernicious “ideological closure.” The motif of “the scriptible ” encodes this protest against “the logic of content,” this hope or desire to escape the constraints of “ideological closure,” at its most utopian and libidinal. It may seem a provocation to propose that Lacan’s most potent attraction for Jameson is as a prose stylist, since for many readers, precisely the impenetrable prose of both of these two figures is the severest stumbling block for any approach to either. Such readers suppose that the value of the “work” is in a “content” that would be available after the difficulties of the “style” had been obviated. But it is part of the appeal of “the scriptible ” for Jameson to confound any such “thematizing” habit of reading that would aim at an instrumental extraction of content from a stylistic skin that, once evacuated, could be safely left behind. As we have seen, it is one of the marks of Jameson’s scriptible that he does not judge its exemplars on the propositional “content,” or “argument,” of their writing—as witness (again) two of his favorite figures, Wyndham Lewis and Martin Heidegger, notoriously “right,” and at times explicitly fascist, in their politics. All of this to prepare for the “dialectical reversal” awaiting Jameson’s Hegel-inflected “Lacanianism,” for where Hegel was, there shall Heidegger be. The presence of Heidegger in Lacan’s work, of course, is evident; and Jameson links the two as exemplars of a twentieth-century critique of subject-object dichotomizing, “identity” thinking, correspondence or “adequation” theories of “truth,” the devolution of techné into technology, the instrumentalization of

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knowledge as “mastery,” and the like (IT1 103–5). In “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” Jameson gathers these Heideggerian concerns under the Lacanian rubric, “the overestimation of the Symbolic at the expense of the Imaginary” (IT1 95, 102; cf. PHL 140)—which aligns Heidegger and Lacan (and Jameson) as petitioners for the claims of “the Imaginary” against those, already overesteemed in our reifying culture, of “the Symbolic.” (The same logic underwrites Jameson’s enthusiasm for the Deleuze-Guattari thematic of “delirium” and the “schizo.”) Yet above, under the sign of Hegel, the very possibility of critique, the very possibility of its power to escape “ideological closure,” was figured as its potential to surmount “the [ideological] Imaginary” and ascend to “the [critical] Symbolic.” Here, Jameson valorizes a desire to head in the other direction. Here, “the Symbolic” itself is the “ideology” from which escape is hoped for, by way not of the stratospheric mediations of critique, but rather of the affective immediacies of “the Imaginary.” To put it another way, on the first (Hegelian) pass, Lacan’s “Imaginary/Symbolic” binary was fraught with the problematic of “ideology/critique”; on the second (Heideggerian) pass, its burden is rather Jameson’s perdurable dialectic of “utopia/ideology.” This difficulty (or “contradiction”) lends its force to Jameson’s assessment of the Lacanian “ethic” as “stoic” and “tragic”; it indicates as well the ambitions of, and the mediations proposed in, the Jamesonian “scriptible ”: a prose whose potencies should be at once analytical and libidinal. “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” indeed, ends by inferring from Lacan something like an ethic or ethos for “cultural intellectuals,” an ethos that would eschew “Symbolic” critical “mastery” of “subject” over “object” (“the discourse of the master”) in favor of a more intersubjective “discourse of the analyst”: The “discourse of the analyst,” finally, is the subject position that our current political languages seem least qualified to articulate. Like the “discourse of the hysteric,” this position also involves an absolute commitment to desire as such at the same time that it opens a certain listening distance from it and suspends the latter’s existential urgencies—in a fashion more dialectical than ironic. The “discourse of the analyst,” then, which seeks to distinguish the nature of the object of desire itself from the passions and immediacies of the experience of desire’s subject, suggests a demanding and self-effacing political equivalent in which the structure of Utopian desire itself is attended to through the chaotic rhythms of collective discourse and fantasy of all kinds (including those that pass through our own heads). This is not, unlike the discourse of the master, a position of authority . . . ; rather it is a position of articulated receptivity, of deep listening (L’écoute), of some attention beyond the self or the ego, but one that may need to use those bracketed personal functions as instruments for hearing the


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Other’s desire. The active and theoretical passivity, the rigorous and committed self-denial, of this final subject position, which acknowledges collective desire at the same moment that it tracks its spoors and traces, may well have lessons for cultural intellectuals as well as politicians and psychoanalysts (IT1 115).

The “active and theoretical passivity, the rigorous and committed self-denial, of this final subject position” forecasts Jameson’s later injunction that critique conduct itself “homeopathically,” from the inside, turning ideology’s own virulences against it. The ambition proposed here, though, encompasses not merely mediation (let alone synthesis) of “Imaginary” and “Symbolic,” but more: an ascesis of “listening” attention that can achieve contact with “the Real,” which Jameson has equated with “History itself.” Here the demands Jameson makes of critique, and of his own critical practice, rely less on Lacan’s categories than on Lacan’s example as a writer, on that peculiar Lacanian “scriptible,” so elusive and yet so evocative of a “Real” that, as Lacan stipulates, “resists symbolization absolutely”—a formula in which the word “symbolization” bears the full, and fully conflicted, Lacanian charge. “Symbolization” is a notion with obvious affinities to “thematization,” a condition Jameson’s own writing practice aims to postpone if not altogether prevent or escape. Hence the pertinence of Lacan’s cagey prose, which resists “thematization,” so much more effectively—“absolutely”—than Jameson’s own. Critique cannot “resist thematization absolutely,” but Jameson’s later prose makes much both of the attempt, and of the failure. Much: but what exactly?—a “socially Symbolic act”? a “socially Real act”? In The Political Unconscious, Jameson will elaborate “History itself ” (“what hurts”) as “absent cause,” and thus as “unrepresentable” and “unsymbolizable” in ways that, in Postmodernism, will require or justify (or “motivate”) a rhetoric of “the sublime”—a name apt, I think, for at least some of the grander effects of the later Jameson’s tortured scriptible. Lacan’s terminology permits us to indicate the anxieties often powering these passages by way of the question, Can critique—critique in general, Jameson’s critique in particular—overcome “the Imaginary” and broach “the Real”? The difficulty, of course, is how to know the difference—or even how to know whether the difference itself is “Imaginary” or “Real.” It is in his work on Lewis that these themes begin to take on the darker colorings that will increasingly prevail in Jameson’s work of the 1980s and after—for in Fables of Aggression Jameson sets out to celebrate the utopian or libidinal energies of a uniquely potent “scriptible,” but is obliged also to measure this utopian potential against the reactionary ideological ends to which Lewis attempted to turn it.

Chapter Four

“Deliberate Failure”

Wyndham Lewis

Fables of Aggression, Jameson’s 1979 study of Wyndham Lewis, “The Modernist as Fascist,” projects “the dialectic of the scriptible ” as an agon between the formidable energies of Lewis’s writing and the “ideological closures” entailed in Lewis’s particular political commitments. In subsequent work—The Political Unconscious and after—this particularity will yield to a more general, or generic—and thus insoluble—construction of “ideological closure” as such; hence the increasingly fatalistic mood of The Political Unconscious and later works. But Fables of Aggression carries itself as if sheer verbal power, at least at the voltages Lewis generates, really can exert some potent effectivity—and hence the book’s peculiar, if febrile, excitements. Fables of Aggression is, again, a book of enthusiasm—Jameson wants more people to read Lewis: he is at pains to make clear that his response to Lewis’s writing is (to use a word Fables of Aggression foregrounds) “libidinal,” not the merely obligatory workout with an acknowledged or canonical “great,” as with Balzac and Conrad in The Political Unconscious. Indeed, Lewis’s uncanonical status is for Jameson a large part of his interest: a symptom and, Jameson dares to hope, perhaps even a promising sign, insofar as what sets Lewis apart from the (by now thoroughly domesticated) “conventional modernism” of his contemporaries is also 67

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what makes his work especially relevant, even revelatory, for our own historical moment, namely its anticipation of a “schizophrenic” and/or “delirious” theory-and-practice of writing (FA 18–20), an interest Jameson foregrounds as a function of Lewis’s style, of his “scriptible,” of his “sentences,” even of what Jameson calls, taking his lead from Lewis himself, Lewis’s “image- and sentenceproducing machine” (FA 28; cf. P 21–3 [on E. L. Doctorow] and 131–53 [on Claude Simon]). Jameson’s enthusiasm for Lewis’s scriptible is insistent not only in Jameson’s frequent praises of its energy and power (“it has been my experience that new readers can be electrified by exposure to Tarr, a book in which, as in few others, the sentence is reinvented with all the force of origins, as sculptural gesture and fiat in the void” [FA 2]), but in the very style of Fables of Aggression itself (the sentence just quoted, for example), which all but avows in so many words its “emulation” of the very qualities it praises. Jameson’s own prose, elsewhere so often attenuated, with conflicting motifs or impulses elaborated and mediated if not to a standstill, then to a highly agitated gridlock, a sort of ideational running in place, here propels itself forward with an impetuosity and brio veritably (and self-consciously) Lewislike. But even as the book offers itself as testimonial to and enactment of the energies and powers of the Lewisian scriptible, it also dramatizes the defeat of those energies by the “ideological closures” intrinsic to the workings of Lewis’s narrative machineries, and perhaps (anticipations here of The Political Unconscious) of narrative as such. This, more than (as Jameson himself announces) Lewis’s shift from one sort of “narrative system” (“national allegory”) to another (“libidinal apparatus”), turns out to be what Jameson calls (inviting us to inscribe Fables of Aggression itself within the category of “narrative”) “the central story the present book has to tell” (FA 11). Fables of Aggression, then, stages the failure of the utopian energies of Lewis’s primordially potent “sentences” at the hands of the “ideological closure” enforced by his “narrative systems”—and with this in mind, we might discern in Jameson’s apparently incongruous enthusiasm for a “fascist” writer a quite lucid “motivation,” for the case of Lewis, precisely because of his fascism, raises to the highest possible pitch (or, some may feel, almost too-tidily sorts out) the contradiction between Lewis’s success on what Jameson calls, borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari (FA 7), the “molecular” level (Lewis’s style, sentences, scriptible) from his failure on the “molar” level (the “ideological closure,” determined by their fascist content, of Lewis’s “narrative [and “character”] systems”). The energies of the former, with its large promise of rupturing open the ideological closure of received and therefore dead and deadening habits of reading and writing, is “contained” (the rupture is prevented) or “recontained” (the rupture is mended, no sooner

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opened than closed again) by the workings of Lewis’s (political) motives and meanings. The political inflection of this agon is evinced in Jameson’s introductory premise that Lewis’s “populist” [that is, utopian] component is expressed through his stylistic practice . . . [whereas] the “petty-bourgeois” [that is, ideological, and specifically fascist] stance in Lewis’ work can best be detected in the obsessive formal problem of the social and narrative place to be assigned to the essentially placeless observer/satirist (FA 16).

A complication is the question of Lewis’s non-narrative writing, a considerable body of polemics, ranging from the highbrow-monumental (The Art of Being Ruled ) to the topically, even ephemerally propagandistic (Hitler), and all insistently political, that Jameson considers at the close of his book. Lewis is rather like Sartre in appealing to Jameson in part because of the generic diversity of his output, not only as novelist but also polemicist, culture critic, and “philosopher” (Jameson notes, with a straight face, that Time and Western Man appeared in the same year, 1927, as Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit [FA 123]), not to mention Lewis’s primary vocation as painter. But in these writings, on Jameson’s showing, the same “ideological closures” operate if anything more rigidly than in Lewis’s narratives— so “ideological closure” is not a liability exclusive to narrative. While elsewhere “narrative” sometimes seems, as we have seen, to mean the “other” of critique, or at least to be an issue that displaces or eclipses generic questions about critique itself, Fables of Aggression largely collapses this distinction. (That ostensibly synchronic genres are “secretly narrative in character” [IT1 140] is one of the developing themes of Jameson’s writing in the 1970s from The Prison-House of Language [cf. PHL 164] to The Political Unconscious itself [PU 13]. But note that “secretly” leaves hanging the question, Secret from whom?—from readers? from the authors themselves? Either way, it is left to the critic to expose this secret, to ascribe various degrees of consciousness—thus of success or failure?—to the “secretly narrative” texts in question.) But is the distinction properly generic, properly one of “genre,” at all? Jameson notes Lewis’s designation of the word “satire” (FA 52n10, 136ff ) as the fundamental impulse of his work, and “satire” is a term, rather like “critique” or “narrative” themselves, that seems transgeneric—too broad, too inclusive or comprehensive, to do the kinds of work, and specify the kinds of difference, for which we usually call on the word “genre.” Indeed, Fables of Aggression might be thought to expend a good deal of ingenuity precisely in eliding the category of “genre,” in finding other vocabularies (“national allegory,” “libidinal apparatus,” “energy model”) in which to negotiate—both to evoke and to suspend—issues that more

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conventional approaches would cast in generic terms. “Narrative” itself, for example: if all discourse is “secretly narrative,” then “narrativity” serves less as a sine qua non of a particular genre than a way to trump or dissolve (or “neutralize”) genre as an issue altogether. I introduce the problem of genre here because its evasion in Fables of Aggression makes a telling contrast with its salience in the book that followed. In the second chapter of The Political Unconscious (PU 103–50), Jameson offers to rehabilitate “genre criticism” by way of a detailed critique of genre-as-usual, subjecting it to the book’s opening imperative—“Always historicize!”—to argue for a critical deployment of genre that “allows the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and [the] evolution of social life” (PU 105), as well as for a view of genre itself that would dissolve criticism’s (usual) hypostasis of the term into a historically determined flux in which precisely the difference of the individual text from the “ideal type” of its genre would be the maximally revelatory index of the “sedimentation” of historically determined forms (an application of the Sartrean “practico-inert” to literary history) in a continual state of (dialogic) generation, cross-fertilization, and degeneration. Jameson argues, in short, for a “historicization” of genre criticism that would correct or reverse its generalizing tendency, and make it an instrument for specifying, rather than erasing, the text’s (historical) “difference.” In Fables of Aggression, Jameson’s account of Lewis stakes all on Lewis’s “difference,” and labors mightily to demonstrate and maintain it—a way of putting it that suggests some of what is at stake in the terminological decision between “form” and “genre.” In The Political Unconscious, “genre” itself is reconceived by the light of the historically determined “difference(s)” between individual texts. And yet there is a crucial, and for Jameson’s development, a telling difference between the two books. In The Political Unconscious, the “dialectic of utopia and ideology” is allegorized in the (Jamesonian) agon that pits utopian desire against “ideological closure”: the book assumes at every point that it is the condition, or fate, of every narrative—and seemingly of every “socially symbolic act”? including critique?—that its subversive or transgressive possibilities, its dramatization of the contradictions of its society, will be “contained” or “recontained” by the “ideological closure(s)” of its “objective” historically determining cultural constraints. Fables of Aggression, by contrast, tells this “story” as a cautionary tale, as if its moral were uniquely instantiated in the career of Lewis as a special case: as if it were, indeed, Lewis’s “difference” as such. Which would mean that Lewis’s failure was his own, the more dramatic and poignant in that it so nearly achieved, gave such large promise of, some of the subversive or transgressive success Lewis so clearly aimed


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for (both in its own milieu, at smashing the domesticated revolution of “conventional modernism,” and in ours, as precursor of the transgressive, DeleuzeGuattari “schizo” [FA 18–20]). In The Political Unconscious, by contrast, the failure, and the “ideological closure,” belong to no individual (text, figure, career), but are culture-wide, and inevitable, the very condition of all cultural production in our particular reified late capitalist culture. Fables of Aggression thus marks an interestingly unstable moment—on the cusp, as it were, between the early Jameson’s confidence (or hope) that art, literature and critique might play some not inconsiderable role in the world-historical drama of revolutionary change, and the later Jameson’s more demoralized—and demoralizing—sense of what The Political Unconscious will announce as a henceforth programmatic “presupposition,” namely the “determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history” (PU 102). So Jameson’s evocation of how, and at what, Lewis succeeds and/or fails, what successes his failures fall short of, is of particular interest: indeed, in Fables of Aggression, the very word “failure” becomes a term richly, even dialectically supercharged, the word itself a kind of self-different, dialogic, multivocal or plurisignificant “text,” and as such a vehicle for complexly, conflictedly antithetical motifs. Jameson finds Lewis’s failure the more interesting because it approaches so nearly to kinds of achievement that Jameson wants to accredit as success; but also, more complexly, because failure appears (again) as not merely the inevitable fate of Lewis’s ambitions, but actually as their very condition, to the extent that the impossibility of the endeavor is part of its point, what made it worth attempting to begin with. But this latter “story”—to call it that—remains embryonic in Fables of Aggression : in it, success still seems, as in the earlier books, a large if not quite specifiable possibility, while the specter of failure remains a motif, not yet the motivation—the “vision” or “ultimate Marxian presupposition” (PU 101–2)— that it will become in The Political Unconscious and after. The later Jameson’s premise or ethos of “inevitable failure” is, in Fables of Aggression, anticipated—both foretold and forestalled, prefigured and prevented—in the provocative and more conflicted theme of “deliberate failure” (FA 55, a passage to be considered extensively below). This premise of Lewis’s constructive-destructive power, functioning in the book as a barely articulated axiom, must project as common to all the ambitions Lewis aims (and nearly succeeds) at, that of inducing the failure, and thus demonstrating the limitations of, and enabling a breakout from, various kinds of socially constructed closures or reifications inscribed in the (stylistic, narrative, ideological) practices of Lewis’s period. The failure is not only deliberate, then, but also necessary as the precondition of Lewis’s culture-critical ambitions. And yet this dialectic of success and failure is unstable enough, at this transitional moment

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in Jameson’s writing, to produce a degree of agitation in the prose not only exceeding (quantitatively) that found elsewhere in his work but also qualitatively different from it as well. I mean that in Fables of Aggression, failure and success are harder to discriminate, more conflictedly (or “dialectically”) interlinked, than anywhere else in Jameson—and Jameson himself often allows or exploits an ambivalence or uncertainty about how to take Lewis’s “failures” that further tangles the already nearly terminal degree of complication entoiling these questions. Take, as an initial example, Jameson’s frequent recurrence to what he calls (in a passage cited above) “the obsessive formal problem [in Lewis’s work] of the social and narrative place to be assigned to the essentially placeless observer/ satirist” (FA 16). Since the book will go on to stage the defeat of Lewis’s “sentences” by the “narrative machineries” of the stories Lewis tells—a defeat projected as a failure to “open” the “closures” entailed by Lewis’s ideological commitments— we may question the criterion for success or failure posed for Lewis here: is Lewis to solve the “obsessive formal problem,” and find a “place” for the “placeless” authorial consciousness?—or is he, rather, to escape (aufheben ?) the problem, loose himself from its bounds and constraints altogether? Are we to take Lewis as having failed to achieve such a place, or as having succeeded in achieving such a placelessness?—as having enacted (and thus revealed or exposed) a “closure,” or as securing some (at least imaginative or “socially symbolic”) breakout from the closures of any “social and narrative” place as such? And: are such questions developed or trumped, elaborated or negated, if we modify the substantive “failure” with the adjective “deliberate”? Can we, for example, extrapolate from the category “deliberate failure” a complementary “inadvertent success”? Here we broach the territory Jameson will shortly begin to designate as a specifically political “unconscious.” Fables of Aggression, as I have said, stages the agon of Lewis’s potentially liberating scriptible with the “prison-house” closures of his ideological commitments and the formal and generic properties of the kinds of writing (fiction, philosophy, culture-criticism, broadside) Lewis produced; to that end the book opens celebrating Lewis’s scriptible, then leads it into confrontation with the constraints and orders, the readings and reason(s), of narrative necessity, these latter initially appearing (in the book’s second chapter, “Agons of the Pseudo-Couple”) in the guise of the formal and other constraints of Lewis’s narrative and character system(s). But Jameson begins, or rather, asserts that Lewis begins, with the author/artist (Lewis himself ) in relation to his model—the image of the painter vis à vis his subject is explicit (FA 36–7)—as the very type of the “detached” (objectifying) subject/object relation (itself, says Jameson, a “protonarrative form” [FA 36]) that prevails in the Lewis-world, both between Lewis and his fictional characters, and between the characters themselves: a “combative, exasperated, yet jaunty stance,”


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as Jameson, sounding (again) very Lewis-like, puts it, “of monads in collision, a kind of bouyant truculence in which matched and abrasive consciousnesses slowly rub each other into smarting vitality” (FA 37). People who don’t care for Lewis (most people, as Jameson admits as readily as any of Lewis’s other boosters, from T. S. Eliot to Hugh Kenner) generally complain that his characters are caricatures, and thus uninteresting; this failure (as most readers think it) Jameson accounts a success, as a “decentering” avant la lettre of the subject (FA 50) and thus of humanist sentimentalisms about “intersubjectivity” (FA 40); here, recall Jameson’s recommendation of the “schizophrenic” and the “delirious” in Lewis, as well as Lacan’s cagier decentering of the subject. Jameson recommends Lewis for mocking and evacuating of their appeal the solicitations of “identification” that degrade most fiction to the status of an ideological pollution of our daydreams. Thus could Lewis be said to have abolished the subject-centered conventions of fiction in his period (“in Lewis’ narrative such categories as ‘irony’ and ‘point of view’ are no longer relevant” [FA 54]); Jameson especially admires Lewis for turning the estranging chill of his prose upon his authorial surrogates no less than on his most despised satirical targets; of an example from “Cantleman’s Spring Mate,” Jameson observes: “This is not Lewis judging himself from the outside: rather an almost pathological depersonalization releases the personality itself from all favoritism” (FA 55). Yet this achievement (this success) proves to generate a peculiarly ironic dialectical backfire, as Lewis’s powerfully estranging verbal or stylistic resources are considered against Lewis’s “official” ideological positions: Lewis’ official thematics assign unambiguous moral coordinates by which to ‘place’ this or that choice or temptation of his characters . . . yet such a judgment cannot function immanently: Lewis’s narrative texture fails—yet the failure is surely deliberate—to provide anything like an ethical framework of the type of Jamesian irony (FA 55).

Only a page earlier, Lewis’s dissolution of “irony” and “point of view” had seemed a success, and one with large “critical” import (against the conventions of highbourgeois subjectivity as these operate in early-modern fiction); here, by contrast, it entails a limitation or lapse of “critical” power (“such a judgment cannot function immanently”). In the agon between (in this passage’s terms) “official thematics” and “narrative textures,” it is the energies of the latter that are declared to fail—“yet the failure is surely deliberate,” Jameson hastens to add, in just the sort of affirmation that confesses doubt. (In fact, on the following page, Jameson is anticipating the objection that Lewis’s “disintegration of the individual subject” is less a “merit” in Lewis’s favor than a “symptom of some ‘dissociation of the moral sensibility’ in Lewis himself ” [FA 56]).

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Moreover, this “failure” of what Jameson has cast as Lewis’s strong point, his verbal “texture,” is a failure not at the hands of, but in the service of, the “official thematics” of Lewis’s fascism. But does this circumstance make the “failure” a fortunate fall, a felix culpa, a failure we should be glad of? If so, then how “deliberate” can the “failure” be?—which suggests the further vexing question whether in this discussion Lewis’s “fascism” is a simple equation for, or guarantee of, “failure” as such (the bad kind of failure), so that if Lewis were to write a successfully fascist work, that success would be, proportionally, the most pointed kind of “failure” possible. Do Jameson’s terms, for all their seemingly limitless flexibility, allow for such a thing as a fascist “success”? But how can they fail to do so? The discussion goes on to take a further unexpected turn when “narrative,” which had seemed, with its necessary structures and sequences, the fated antagonist of the utopian force of the scriptible, momentarily appears as its ally against the “machine” of Lewis’s polemical/ideological moralism: one part of Lewis’s mind . . . is powerfully locked into the ideological closure of ethics and has become a virtual machine for issuing judgments and anathemata. The narratives, on the other hand, may be seen as the experimental or laboratory situation in which the very problem of making such judgments is itself foregrounded, and in which the impossibility of the ethical becomes itself the implicit center of the text, whose operations systematically and critically undermine this older “habit,” this henceforth historically outmoded system of positioning the individual subject (FA 56–7).

Much narrative theory stresses the “plurisignificance” or “indeterminacy” of narrative, seeing in these an opening for imaginative freedom from the tyrannies of every monologic, authoritarian “will to interpretation.” By contrast, Jameson’s penchant has always been rather for structuralist narratologies, which emphasize the finite “combinatoire ” of a closed field of possibilities, than with hermeneutic ones, with their stress on interpretive indeterminacy. Indeed, Jameson’s deployment of “narrative” is usually such as to make the structuralist sense of closure an immanent criticism of the hermeneutic jouissance of plurisignificance as a kind of ideology. In The Political Unconscious, as we shall see in the following chapter, Jameson projects narrative as the very figure or condition of ideological closure, a closure that, fatedly, “recontains” whatever energies narrative indeterminacy might release, recloses whatever aperture narrative indeterminacy might seem momentarily to have opened. I make this point not to charge Jameson with a “contradiction,” nor to instantiate how Fables of Aggression leaves in a fluid state issues that will harden in Jameson’s later work, but rather to point out again an instance in which “deliber-


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ate failure” turns around into an inadvertent failure that amounts to a kind of inadvertent success, for here again Lewis’s “offical” aims—what he consciously meant his work to accomplish—are subverted despite his best efforts, and the “part of [Lewis’s] mind” Jameson is rooting for (the stylist, the Lewis who writes those “sentences”) succeeds at the expense of Lewis’s avowed reactionary intentions. And in doing so, the scriptible seems, momentarily, to succeed at the expense of the “ideological closure” that, in the book’s larger plot, figures as the defeated scriptible’s victorious antagonist. This latter motif, indeed, closes the chapter, as the function of Lewis’s “pseudo-couple,” which at the chapter’s opening had been a “decentering” blow against the ideology of the subject, is summarized as a molar reunification of impulses that threaten dispersal; as the reimposition of a framework that allows powerfully antinarrative tendencies to be safely renarrativized, and the recontainment of an essentially centrifugal production of style. The pseudo-couple at once reveals and betrays the inner truth of what we have hitherto called the agon, of which it is the hypostasis, and which it retroactively unmasks as a pseudo-agon in its turn: a reification of struggle arrested and transmuted into static, structural dependency (FA 60).

Even here, however, it is difficult to discriminate the “deliberate” failures (Lewis’s admirable achievements, his hard-won critical negations) from the unwitting or ideological ones (Lewis’s symptomatic lapses of false consciousness). The “unmasking” in question here, for example: is it Lewis’s heroic deployment of the “pseudo-couple” to expose and critique the subject-centered ideology of the high-bourgeois era (which would be Lewis’s success), or is it what we, with the help of Jameson’s analysis, are in a position to recognize as Lewis’s unwitting self“reification” of his own “centrifugal production of style” into a “static, structural dependency” (which would be Lewis’s failure)? These problems, or problematizations, prompted by Lewis’s treatment of “character,” are recapitulated in chapter 5 (“From National Allegory to Libidinal Apparatus”) in relation to the structural problems and shapings of Lewis’s “narrative machineries.” The central exhibit is again Lewis’s Tarr, a fruitfully problematic case because it is Lewis’s first novel and yet his most advanced in terms of narrative experiment. In it, on Jameson’s showing, various narrative conventions of the pre-1914 period are sublated, or compelled to undergo (again) a deliberate failure; and it is thus, for Jameson, that Tarr can be said to prepare a non- or postnarrative possibility in Lewis’s subsequent oeuvre, and in subsequent literary history at large. But by the same token, the deliberate failure in question cannot help but entail also Tarr ’s own, and so there is released within Jameson’s “story” a counterplot in which Tarr foretells the conventional scenarios and predictable

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characters of Lewis’s later ideological potboilers (whose success Jameson is loath to liken to that of a right-wing Shaw), as well as figuring the impotence of cultural production in our century at large to do any more than “testify to [its own] powerlessness” (FA 81). The chapter’s title (“From National Allegory to Libidinal Apparatus”) provides the terms for the project whose possibilities of success or failure Jameson will combine and recombine, kaleidoscope-fashion, into continuously multiplying, and conflicting, permutations. On the one hand, the passage “from national allegory to libidinal apparatus” appears as Lewis’s accomplishment in exploding and escaping the constraints and conventions, the “formal completeness” (FA 94), of a familiar genre to break through into the open, unpreempted space of what J. F. Lyotard has called a libidinal apparatus, an empty form or structural matrix in which a charge of free-floating and inchoate fantasy—both ideological and psychoanalytic—can suddenly crystallize, and find the articulated figuration essential for its social actuality and effectivity (FA 95).

Underwriting the story of this sanguine “break” is the historical confirmation of events contemporaneous with the composition and publication of Tarr, namely Lenin’s analysis of imperialism (to which “national allegory” corresponds) and the revolution against (or “break” from) that “national system” that Lenin effected in 1917 (FA 92). But the “libidinal apparatus” no sooner appears in this hopeful guise as a sign of revolutionary renovation than its psychoanalytic implications summon Freud (FA 96), and with him a very different reading, in which the “libidinal apparatus” figures as something more like what Jameson will later call a “political unconscious”: not a happy narrative destination but a persistence of some primordial and original limitation, a repressed ever returning, and thus always and fatedly dooming (or “always already” having doomed) any narrative of renovatory change, returning it to (or “recontaining” it in) what Jameson calls the “‘energy model’ of the rivalry between Eros and Thanatos” (FA 96)—a mere cycle, a mere semblance of kinesis that only mystifies a steady-state, antinomic “structure” of non-narrative stasis. The seemingly different proves (again) to be the same: the narrative of revolutionary change reappears as a structure of repetition—a dénouement, however, that Jameson affects momentarily to hold at bay by “historicizing” Freud’s own development via the linkage of Freud’s metaphors and figures to their “objective precondition” in “the industrialization, the social stratification and class polarization, the complex division of labor,” of Freud’s historical period (FA 96).


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In these reworkings of theme-and-variations, the antithetically inflected permutations we have seen above—deliberate and/or inadvertent failure and/or success—impel the forward momentum of Jameson’s own writing. As “national allegory,” Tarr objectifies the social contradiction of pre-Great War (that is, stillimperialist) Britain, and “it is from this dilemma that Tarr as an aesthetic totality seeks to deliver itself ” (FA 95). “Deliverance” would seem the very type of the all-or-nothing project at which it must be possible to succeed or fail; but the deliverance requires, as its precondition, an evocation of the precedent objectification from which deliverance is sought. Tarr must succeed, as writing, then, in its objectification of the “dilemma,” but would fail, presumably, if it remained there. Yet, too, Tarr ’s success is also cast as its power to so construct the objectification as to make it deliverance-proof—which would in turn be compromised (that is, have to be judged a failure: “an imaginary solution to a real contradiction”) if the narrative deliverance were to succeed. So that when Jameson observes, a few pages on, that “Lewis’s narrative is locked into [a] static binary opposition in much the same way that his national allegory is paralyzed by the conception of nation-states (rather than the more genuinely historical dynamic of class antagonism) as the equivalent subjects of a history which can thus only end in catastrophe” (FA 99), the judgment clearly goes against Lewis for telling an imperialist rather than a socialist story (of international, rather than interclass, antagonism). Yet it also seems to commend him for rendering with such acuity a “locked in” set of antagonisms that, indeed, did produce the catastrophe of 1914–1918, the debacle in which the imperial behemoths bled each other white, in which imperialism’s self-inflicted wounds brought it to its gravest neardeath experience yet, and in which, furthermore, Lenin’s revolution of 1917 was able to make its opportunity. There also recurs, again in connection with Tarr, “the obsessive formal problem of the social and narrative place of the essentially placeless observer/satirist” (FA 16); and at stake, again, is the possibility of (alternatively) either a “break” from narrative, or a perpetuation of it, with (again) the question which of these possibilities would be more desirable and why. Jameson quotes one of Tarr’s speeches on the Lewisian theme that “Deadness is the first condition of art”; then comments: This, which is virtually the letter of what will later become Lewis’s own aesthetic program—called satire—is here still the mere opinion of one of his characters: the coincidence of authorial value with Tarr’s structural position as a character within the novel marks him as the first and last fully positive figure in Lewis’s work, at the same time that it virtually excludes him from the narrative itself. In his fashion, indeed,

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Tarr attempts to realize the Shavian superman and to project an almost evolutionary mutation of the species, from which the artist can emerge from the latter’s organic necessity. Yet if he succeeds, he fails; for of such an artist, no story can henceforth be told, and the narrative of Tarr must quickly give place to a quite different one, namely that of Kreisler (FA 98).

“Tarr attempts to realize the Shavian superman”: the chapter had opened with a suggestion of Shaw as a model or example for Lewis, or perhaps a counter-model in that a fascist Shaw would be of no interest to a Jameson. (The “successful” Shaw versus the failed, all-but-forgotten Lewis: the mere conjunction says almost all.)1 But is Tarr’s attempt “to realize the Shavian superman” a vehicle for Lewis’s own ambitions, or is it rather a project, involving the acceptance of “a narrative and social place,” that Lewis means to satirize, and disown? And “an evolutionary mutation” (not, observe, a revolutionary one): an organic metaphor to figure what Jameson’s next words characterize as an escape from “organic necessity.” The project is figured as an escape from narrative; but doesn’t narrative belong rather with history and cultural change than with natural evolutionary processes?—especially since Jameson explains that the Tarr-story “fails” because its narrative viability has attenuated. (Compare the earlier non- or even anti-organic term, “break,” which entails the question whether a “break” away from narrative, or any “break” as such, can be thought in other than narrative, before-and-after terms.) And in the following paragraph Jameson argues that Tarr’s “virtual exclu[sion] . . . from the narrative itself ” leaves an important “male axis” of the narrative “structurally incomplete”—which might seem an achievement to Lewis’s credit in view of Jameson’s earlier commendation that Tarr “calls into question” the “formal completeness” (and thus also the ideological assumptions) of realist fiction (FA 94–5); but which more immediately seems some sort of deficit when Jameson goes on to observe that because of this structural incompleteness Tarr is “condemned to an oscillation” between binaries from which there cannot possibly be any “deliverance.” Has Lewis again successfully, that is, critically, dramatized an “objective” oscillation, or has his “structural incompleteness” vitiated the attempt to do so, so that the oscillation is simply replicated in Lewis’s novel, a “symptom,” not a “negation”? I have risked the foregoing close readings with some misgiving. I well know that such detailed and minute examination tries a reader’s patience, and in the case of a prose as densely textured as Jameson’s, incurs the further liability—not to call it the “inevitable failure”—of selecting from a rich fabric a very few (tangled) threads, with a consequent simplification and distortion that can be redeemed only, if at all, in the reader’s own return to Jameson’s writing. But for some pages


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now, my account of Jameson’s account of Lewis’s successes or failures has generated—indeed, has proceeded by way of, even on condition of—unanswered questions. It’s easy enough to reach for a word like “undecidable” at such moments; more useful would be some specification of what these undecidables do for Jameson’s writing, and what costs they exact from or entail upon it. For a prose that evades or renounces answers to the questions it poses must be judged, expositorily at least, a failure; the question is, can compensating gains redeem this (deliberate) failure, and make possible other kinds of success?—with the caveat that, in my view, the question becomes more acute, not less, if the alternatives it seems to propose turn out not to be mutually exclusive. For the failure is, again, inseparable from the success—is, indeed, its very condition. Jameson’s “dialectical” procedure does indeed entail certain kinds of expository lapses and frustrations. The motif of the “libidinal apparatus,” for example, deserves lengthy exploration—its applications, its limitations, its ideological baggage, its relation to “genre” (it seems that every genre is a libidinal apparatus, but not vice versa)—but Jameson’s transposition of it, via a characteristically quick cut from (or Adornoesque “historical troping” of ) the force-field of “Lenin” to that of “Freud” rather enacts these issues, displays them in action, in collision, in conflict, in the very process of doing (or failing to do) what they promise or permit to be done (or prevented)—in the very process, that is, of succeeding or failing. Jameson’s writing suspends or postpones the antinomic closure that demands a bottom-line (and allor-nothing) judgment—success or failure?—keeping the opposed possibilities disintricable, in attestation of their “dialectical” interconnection. More dramatically, it enlarges or amplifies to the maxima of possibility the stakes of the agon between the opposing alternatives, charging them with such significance and weight as to make not merely argumentatively plausible but libidinally compelling, as effects of the power of the writing, their conflictedness as instances of the “dialectic of utopia and ideology.” Which is to say that in Fables of Aggression, the question of Lewis’s success or failure implies the question of Jameson’s success or failure—or rather, turns out to have been the same question all along, an eventuality, indeed, that Jameson conjures from the beginning of the book—though (tellingly) not as a reflexivity he magisterially promises to achieve, but as a fatality he, as critic, cannot escape, thus is obliged to suffer, and so in the spirit of a kind of intellectual amor fati makes it an askesis to embrace. If Fables of Aggression stages Lewis’s career as an agon of the liberating energies of Lewis’s “molecular” scriptible, his “will to style,” his “sentences,” against their “molar” adversary, the “ideological closures” of his (and/or his culture’s) “narrative machineries,” this agon looms in Fables of Aggression not merely as theme, or thesis, but as Jameson’s own engagement in a

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struggle that criticism-as-usual typically refuses, when Jameson’s “Prologue” announces that one of the book’s ambitions (it will prove the central one, in Fables of Aggression and later) must be to tackle the methodological problem of the unsatisfactory alternative between stylistics and narrative analysis . . . between the micro- and the macro-level of cultural artifacts. Every serious practicing critic knows a secret which is less often publicly discussed, namely, that there exists no ready-made corridor between the sealed chamber of stylistic investigation and that equally unventilated space in which the object of study is reconstituted as narrative structure. In practice, whatever the solution adopted, there is always an uncomfortable shifting of gears in the movement from one of these perspectives to the other: nor does the assertion of this or that “homology” between style and narrative do much more than to pronounce resolved in advance the dilemma for which it was supposed to provide a working answer. To grasp this discontinuity as an objective reality in our culture, rather than as a methodological inconsistency which might be solved by tinkering with the methods in question and readjusting them to each other, requires us radically to historicize the gap between style and narrative, which then may be seen as an event in the history of form (FA 7).

This passage suggests, indeed, the very terms in which the drama and effect of Fables of Aggression itself are most adequately characterized: Jameson’s acute pleasure in Lewis’s writing sentence-by-sentence in fruitful agon with his loathing of Lewis’s political commitments. The passage so stages methodological problems of literary criticism as to make them agitate or “cathect” an array of politically and otherwise “libidinal” impulses: to publish literary criticism’s professional “secrets,” and thus to expose the ideology their unacknowledged contradictions would betray; and by that very stroke, simultaneously to pose, if not “solve,” the very “problem” this earlier self-blinkered criticism could not even articulate to itself; to expose its putative ideal or aim, namely to harmonize, or “homologize,” style and structure, as itself deluded, not merely “part of the problem rather than part of the solution,” but indeed the problem from which criticism should properly start rather than the supposed solution or achieved end at which criticism can pronounce its task completed. On the contrary, “to grasp this discontinuity as an objective reality” is the revised ambition, and its realization will involve inducing the (deliberate) failure of any “homology” between molecular and molar—so that, in Jameson’s account of Lewis, “style” and “structure” are cast as combatants in an agon whose stakes Jameson is at pains to raise as high as possible.


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Thus does Jameson announce the ambitions of his own “critical” program, in terms cognate with those in which he casts, and assesses the success or failure of, Lewis’s. And the central issue or “problem” Jameson identifies in Lewis’s work, the crux on which its success or failure turns, namely the relation of style to structure, is staged as the central issue or problem of Jameson’s own engagement with Lewis. I have singled out the style/structure problem because it best illustrates my success/failure theme, but every critical problem Jameson’s “Prologue” raises likewise implies an agenda for Fables of Aggression itself. For example, when Jameson observes that Marxist criticism has not dealt satisfactorily with the problem of literary “value” (FA 18) he implies a deficit that Fables of Aggression will attempt to redeem—another angle from which the success or failure of Lewis’s work proves to be a concern informing its every page. And the question of Lewis’s “value” involves Jameson’s own success or failure in realizing a range of complexly interrelated ambitions: most grandiosely, to strike a blow against bourgeois critical ideologies; most simply (but perhaps, at last, no less vainly), to incite more people like you and me to give Lewis another try. In Fables of Aggression, to a degree unmatched elsewhere in his work, Jameson seems to me to achieve most dramatically this dialectical omni-intrication of utopia and ideology—an achievement conditional, first, on his “libidinal” attachment to Lewis’s writing, and its consequences, a participation or methexis in the problematics not only of Lewis’s work but of his historical period that imposes the conflictednesses entoiling Lewis upon Jameson himself: so that Lewis’s successor-failure is cognate with Jameson’s own in Fables of Aggression, and the book thus yields a “historicized” dramatization not only of Lewis’s effort but of Jameson’s (and our own, reading them both) as well. There are other “theory” writers who stage their work with something of this kind of performativity, but none that achieves anything like Jameson’s dramas of (self-) “historicizing.” Yet this self-reflexiveness, too, is (again) suspended, left implicit in Fables of Aggression. In particular, the pages on Barthes in The Prison-House of Language, as we saw, praised Barthes for raising problems for cultural production, or for writing-in-general, from which the writing of Barthes himself (and Jameson) seemed exempt—or, alternatively, to which they seemed liable in an if anything more desperate way. In Fables of Aggression, as in the earlier work, Jameson suspends the question to what extent his construction of his topic’s problematic is to be read as incumbent on his own work; and if this suspension can be read as a kind of modesty (disclaiming equality with Barthes, or Lewis), it is doubtless a measure of Jameson’s “success” in evoking the “failure” motif that no one is tempted to read it as a kind of hubris (claiming critique’s immunity from liabilities incumbent upon other kinds of writing).

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But the larger interest of this suspension is the diversity of its motivations: how differently it is mobilized, and with what variety of effects, in Jameson’s various works. In Fables of Aggression, the motif both evoking and holding in abeyance the possible self-reflexiveness of the book’s argument is that of “deliberate failure”—as if, where failures are deliberate, they are no longer so simply failures. Still, as a libidinal resource for his own writing, as well as innoculation against critical (and a fortiori ) Marxist hubris, the motif of “deliberate failure” seems only the more to ensure that in Fables of Aggression all the exfoliating permutations of possibility, all the calculated (“deliberate”) contradiction, all the conflicting perspectives, all the competing critical vocabularies and methodologies and their different, only imperfectly “transcodable” ways of constructing or evaluating the critical ambitions or possibilities of whatever (text, figure, movement) Jameson is writing about, as well as of his own engagement with it—in all of that, the kaleidoscopic shiftings of Jameson’s critical combinatoire are, increasingly in Fables of Aggression and after, inflected or tilted in the direction of failure. And the formulation above, that every combination or permutation will be worked out, requires the qualification: except those conducive to a verdict of “success.” Those possibilities will be recast, the agon they encode reframed, in such a fashion as to project the agon as failed. Lewis’s narrative experiments, for example: is Lewis trying to escape narrative? If so, Jameson will demonstrate his lapse back into narrative closures. Or, alternatively, is Lewis trying to remake narrative? In that case, Jameson’s finding will emphasize Lewis’s lapses into precedent “libidinal apparatuses.” I have noted in earlier chapters Jameson’s way of putting “hermeneutic” and “critique” each to the test, or limit, of the other; in Fables of Aggression and after, this “critical” procedure is put to more sheerly rhetorical uses, as the “failure” becomes a theme, indeed, a pathos all its own—for how can any project of revolutionary (“utopian”) hope “succeed” if the revolution itself is failing? In The Political Unconscious and later, this anxiety of “inevitable failure” will become increasingly, globally, the most insistently foregrounded “motivation,” even something like the “libidinal apparatus,” of Jameson’s mature writing.

Chapter Five

“Inevitable Failure”

The Political Unconscious

In Fables of Aggression, as we have seen, the passage “from national allegory to libidinal apparatus” reads on one take as the victorious escape of Lewis’s scriptible from the closure of generic narrative systems, on another as Lewis’s fatedly ideological transit from one such closure to another: as either a successful escape from genre, or (deliberate [?] failure) another reinscription within it—with the caveat, of course, that Jameson’s text labors to project this either/or “dialectically,” that is, not as mere “oscillation” between mutually exclusive antinomies. “Genre” is one of the salient critical terms The Political Unconscious deploys, and, as I have suggested, its usage there is as symptomatic as its non-usage in Fables of Aggression. For the category of “genre” in The Political Unconscious induces a reorientation, a shift in paradigm from the aesthetic, existential or phenomenological interests invested in Jameson’s earlier use of the word “form.” The stakes involved in the terminological shift from “form” to “genre” are best indicated by way of a glance back at Jameson’s usages of them over the course of his career. In Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Jameson stakes much on an expanded notion of “style” that implies all the dialectical ins and outs of a strong authorial engagement with a richly perceived existential world. Ten years later, in Marxism 83

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and Form, “style” gives way to the second term of that book’s title: “form” figures as a property not of the author, but rather of the work, as an (in the Hegelian sense) “objective” registration of the role of cultural, social, historical, and economic determinants in the agon between author and world of which the work is a product, and a mediation. Later in the 1970s, concerns earlier associated with “style” find a different vehicle in Barthes’s depersonalized, deindividualized, depsychologized “scriptible,” a term that evades or renews “style” much as “text” does “work” in Barthes’s well-circulated slogan, “from work to text” (Rustle of Language 56–64). So when, in The Political Unconscious, Jameson recurs to the word “style,” it is as the sign of the author, or the authorial component in the activity of composition, not as a heroic authorial prerogative or accomplishment, as in Sartre, but on the contrary as a biographical disposition, libidinal investment, or “wish fulfillment”: a condition no writer can evade, an entailment of bourgeois subjectivity and thus another kind of “closure.” And in place of “form” Jameson now emphasizes the category of “genre” (the book’s second chapter is subtitled “On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism”). With this trajectory in mind, it is worth pausing to consider these terms and some of their implications and history. In Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes (as Jameson points out [IT1 37]) projected “style” as an ideologically symptomatic bourgeois-era sublimation of an earlier collective property, “rhetoric,” into a mark of individual and individualizing verbal performance. In the same way, “form” appears in the modern era (think of instances as diverse as the prefaces of Henry James and Lukács’s Soul and Form) as a way of talking about the structures and shapes of works of art, music, and literature as if those works were individual (“organic”) entities; whereas the motive of the earlier system of literary “kinds” in the eighteenth century had been to assimilate (as does our own time’s category of “genre”) the individual work to others it resembles. The need or desire (or delusion) of writers and artists in modern literary culture to see themselves and their works as “original” is an old story; and it is a dynamic with a rich (and insufficiently explored) internal history: a writer like Dickens, say, achieves a “signature style,” instantly recognizable on any page of any of his works as his; whereas a James, a Conrad, a Ford, will aim to make the signature style serve a formal inventiveness meant to guarantee each successive work a “form” all its own; later still, an Eliot or a Pound will labor to make each new work of his developing oeuvre a radical departure from those preceding it (The Waste Land aims not to rewrite Prufrock ; each new block of the Cantos pioneers procedures different from the preceding ones), and this in tandem with an intermittently programmatic effort to disperse any sense of a properly authorial “style” as such. With Joyce, this imperative requires not only each of his works, but starting

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midway through Ulysses, each episode within the work, to have a distinctive style and form of its own; and in Finnegans Wake this ambition might be said to terminate in the effort to fulfill itself at the level of the individual word, whose very letters are repermuted, substituted, crossed with those of other words, often in other languages, until it no longer makes any sense beyond the merely typographical to speak of “the word” at all. (Hence the interest of Joyce’s “revolution of the [selfdifferent] word” for Derrida. Après mot, indeed.). But in the wake of this modern imperative to individual identity and distinctiveness—the author’s “style,” the work’s “form”—there arose an increasingly professionalized ethos of criticism, first as a kind of journalism, then as an academic discipline, whose need for classification and taxonomy has given us (among other things) the ingeniously elaborated genre theories of such figures as Northrop Frye; narratological systems from the Russian Formalists to Greimas and after, in which “the system of literature” is projected as a closed universe or “combinatoire ” of possibilities of shape and structure; and the structuralist myth analysis of Lévi-Strauss, in which the recurrence of deep-structural mythemes permits a narrative to be refigured rather in the manner of the Mendeleev-Moseley periodic table of the elements, with the ordinal atomic numbers recapitulating recurring sequences according to the empty positions in the concentric electron shells, or Mendel’s emplotment of the recurrences or repermutations of binary genetic markers across generations of flower peas or fruit flies (such periodicity as an intellectual device may be said to begin with the Arabic number system enabled by the invention of the zero). As a Marxist Jameson brings to “aesthetic” analysis an interest in “human sciences” efforts to account for such (“superstructural”) productions; but Jameson also remains an aesthete in the sense that he is, and takes it as incumbent upon any cultural analyst or critic to be, as alive as possible to the ways that art and literature do their complex social work—not so that this sensitivity can culminate in any celebration of art or genius “for their own sakes,” but precisely in the conviction that it is in the very quirks and folds of “the aesthetic” that the work’s or text’s (“absent”) determinants in “the social” are most richly and conflictedly (however latently) operative. As with “hermeneutic” and “critique” in an earlier chapter, the “aesthetic” is a limit-point for any “scientific” account of it, and vice versa; neither an “aesthetic” nor a “scientific” critical program can be fully realized except in the proof or test of its limit-encounter with the other. A recent locus classicus at which this tension becomes manifest is Barthes’s protest against systematic and systematizing styles of criticism on the opening page of S/Z, that under their taxonomic gaze the text “loses its difference” (S/Z 3)—a polemical gesture that, at the time, seemed either, according to your beholding

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eye, a welcome relief from, or an ideological neo-“aesthetic” evasion of, the systematizations of “theory” itself; we might now rather see it as a moment illustrating how “difference” could be mobilized in the 1970s as a protest against a “bourgeois liberal” language of identity or individuality or uniqueness, even as it harbored (“cancelled yet preserved”) some of their ideological freight, insofar as the work’s or text’s “difference” is its individuality or uniqueness. (Compare that other Barthesian slogan, “from work to text”: patently an assault on the authorcentered ideology that makes the “work” an individual product and “property,” but latently displacing it with the “text” whose “difference,” multiplied and “disseminated,” as much confirms as disperses its uniqueness.) Jameson’s own work, like Barthes’s (if anything, more agitatedly), dwells in—both suffers and exploits—this tension, a tension I want to explore here via its projection onto the binary that opposes “the scriptible ” to “genre.” Again, the scriptible functions in Jameson as a utopian motif, encoding the liberty of the “dialectical” writer at the moment of reading/writing, a moment seemingly, somehow, loosed from at least some of the constraints of ideological and other kinds of closure. By contrast, “genre” in The Political Unconscious encodes the writer’s (or work’s) inescapable struggle with the cultural surround, a struggle much more futile than that encoded in “form”—for while “form” grants the text its difference, “genre” enforces its reinscription in, its fated repetition of, “the same.” (In Barthes’s own usage, the connotations of “text” are aligned with “form” rather than “genre.” This is perhaps also the place to acknowledge a certain overschematizing of the genre/form binary here; one need only think of “form” in Propp and Shklovsky to be reminded of the ways the terms can bleed into each other.) “Genre” thus functions, in The Political Unconscious, as the very type or instance of “ideological closure”—and as such, as the antagonist of the utopian energies of style or scriptible. Jameson inflects the category of “genre” with his own particular concerns, of course—most notably, by warning against a Platonic or idealist reification of genres as a priori eternal, immutable archetypes in the style of Northrop Frye. Jameson “historicizes” the category of “genre” itself, thus making historically determined “sedimentations,” themselves period-specific, available, as clues or symptoms or traces of the “absent [social-historical] causes(s),” for the purposes of historical interpretation (or “Marxist hermeneutic”) the book’s program calls for. Jameson’s historicization of “genre,” qualifying its homogenizing effect, can be taken as earnest of his Barthesian care lest the text “lose its difference,” except that the resonances of this individuation in The Political Unconscious are less those of aesthetic preciosity than of historical fatedness: the predicament of the given cultural production, suffering its own uniquely (historically) determined “(re)containment,” a sort of solitary confinement within the “prison-house” of


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“ideological closure.” But Jameson’s historicization of genre also has the effect of making particular genres seem less discrete and differentiable entities than “moments” of a continuum (not to say episodes in a master narrative)—so that the book’s motion, chapter by chapter, from “Magical Narratives” (the title of chapter 2) through Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad, seems not merely a progress from “romance” to “realism” and beyond via a ceaseless flux of “coding,” “decoding,” and “recoding” (these are the terms between which Jameson projects the story he is telling) but also a sort of ebb-and-flow of ideologemes (mostly to do with the emergence of bourgeois subjectivity) that is visibly in course in all of the narratives he considers. Hence the function of the term “narrative” in The Political Unconscious, not as itself the name of a genre, but as a transgeneric term, serving as a medium in which particular narrative genres are suspended. The Political Unconscious announces this master-theme in its subtitle, “Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.” The book’s “Preface” stresses “the all-informing process of narrative ” as the “central function or instance of the human mind” (PU 13; cf. 123) and nominates Marxism, precisely because of the centrality in it of a narratively conceived sense of history, as the “untranscendable horizon” of all cultural inquiry (PU 10; the phrase, borrowed from Sartre’s Problem of Method, is in quotation marks in Jameson’s text). On a later page it is “History” that figures as “untranscendable horizon” (PU 102), and this commutability of predicate from “Marxism” to “History” is the more suggestive in that the latter term can mean both the turmoil, conflict and change of human events, as well as the narrative, interpretive, and/or explanatory genre of writing that takes that turmoil as its content. Thus the imperative announced at the book’s opening—“Always historicize!” (PU 9)—entails on Jameson a certain self-consciousness with regard to the genre he himself is working in; an interesting sign is that Jameson’s own frequent word for the sort of critical activity he advocates, and assays, in The Political Unconscious is “historiography,” by which he means any critical discourse that “historicizes” not only its ostensible topic, but also its own historically determined status and limitations—a fresh way of putting Jameson’s career-long imperative that critique must always be, whatever else it is, self-critical as well. But more problematic, and more local to The Political Unconscious itself, is the suggestion that “historicizing” inquiry must be, in however qualified a way, however “secretly,” a narrative or proto-narrative operation in its own right. Hence in part the privileged place of Marxism, in which world-history is narratively inscribed from the beginning:1 Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, to

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deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it. This mystery can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one; only thus—and not through hobbies of antiquarianism or the projections of the modernists—can we glimpse the vital claims upon us of such longdead issues as the seasonal alternation of the economy of a primitive tribe, the passionate disputes about the nature of the Trinity, the conflicting models of the polis or the universal Empire, or, apparently closer to us in time, the dusty parliamentary and journalistic polemics of the nineteenth-century nation states. These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme—for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity; only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot . . . It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity (PU 19–20).

Stylistically as well as substantively, this passage declares an allegiance, provocatively out-of-fashion in 1981, to the Sartrean (and Hegelian) rather than the LéviStraussian (and Althusserian) assessment of the place, the use, and the value of history in human sciences inquiry. And the ambitions it announces are, again, much more literarily figured than any usually associated with “historiography”: to “reenact” a cultural “mystery,” indeed, to resurrect its “long-dead issues” (cf. the “almost ontological restitution” proposed a decade earlier [M&F 401]) in the course of nothing less than an Odyssean descent into the Hades of archival scholarship (projected as an ordeal, precisely not the escapist Elysium of the antiquarian hobbyist) to pour blood for Tiresias; it is if anything anti-climactic that this epic trope should give way to the now more conventional Freudian figure of the undoing of repression. One could make heavy weather of the question of the extent to which, or how consequentially, any of Jameson’s own work might be read as “narrative”— especially since the passage above implicitly proposes narrative-ness as a success-orfailure criterion for “historicizing” inquiry. Grant, for example, that the chronological triptych of the central chapters of The Political Unconscious (Balzac-Gissing-Conrad) amounts to a kind of narrative; then ask why Fables of Aggression could not have fit into that sequence (and it couldn’t have) as its final chapter. A happy ending?—for Lewis’s “dissolution of the bourgeois subject” could be taken as culminating one of the more salient narrative themes of The Political Unconscious, effecting at least one (admirably “schizo”) avenue of escape from, or scenario of the destruction of, the reification of subjectivity, shades of the prisonhouse of selfhood closing round, in the high bourgeois age. But as we have seen,


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no more than Lewis himself can Jameson allow his narrative a happy ending: Lewis’s “dissolution of the bourgeois subject” conjures (typically for any construction of Jameson’s) a prospect of something worth succeeding at, but must ultimately be reckoned a failure (more or less “deliberate”), an overdetermined enactment of its own impotence to realize itself. All of this is to suggest something of the degree of “problematization” with which Jameson invests “narrative.” As we have seen, “narrative” appears in the argument of Fables of Aggression as a vehicle (or functions as an actant in its “story”) for symptoms uniquely determining for the career of Wyndham Lewis; by contrast, in The Political Unconscious, it figures more globally as the sign and condition of “ideological closure” as such, and thus as the fated antagonist of every utopian impulse manifested in the energies of the scriptible. What featured in the one book as a contingency, distinctive of and revelatory for one career (Lewis’s), appears in the other as a determinant for modern cultural production as such—indeed, as the very figure of “Necessity” (capital N) itself—and thus determining for a total cultural condition (ours). Narrative is foregrounded in The Political Unconscious, then, despite the honorific sound of the passages quoted above (“the central function or instance of the human mind”), less as some sort of methodological key or solution, a sine qua non of critical success, than as the inescapable limit, the irreducible problem, or “problematization” (whether initial, terminal, or chronic), the inevitable failure-point of all cultural inquiry—and the more so, in that this narrative “Necessity” is what critique shares, or suffers, in common with its object. Which may help explain, or “motivate,” the anomaly that what Jameson’s actual practice in The Political Unconscious generally seeks to do with any particular narrative seems at odds with the narrativizing-historicizing program the book ostensibly calls for, insofar as his most frequent move is to process a given narrative’s characters through the “semiotic rectangle” of A. J. Greimas, an operation which freezes the kinesis of narrative motion into the at best oscillating stasis of a schematic diagram. Greimas’s device need not prescribe such results, but in Jameson’s usage it virtually always does—and calculatedly so: [Greimas’s] apparently static analytical scheme, organized around binary oppositions rather than dialectical ones . . . can be reappropriated for a historicizing and dialectical criticism by designating it as the very locus and model of ideological closure (PU 47).

Solution become problem, and that’s what’s good about it: the semiotic rectangle, which offers itself as a procedure for getting “outside” or meta- to the prison-house of ideology to achieve thus a perspective on it as “system,” turns out to be useful as precisely “the very locus and model of ideological closure,” as meme of ideology’s

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infra-ness. Thus is narrative de-narrativized, its diachrony de-diachronized and rendered synchronic, its temporality made spatial—which recasts (to stage the stakes in the relevant passage from phenomenological to structuralist vocabularies) its fluidity of contingent narrative event as a non-narrative schema of its determinate thematic structure, in relation to which turns of plot serve only as epiphenomenal recombinations or reorientations of elements whose fundamental possibilities of interaction are sharply (and ideologically) limited, and whose interactions enact (and enforce: cannot escape) a “lawful” calculus whose working, whose “Necessity” is so overdetermined a figure of “ideological closure” as to be able to stand in for the thing itself. We recur here to a crux of the preceding chapter, between the hermeneutic celebration of narrative’s open, semantic “plurisigificance,” and the narratological premise of the closure of any semiotic system. Symptomatic here is Jameson’s occasional wobble on whether to call Greimas’s rectangle “semantic” or “semiotic” or both (see, for example, PU 46–7). In his 1987 “Foreword” to Greimas’s On Meaning, he tries to allow more scope to narrative indeterminacy—“[Greimas’s] semiotic square is thus not static but dynamic”—but goes on to qualify that “dynamic” back into something (“desperately”) “static” again: The significance of positionality within [the semiotic square] is only one index of the way in which it can just as easily be considered to map a temporal process as to register a conceptual blockage or paralysis; indeed, the latter can most often be grasped as the very situation that motivates the former, namely, the attempt, by rotating the square and generating its implicit positions, to find one’s way out of the conceptual or ideological closure, out of the old or given—into which one is locked—somehow desperately to generate the novelty of the event, or of breakthrough, or of the Novum. . . . [The semiotic square] can ‘reduce’ a narrative in movement to a series of ‘cognitive’ or ideological combinatory positions; or it can rewrite a cognitive text into a desperate narrative movement (“Greimas” xvi–xvii).

Observe the recurrent “desperate,” and compare Jameson’s own discrimination of structural or synchronic from narrative or diachronic applications of Lévi-Strauss’s schema for myth-analysis in “The Vanishing Mediator” (1973): if the focus is on “the ‘deep structure’ of the myth, then no surface narrative movement is implied”; whereas if the focus is on “narrative events, [the scheme’s] advantage is to suggest the ways . . . in which some illusion of change and transformation may nevertheless be generated” (IT2 18); on a later page he prefers Lévi-Strauss’s scheme over Greimas’s on the grounds that it better handles narrative (“irreversible, diachronic”) possibilities (IT2 22); and these questions recur in Jameson’s discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s critique of Propp (PU 120ff ). But the point is that when Jameson


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works out on a narrative himself, it is Greimas’s model, not Lévi-Strauss’s, that he deploys, and it is the narrative’s “desperate” predicament rather than its potential for “breakthrough” that he foregrounds. As we have seen in a passage (PU 47) quoted above, Jameson taxes Greimas with having allowed “analytic” to usurp the space where “dialectic” should be. Jameson’s gambit here, turning problem into solution, ideological liability into critical asset, must seem to reproduce the problem, the liability, the “ideological closure” he hopes to open or breach. Again, a critique with “dereifying” ambitions needs devices for projecting or evoking the reifications it proposes to (try to) undo. Hence a “dialectical” conflictedness in the devices and the purposes, the themes and ambitions, the imperatives and the very watchwords of Jameson’s critique. For example, “narrative”: a requirement of “historicizing” analysis, or a feature that analysis must reduce? a property that analysis must own, or analysis’s object, the more estranged the better? To “historicize” means on the one hand to achieve a narrative awareness of History and of your critique’s own place in it (thus, in good Hegelian fashion, to achieve a self-consciousness indispensable to any hoped-for Aufhebung), on the other to figure and attest History as an “untranscendable” Necessity that critique must suffer as its very condition (thus, in good Marxist fashion, to own that consciousness cannot determine, but is inescapably determined by, material conditions). Hence an ambiguity in my comments on Jameson’s denarrativizing uses of Greimas just now: did the diagnosis indicate Jameson’s failure to achieve or maintain the narrativity he himself prescribes for works of “dialectical historiography,” or his effort (an “inevitable failure” ex hypothesi ) to escape or neutralize it? The one ambition idealizes “historicizing” as a program impossible to achieve; the other laments it as a doom impossible to escape—two very differently inflected “conditions of possibility” for success or failure, but both motivating, in The Political Unconscious, the theme of “inevitable failure.” In other words, “historicizing” means, to recur to the problematic of an earlier chapter, on the one hand putting critique’s chosen object “inside” an historical frame, from “outside” which the critic operates the handles of analysis—but it also means, on the other, the critic assuming a (determinate) place inside the frame; it means, indeed, the projection of history itself as the frame you can not get outside of, an “untranscendable [or “absolute”] horizon.” In the former gesture, the analyst figures as the critical subject, operating a defamiliarization of critique’s object; in the latter, as irredeemably subject to an ungainsayable homogeneity with it. The force of the injunction to “Always historicize!” is that we must narrativize or historicize in order to unsettle reified appearances that had seemed “natural” and “necessary,” and thus as beyond change, to expose or demystify them as on the contrary contingencies of mere cultural or historical circumstance, and thus alterable, mutable, plastic

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to utopian desire or a revolutionary will-to-dereification, smashing their “ideological” appearance of fixity. But this very impulse or purpose in “historicizing” encounters its limit, is checked, chastened, terminated, and so fails, insofar as “history” and/or “narrative” themselves are mobilized as figures for the intransigence and enormity of what our utopian desire would change, what we are up against, what has so far defeated us, inflicting on us, through the long “nightmare of history as blood guilt,” the “inevitable failure” designated in the peroration to the program chapter of The Political Unconscious as the “vision”—at once theme, effect, and motivation—incumbent upon “Marxist historiography” as such (PU 101–2). This conflicted or dialectical pattern, however, is increasingly mobilized in Jameson’s work less to serve the “critical,” limits-testing purposes we saw it put to in the essays of the 1970s than to dramatize the stakes at issue in projects like Jameson’s own: the utopian program or desire is increasingly set in an all-or-nothing agon with the ideological closures that would—that will, that always (already) do— “contain” or “recontain” it. Hence, for example, the drama The Political Unconscious makes of the issues encoded in its subtitle, “Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.” The initial premise is that fictional (and other) narratives are “symbolic” of forces, tensions, contradictions in what Jameson calls “the vast text of the social” itself, and thus that there must be some access (again, implicitly on the base-and-superstructure model) between the novel and “History itself.” But this claim sustains itself for critical purposes only at the cost of entailing that “narrative as socially symbolic” cannot escape determination by “ideological closure.” Thus the pathos of the “symbolic act”: the more potently “symbolic” it is, the feebler its potential as liberatory “act.” Which raises, again, the question whether critique can escape “ideological closure” any better than narrative can. To ask the question another way, Must “socially symbolic” mean “ideological”? Can it ever escape reduction to “ideology”? Can it ever mean or achieve anything else? (Jameson has recently revisited this problem in “The Brick and the Balloon” [1997; CT 182–3]). Though the very premise of The Political Unconscious seems to dictate a negative answer, an effect of “linguistic optimism” in Jameson’s inimitably agitated prose continues to attest a fitful readiness to hope for the affirmative. Among the largest hopes the book entertains is that this problem might be cast in specifically Lacanian terms: that, as we have seen above, narrative writing might somehow become a “socially symbolic act” in a fashion that would merit capitalizing the S in “Symbolic”: that would merit, in short, taking narrative’s or critique’s power as “Symbolic” in a specifically Lacanian sense (though remembering the ambivalence noted in the preceding chapter, whether this “Symbolic” would be a critical Hegelian transcendance of the “Imaginary,” or a quasi-Heideggerian sublation into it.) Most of The Political Unconscious proceeds as if “narrative as a socially symbolic


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act” encodes narrative’s “closure” within ideology; but at certain moments, especially at the close of the Balzac chapter, Jameson seems willing to talk as if the “Symbolic” might be the condition of a possible critical escape from the prison-house of ideology, a break-out from the “ideological closure” the book protests. As if, in other words, “narrative [or critique] as a socially Symbolic act” [capital S] would mean surmounting a more normatively ideological condition in which cultural production functions, inescapably, as “socially Imaginary act.” See especially PU 183, where the locution “Symbolic texts” (capital S) is played off against “Imaginary” with a capital I in a fashion to make the Lacanian freight unmistakable. Of course, this question is susceptible of no final answer: not from Lacan, whose authorial tone assures that the “Symbolic”’s projection of itself as the critical “other” of the “Imaginary” invariably proves a vanity, a merely “Imaginary” self-idealization, and whose rhetoric, more largely, exploits the plurisignifiant possibilities of leaving such questions not only hanging by, but “sliding” precipitously down, the slipperiest of signifying chains. It seems ironic, even anomalous, that in this instance, the Lacanian “Symbolic” should betoken the last vestiges of an Enlightenment “critical” rationalism as mediated by Freud. More anomalous than that—or, if you prefer, exemplarily “dialectical”—is that Jameson should contrive to wring from the Schadenfreude and calculated irrationalism of Jacques Lacan, a writer whose effects Jameson himself pronounces “stoic” and “tragic” (IT1 98, 112), the terms in which to sustain the most sanguine and hopeful moment (however conflictedly so) in the whole melancholy fabric of The Political Unconscious. For our subjection to History, to material conditions, to ideology and reification, to the prison-house of representation (what can critique do but multiply figures for its own repressive condition?)—in short, the “inevitable failure” of every critical, utopian, revolutionary desire—is among the most insistent motifs, or motivations, of The Political Unconscious. Quite apart from its notorious difficulty, Jameson’s writing is fastidously pained—“stoic” and even “tragic,” indeed—in its evocation of the ordeals utopian desire must suffer through what Jameson calls “the nightmare of history as blood guilt” (IT2 43, 68). I say “evocation”—a term Jameson frequently uses (some might think, overuses)—meaning the evocation of these ordeals not merely as subject matter, but as an effect, in the writing : “inevitable failure” as not merely the terminal QED, but the premise or “presupposition,” as well as the constant burden or refrain, the effect or (Jameson’s word) the “vision” (PU 101–2) that animates the whole from opening overture to closing cadenza: the “conclusion” not in the syllogistic but in the musical sense, the dying fall whose effect at the finish involves its reprise of an initial motif or opening theme as well. Such an orchestration of tone is discernible over the course of The Political Unconscious as a whole, as well as in each of its chapters—especially, as if in obedience to some deeper structural rhythm, in

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chapters 1, 3 and 5, as a reading of how those chapters begin and end will show, with chapter 6, “The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology,” functioning in the same way, as a summarizing finale, for the book as a whole. The close, indeed, of the first, program chapter, “On Interpretation,” of The Political Unconscious—the “History is what hurts” passage—stipulates the imperative “vision” of “inevitable failure” so forcefully as to have attained among Jameson’s readers the status of an oft-quoted topos. Even casual readers, long before they grasp the complexities of Jameson’s writing, are moved by the sheer sound and feel of it to take this passage as the best motto Jameson’s work supplies for itself. I quote it then not merely (again) for what it says, but for its facing-theworst way of saying it—and I can only declare what mere quotation cannot display, its quasi-musical function as, in effect, a note or cadenza sounded darkly at the sweeping close of a long and often exhilaratingly heady survey of the prospects for Marxist “interpretation” in the age of “theory”: the most powerful realizations of Marxist historiography . . . remain visions of historical Necessity . . . But Necessity is here represented in the form of the inexorable logic involved in the determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history: the ultimate Marxian presupposition—that socialist revolution can only be a total and worldwide process (and that this in turn presupposes the completion of the capitalist “revolution” and of the process of commodification on a global scale)—is the perspective in which the failure or the blockage, the contradictory reversal or functional inversion, of this or that local revolutionary process is grasped as “inevitable,” and as the operation of objective limits. History is therefore the experience of Necessity, and it is this alone which can forestall its thematization or reification as a mere object of representation or as one master code among many others. Necessity is in that sense not a type of content, but rather the inexorable form of events; it is therefore a narrative category in the enlarged sense of some properly narrative political unconscious which has been argued here, a retextualization of History which does not propose the latter as some new representation or “vision,” some new content, but as the formal effects of what Althusser, following Spinoza, calls an “absent cause.” Conceived in this sense, History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its “ruses” turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them (PU 101–2).


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The word “vision” is salient at two points in the passage, and its second appearance could be read as repudiating the first. A more properly dialectical reading, though, must respond to the motion encompassing, and transiting between the two passages, not derive a merely arithmetic “bottom line” by (as it were) subtracting the one from the other. The qualification in the second paragraph, then, does not disown the word “vision,” but rather extends the claim of “Marxist historiography” beyond the usual connotations of the visionary (idealist, individualist, aestheticizing) to assert its achievement (when it succeeds) in demonstrating the “formal effects” of an “absent cause”: the point is to make “vision” not the desired achieved effect of “Marxist historiography,” but something more like a condition inevitably entailed upon it, and thus, again, a testament to the entrapment of critique (or “historiography”) in the very “ideological closure” it aspires to diagnose, breach, even (at its most fully utopian) abolish. As visions go, this one—the failure of all revolutionary action as “inevitable after the fact”—is about as bleak as any vision, Marxist or otherwise, could possibly be. (The only “vision” bleaker would be inevitability before the fact. Alas, the tonal effects of a piece of writing are of an “indeterminacy” that makes the boundary between post-facto and ante the sheerest infinitesimal, as Jameson acknowledges when he warns nominally Marxist writers that such a vision risks “post-Marxism”—an anxiety, as we shall see shortly, close to the quick for Jameson himself.)2 Hence the paradox, or “dialectic” (not to say contradiction), of the prescription above. It states what Marxist criticism must do to succeed, but it is an imperative of failure: the (historical) failure that critique addresses and attempts to redeem—“the determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history”—it must also participate in, make its own, by enacting it as a “vision.” Jameson’s summary of Adorno’s “vision” in The Philosophy of Modern Music puts this quotably: the work of art—of music in this case (but implicitly, also, of criticism)—must obey a peculiar “logic of content” [that] has its own dynamics and generates fresh problems with every solution, setting absolute limits to the freedom of the composer at every historical moment, its objective contradictions increasing in intensity and complexity with each of those moments . . . to produce an absolute that is a full stop, beyond which composition cannot go: a success which is also, in genuine dialectical fashion, an absolute failure (IT2 43).

The measure of a dialectical success, in short, must be the acuity of its rendition of failure. The passage just quoted comes not from The Political Unconscious but from “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” published in 1985. The “vision” of

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“inevitable failure” agitated by The Political Unconscious might be “historicized,” keeping its date (1981) in mind, with reference to the disappointments of the 1960s and after, the new economic anxiety and multinational corporate consolidation inaugurated by the oil shocks of the early 1970s and the stagnation of the second world under Brezhnev; the latter essay dates from the heyday of Reagan and Thatcher and the initial reforms of Gorbachev. These reminders are prompted by the assertion, in the passage quoted above from The Political Unconscious, that the ultimate (“untranscendable”) context for assessing the success or failure of critique is that of the success or failure of the “total and worldwide process” of “socialist revolution” itself: pending the success of the revolution, revolutionary criticism can “succeed” only by failing. Jameson nowhere explicitly says, but the implication is all-pervasive, that in such circumstances, any critical “success” risks being “ideological” in the most abject sense, functioning for “cultural intellectuals” as a substitute or mere consolation for revolutionary failure, “an imaginary solution to a real contradiction.” According to a certain (antinomic) style of “rigor,” the “imaginary solution to a real contradiction” is an accusation against which there can be no defense; but we may note that against such a charge, of false or self-deluding compensatory “success,” the theme or “vision” of “inevitable failure” offers what (qualified) defense is possible. This indeed is the function of that “structural rhythm” noted above, in which the “inevitable failure” sounds at the concluding moments of various chapters of The Political Unconscious, and of the book as a whole: enforcing the “vision” of failure, allowing it the last cautionary word, lest anyone mistake the book’s heady excitements, its dazzling prospects of critical success, as false consolations for the revolutionary tradition’s real historical predicaments. As if under the compulsion of the resistless antinomic force of this failure imperative, Jameson’s 1985 essay, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” sounds these themes—“of Necessity, of necessary failure, of unbreachable closure, of ultimate unresolvable contradictions and the impossibility of the future” (IT2 40)—much more desperately than The Political Unconscious itself: the dialectic, or powerful dialectical history, must somehow always involve a vision of Necessity or, if you prefer, must always tell the story of failure. . . . [It] always tells the necessity of an event, why it had to happen the way it did . . . (IT2 41)

Jameson’s commitment to this theme is not absolute; recall, for example, his fondness for Philip K. Dick, many of whose novels employ the “alternate history” gambit. And in Late Marxism, Jameson will represent Adorno as, in effect, challenging Marx with the question


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whether it would not be better (politically better? more efficacious?) to think of history in terms of contingence [sic] rather than necessity; to attribute the fall into violence, state power, and capital to a catastrophe that need never have taken place (LM 92) . . .

And in his 1982 interview in Diacritics, Jameson seems to dismiss this whole problematic: “Hegelianism, it is true, includes the peculiar operation of considering the past to have been ‘inevitable’ after the fact, but that is a way of framing historiography” (Diacritics 80)—as if “framing historiography” were not one of the larger and more consistent preoccupations, a veritable “self-consciousness” indeed, throughout Jameson’s career generally, and in The Political Unconscious itself (in print at the time of the interview) in particular—as if, that is to say, in the “framing” of Jameson’s own later work, the “inevitable failure” theme did not provide much of the voltage for the “powerful dialectical history” Jameson himself aspires to write.3 You cannot, for example, imagine “Periodizing the 1960s” (1984) conducting itself as the narrative of events “that need never have taken place”: the sense of their inevitability is inextricable from the drama and energy of the essay as a whole, both its point or effect and its motivation. I point out these inconsistencies because I want to bring them to bear on an anomaly in the effect, as reading matter, of The Political Unconscious: that (as we have noted) its “motivation” is “inevitable failure,” the presupposition of its argument and of all its interpretive efforts is “ideological closure” (by definition unbreachable), and yet the book’s readers find its effect to be tonic. It exhilarates; it inspirits; it conjures a sense of new possibility and power for critical or interpretive effort even as it stipulates a “vision” of “inevitable failure” as the condition of these things—even, it is not too much to say, as it makes of its own projection of that “vision of failure” an excitingly potent success. We have seen in Jameson’s earlier work how the issues or problems he raises for his ostensible subject (Barthes, Lewis; critique, narrative) implicitly bear on his own work, and we have seen how the earlier work makes a kind of drama of assuming the burdens of these implications, but also of contriving escapes from them. We have seen how Jameson chronically leaves open (not to say, evades) the question whether the ideological closures incumbent upon literature and art are operative also in or on critique. In The Political Unconscious these long-suspended questions remain less than explicit, even as their implicit force, as sequelae of the “inevitable failure” motivation, becomes more insistent than ever before. Sustaining this seemingly unsustainable condition, Jameson wrings from it a powerful yet curiously muted dissonance between the grimly unrelenting theme of “inevitable failure” as it is projected in the book’s consideration of the novel and other narrative genres on the one hand, and, on the other, the heady exhilaration of the pages on contemporary critical and

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interpretive methods. The avowed logic of the book would seem to dictate that criticism, no less than narrative itself, is trapped in “ideological closures” it cannot surmount or breach; but nevertheless the actual sound, feel, or “effect” of the book’s prose communicates an excitement about critical and hermeneutic possibilities that considerably relieves the bleak “vision” of “inevitable failure” the book so insistently avows. If realist fiction “fails,” critical theory at least sounds, in the pages devoted to it, even against the book’s announced program, like a field of endeavor in which successes, of however qualified a kind, remain a real possibility. (It is worth remembering that the audience that found so much excitement in the book was interested more in critical theory than in Balzac, Gissing, or Conrad.) The tension between this “linguistic optimism” (as Jameson calls it in his “Afterword” to the reprint of Sartre, written not long after The Political Unconscious [S 208]) and the premise of “inevitable failure” is pervasive throughout The Political Unconscious itself. (The “inevitable failure” theme, indeed, is so pervasive as to have led me to focus it here with an exclusivity that I worry has eclipsed too many of the book’s other interests.) Yet the dissonance between the book’s thematic of “inevitable failure” and the “linguistic optimism” of its writing practice (or “textual effect”) is left implicit in The Political Unconscious itself. But though this problematic is nowhere thematized, it can be said to be, on a higher level, something like allegorized in some of the book’s particular arguments—most richly in the chapter on Gissing. I said above that while Fables of Aggression might initially look like a chapter of The Political Unconscious that grew to a size that required separate publication, it explores a problematic quite different from that of The Political Unconscious : “deliberate failure” is, in ways rehearsed above, an altogether different story from that of “inevitable failure.” In The Political Unconscious, the Gissing chapter comes closest to transcoding the one story into the terms of the other, which is to say achieving a mediation between them—a narrative mediation, it turns out, that reprises the never quite explicit dénouement of Fables of Aggression, in which Lewis’s “deliberate failure” delivers him into an “inevitable failure” he not only never intended, but could never even begin to recognize. In Jameson’s account, Gissing’s earlier, most explicitly political novels, enact a refusal of or protest against the “indicative” (PU 193) register of the realist tradition in their depictions of the strike as the figure for social revolution, which calls social “being” and the social totality itself into question, thereby undermining that totality’s basic preconditions: whence the scandal of this form, which fails when it succeeds and succeeds when it fails, thereby evading the categories of literary evaluation inherited from “great realism” (PU 193).


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The younger Gissing’s representations of socialist struggle achieve, that is, a Lewislike “deliberate failure.” The later Gissing, in Jameson’s account, will seem to succumb to realism’s ideological closure, reconfiguring the revolutionary as the “alienated intellectual” whose impotence manifests as (quoting Nietzsche) “the ressentiment of those to whom the only way of reaction—that of deeds—is unavailable, and who preserve themselves from harm through the exercise of imaginary vengeance” (qtd PU 201). The ressentiment of the maturer Gissing’s protagonist is Gissing’s own, intensified by Gissing’s refusal of the identification, manifest (or symptomatized) in its turn as Gissing’s own ressentiment turned now less against the oppressor than against the oppressed protagonist himself: What is most striking about the theory of ressentiment is its unavoidably autoreferential structure . . . what [Gissing] resents most [in his resentful protagonist] is the latter’s ressentiment . . . it may therefore be concluded that the theory of ressentiment, wherever it appears, will always itself be the expression and the production of ressentiment (PU 201-2).

“Always,” “wherever it appears”: it is easy enough to turn this diagnosis back upon Nietzsche himself—but what about turning it back on Jameson? Even if Nietzsche’s language of “imaginary vengeance” didn’t recall recent critique’s familiar formula for ideology (“an imaginary solution to a real contradiction”), Jameson clearly implicates his own project within the scope of that “autoreferentiality” he here posits as intrinsic to the “theory of ressentiment.” And lest this seem that handwringing, reflexive mea-culpaism that is a cliché, a generic “sediment” of critique, Jameson then dialectically trumps this particular form of the failure imperative one more time by discerning a utopian possibility even within ressentiment itself. The late Gissing’s sourness achieves, Jameson writes, an Aufhebung of the whole problematic of desire and its frustration that is central to his novels: [Gissing’s] dialectic of desire is thus . . . something like the negation of a negation . . . as though the whole system of success and failure has been undermined from the outset by a narrative strategy which may thus be read as something like the final form of ressentiment itself. From that point of view, renunciation becomes dialectically transformed. No longer a response and an adaptation to the constricting situation of the petty bourgeoisie and the objective contraction of possibilities, it is now generalized into a global refusal of commodity desire itself. Thus extended to a universal principle and absolutized as the very motor force of Gissing’s narratives, ressentiment ceases to generate sheerly ideological images and becomes the guarantor of a divisiveness beyond ideological commitment. An Unhappy Consciousness too absolute to find any rest in conventional snobbery is now called on to

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register historical and social reality, its profound “mixed feelings” generating an omnipresent class consciousness in which it is intolerable for the bourgeois reader to dwell for any length of time. This is indeed the sense in which the oxymoron of our initial characterization of Gissing may be justified, and in which alone the phenomenon of ressentiment—surely, among all human passions, the most deeply driven by bad faith of the Sartrean type—may be said to have a certain authenticity (PU 205).

There readily come to mind the pat antinomic logics that would refuse credit to the transit “beyond ideological commitment,” let alone any mystique of “authenticity.” But the audacity of thus “authenticating” ressentiment, that chronic bogey of liberal ideology, is all by itself worth the price of the ticket, even leaving aside the implicit question of the mauvaise foi (protesting too much?) of liberal ideology’s own supposedly post-moralistic psychologizing. More troubling (and more fruitfully so) would be to turn the notion of “authentic ressentiment ” back in the form of a question upon Fables of Aggression: is leftist Gissing somehow vouchsafed a success denied to the reactionary Lewis? Is Gissing’s failure somehow (politically or otherwise) preferable to Lewis’s? (Are these versions of the same question?) I leave such questions for now unanswered, to raise the question Jameson’s account invites, that of the uses or relevance of “authentic ressentiment ” as a paradigm for the predicaments of critique itself, or at least of Jameson’s early 1980s work. At the very least, the dialectic of “authenticity” and ressentiment promises a refreshing displacement of the rather stale binary of “optimism” and “pessimism.” The formula provocatively conflates terms constructed as incommensurables from Nietzsche and Freud to Sartre. (Like Jameson, Lionel Trilling also conflated them, though to the opposite purpose from Jameson’s, that is, to tar “authenticity” with the brush of ressentiment rather than to redeem the latter by association with the former.) Jameson’s conflation, or I would rather say sublation, of “authenticity” and ressentiment seems to forecast the salient departure of Jameson’s next major works (and of the next chapter), “the sublime,” in whose relève of “antithetical” motifs Jameson figures both the relief and the intensification of the burdens of the failure imperative. Ressentiment as “unhappy consciousness” of “inevitable failure” and “winner loses logic”? This suggestion feels almost too suggestive—but it is worth bearing in mind as we consider how the “linguistic optimism” of The Political Unconscious notably wilts in the work immediately following it—work coinciding, it happens, with the advent of Ronald Reagan to the American presidency. Increasingly, “inevitable failure” will manifest itself without the leavening of The Political Unconscious’s critical exhilarations; the impossibility of critique’s tasks, and the anguish of its failures, will make themselves felt much more desperately in the


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effects or affects of the writing itself. “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” for example, addresses frontally, insistently, the entrapment of critique in general, and critique of ideology in particular, within the “ideological closures” it must (impossibly) try to breach or escape. “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” is not without its accents of hope; Jameson seems sanguine that new forms of critique may offer “not merely a new set of dialectical insights into literature, but the practice of a peculiar, condensed, allusive discursive form, a kind of textual genre, still exceedingly rare, which I will call dialectical history” (IT2 40; note the passage, or blurring, between “form” and “genre”). Obviously Jameson here is describing the “genre” he himself is attempting to practice. But as we have seen, Jameson also now stipulates that this new genre, too, like “genre” (so to speak) generically in The Political Unconscious, must suffer the constraints of ideological closure, and of “formal dilemmas and problems” that “may be seen as determining (or at least overdetermining) certain of [its] organizing concepts” (IT2 38). The coloration of these “formal dilemmas or problems,” and the varieties of success or failure they enable for or impose upon critique, are now significantly darker than before. “Inevitable failure” now figures not merely as a gesture, ethos or “vision” incumbent upon critique, a sine qua non which the writing of critique must achieve (whatever else it achieves), but more dangerously as a “motivation” whose potency might be overstressed—too “successfully” evoked—and thus become a pessimism, a Weltanschauung, an ideology or false consciousness (even a ressentiment ?), a presupposition of “inevitable failure” so oppressive as to foreclose not merely the value of past revolutionary successes, but the success of future revolutionary struggle as well. In this way, Jameson warns, a Marxist “vision” risks passing, even unwittingly, into a defeatist “post-Marxism” inadvertently acquiescing in the “end of history” arguments of such neoconservatives as Daniel Bell and Francis Fukuyama. The central exhibit in “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” is the Marxist architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri; but the problem itself is adumbrated by reference to the differing negotiations of it in Adorno and Barthes. I lack the space here to rehearse Jameson’s accounts of these three figures; but as attestation of the ramifications to which Jameson can impel these concerns, I will note that at one point the very considerations that make “inevitable failure” such a danger are projected as “generic,” and thus “objective,” in a sense that at first seems to obviate, for the individual critic, the danger altogether: Tafuri’s “pessimism” is thus to be seen as a formal necessity of the generic structure of his text [that is, of the “textual genre” he is working in]—dialectical historiography—rather than as an “opinion” or “position” in its own right” (IT2 46).

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This move recalls Jameson’s remark about Hegel’s “inevitability after the fact” as (just) “a way of framing historiography,” except that Jameson goes on to add, “Unfortunately, it must also be read as just such an opinion or position . . .” (IT2 46)—a turn that illustrates the sense in which (to recur to a point above) the “objective” considerations that make a Marxist “vision” more than merely a vision nevertheless do not exempt it from the liabilities incumbent upon “vision” as such. More generally, it instantiates the premise that in Jameson, every “solution” will be rotated, almost immediately, into a light which reveals, or accomplishes, its reproblematization. But so much could be said of any of Jameson’s writing. What is new in Jameson’s work after The Political Unconsious is the way it feels in the writing, in the reading. In “Postmodernism” and Jameson’s other writing of the 1980s, the “failure imperative” will be suffered less patiently, its exactions honored less fastidiously; it will be increasingly cathected with ever-higher voltages of the affects attendant upon “the dialectic of utopia and ideology”; the conflicted motivations of despairing diagnosis and utopian desire will increasingly yield, in the writing, an effect of antithetical forces in a conflict of such intensity as to defy analysis or interpretation, a conflict whose evocation will drive Jameson to a rhetoric in which “dialectic” conjures the dread of its own devolution into “antinomy,” or its exposure as “always already” having been antinomy all along—as if Kant, not Hegel, might turn out to have been right after all. This ratcheting up of the stakes of the struggle requires, of course, a scriptible and a figuration capable of giving it expression—even though, as we shall see, one of its central themes will be precisely the impossibility of giving it such expression. To express this critical predicament—irresistible (utopian) forces expending themselves furiously upon immovable (ideological) objects—Jameson will have recourse to the theme, and evoke, in the writing, the effect, or affect, of “the sublime.”

Chapter Six

Failure and the Sublime

Postmodernism

The “vision of failure” is a “textual effect,” and an effect, it goes without saying, that Jameson’s own later work regularly achieves, and renews: one of its “successes.” But more than a mere effect, Jameson projects this failure imperative as a “motivation” of critique generically—and to inscribe “failure” as the motivation of an enormously ambitious project, and the measure of its success, is to incur certain difficulties—preeminently, what Jameson calls a certain “textual determinism”: the purpose of the theorist is to build as powerful a model of capital as possible, and as all-embracing, systemic, seamless, and self-perpetuating. Thus, if the theorist succeeds, he fails: since the more powerful the model constructed, the less possibility will be foreseen in it for any form of human resistance, any chance of structural transformation (IT2 48).

How to manage this predicament—exploit it? suffer it? dramatize it? but dramatizing also somehow (how?) the persistence of “human resistance”?—these are questions to which Jameson’s seminal 1984 essay, “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” offers a complicated and suggestive set of mediations—less an “answer” to these questions than an enactment of them. 103

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The “Postmodernism” essay has too often been taken as a series of theses on, and even on behalf of, “the postmodern”—a reading that involves, most simply, an exultation over the grave of bad old modernism and a triumph (however qualified) of the generational revolts of the 1960s. (I am speaking here less of published comment on the essay, which tends to be by seasoned readers of Jameson, than of the quite different sense of the essay’s impact one infers in conversation, at Q&A after panels at conferences, and the like, among more casual, often younger readers.) Jameson, needless to say, has much sympathy with these values, but neither his repudiation of modernism, nor his embrace of the postmodern are so simple as many of his more excited readers have wanted to believe. He is at pains in the essay itself to warn against taking the modern/postmodern binary as an occasion for a “moralizing” choice between them; such either/or thinking, he cautions, invoking both Hegel and Marx, is un-dialectical (P 46–7)—a caution consistent with the admonitions against “ethics” sounded in the essay on Lacan and elsewhere. So when Jameson speaks of the (postmodern) “euphoria” and “joyous intensities” displacing “the older affects of anxiety and alienation” (P 29) or, even more rapturously, later (in the 1991 book that reprints and draws its title from the 1984 essay), of “the relief of the postmodern generally, a thunderous unblocking of logjams and a release of new productivity that was somehow tensed up and frozen, locked like cramped muscles, at the latter end of the modern period” (P 313), he is better taken as ventilating an anxious hope than announcing an achieved victory. We must not forget, after all, that the essay’s title, retained in full for the book, identifies “postmodernism” with “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” Nevertheless, the enthusiasm over “the postmodern” has its “truth,” and attests something real, some genuine “effect,” in or of Jameson’s text, another instance such as we have already noted in The Political Unconscious of the excitements of the Jamesonian scriptible, qualifying (perhaps, overriding?) its announced presupposition(s) or “vision” of “inevitable failure.” We will shortly consider how this happens, but we must begin with the presupposition itself. The “Postmodernism” essay, like the virtually contemporaneous “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (the two essays appeared within a year of each other), foregrounds the problem of “textual determinism”: there is a strange quasi-Sartrean irony—a “winner loses” logic—which tends to surround any effort to describe a “system,” a totalizing dynamic, as these are detected in the movement of contemporary society. What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic—the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example—the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and ter-

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rifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself (P 5–6).

To this problem, and to a number of others—some of which we have considered extensively above, like “the hermeneutic model of the inside and the outside” (P 12), or the possibility of “critique” when critical “distance” has been annulled (P 9); some of which we have not touched on, like “periodization” (P 6)—the essay’s several characterizations of “postmodernism” may be taken as agitating variously anxious or hopeful responses. And, I want to argue, quite self-conscious responses: more than in The Political Unconscious or earlier works, these and other of Jameson’s writings of the 1980s make explicit what had earlier been left implicit, namely the import of problems arising from the determining force of “the vast text of the social” upon critique itself, or as Jameson’s 1980s usage increasingly calls it, “theoretical discourse.” Jameson actually uses this term (in quotation marks) as much as a decade earlier, in (and as, so to speak, a sign of ) “The Ideology of the Text” (IT1 56, 66); but in Jameson’s 1980s writings “theoretical discourse” figures more saliently as itself an important sign of “the postmodern” (see, for example, P x, 12, 391–9; SV 68; Diacritics 87–8). Jameson’s deployment of the term “theoretical discourse” is seemingly value-neutral, in contrast with such terms as “dialectical history” (or “historiography”) with which he much more readily identifies his own project; nevertheless the former term usually signals that Jameson is prolonging the worry of “the ideology of the text,” voicing his reservations about theory’s reductions of History to textuality or representation, its self-congratulatory connoisseurship (another apolitical aestheticism) of highbrow “jouissance ” and “the pleasures of the text.” But the same logic by which “Marxist historiography” cannot escape also being a “vision,” means it likewise cannot escape also being “theoretical discourse,” so that Jameson’s reservations about the “ideology of the text” enumerate the possible pitfalls or failures specific to any practice (including his own) of “dialectical history” or “Marxist historiography” themselves. Which is to say, the term “theoretical discourse” signals (again) the dangers inherent in “the dialectic of the scriptible,” whereby the latter’s possible utopian energies may devolve into an “ideology,” “an imaginary solution to a real contradiction.” To such inexorable “logic(s)” generally, and the self-reinforcing or -fulfilling impasse of the “winner loses logic” in particular, the whole drift of the “Postmodernism” essay seems to suggest a loosening or relaxation (even a “thunderous unblocking”?)—as if these problems themselves are part and parcel of that very “logjam” of the modern that (the essay dares hope) may now be

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breaking up and passing away. A pregnant contradiction insinuates itself at the essay’s opening, in that the problem of “textual determinism” is prompted by that of “periodization”: periodization implies narrative, and narrative implies a circumscribed field (an “ideological closure”) of possibilities of character and event. How to project “postmodernism” as something really new, when the advent of “the new” is perhaps the oldest story (even “ideology”) of all? Jameson’s essay elaborates the potentialities of the postmodern novum largely in libidinal terms—“intensities,” “the delirious” and “euphoria,” and their inverse, the “waning of affect” (both “joyous” and “boring”), the Deleuzian-Guattarian and Lacanian rhetoric of “the schizo.” It is not merely that elsewhere (in “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” for example; see IT1 99–101) Jameson assimilates these properties to earlier twentieth-century movements like dada and surrealism. It is that the very primary function of these novelties in “Postmodernism,” to loosen or unblock the coils of what had previously been an ever-tightening “logic,” is one his earlier writing had assigned to the operations of “the dialectic,” or “dialectical thinking [and/or] writing.” Indeed, in the “Postmodernism” essay itself, Jameson reminds us that Hegel’s and Marx’s renewal of dialectic has for some time now provided us with the necessary, the sufficient, and the only antidote to the prison-house of antinomic “logic” (ideology, metaphysics, History, language, representation). But if the libidinal novelties celebrated in “Postmodernism” must repeat a Hegelian/Marxist dialectical gesture, how “new” can they really be? Moreover, to the extent that their claim of newness seems to relegate the dialectic itself to a now superceded past, they approach what Jameson himself reprehends (IT2 133) as naively “ideological” kinds of “post-Marxism.” Worse yet, to the extent that to “renew” the dialectical gesture is merely to “repeat” it, they make the dialectic itself merely another instance of the problematic of repetition, another “old story” rather than the very principle of “the new” itself that, in the Hegel-and-Marx tradition, is the dialectic’s promise and raison d’être. I make these points (to repeat a caution sounded frequently enough in these pages before) less to hoist Jameson on the petard of contradiction than to indicate the scope of contradiction and conflictedness, of critical desire and anxiety, that his writing here (and elsewhere) both manages to summon and appoints itself to negotiate. For even as he deplores the “winner loses logic” that continually enforces, even exaggerates the “closures” against which it protests, Jameson is obeying (or exploiting) it in his own writing, and in this very essay most particularly. Which is to say the “Postmodernism” essay needs a theme, a problematic, a motif or “motivation,” sufficiently supercharged to answer to the extremity—or accomplish the extremification—of these tangles.


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Hence the role the essay assigns, or the use to which it puts, the rhetoric of “the sublime,” a discursive formation with a long and rich history, a term— Freud would call it an “antithetical word”—that maximizes both extremity (an absolute affective or aesthetic limit [or limitlessness] of physio-psychological experience) and ambivalence (conflating polar extremes of feeling: pleasure and pain, joy and terror, grandiosity and annihilation, transport and entrapment, enlargement and contraction, omnipotence and powerlessness . . .). Vocabularies of affect tend to connotations either of narrowed, focussed force, or of a conflicted and thereby diffused ambivalence; “the sublime,” uniquely (sublimely?), delivers both, seeming to make these usually opposed tendencies collaborate to reinforce and strengthen each other (rather than balance or cancel each other out)—and to that degree, “the sublime” might be said to “perform” something of what it “constates.” (Wittgenstein warned against the fallacy of supposing that the concept of sugar is sweet; but “the sublime” approaches being an exception that proves—or probes—Wittgenstein’s rule.) In any case, the scriptible Jameson practices, or aspires to, involves a constant pathos of the relationship of thetic to themic, in that neither their (critical) differentiation nor their (hermeneutic) “fusion” ever turns out to be more than provisionally or limitedly possible. With such agitations does Jameson’s usage manage to inflect “the sublime.” Jameson’s first substantial invocation of “the sublime,” however, slightly precedes, and makes a surprising contrast with, its projection in “Postmodernism.” In “Pleasure: A Political Issue” (1983), among Jameson’s primary concerns is to rebut apolitical, even depoliticizing, 1970s readings of the Barthesian binary of “plaisir ” and “jouissance ” in order to rescue Barthes both from aestheticizing enthusiasts, who valorize this view of him, and from politicizing detractors who revile it. So far from celebrating a privatistic hedonism (writes Jameson), Barthes’s Pleasure of the Text “restore[s] a certain politically symbolic value to the experience of jouissance, making it impossible to read the latter except as a response to a political and historical dilemma” (IT2 69). Jameson concedes “plaisir ” to the enemy, the better to recuperate “jouissance ” for political (or at least “politically symbolic”) purposes; and to that end he assimilates the Barthesian binary to Edmund Burke’s “beautiful” and “sublime,” a move justified in the first place by the latter term’s connotations of an “intensity” that marks a transport beyond the manageable domain of simple “pleasure” or the merely “beautiful,” but with more explicit reference in Jameson’s text to Barthes’s evocations of “fear.” Thus Jameson works on “jouissance ” an astonishing reversal, finding in the experience of ecstasy an affinity with the Burkean sublime of terror, an effect that “threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life” (IT2 72).

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This latter theme had appeared before in Jameson’s work as a “critical” or “therapeutic” property specific to “dialectical,” that is, politically left, art and criticism. (See, for example, the theme of “shock” running through the chapters on Adorno and Benjamin in Marxism and Form, as well as IT1 40; IT2 41, 72; LM 91–2). But here, notably, its political force is reactionary, an effect, in Jameson’s account, not merely aesthetic, but “ideological,” a more-than-aesthetic mystification and thus a prop of that tyrannous belittlement of human capacities which has acted so powerfully throughout history to anchor variously exploitative social orders in place. Burke, Jameson notes, makes the end-term of the sublime God Himself—and in this vein, Jameson jeers the hunger for such an effect: “Choose what crushes you!” (IT2 72). However—dialectical reversal!—the valence changes when he goes on to posit an end-term of his own, namely that “unfigurable and unimaginable thing, the multinational apparatus” of late capitalism itself (IT2 73). Jameson alludes to the work of “the capital-logicians,” who invert Hegel’s providential world-historical metanarrative so that “what Hegel called ‘Absolute Spirit’ was simply to be read as the transpersonal, unifying, supreme force of emergent Capitalism itself ”; it is “beyond any question,” Jameson continues, that some such apprehension attaches to “the Barthesian sublime” (IT2 72–3; on “capitalogic,” see PU 93n71; and cf. SV 50). Granted Barthes’s good-leftish politics, an écriture (“sublime” or not) that “threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life” seems not only very un-Barthes-like, but might be said to valorize Barthes in the terms of that very “Left puritanism” Jameson affects to defend Barthes against. Jameson has remade Barthes’s jouissance, in short, in the image of his own “sublime,” a passion of “fear” prompted by “History,” by “what hurts”: it is not Barthes who has chosen what crushes him; Barthes is willing to confess (or boast) that at least parts of him are not crushed; it is the motivation of Jameson’s own prose that insists on the threat of being crushed, by a “sublime” villain, late capitalism. The measure of that “crush” is of course the effect of the prose in which Jameson projects his “vision of Necessity” and its inverted Hegelian-Marxist metanarrative in which “the subject of History” proves to be not the proletariat but capitalism. (On Jameson’s reading, the “capital-logicians” in effect revive the “Right Hegelian” reading of history, but as nightmare rather than theodicy—a reminder that not all metanarratives belong to the master: the “vision” of “inevitable failure” is the underdog story, the metanarrative of the slave.) Here the worst anxieties ventilated in connection with “post-Marxism” (that “failure” will figure as “inevitable” not only after the fact but before it) come true; and “textual determinism” is, so to speak, (textually) overdetermined—to say, in effect, if the Marxian “grand recit” no longer compels, consider the (polar) alternative. “Choose what crushes you!” indeed—or even “Enjoy your symptom!”


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In “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” “the sublime” functions as a vehicle, indeed, an enforcer of that very “textual determinism” or “winner loses logic” that Jameson protests in “Postmodernism”—hence the surprising contrast between the two essays, a contrast less of the ways they diagnose than in the ways they mobilize these problematics. In the “Pleasure” essay, “the sublime” functions to augment the sense of powerlessness before not merely the “winner loses logic” Jameson identifies as generic to his project, but before that much larger and more grasping “Capitallogic” or “ideological closure” of what the later essay will call “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” But in the later essay itself, as if in obedience to some unforeseen dialectical reversal, this very “logic” seems to generate varieties of “lawless” libidinalisms incompatible with capitalism’s program to rationalize, routinize, instrumentalize, commodify, reify or colonize them. In “Pleasure,” “the sublime” functions to bring apparently divergent and conflicting motifs—“fear” and “jouissance,” preeminently—to a concentrated focus; it disciplines a variety of impulses or affects to a single (“politically symbolic”) effect. In “Postmodernism” it functions in the opposite way, to loosen or even reverse this inexorable “winner loses logic.” If the earlier essay turns private “jouissance ” to an apprehension of historical terror, the later enables the transformation of “fear” or “shock” back into “joyous intensities.” In “Postmodernism,” moreover, “the sublime” operates not merely in the Freudian way as an “antithetical word,” a vehicle for reversals of affects into their opposites (for instance, terror into euphoria); the “Postmodernism” essay also exploits what we might call its Greimassian possibilities, to enable the articulation of affects Greimas would call correlatives rather than opposites, so that transverse to the dialectic of these “intensities,” the picture can also accommodate attenuations—not merely, for example, “boredom” in particular but a “waning of affect” generally that Jameson cites as itself an important feature of the postmodern, illustrating the point immediately with the familiar quadratic Greimassian diagram Jameson here calls a “semiotic cube” (P 10). We noted above that in The Political Unconscious Jameson evokes the “semiotic reduction” (“Greimas” ix) of the Greimassian rectangle not merely to anatomize, but more pertinently to enforce a sense or effect of “ideological closure”—quite in contrast to its effect here. Which is to say that among the “motivations” of the “Postmodernism” essay is a certain dis-motivation or de-motivating (Jameson calls it “autonomization”)— that is, a de-linking of terms that would elsewhere in Jameson’s discourse have entrained an inexorable (antinomic) “logic,” “Necessity,” “History,” “closure.” Probably the best-circulated example is that encoded in Jameson’s contrast of (modern) “parody” with (postmodern) “pastiche”: the former motivated by a critical attitude toward its original; the latter, more anomically, simply aping received cultural styles in a “neutral practice of mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives,

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amputated of the satiric impulse . . . blank parody” (P 16). Here the general theme of the “waning of affect” reprises an earlier incertitude about why Warhol’s Coke bottles, and other works, “ought to be powerful and critical political statements” but seem not to be, thus raising doubt “about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital” (P 9). And indeed, of political or critical critique, or “theory”: in the “Introduction” to Postmodernism, Jameson declares that “I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters are inquiries into the nature of ‘postmodernism theory’ or mere examples of it” (P x)—a gesture cognate with the “Postmodernism” essay’s brooding, alternately sanguine and anxious, over the disappearance of “critical distance” itself.1 (It was in the 1980s that Jameson advanced “homeopathy” as a figure for his critical project: “To undo postmodernism homeopathically by the methods of postmodernism: to work at dissolving the pastiche by using all the instruments of pastiche itself ” [Kellner 59]). “Postmodernism” thus dis-motivates, or re-motivates, “the sublime” itself, by a sort of performative fiat, as much in the actual (libidinal) effects of the way it is written as in its deployment—the most consequential in Jameson’s oeuvre to date—of Lacanian, Lyotardian, Deleuze-Guattarian “schizophrenia,” “libidinal skin,” and “delirium,” terms suggesting (especially with the writing practice of either Libidinal Economy or Anti-Oedipus in mind, whose sheer nutsiness makes Lacan’s calculated impenetrability seem sedate) a willful, Luddite vandalizing of the (over-) functioning circuitries of sense and discussion “as usual.” The career of the term “schizophrenia” itself illustrates these instabilities: it first circulated in clinical contexts, and assumed potent cathexes of dread in the post-war era, with its threat (“from within”) to the integrity of the self; it was this very implication in the ideology of “the subject” that made the term so provocative in the usages of the anti-psychiatry movement from Thomas Szasz and R. D. Laing to Deleuze and Guattari. “Schizophrenia” used to connote an ominous toggling back and forth between sharply polarized binaries; more recently our imagination of the disorder has projected rather a sense of arbitrary but also global short-circuitings, the unmooring of signifieds from their proper signifiers further disarrayed by that of affects from their appropriate associations, as in dreams where a mundane object terrifies while a horrific image prompts no feeling at all. Citing an autobiographical account of a schizophrenic breakdown, Jameson observes that “the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality . . . could just as well [be imagined] in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory of hallucinogenic intensity” (P 28)—which becomes an axiom on the following page: schizophrenic disjunction . . . , generalized as a cultural style, ceases to entertain a necessary relationship to the morbid content we associate with terms like schizophrenia and becomes available for more joyous


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intensities, for precisely that euphoria which we saw displacing the older affects of anxiety and alienation (P 29).

Jameson takes care to distinguish schizophrenia as a clinical disorder from the “schizo” as a “cultural style,” but he draws from the libidinal reserves of the trope an “impossible imperative”—another inevitable failure inscribed here?—“to achieve that new mutation in what can perhaps no longer be called consciousness” (P 31). It is in the next section of the essay that he passes on to “the sublime” as a summarizing term both for the predicament and for the release of this “impossible imperative” and the unstable affects of a putatively unprecedented “postmodernity” associated with it— and asks, “is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating experience?” (P 34) I have staged the “Postmodernism” essay’s mobilization of “the sublime” as the sign of a “new” effect in Jameson’s writing, indeed, as the specific vehicle for reversing what had become the increasingly, even terminally comprehensive effect of “closure” motivated by the “winner loses logic” of the “inevitable failure” imperative. But as “new” as this move is in one way, we have seen that it also continues a long-standing interest or fascination of Jameson’s in the “schizo” and/or “delirious” thematics and rhetoric of Deleuze-Guattari, Lyotard, and Lacan, with which he had conjured utopian possibilities (“the subversion of the subject” [IT1 61]) in Fables of Aggression, The Political Unconscious, and various essays of the 1970s.2 But the “Postmodernism” essay’s projection of “the sublime” similarly, if less drastically, renews many other longstanding preoccupations of Jameson’s as well. In “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” as we have seen, “the sublime” figured as an effect that “threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life” (IT2 72)—but the valorization of cultural production (whether art or critique) that realizes a “critical” effectivity by way of such an effect is a long-standing theme in Jameson, whether associated with “the sublime” or not. In Marxism and Form, Jameson lays it down as a self-evident proposition that in an increasingly reified world, the serious writer is obliged to reawaken the reader’s numbed sense of the concrete through the administration of linguistic shocks, by restructuring the overfamiliar or by appealing to those deeper layers of the physiological which alone retain a kind of fitful unnamed intensity (M&F 20–1).

The “serious writer” here is Adorno, whose “dialectical sentences” Jameson praises for precisely their ability to administer such “shocks” (this theme of “shock” recurs passim thoughout the Adorno and Benjamin chapters of Marxism and Form). And given the passage’s emphasis on “the physiological,” we might propose that the “shock” potential specific to, or uniquely operable under the sign of, that

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“antithetical” word “the sublime” in effect libidinalizes “dialectical” effects, enacting their motions and reversals in the somatic domain of affects. Thus, in “Postmodernism,” does a scriptible of “the sublime” newly synthesize “dialectical thinking” with what “Pleasure: A Political Issue” idealizes, in a passage aiming to redescribe Barthes’s supposed hedonistic aestheticizing as something akin to the Lacanian ethos of “L’écoute,” of listening (to desire), of the “discourse of the analyst,” as Barthes’s “writing with the body”: [Barthes] taught us to read with our bodies—and often to write with them as well. Whence, if one likes, the unavoidable sense of selfindulgence and corruption that Barthes’ work can project when viewed from certain limited angles. The libidinal body, as a field and instrument of perception all at once, cannot but be self-indulgent in that sense. To discipline it, to give it the proper tasks and ask it to repress its other random impulses, is at once to limit its effectiveness, or, even worse, to damage it irretrievably. Lazy, shot through with fits of boredom or enthusiasm, reading the world and its texts with nausea or jouissance, listening for the fainter vibrations of a sensorium largely numbed by civilization and rationalization, sensitive to the messages of throbs too immediate, too recognizable as pain or pleasure—maybe all this bodily disposition is not to be described as self-indulgence after all. Maybe it requires a discipline and a responsiveness of a rare yet different sort . . . maybe indeed the deeper subject is here: not pleasure (against whose comfort and banalities everyone from Barthes to Edmund Burke is united in warning us), but the libidinal body itself, and its peculiar politics, which may well move in a realm largely beyond the pleasureable in that narrow, culinary, bourgeois sense (IT2 69).

“The sublime” might be said to name that “realm beyond the pleasureable” in which “the libidinal body” and its “peculiar politics” less “move” (to qualify that last sentence) than desire (anxiously, vainly) to move; “the sublime” also answers to the longing for stimuli, even in the form of “shock,” that might reawaken responses that have been “numbed” by overhabituation—“too recognizable as pain or pleasure”: a formula that again agitates the desire for the (sublime) “antithetical,” in which all the domesticating binaries suffer (or enjoy) a reversal or sublation for which perhaps even the term Aufhebung might suddenly seem apposite. The desire for release from (what we might call the “prison-house” of ) the “too familiar” is itself, of course, rather too familiar a theme, both in the problematic of the modern generally (from at least Romanticism to now) and in Jameson himself, in whose scriptible we have already observed the desire to escape “thematization,” and noted its family resemblance with Lacan’s characterization of “the Real” as “that which resists symbolization absolutely.” The latter formula, indeed,


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invites us to read Jameson’s “sublime” as another figure of “the [Lacanian] Real.” To recall that Jameson characterizes the latter as “History itself ” (IT1 104) is to rejoin the impulse that prompts Jameson to cathect Barthesian “jouissance ” with political force, and thus to assimilate it, as “the sublime,” to a nightmare-of-history experience of fear and terror. If above we evoked a Hegelian sublime of “dialectical” reversal or fusion of polar alternatives whose contradiction had hitherto seemed to impose absolute discontinuity between them, the present point—the sublime as the unrepresentable—resonates with the Kantian noumenon, the Ding an sich, forever inaccessible to the categories of reason. But the dialectical or “antithetical” oscillation between the libidinal and the historical valences of “the sublime,” between its utopian hope and its ideological terror, underwrites the rescript of this desire to escape representation as, instead, anxiety about an inability to achieve it, in what I take to be the “Postmodernism” essay’s most consequential inflection of “the sublime”: the Burkean experience of terror as refined by Kant to include the question of representation itself, so that the object of the sublime becomes not only a matter of sheer power . . . but also of the limits of figuration and the incapacity of the human mind to give representation to such enormous forces (P 34).

Burke and Kant, Jameson observes, could stage “the sublime” in terms of an incommensurability between Nature and the human; but today, “in full postmodernism” (he says), Nature has been too effectively tamed to play such a role in our imaginations; on the contrary it is the world system of technology and finance that now exceeds our power to grasp, to represent to ourselves. In “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” what uniquely defeats our understanding is, Vico and Marx notwithstanding, precisely what “we” have made. This “postmodern or technological sublime” necessarily generates “high-tech paranoia” or “conspiracy theory” as the mind’s “degraded attempt[s]” to figure what cannot be figured, to represent what cannot be represented, “to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system” (P 37–8). Here, “the sublime” reprises the chronic Jamesonian theme of “society” as the “absent, invisible” determinant (Marxism and Form) or (adapting Althusser, in The Political Unconscious), the “absent cause,” operative upon all cultural production and lived experience, and which it is the task definitive of “Marxist hermeneutic” to infer or extrapolate from such particular written or other “texts” as may be available, the “political unconscious” latent in the manifest texts of cultural production, the “ideological closure” whose “untranscendable” limit critique can probe or prove only in the inevitable failure of its attempt to breach, open, or pass beyond (“transcend”) it.

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The “vast text of the social,” and our abjection to it, as “sublime”: to pursue this theme through the vast text of Postmodernism is a task I am grateful to have to renounce here. Suffice it to say that simply as a “read,” even just as an object to be hefted in the hand, Postmodernism makes many telling contrasts with The Political Unconscious, contrasts for which “the sublime” must here be the summarizing term. Dense and compact(ed), The Political Unconscious tells a (Hegelian) story— there is nothing “secretly narrative” about its diachronic trajectory from prerealism, through realism to modernism. By contrast, the vast and sprawling Postmodernism, renouncing temporality, narrative, and hermeneutic itself in favor of themes of “mapping,” “the visual,” and “space,” arrays itself in large chapters both thematically and procedurally disjunct. To belabor the book’s own frequent recourse to figures of the geo-“spatial,” we might say that Postmodernism suggests, estrangingly, a satellite probe of some distant planet, the encyclopedically bulky tome itself a hangar-sized bunker housing data as diverse as high-altitude photographs (in, for example, the “Postmodernism” essay itself ) on the one hand to spectrographic analyses of soil samples (in the minutely argued subchapters on DeMan and Walter Benn Michaels) on the other. (Granted, this sketch, structured by the binaries at stake between the phenomenological tradition and poststructuralism—we might say that “postmodernism” is the form in which Jameson could least equivocally embrace the latter—is over-schematic: in particular, I would argue that Postmodernism frequently displays a “secretly hermeneutic” impulse; and I would note that, as if “narrative” too still merits a dossier of its own, the chapter on Claude Simon, “Sentences,” reprises the Hegelian and phenomenological themes of temporality, diachrony, and “event.”) In any case, in Postmodernism, again, theme and theory are not merely announced as program, but enacted in practice, in the writing and in the reading. We need not argue that Jameson altogether calculated these “textual effects” to assert their impact on the experience of reading Postmodernism, and on the book’s renunciation or evasion of some of the predicaments elaborated in The Political Unconscious, most crucially that of the “vision” of “inevitable failure” itself. The Jamesonian “sublime” of impossible imperatives recurs throughout Postmodernism, in tension with antithetical themes of release, dissolution, “intensities,” to lend its discursive expansions and contractions a systolic/diastolic rhythm, working to heighten the impasse of the “winner loses logic” and/or “textual determinism” here, to loosen and “relieve” it there. Both stylistically and thematically indeed, this may be the most consequential of Jameson’s exploitations of the “antithetical” resources of “the sublime”: beyond terror/joy, boredom/intensity, and the like, “the sublime” also operates and signals the (“untranscendable”?) binary of Necessity/ Freedom itself, figured here as the tightening and loosening of Jameson’s own


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“winner loses” rhetoric. The chapter of Postmodernism called “Theory,” for example, consists of two long essays, on Walter Benn Michaels and Paul de Man. Different and complex as these two essays are, one formula for their conjoined effect in the book is to suggest that Michaels’s explanatory category of “the market” is reproached for minimizing (that is, mystifying) the necessities of “production,” while de Man’s supposed demystification of “aesthetic ideology” is shown to reinscribe a fatalism that prematurely forecloses critical and analytic prerogatives (and is itself a kind of aesthetic ideology besides). Space forbids more than a word here on Jameson’s 1990 book on Adorno, a book apparently overshadowed by Postmodernism, even though the titles (Late Marxism, “Late Capitalism”) invite us to read them as companion volumes. For Jameson, Adorno has raised the Freedom/Necessity dialectic with special force ever since Marxism and Form, in which Adorno’s “dialectical sentences” needed defense, as it were, against the liability of their own aesthetic brilliance: Adorno’s “historical trope” could look uncomfortably like a merely imagist device, that is, a contingency of Adorno’s own merely individual creative wit rather than a “working through” of some “objective,” that is, “necessary” reality of the determinate world. In Late Marxism, Jameson means to celebrate Adorno again as a writer of “dialectical prose,” but also to guard against a too-easy assimilation of Adorno’s scriptible to a mere écriture or “textual productivity.” Thus Jameson valorizes the “resistance to thematization” in Adorno’s writing practice (and program, in such essays as “The Essay as Form”) even as he wants to claim that Adorno’s ostensibly “essayistic” or “aphoristic” oeuvre ultimately achieves a coherence and scope that deserves, indeed demands the name of “system.” Adorno’s own prose as “sublime” is a leitmotif throughout: as scriptible, his long (and headlong) sentences and unbroken paragraphs confront the reader with (note the sublimity of this image) “a towering wall of water of a text” (LM 51); as program, or “system,” Adorno’s resourcefulness as a writer answers to (achieves a “mimesis” of ) a sense of history, or the “administered universe” as (“sublime”) nightmare (LM 215–6), as in Jameson’s adaptation of the “Capital-logic” Marxists (whom, indeed, he figures as Adorno’s rightful intellectual heirs [LM 239]). And throughout, the problem of the (un)representability of the “totality” looms. It is worth attempting to “historicize,” however sketchily, Jameson’s “sublime” in the context of Jameson’s period. Its career could be said to begin in the era of “classic” modernism, with (for example) Ortega’s “dehumanization of art,” Worringer’s “abstraction and empathy” (another modernizing homeomorph of the sublime/beautiful), to say nothing of Adorno’s austere ethos of art as critical “negation.” By the 1950s, when Jameson (b. 1934) was coming of age intellectually, existentialism in general and Sartre in particular held for literary-intellectual culture

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something of the interest that “theory” and Derrida have held for the academicintellectual subculture more recently. Among the more salient of existentialist motifs was “the absurd,” which meant, first of all, the meaningless: the search for (or the making of ) meaning defined the existential task or problem—and often, in Beckett among others, its impossibility, or “inevitable failure.” But for a more recent generation, “meaning” has tended to appear not as idealized goal, the hoped-for end or reward of heroic quest or Promethean acte but rather (along with its constituents, language and representation) as “prison-house,” a “closure” from which escape is vainly sought, an all-inclusive text coextensive with and complicit in (variously) an ever more mystifying “aesthetic ideology,” an unwitting “logocentric” metaphysics, or (Jameson’s focus) an increasingly oppressive world political and economic system. The transit of the un-meaning—what cannot be represented, signified, symbolized, or otherwise expressed, registered, assimilated or co-opted by or in any semiotic system or language—between these two positions could hardly be better graphed than by conceiving it as the passage from “the absurd” to “the sublime.” Nor, in my view, does any competing version of it—from “absurd” to (variously) post-Lacanian/Barthesian “jouissance,” Derrida’s “athetic,” Baudrillard’s “sleep” and/or “death,” Lyotard’s “inhuman,” the “impermeability” of Charles Bernstein, Paul Mann’s mock-apotheosis of “the stupid”—stretch the transit itself as far, nor generate within it so many “antithetical” or dialectical possibilities, as Jameson’s. It also seems to me worth saying that of all Jameson’s successes, among the most startling, because it is, prima facie, the most implausible, is to have credibly and sustainably predicated “sublimity” of the postmodern in the first place. This globally oppressive atmosphere of muzak and of bar-codes, of transnational designer logos as legible “fashion statement” or willing self-commodification, of smiley-faces and franchiser’s manual courtesies, where shopping is the only leisure activity there is, and for increasingly large numbers of people, the only leisure activity they are “good at”—how to make the narcosis of such a commodity-scape interesting at all, let alone juice it up with the excitements of “the sublime”? I intend no derogation of “excitement” here; it appears to be a fundamental need of the human creature, and I am sure its scarcity in contemporary American life has much to do with our juvenile crime problem. Nor do I think it sugarcoats the ravages of “late capitalism” to say that its brutalities look, at least in our own firstworld environment, more like the banality than the sublimity of evil; and I regret that these remarks might seem to reduce Jameson’s achievement to a mere species of horror fiction for “cultural intellectuals.” Granted, “anxiety” is by now a soothingly conventional motif; still, as anxieties go, multinational capitalism need not solicit the willing suspension of my disbelief as is the case with metaphysics or lo-


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gocentrism (whether onto-, theo-, or phallo-), let alone commies (or FBI agents) under the bed, illegal aliens (or skinheads) at the 7-Eleven, homosexual (or fundamentalist) “agendas” at the school board, or whatever bogeyman/scapegoat du jour (Marxist professors?) the corporate-foundation think-tanks and Capitol Hill press releases work so hard to scare me with. Alas, “boredom” and “waning of affect” seem rubrics all too adequate to the postmodern vécu—and as we shall see in the following chapter, Jameson post-Postmodernism will increasingly agree, drastically revising his early-1980s account of the inter-relations of postmodernism and “the sublime.” But “the sublime” as (at this moment) a culminating theme is an index of something else important about Jameson’s career, his general penchant for expansion rather than contraction, for problems (even problematizations) rather than solutions, for seeing how far a notion or a vocabulary can be pushed rather than setting out to curtail its range in the name of clarity or certainty. Hence, for example, the difference between Jameson’s airy (indeed, stratospheric) Hegel-, Heidegger-, Adorno- (etc.) effects and, say, the pugilistically deflationary wit of Terry Eagleton, whose bare-knuckle style is in the mainstream of English polemical and satirical traditions, in which the game is to bludgeon the other fellow with barrages of caricatural mock-syllogisms delivered in an exasperated baby-talk, as if explaining the ABC’s to an unusually dimwitted child (“we are not politically conflicting if you hold that patriarchy is an objectionable social system and I hold that it is a small town in upper New York state” [Ideology 13]: the pleasures of reading Eagleton are not unlike those of reading Karl Popper). I have alluded earlier to Jameson’s forbearance with polemic and satire—not that Jameson is not good at these things when, for local effect, he wants to be: in, for instance, the “Introduction” to Postmodernism, in which “the cultural logic of late capitalism” is jeered as effectively as anywhere in Eagleton (on “the ‘aestheticization’ of reality”: Benjamin “thought it meant fascism, but we know it’s only fun” [P x]). But Jameson’s larger ambitions are for degrees of subtlety and nuance to which the hurly-burly of polemic and satire are inimical. For polemic and satire depend on belittling, on banalizing, on stripping away anything complex, let alone uncanny from the target. Marx’s own sarcasm, for example: Jeffrey Mehlman characterizes the Eighteenth Brumaire as a de-unheimlich -izing of the very cultural dominants whose force Jameson enlarges and amplifies, in a fashion to render them “sublime” (Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition 35). Think, indeed, of the contrast between Jameson and Eagleton on “postmodernism”: in Eagleton’s hands, it is a sheerly satiric object, an ideological wetdream, an occasion for jeers and catcalls;3 whereas Jameson, with appropriate gravitas, makes of it an access to the central problems of the age.

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The “antithetical” power of “the sublime” draws, again, from both a desire for the unrepresentable—escape from “thematization”—and an anxiety about an inability to represent or render representable. This anxiety about the inability to “give representation to such enormous forces” (P 34), an ominous sense of emptiness in the postmodern vécu itself, an inability to make sense of things, besets individuals in their lived experience of the increasingly unintelligible life-world of late capitalism (P 51)—a theme that revives, as I have been suggesting, the existentialist “absurd” of a generation ago (when “alienation” was a buzzword only bores and spoilsports linked with Marx). More pertinent for Jameson’s own project is its consequences for critique, for how can we critique what we cannot represent?—or (if our program is hermeneutic) interpret what is not represented or representable? If “the sublime” is the unfigurable, it must necessarily defeat any project of “Marxist [or indeed any other kind of ] hermeneutic.” Yet, as we have seen, in central chapters of Marxism and Form, in The Prison-House of Language, in the 1971 essay “Metacommentary,” through the opening chapter, “On Interpretation,” of The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson characterizes his effort as a hermeneutic project, programmatically opposed to that of “antihermeneuts” from Susan Sontag to Foucault, Barthes and Derrida. Not that the imperative of interpretation is a “desire” to interpret: “we are condemned to interpret at the same time that we feel an increasing repugnance to do so,” Jameson advises in “Metacommentary”—though even in this early (1971) essay, Jameson anticipates the desire of the sublime when he acknowledges, in figures like Mallarmé, a “will to be uninterpretable ” (IT1 6, 5; cf. P 91–2, 391–3). But if “History” is uninterpretable, unrepresentable, any project of Marxist hermeneutic would seem to be at a non plus. Of course, from the beginning in Jameson’s oeuvre, History itself has evinced something like a “will to be uninterpretable,” a will to mystify, via the “absence” of its “absent cause” and the systematic distortions of ideology, the ugly truth of its exploitation and reification of human beings. And Jameson has always ascribed to a “Marxist hermeneutic” confronted with such obstacles a heroism accruing from the very difficulty, or indeed impossibility, of its task. Impossible imperatives and inevitable failures have long been salient features of Jameson’s scriptible. So while the “Postmodernism” essay’s “sublime” might be read as a final declension or failure or abandonment of “hermeneutic” as a project, it might equally seem merely a reinscription, more vehement and despairing to be sure than any before it, of a chronic Jamesonian gesture. Some might also question the extent to which any of Jameson’s “metacommentaries”—to call his writings for the moment by the least prescriptive of the available terms—are properly “hermeneutic” or “interpretive” to begin with. Others might suspect that “the sublime,” while


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ostensibly deploring the debacle of interpretation, covertly lets Jameson off the hook of “we are condemned to interpret,” and licenses his “repugnance to do so.” (One could ask, parenthetically, how “motivated” is the coincidence of this attenuation of “hermeneutic” in Jameson after The Political Unconscious with the waning of “narrative” as an interest in his work of the same period. Jameson’s 1980s-and-after interest in “space” rather than “time” has always seemed to me almost a kind of penance for the Hegelian, narrative, historical, diachronic, temporal—that is, still phenomenological—orientation of The Political Unconscious, chided so harshly by British Althusserians. Still, even Jameson’s more recent books have continued, like his earlier, to forecast, however wistfully, a Hegel revival (for instance, LM 241; ST 3), and temporality would seem to have staged a major return in the very title of his recent book, The Seeds of Time. In contrast to “time,” “space” in Jameson connotes the synchronic, the post-narrative or -historical presuppositions of structuralism and poststructuralism, and even, I suspect, something of these latter movements’ antihumanism, too: “space” as “the inhuman” in a sense whose embrace extends from Foucault and Lyotard to Charles Olson, as well as to the more conventionally Marxist-“without-a-subject” geography of David Harvey, Kevin Lynch, Ed Soja, and others—but see the next chapter’s remarks on Jameson’s 1994 Seeds of Time. Relevant to the attenuation or persistence of the hermeneutic in Jameson is the theme of “cognitive mapping,” which may be read as a spatializing displacement of the temporality and historicity traditional to hermeneutics from Schleiermacher to Gadamer and Ricoeur.) In any case, hermeneutic or not, or hermeneutic in whatever altered form, Jameson’s later writings have a full-throated plangency about their “impossible imperatives” and “inevitable failures” that lifts the career-long gesture into a different—we must say, a “sublime”—register quite unlike the austerer (more “stoic”) sound of the earlier work. “The cultural logic of late capitalism” triumphant, “the postmodern” itself, that is, seems, in Jameson’s writing, to mark a period of revolutionary failures and capitalist successes so demoralizing as to bring “interpretation” itself under the full force of the devaluation expressed in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach—as if our impotence to “change” the world can now be adequately expressed only as an impotence, also, even to “understand” it. And I will add that this attenuation of the hermeneutic can also be read as a swerve away from a certain set of dangers or possible failures (the bad kind of failures) that Jameson wants to avoid. Call these dangers “hermeneutic determinism”—for there is a “logic” to interpretive explanation that can inexorably entrain characteristic “textual effects” (or “generic closures”) as surely as any other too-exclusive “motivation.” The hermeneut can seem a village explainer, a caricatural sujet “supposed [by himself ] to know,” laying out with knowing

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aplomb the hidden designs and purposes that render what looks to uninitiates like a chaotic situation on the contrary a lucid scenario, minutely scripted down to the last detail by an invisible, all-powerful cabal. At its worst, I am describing the sort of paranoid explanatory grandiosity one used to find as laughable in the Daily Worker as in the John Birch Society Newsletter. (Cf. Freud’s assimilation of art to hysteria, religion to obsessional neurosis, and systematic philosophy to paranoia [Totem and Taboo 73].) The danger here is that an excess of hermeneutic “success” risks a failure of a too familiar, even “vulgar Marxist” sort. This could be one reason why Jameson attends mostly to cultural texts, rather than “politics” per se: there is less risk of your commentary lapsing into prefab paranoia with E. L. Doctorow or Claude Simon than with, say, Jesse Helms (one of Jameson’s home-state Senators). Jameson’s essay “Periodizing the 1960s” could stand as a cautionary example of what I mean, the narrativization of that turbulent decade as a scenario sufficiently obvious to those with the correct interpretive tools. That rhetoric has its satisfactions, for reader and writer alike, but they are quite the reverse of “the sublime,” and indeed represent a choice that Jameson’s “sublime,” however deliberately, refuses—a point the more acute for the contemporaneity of “Periodizing the 1960s” with the “Postmodernism” essay: both appeared in 1984. (Jameson accesses this problem of the “paranoiac-critical” in the contrast of Foucault with Baudrillard [P 202–3].) Hence, too, perhaps, the special use of popular culture, especially film studies, to Jameson’s project: a body of cultural production whose “ideological closure” might be more accessible, no less “absent” than in high culture, but more naively so, and thus perhaps able to be made present in a different way—and presenting, to that extent, a field of analysis somewhere between high culture and Jesse Helms. The essay on Dog Day Afternoon, for example (SV 35–54), dating from 1977, anticipates many of the themes of the “postmodernism” essay’s “sublime”—the problem of representability, in this case of the class system, the unfigurability of multinational capitalism (projected here, too—nightmarishly— as “the subject of present-day world history” [SV 50]), but there is no reservation about Jameson’s own hermeneutic power to represent or interpret these phenomena, however (ideologically) unfigurable they are in or by the (popular) culture at large. And the essay’s indignation at the social changes of the 1970s at least approaches the slippery slope that begins in moralizing and ends in the paranoia of the over-certain (“not merely part of the on-going logic of the system . . . but also, and above all, the consequences of the decisions of powerful and strategically placed individuals and groups” [SV 45]). Of course, just because it’s over-certain doesn’t mean it isn’t true; to cite the Delmore Schwartz truism one more time, even paranoids have enemies.


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I have spoken of “the [unrepresentable] sublime” as both a desire (escape from representation) and as an anxiety (impotence to represent); and of overcertain hermeneutic representation as entailing a danger Jameson wishes to avoid: there remains one further permutation I want to work through, in which desire and the anxiety of its possible failure generate a psychology of apotropaism and taboo, the mood of the Bilderverbot, the ban on graven images, that is so pervasive a theme in Benjamin and Adorno (see Jameson’s treatment in LM 118–20; cf. 192 and P 392 on “taboo”). An impulse under ban: we have to do here with something Jameson does not say, an inference or possibility he does not draw or acknowledge, namely the representation of utopia. If utopia is to be imagined as something utterly other than, different from, the ideological present, a novum and not a mere “repetition,” it follows that any imaginative projection or representation of it we attempt with the expressive means available to us will necessarly profane that unimaginable end of “History” as we know it, “History” whose Necessity, ideological closure, and inevitable failure have so irredeemably tainted the very veins and capillaries of our subjectivities. Jameson’s “sublime,” for all its avowal of “euphoria” and “joyous intensities,” remains, in Jameson’s writing practice, overwhelmingly anxious, and scrupulously wary of the ruses of (“ideological”) hope, and thus—a kind of moral “rigor”—backward-looking, oriented to the nightmare past rather than any utopian future, an experience of “shock,” of “fear,” of a “therapeutic humiliation of the pretensions of the human mind to understanding” (IT1 40). Like Orpheus leading Eurydice up from Hades, or Benjamin’s Angel of the New surveying the ruin of History avalanching at its feet with its back turned firmly on the future, Jameson’s imagination must avert its eyes from what it desires, gazing instead upon a “sublime” identified with the unrepresentable guilt and violence of the past rather than with that equally, indeed more unrepresentable future possibility (impossibility?) called Utopia. (“Pleasure: A Political Issue” enacts precisely this transit.) I make this point for the sake of accounting for an effect, illuminating a motivation, of Jameson’s prose—an illumination which may be assisted by a contrast with another passage from Eagleton, for whom it is the revolution, not the prevailing “capital-logic,” that is sublime: socialist revolution . . . is excessive of all form, out in advance of its own rhetoric. It is unrepresentable by anything except itself, signified only in its “absolute movement of becoming,” and thus a kind of sublimity (Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic 214–5).

Eagleton might never have written this passage (dating from 1990), or thus linked the “unrepresentable” and “the sublime,” without Jameson’s “Postmodernism” essay; but just as surely, Eagleton’s repredication of sublimity from

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capitalism to “socialist revolution” implies a difference from, even Eagleton’s habitual critique of, the failure-haunted “vision” adumbrated in the prose of Jameson and many others.4 Desire and anxiety, humiliation, shock, proscription—Jameson articulates these terms with sufficient “dialectical” ingenuity and passion as to more than motivate the extraordinary “difficulty” of his prose. But let me repeat here my own experience that in Jameson the “difficulties” make a basis for fellowship between reader and writer—they are shared difficulties, however differently difficult they are for the reader than for Jameson—in contrast to some other “theory” prose styles whose “sublime humiliation” of the reader can feel quite differently motivated (for the writer, more enjoyable; for the reader—ça dépend ). When Jameson sounds the “unrepresentability” theme in terms of “a complexity beyond the normal reading mind” (P 38), he means “reading” figuratively; but the word inevitably also brings the reader right back down to the experience of the book ( Jameson’s Postmodernism) presently in hand, the prose uncoiling, ramifying, exfoliating in so many “dialectically” conflicting directions, through such stupefyingly superimposed problematics, keeping aloft so daunting and yet relevant a weight of allusion to the most challenging thought of our period. The moments are quite frequent in Jameson when the reader can feel engulfed by the threatened onset of an ideational congestion, a cerebral meltdown or synaptic overload, a sense of argumentative threads and suggestions, themes and variations, multiplying beyond any hope of keeping track of them, an intellectual levitation at once exhilarating and daunting, illuminating and befuddling, an experience of thought and speculative possibility that might fairly be called (in the words of Thomas Weiskel), “the hermeneutic or ‘reader’s’ sublime.”5 But this augment of “difficulty” or “shock” in Jameson’s writing of the 1980s also engenders its own “dialectical reversal,” insofar as the prose remains as allusive and inward as ever, but with an affective charge much larger and more accessible, more immediate (in the colloquial sense) than before. The “vision of failure” in The Political Unconscious and other writings of the late 1970s prompted a “stoic,” facing-the-worst tone in the prose—indeed, when Terry Eagleton in 1982 chided Jameson’s “regular, curiously unimpassioned style” (Against the Grain 74), he was calling for a more “impassioned” (he doubtless meant a more polemical) Jameson. But Eagleton’s 1982 remark was on the way to being out of date almost as soon as it was made, as even a cursory reading of the 1984 “Postmodernism” essay, as well as the other contents of the book, especially the shorter, more improvisational meditations on diverse topics gathered as the “Conclusion” of the book, will show. But it is time for an example—and although “close reading” is out of fashion, I will risk a lengthy quotation to try to put on view how “the sublime” and “unfigurability,” the condition of postmodern reification, the consequent predica-


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ments (paramaters of possible success or failure) of a project or a writing like Jameson’s own, can, in Jameson’s diffuse verbal medium, in the heat of affective investments nominally under ban, fuse into an amalgam, ideationally complex but libidinally quite direct, in which “theme” becomes inseparable from “effect.” The following passage is from one of the previously unpublished, presumably recent, meditations gathered in the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism: Jameson is discussing the inferiority ordinary people feel before the intellectual, and complains that an analogous demoralization, what Jameson calls (citing Gunther Anders) a “Promethean shame, a Promethean inferiority complex . . . is what we [ordinary people? intellectuals?] now feel for culture more generally”—an abjection that “happens to people when their relations to production are blocked, when they no longer have power over productive activity”: Impotence is first and foremost that, the pall on the psyche, the gradual loss of interest in the self and the outside world, very much in formal analogy to Freud’s description of mourning; the difference being that one recovers from mourning (Freud shows how), but that the condition of non-productivity, since it is an index of an objective situation that does not change, must be dealt with in another way, a way that, acknowledging its persistence and inevitability, disguises, represses, displaces, and sublimates a persistent and fundamental powerlessness. That other way is, of course, consumerism itself, as a compensation for an economic impotence which is also an utter lack of any political power . . . I want to add that the way in which (objectively, if you like) this analysis takes on the appearance of anthropology or social psychology . . . is itself to be reckoned back into the phenomenon we are describing: not merely is this anthropological or psychological appearance a function of a basic representational dilemma about late capitalism . . . it is also the result of the failure of our society to achieve any kind of transparency; indeed, it is virtually the same as that failure. In a transparent society in which our various positions in social production were clear to us and to everybody else—so that, like Malinowski’s savages, we could take a stick and draw a diagram of the socioeconomic cosmology on the sand of the beach—it would not sound either psychological or anthropological to refer to what happens to people who have no say in their work: no Utopian or Nowhereon [sic] would think you were mobilizing hypotheses about the Unconscious or the libido, or foundationally presupposing a human essence or a human nature; perhaps it would sound more medical, as though you were talking about a broken leg or paralysis of the whole right side. At any rate, it is thus, as a fact, that I would like to talk about reification: in this sense of the way in which a product somehow shuts us out even from a sympathetic participation, by imagination, in its production. It comes before us, no questions asked, as something we could not begin to imagine doing for ourselves.

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But this in no way means that we cannot consume the product in question, “derive enjoyment” from it, become addicted to it, etc. Indeed, consumption in the social sense is very specifically the word for what we in fact do to reified products of this kind, that occupy our minds and float above that deeper nihilistic void left in our being by our inability to control our own destiny (P 315–7).

I quote at such length to make accessible the energy beyond or exceeding the mere “points” the passage makes. Indeed, the motives discernible here might rather be thought of as the unmaking of points, the evacuation or discard of all thoughtinstruments, as though the ambition of critique, the undoing of alienation, could after all be an affair of nullifying conceptual obstacles by fiat, not merely solving but abolishing “representational dilemmas about late capitalism” and breaking through into “transparency,” realizing the “socioeconomic cosmology” as a radiant Ding an-sich, available not merely as phenomenon but as noumenon to a mentalité in whose operations language once again functions as windowpane. Note that “transparency” here is a more than merely hermeneutic aim, as if “understanding the world” and “changing it” could, or must, or can only (the intellectual’s most grandiosely Promethean desire, or hubris) happen in one fell apocalyptic swoop, delivering (or restoring) us to a pristine naturalness like that of Malinowski’s savages on the beach. (Is this the same beach on which, Foucault prophecied, “Man” would disappear like a [cosmological?] sand-drawing under the wave? Even LéviStrauss did not idealize pensée sauvage as “transparent” to its subjects.) Notably, the animus against all “thought-instruments” includes not only the mystifications of capitalism but also the theoretical constructs of critique that would challenge them—the “anthropology or social psychology” that must themselves be counted as part of the problem, the “hypotheses about the Unconscious or the libido, or . . . [“foundational” assumptions of ] a human essence or a human nature” (here Jameson names a central preoccupation of his own work in the same breath with one of the principal bourgeois idealizations he opposes). Also audible is impatience under the burden of the taboos, the moralistically cathected left shibboleths under which a critic like Jameson must operate, what he elsewhere calls the “rigorous, quasi-religious examen de conscience . . . [or] Ideological New Year’s Resolution” (Diacritics 78) taken against naive, “ideological” fantasies like the one risked in this passage, that of “achieving transparency” (a fantasy Jameson elsewhere is as quick as anyone to denounce as ideological)—all the stratospheric intellectual speculation that to the plain-thinking of ordinary folks (Malinowskian savages, ethnic blue-collars, suburban Republicans), sounds like something for which “mystification” would be a typically evasive (and “classy”) euphemism. (“Plain thinking”: Brecht’s plumpes Denken is invoked often in Jameson’s work as


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leitmotif for the gap between high theory and proletarian consciousness—but figured nostalgically, as a sentimentalism the intellectual must, however regretfully, renounce.) Hence what we might call the dialectic of the grandiosity of intellectual hopes or desire(s), and their abjection in anxiety and failure: “Promethean shame” indeed. “Shame” because of the intellectual’s “impotence” before the reified world, “Promethean” because the intellectual is chained to the ideological rock, with the ideological eagles pecking his or her liver, in a predicament from which there is no escape: “it is thus, as a fact, that I would like to talk about reification,” Jameson writes, but in what follows he does not, can not, do so. He comes closest to talking about it “as a fact,” indeed, here, stating the wish that attests the failure to accomplish the deed. But what prevents Prometheus from talking of reification as a fact? Why must Jameson wave away any suggestion that he has, in this very passage, talked, eloquently, powerfully, of reification “as a fact”? The chains holding him (this is his own complaint in the passage) are those mind-forged manacles, the very thought-instruments whose uses no intellectual commands so masterfully, indeed, as Jameson. A pragmatist might blow the whistle on this as melodrama, since Jameson has been able to talk in any style and about any topic he chooses from a pinnacle not of exposure on a rockface but from a series of positions at distinguished universities—that his position, his career, has been a privilege, not a doom. Jameson might reply that to find satisfaction in such facile ironies is to acquiesce altogether too complacently in the reifications of a system that, in other precincts of its operation, daily inflicts, on a mass scale, violences for which Prometheus’s torment is if anything too soothing a figure. My purpose here is not to force a choice, or cast a vote, for one position over the other, but rather to illuminate the motives of contrasting rhetorics. The pragmatist’s hope, however modest, that critique can make change, is liable to the charge of being not merely complacent, but “ideological”—an “imaginary solution to a real contradiction.” Jameson’s Promethean rhetoric attempts to ward that accusation away by inscribing failure as its very premise: since Prometheus never gets off the rock, he cannot be charged with offering our desperation a false hope, an “imaginary solution,” a merely “aesthetic” consolation. “The sublime” expresses with new force this long-standing Jamesonian predicament, including the predicament’s more-than-aesthetic character; and it aspires as well to offer that predicament some more-than-aesthetic “relief ”—and in that dialectical alembification of thetic “logic of content” and “textual effect” that Jameson calls “linguistic optimism” it can seem, however provisionally, to do so. How provisionally, though, is not only a question but also a qualification—and one not to be postponed in the follow-through inevitably to arrive after the moment of sublimity has passed.

Chapter Seven

Jameson Post-Postmodernism

The Success and Failure of Theory

After “the sublime,” whither?—for the sublime would seem the (“untranscendable”?) limit of limits, the extreme of extremes, the ultimate effect or affect possible to Jameson’s or anyone’s probes or projections of “ideological closure,” the ne plus ultra of any possible critical-writerly non plus. No surprise, then, that the temperature has lowered in work Jameson has published since Postmodernism, even if this affective or tonal dénouement has been forced to coincide so ironically with the terminal debacle of world-historical Marxism itself, that is, the Eastern European “revolutions” of the Fall of 1989 that culminated in the collapse of the U.S.S.R. at the end of 1991. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, indeed, is a circumstance Jameson has seemed reluctant to address frontally: it is a central topic of a 1993 essay, “Actually Existing Marxism,” but Jameson has (so far) published the essay only in out-of-theway places;1 in books appearing under his own name, meanwhile, the fall of the U.S.S.R. went for long unmentioned—a gesture we shall touch on below, and worth keeping in mind throughout the pages to follow. Publication has its time-lags of course, and we do not expect books appearing in 1992 (The Geopolitical Aesthetic and Signatures of the Visible) to respond to events of December 1991. About Seeds of Time (1994), a more complicated case, and “Marx’s Purloined Letter” (1995), more later. 127

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But to begin with the two former books, both are about film. Signatures of the Visible gathers some of Jameson’s uncollected essays on film going back to the 1970s; but there are also a preface and a new (previously unpublished) essay, “The Existence of Italy,” that frames the older writings with more up-to-the-minute reflections, and what is interesting about these is that they offer, both as program and as practice, a renewal of hermeneutic. In Postmodernism, the omnipresence of “the sublime” threatened the defeat (for better or worse) of representation, and thus of hermeneutic itself, insofar as what cannot be represented cannot be interpreted—a difficulty, as we have seen, complicated by (if it is not in some sense simply mimesis of, or even being mobilized in order to evoke) the further anxiety that hermeneutic itself risks the most abject sort of “ideological” failure, to the extent that the satisfactions of interpretive understanding might themselves amount to an imaginary solution to such real contradictions as a “Marxist hermeneutic” should properly aspire to lay bare. In “The Existence of Italy,” this anxiety abates. The essay applies the periodizing triad of realism/modernism/postmodernism to film—indeed, Jameson describes the essay as “the most sustained rehearsal of the dialectic of realism, modernism, and postmodernism that I have yet attempted, and which I have hitherto misrepresented by staging one or the other in isolation” (SV 6)—and thus should be read with Jameson’s other major essays on this problem.2 In this study I have not featured Jameson’s evolving discriminations and evaluations of realism, modernism, and postmodernism; his changing accounts of these movements signal interesting shifts in his thinking, and are notably staged in terms of what proponents of each were attempting and with what success or failure. For now, suffice it to say that the very questions the problem generates (especially when the periodizing triad is applied with deliberate anachronism to film) presuppose some degree of confidence in interpretive possibility even to be asked.3 Another sign of recoil from the extremity of “the sublime” is that “The Existence of Italy” and later writings display a franker nostalgia for modernism than Jameson earlier allowed himself. We noted above that a “Marxist hermeneutic” already suffers some problematization to the extent that the paleo-Marxist cause-and-effect relation of base and superstructure comes into question. If “the sublime,” in effect, reads this question as a devolution into utter unrepresentability, “The Existence of Italy” more dispassionately figures an inversion of, or disconnect between, base and superstructure (for it appears in both versions in the essay) theorized as “autonomization.” The word first designates the “becoming autonomous” of the cultural realm—between yesterday’s modernism and the postmodern now, the simulacra thrown up by the “society of the spectacle” become so pervasive as to eclipse the “mode of production” or the unfigurable “world system” altogether, to produce

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what Jameson does not hesitate to call an “inversion” of base and superstructure. (In this scenario, Althusser’s “relative autonomy” appears as a symptom.) But “autonomization” also takes on another sense: the fragmentation of film and other cultural production into mere sequences of “effects” for their own sakes (“pastiche” again), effects detachable from any larger structural whole or meaning, as well as from any larger langue or semiosis that would generate or allow intertextual significances. The modernist “motivation of the device” has devolved into a postmodern aesthetic of the device for its own sake, or as its own motivation. The point: in Postmodernism, “fragmentation” and “unrepresentability” prompted anxiety; here, by contrast, they appear, under the guise of “autonomization,” as an at least hermeneutic or explanatory gain, and to that extent a cause for satisfaction. The Geopolitical Aesthetic finds a related route to hermeneutic comfort in an otherwise comfortless world, via conspiracy theory, or (the book’s own rubric) “totality as conspiracy.” “The geopolitical aesthetic” is the effort to think the “world system” as a “totality”—an effort which revives “allegory” and “narrative,” and other like terms that Jameson’s account of “the postmodern” had seemed to put into eclipse. The hope Jameson invests in “the geopolitical aesthetic” is that thirdworld cinema will reinvent what the first and second worlds have eschewed or lost, the narrative means, and the (Marxist) politics, to figure “the world system” for the brutal thing it is. Brutal, and to that extent, “sublime”—but not at all in the sense of “unrepresentable”: that is a First World anxiety, evidently; and in The Geopolitical Aesthetic the focus is largely on the Third World, where interpretive strategies Jameson would disown as paranoid at home can figure as a worthily populist/ mass attempt to give representation to an exploitative “world system.”4 Jameson’s responses to unfamiliar Third World films (suggestively juxtaposed with more familiar First World examples) is one of the book’s chief interests. But the rhetoric of paranoia incurs, as we have seen, certain dangers; and Jameson’s account of the exciting “new” realisms emerging in Third World film risk sounding uncomfortably like the dreary old “socialist realism” of yesteryear, not to mention its First World Hollywood variants, in which “realism” doubly calls for quotation marks. (I should add, however, that in question here, mostly, are films I have not seen; perhaps their reality-effects really are as fresh as Jameson would have them.) More pertinent, however, might be the note that Jameson’s own effects in the forcefield of “conspiracy as totality” tend away from the plangent ore rotondo of “the [unrepresentable] sublime,” and toward a tighter-lipped, sometimes grimly satiric tone of sarcasm, in which the pain of “what hurts” manifests as a form of black humor: If everything means something else, then so does technology. It would be a mistake to reduce the menacing object-world of allegorical conspiracies to that first, fresh fear of spy systems and informants in the

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1960s, when right-wingers discovered a whole new generation of just the right gadgets and someone was listening to you, but only to you personally. J. Edgar Hoover would make a most anachronistic mascot for late capitalism; while the anxieties about privacy seem to have diminished, in a situation in which its tendential erosion or even abolition has come to stand for nothing less than the end of civil society itself. It is as though we were training ourselves, in advance, for the stereotypical dystopian rigors of overpopulation in a world in which no one has a room of her own any more, or secrets anybody else cares about in the first place . . . (GA 11)

Perhaps this sort of knowing (self-?) Schadenfreude must be Jameson’s inevitable note for an analysis of any filmic “sublime” generated—constrained or “contained”—by narrative and representational machineries whose requirements of legibility are such as to have appropriated “generic” as a term of praise. An altogether different register of the success/failure anguish prevails in The Seeds of Time, with its willed elision of the collapse of the U.S.S.R., despite appearing fully three years after the fact. Rhetorically, the book maintains for itself a prolongation of its supposed “moment”: it offers itself as a reprint of Jameson’s Wellek lectures at Irvine, given in April 1991 (that is, before the fall), but the text has obviously been enlarged and supplemented since, leaving many traces of what we might call a “self-difference” that is not merely temporal but historical, as if the text itself has suffered asynchronously the differential seismic shocks of an “uneven development.” Thus “Second World culture” may figure in the present tense on one page, in the past tense on the next, while “Eastern Europe” appears throughout as ex-socialist, but in the context of a rollback that seems to have proceeded only as far as the Soviet border—that is, as if the “moment” of this text were quite specifiably that of post-autumn 1989 but pre-, and without anticipation of, December 1991. It is a standard move of theory to “suspend” rather than to answer pressing questions, but this is a perplexing suspension from a critic whose best-circulated slogan is “Always historicize!” It is also, thereby, a telling sign or “symptom”—not simply of a residual allegiance to the Soviet experiment that can seem almost a form of denial in face of its demise, but of that larger, more general and systemic conflictedness that agitates all of Jameson’s projects. Recall the affirmation in “Metacommentary” (1971) of the necessity of interpretation: “we are condemned to interpret at the same time that we feel an increasing repugnance to do so” (IT1 6); similarly, the imperative to “historicize” is not a “desire” to do so: in The Political Unconscious, its burden is of a facing-the-worst sort, a chastening “necessity” entailed by “the determinate [sc. “inevitable”] failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history” (PU 102). Already in The Political Unconscious (1981), such talk acknowledged that the Soviet Revolution, sixty-some years after the fact, held little


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consolation for Jameson. But that was then, this is now: a familiar kind of antiSoviet Marxist might welcome the end of the U.S.S.R. as good riddance to bad historical baggage,5 and such a position would seem to be perfectly tailored to intellectuals of the Western Marxist tradition. But Jameson is of the more conflicted sort whose reservations about the U.S.S.R. were more salient before the fall than after, and whose loyalties to it are likely to prove more poignant after than before. (Compare “Actually Existing Marxism,” on which more below.) Such reticence might seem an evasiveness inscribed programmatically in Jameson’s “resistance to thematization”; obviously a scruple against “premature clarification” fares badly on such world-historical occasions as the “winning” (or should we say the “losing”) of the Cold War. But rather than moralize or score points against Jameson’s “evasion,” we can more fruitfully consider it as an emblem of the later Jameson’s constant theme, what the title of the last chapter of The Political Unconscious calls “The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology”: the Eros-and-Thanatos agon of Utopian desire in fated conflict with the reality principle, or with that Lacanian “Real” which Jameson has glossed as “simply History itself ” (IT1 104). Whatever else we might want to infer from this agon’s enactment in the motions and the motives of Jameson’s prose, we cannot ascribe any of this problematic’s “political unconscious” to Jameson himself: no doubt he is as “conscious” of it as anyone. I put it this way in hopes of quickening a sense of what is at stake in Jameson’s effort to utopianize against the historical wind: the costs or conditions, the strains and contradictions (I-can’t-go-on-I’ll-go-on) of this Beckettian but also Promethean project. The title of The Seeds of Time is drawn from a (slightly misquoted) passage of Macbeth in the book’s dedication to Wang Feng-zhen: “for who can look into the seeds of time / And say which grain will grow and which will not . . .” The allusion is at once elegiac and defiant: both a farewell to the Marxist dream of foretelling the plot of History’s grand narrative, and a protest against the postmodern ideology’s preemption of the future. Such are the ambivalences enacted in Jameson’s prose, so often suspended between, or rather overlapping and thus positioned to exploit the libidinal effects of both, a refutation of postmodernism as the (false) ideology of “late capitalism” and an equivocal acknowledgement of its “truth,” a debunking of something illusory and an effort to delimit the outlines, and warn against the menace, of a world-historical ideology whose temptation is only too real. And of course, “time” is hardly over; absent nuclear holocaust, there is ample history left in which Marxism may yet achieve its revivals and even its revolutions (an implication made explicit in “Actually Existing Marxism”). “Seeds of time,” indeed: we may recall Jameson’s remark apropos the title of Late Marxism: “better late than never!” (LM 12) The point perhaps even motivates, in reverse, so to speak, the soft-pedalling of “the sublime” after Postmodernism—as if that book’s ominous talk of “capital-logic,”

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and of capitalism, not the proletariat, as the “subject of history” triumphant over socialist revolutionary and utopian desire, had been all too abruptly literalized (cunning of history, indeed) for “the sublime” to remain a tenable key in which to respond. It is not merely (to mix metaphors) that there is no point in crying wolf after the lamb has been snatched from the manger; but that in circumstances so grave, when History has trumped your imagination of “the worst” with something worse yet, a reconsideration of “textual effects” is called for—as if, in the context of historical anxieties, “the sublime” must be anticipatory: it loses torque when the view is retrospective. To all the problems posed for the socialist tradition by the fall of the U.S.S.R., “the sublime” begins to seem an imaginary solution, if not indeed (just what we do not need now), an imaginary aggravation. In Postmodernism, Jameson confided, “I have pretended to believe that the postmodern is as unusual as it thinks it is” (P xiii); he had entertained its hope of “a thunderous unblocking” of long“contained” energies; in The Seeds of Time he announces, in a self-retrospective gesture whose confessional tone is most uncharacteristic for him, a change of mind about “the postmodern,” springing, he says, from a certain exasperation both with myself and with others, who have so frequently expressed their enthusiasm with the boundless and ungovernable richness of modern [sic: in context, read postmodern] . . . styles, which, freed from the telos of modern, are now “lawless” in any number of invigorating or enabling ways . . . In my own case it was the conception of “style” . . . that prevented me for so long from shaking off this impression of illimitable pluralism . . . (ST xiv)

He goes on to make the connection of “personal style” with “the individual centered subject” (both of which the postmodern promised to leave behind), and of “period style” with “aesthetic or stylistic totalization ” (both of which postmodernism’s proliferation of borrowed styles, disjoined from their former motivations by an alienated practice of “pastiche,” likewise affected to exorcise). But the disdain of “aesthetic or stylistic totalization,” Jameson cautions, should not extend to “political or philosophical totalization”: it is a chronic theme of his that analysis must not disown the aspiration to totalization as a Hegelian hubris, but rather must accept it as a Necessity imposed by the abjection of our historical moment. Once again, what the zealous would overhastily dismiss as an (incorrect) “desire called totalization,” Jameson affirms (suffers) in the guise of an “anxiety of totalization.” By a “totalization” Jameson means, whatever else he means, an interpretation of “totality”6—and in the passage above, those quotation marks around “lawless” are confessing that what had seemed postmodernism’s suspension of the “logic(s) of content” or “ideological closure(s)” enjoining the “inevitable failure” of all utopian hopes now looks to have been wishful thinking, a pretending-to-believe


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no longer tenable even as an “as if.” The good news, at least, is that such “logic(s)” and “closure(s)” are the conditions of possibility of a Marxist hermeneutic. Even if changing the world looks less feasible than ever, understanding it once again appears as a renewed imperative (even if, in a register lower than “the sublime,” still an “impossible” one). Hermeneutic now!—and now more than ever. Given Jameson’s association of the postmodern sublime with “space,” the new book’s titular evocation of temporality suggests that the renewed commitment to hermeneutic brings with it a renewed “consent to time” (M&F xiii), that is, to the historicizing, narrativizing, diachronic approach to “what hurts” as a system or “ideological closure” of representation(s), as distinct from his more recent spatial, synchronic probes of a “cultural logic” that, even though it is a “logic,” remains “unrepresentable.” In short, a reversion from the premises of Postmodernism back toward those of The Political Unconscious. The quotation above, with its tone approaching recantation, lends this motion an almost penitential coloration. As an emblem of this post-“sublime,” this renewed commitment to interpretation, historicizing, and a more subdued rhetoric, consider the opening chapter of The Seeds of Time, “The Antinomies of Postmodernity,” which tests the possibility (or contests the prevailing doxa) that the venerable Hegelian-Marxist problematic of the “contradiction,” which the historical process (“the dialectic”) will resistlessly “resolve,” must now (or again) be rethought as “antinomy,” a selfreinforcing, overdetermined stasis, a “stalled or arrested dialectic” (ST xiii; cf. PHL 119), whose apparent lock on the future complements its erasure of the past (except as commodified nostalgia), to produce an “end of history” in which all difference and otherness, including that of the once-utopian future itself, homogenizes into an indifferent condition of always-already-more-of-the-same. This last, and the sarcasm with which Jameson expresses it, disperses any redolence of “the sublime” still latent in the Kantian problematic of “antinomy.” Jameson takes “antinomy” seriously enough to test it against the alternative model of “contradiction” (“each is uniquely equipped to problematize the other in its most vital implication” [ST 4]), even as his irony indicts “antinomy” as a mystification, a reification of “contradiction,” and as such an ideology of the postmodern according to which where “permanent revolution” was, there shall “permanent reification” be—except that we must scratch that future tense: there (here) permanent reification now appears always already to have been, and promises (or threatens) always forever to remain. Again, not a “new” anxiety in Jameson, but evoked here in accents of “stoic” resoluteness rather than of Postmodernism’s thematicand-practice of “the sublime.” Nor is Jameson’s response here without precedent in earlier work: the premise that “ideology is not false consciousness but itself a possibility of knowledge” (ST 27) reinstates the possibility, or rather the necessity, of

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interpretation as “ideological analysis.” As various therapeutics (including Jameson’s own “homeopathy”) would have predicted, this “explicitation” of the terms of the predicament—the making of this particular (political) unconscious conscious—has helped to lower the temperature. The book’s two other chapters inflect possibilities of “the sublime” in symmetrically opposed ways. “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” in which an extended discussion of an only recently published early-Soviet text, Andrei Platonov’s “great peasant Utopia” (ST 78), Chevengur (1927–8), reprises the “anxiety of Utopia” considered in the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism—and does so in terms that might reevoke “the sublime,” for Chevengur, which narrates a peasant rebellion, is sufficiently saturated with violence as to read more like a nightmare than a “Utopia.” Again, Jameson’s tone is rather “stoic” than “sublime.” The last chapter, “The Constraints of Postmodernism,” takes up contemporary architecture, citing “texts” including manifestos as well as buildings and drawings from Venturi, Koolhaas, Eisenman and Rossi to “deconstructionists” and “neo-” or “critical”-regionalists,” as if seeking in their differences some sort of contestation of what “the postmodern” might yet mean or become. Jameson apparently wants to try whether the complacent “diversity” of the postmodern present might yet be imaginable before the fact, as if in some future retrospect, as something more vitally conflicted “in the seeds of time” than yet appears. These two latter chapters of The Seeds of Time lack the complexity and interest of the first, on “The Antinomies of Postmodernity,” but I sketch their contents to suggest the book’s diverse permutations of critical “sublimity”: the first chapter de“sublimes,” in satiric tones, material that readily lends itself to such extravagance; the second treats material already maximally “sublime” in its own right, but in a tone of weary long-suffering; the third attempts (not very successfully, to my reading eye) a “sublime”-ification of what might seem, of all possible fields of cultural production, the most thoroughly domesticated or “contained” (because the most directly subject to the will of big-money clients). More recently, “Marx’s Purloined Letter” (1995), Jameson’s lengthy response to Derrida’s Specters of Marx, may be read as yet another staging of “the sublime” and of the later Jameson’s reservations about it.7 For here, the sublimity, implicitly acknowledged by Jameson as appropriate to the historical moment of Marxism’s apparent nadir, not to say its “end,” is all Derrida’s: in the first place simply because Specters of Marx is (Jameson’s word) “thrilling . . . particularly as it is punctuated by the great shouts and cries of alarm of the opening scenes of Hamlet ” (“MPL” 75/26–7). Indeed, Derrida’s text returns repeatedly to Hamlet, as if to some bottomless source of uncanny or sublime effects, for figures of its elected rhetoricand-thematic of ghosts and apparitions (and the questionable status of their aesthetic-as/or-ontology), of “spectrality” and hauntedness (“Let us call it a haun-


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tology,” writes Derrida),8 as well as to the gravity of Marx’s charged historical legacy. But Specters of Marx also rehearses characteristically Derridean problematics or gestures, here identified by Jameson with themes he elsewhere associates with “the sublime”—in particular, the “resistance to thematization.” Earlier, the proposition that all discourse is “secretly narrative” (IT1 140) amounted to a way of saying that all discourse is “contained” in or by “ideological closure”; translating (or “transcoding”) this into Derrida-speak would read “metaphysics” for “ideology,” of course; and Derrida’s game of “Fort” and “Da” with the thetic has conducted itself into very different affective territory from Jameson’s; but Derrida’s energetic enactment of this “period” problem earns from Jameson the concession that perhaps Derrida has indeed achieved something like the “impossible” escape they both conjure from “narrative” as well as from “argument,” and all the baggage of ideology and/or metaphysics they bear (“MPL” 78–9/29–31). But as Jameson goes on to explain, such an impossible success nevertheless must suffer, as Derrida’s has suffered, a regularization into a set of motifs inevitably to be “reified and turned into ‘theories’ and thenceforth into something like oldfashioned philosophies or ‘world-views’ in their own right”—an instance of “fundamental contradictions in modernism in general,” such that any attempt at “avoiding the closure of a finished system of signs” incurs the dilemma that “if it succeeds, it fails” (“MPL” 80/32). As the hermeneut—at once analyst and sufferer—of this dilemma and of its sublimity in Derrida’s text, Jameson can, must, both conjure “the sublime” one moment and critique it the next. As critic, indeed, Jameson’s effects can even tend toward the satiric, as when he asks, apropos Derrida, “where content can be generated in an exercise otherwise so seemingly fruste and barren as one thus vigilantly policed and patrolled by the intent to avoid saying something” (“MPL” 81/33). Of course Jameson grants that “content” is generated in Derrida’s “atheticity,” and to that extent this remark is a kind of praise; more saliently, though, its mirthless humor suggests another sense in which the “success” of the Derridean “athetic” is no success at all, insofar as the proper task of critique (for Jameson) cannot be to “escape” the “closure” it critiques, but to engage it, indeed, to suffer it. But more telling than any such point (“content”) we might infer from Jameson’s humor is the humor itself: after all, the angst Jameson smiles at here, “thematization,” is, we have seen again and again, one he elsewhere regards as quite anguishing. Many of my observations in this chapter have implied a chronological development (or dénouement) from Postmodernism’s “sublime” into a reprise of hermeneutic, narrativity, “the consent to time,” etc. Jameson’s apparent disdain of “thematization”-anxiety here could be explained that way, though I suppose it has more to do with his long-standing reservations about Derrida—given

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that as recently as the 1990 Adorno book (Late Marxism), “thematization” is as “inevitable” and acute a predicament as ever. I think Jameson is simply moved by Adorno’s “sublime” dramatization of the “thematization” problem, and is put off by Derrida’s (usually) more “comic” enactments of it; his approbation of Specters of Marx explicitly treats it as an exception to this tendency in Derrida’s mid-to-late oeuvre, and implicitly commends throughout Derrida’s having recognized the occasion as meriting a renewal of the “ton apocalyptique ” (though of course Jameson is not so tactless as to call it that). But this point underlines the contrast with the essay one might think of as Jameson’s own “Specters of Marx,” the essay (the only one so far) in which he directly confronts the Soviet collapse. “Actually Existing Marxism” (1993) studiously avoids any touch of the apocalyptic or the sublime: it is arguably, indeed, the most plain-spoken (or -written) piece of Jamesonian prose extant—as if Jameson wanted, for once, to write something even a Republican could read. And not only stylistically: substantively as well, the essay ventures into the prosaic in ways unprecedented for Jameson, taking up questions of practical politics, even advocating nuts-and-bolts policy positions, in ways Jameson usually eschews (support Clinton, maintain the welfare state—ironic advice in retrospect, but he was writing before Clinton’s 1996 embrace of welfare repeal). For my purposes here, a useful way of putting the uniqueness of this essay in Jameson’s oeuvre is to say that its prose largely forswears the agitation and difficulty of Jameson’s usual style of “dialectical sentences,” the push and pull, the saying and un-saying, the leaps of allusion, the syntactical halts and jolts and jumps calculated to hold at bay the commodifying, reifying, objectifying fate looming over all textual labor. By contrast, in “Actually Existing Marxism,” Jameson writes almost as a propagandist, aiming to circulate positions and prescriptions that he wants readers to adopt and appropriate, and never mind (for once) the consequences in vulgarization or simplification. Or, indeed, “thematization”: the essay was expanded as a contribution to a 1996 book,9 and this is the version likeliest to be widely read—the 1993 version appeared in a (rather inaccessible) journal, Polygraph—but for my point here, a much more suggestive gesture is that for yet another publication, in a more partisan venue,10 Jameson actually reduced the original essay’s 16,000 words to a ten-page précis, in effect bulleting the main points, and retitling it “Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism.” The “Five Theses” digest the five sections of the original essay—but rescripting the essay’s meditations as “Theses” is itself a startling gesture from a critic so wary of “thematization,” so insistent on “dialectical prose.” I do not think it is making too much of this extreme gesture to see in it confirmation of Jameson’s swerve, post-Postmodernism, away from the thematics and


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figuration summed up in “the sublime.” Another such confirmation appears in The Cultural Turn, Jameson’s 1998 “Selected Writings on the Postmodern.” It offers itself as a compendium of Jameson’s “key writings on postmodernism,” but let the buyer be aware that it does not contain the famous “Postmodernism” essay published in New Left Review (1984) and reprinted as the opening chapter of Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Instead it opens with the earliest, much shorter, version of that essay, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”—less a “version,” indeed, than the kernel that grew, at about three-anda-half times its original length, into the “landmark” essay.11 I could write pages about the differences between these two versions of the “Postmodernism” essay, but for now, two salient points will suffice: 1) the earlier version is written in a prose much more accessible, even sedate, than that of the later version—no agitation in the texture of the prose to signal any anxiety about its adequacy to represent the topics it summons—and 2) the earlier version nowhere sounds the motif of “the [“unrepresentable”] sublime.” Presumably, the decision to reprint the earlier version was about marketing: publishers want to minimize overlap between competing products. But motivation aside, reprinting the earlier version has the effect of highlighting a littlenoticed feature of Jameson’s thinking about postmodernism since the big essay, namely that ever since its first appearance and astonishing impact, Jameson has been moderating its grandest claims, qualifying just what had excited its enthusiastic readers most. On the evidence, the enormous success of the 1984 essay was not altogether what Jameson had hoped for. Many read it as a manifesto on behalf of the “postmodern”—modernism was dead, long live postmodernism—despite Jameson’s cautions in the essay itself against any such for-or-against reading. Granted, Jameson here and elsewhere in his 1980s writing allowed himself considerable hope on the score of postmodernism, but even in the essay itself, the culminating theme of “the sublime” was inflected as much with terror as with hope. “The sublime” was “unrepresentable,” and since we can’t understand what we can’t represent, the chronic Jamesonian burden of “Marxist hermeneutic” (“we are condemned to interpret at the same time that we feel an increasing repugnance to do so” [IT1 6]) was for the nonce “relieved.” Jameson seemed, at last, to have joined the clamor (from Susan Sontag to Deleuze and Guattari) “against interpretation”; and the aesthetes of jouissance delighted to hear him talking the talk of “delirium,” “euphoria,” and “intensity.” This release involved others: like dominoes, all the direr Jamesonian themes seemed to be falling, as Hegelian “time” (History, temporality, the diachronic, narrativity) yielded to the favored pomo category of “space” (the synchronic, the visual, geographies [plural], cognitive mapping).

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And these were shifts not merely of theme, but of Jameson’s actual writing practice: dense and compact, The Political Unconscious had told a (Hegelian) story; by contrast, the vast and sprawling Postmodernism scanned, from varying altitudes, diverse cultural terrains whose roughly synchronous disjunctions were no small part of the point. These macrolevel gestures were sustained at the microlevel in the very textures of the prose as well: The Political Unconscious had elaborated the premise of revolution’s “inevitable failure” in a “stoic” and “tragic” prose that enacted the “labor and the suffering” of “the dialectic of utopia and ideology”; whereas “Postmodernism” (both essay and book) continuously evoked, in the feel and sound of the writing itself, “the relief of the postmodern generally, a thunderous unblocking of logjams and a release of new productivity that was somehow tensed up and frozen, locked like cramped muscles, at the latter end of the modern period” (P 313). Throughout Postmodernism, this promising prospect motivated not merely a thematics, but also a stylistics of “the sublime.” But “the sublime,” and everything I’ve just linked it with above, constitutes new material added between the earliest version of the essay, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” and the now-canonical “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” And it is precisely “the sublime” (etc.) that The Cultural Turn elides by reprinting the former rather than the latter. (Arguably, even the choice among the available “earlier” versions supports this point, since The Cultural Turn reprints the one that substitutes a discussion of the Westin Bonaventure for the earliest version’s pages on the proto-“sublime” theme of “the schizo.”)12 In thus reverting, as it were, to this earlier, pre-“sublime” version, and making it the starting point for a new itinerary through Jameson’s “selected writings on the postmodern,” The Cultural Turn could be read as a (self-) revisionist retrospect, a corrective alternative genealogy to the received understanding of “Jameson on postmodernism.” Whether or not Jameson intended anything like this, there’s no question that readers who rely on The Cultural Turn for their sense of Jameson’s role in the postmodern debate will derive a picture very different from that still governed by memories of the 1984 version’s initial impact. And in any case, such revisionist impulses manifested themselves in Jameson’s work even before Postmodernism came out (and indeed, in Postmodernism itself )— for example, in “Marxism and Postmodernism” (1989), which appeared as a replyto-critics in Douglas Kellner’s casebook, Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique (1989; parts of this essay were also cannibalized for the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism). And in the work that followed Postmodernism, Jameson returned to the supposedly retro interests (Hegelian, Marxist, phenomenological) that Postmodernism had seemed to downplay or eschew: Signatures of the Visible and The Geopolitical Aesthetic (both 1992) renewed hermeneutic commitments; and The Seeds of Time


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(1994), as the very title hints, conjured the phenomenological thematics of temporality. The latter book’s first and strongest chapter, the obvious program piece for the whole, is called “The Antinomies of Postmodernity,” a meditation on the contemporary (postmodern) ideology of standoff and standstill, of (Kantian) “antinomy” usurping the analytic/interpretive space where (Hegelian) “dialectic” should be. By now no one should have missed that Jameson was seeing the “postmodern condition” as much less “euphoric” and “joyous” than he had earlier seemed to do. The choice of “Selected Writings” in The Cultural Turn gives this tendency in Jameson’s work the sanction of a volume, and to that extent, The Cultural Turn is less a sequel to Postmodernism than a revision of it—or at the least, an update, a “Version 2.0.” (After all, the 1991 volume was also a “Selected Writings on the Postmodern”). Besides reprinting the two essays (“Marxism and Postmodernism” and “The Antinomies of Postmodernity”) I’ve just discussed, The Cultural Turn presents four new essays that make Jameson’s dissent from pomo-as-usual almost aggressively insistent. Two of these offer yet another of Jameson’s periodic attempts to rehabilitate the irredeemably out-of-fashion Hegel; the other two extrapolate from the problem of “finance capital” Jameson’s most jaundiced take yet on The Way We Live Now. Of the two latter essays, the first, “Culture and Finance Capital,” takes up Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century with an eye to the question whether “finance capital” is the distinctive or constitutive feature of late capitalism; the second, “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism, and Land Speculation” treats aesthetic issues: the paradoxes of the artwork’s “symbolic act” (is it “act” at all, or “symbol” merely?—a question for the centrality of which, recall the subtitle of The Political Unconscious : “Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act”). This problematic prompts the related question of what constitutes, and what is the use of, a critical account of cultural forms. The discussion here interestingly enlarges Jameson’s previous accounts of Manfredo Tafuri, the Marxist architectural historian who for Jameson, has, as we have seen, long instantiated the very problems of “dialectical writing” that Jameson’s own writing chronically raises for itself: how to own the “inevitable failure” of the revolutionary past without making a fatal defeatism the foregone conclusion of its future? But interesting as these issues are, I want to give the space remaining to the two Hegelianizing essays here, “‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History’?” and “Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity.” The first of these urges what can only be called a Hegelian full-court press: Jameson has been rereading the Phenomenology, the Aesthetics, and the Philosophy of History, and this return to Hegel quite contravenes the anti- or un-Hegelian carriage of Postmodernism. Indeed, this essay’s Hegelianizing makes that of The Political Unconscious seem mild; some of

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the more high-rolling passages leap from one continent of thought to a whole other galaxy, in a single bound and several times per paragraph, in ways actually reminiscent of Hegel himself. (When Jameson adverts to “Hegel’s immense dictée—the compulsive graphomanic lifelong transcription of what some daimon of the absolute muttered to him day-in day-out at the very limits of syntax and language itself ” [CT 77], it is hard not to see his own oeuvre, however momentarily, in similar terms.) In this distinctly Hegelian spirit, both essays pursue distinctly Hegelian themes. One array of these is gathered under the rubric of the “end of ” problem, as instanced in “the sublime” and its relation to “the postmodern” (in which “end of ” motifs proliferate, including Derrida’s meta-twist, the end of “the end of ”). The other principle thematic is that of “theory” itself, whose “end,” in another sign of our accelerating times, we increasingly hear announced. There is considerable overlap between the two essays, because the “transformations in the image” (that is, in the visual) tracked in the former prove an instance of the transformations (that is, in part, endings) explored in the latter. For Jameson, the increasing hegemony of “the visual” attests a contemporary “return of the aesthetic”; and to the extent that the latter is a reaction against the selftranscending “anti-aesthetic” of modernism, postmodernism appears as a reversion from “the sublime” back to “the beautiful”—equivalent for Jameson with the merely “culinary” or “decorative” kind of art that Hegel’s prophecy of the triumph of philosophy, and modernism’s “anti-aesthetic” of shock and ugliness, both aimed, in what Jameson projects as their different but related ways, to “end.” Jameson sketches “self-transcendence” as one of the keys to the dialectic of “the sublime,” from Kant’s “sublime,” which transcends “the beautiful,” and Hegel’s “end of art” (in which sensuous figuration [the aesthetic] is sublated in the trans-sensuousness of the Absolute [philosophy]) through modernism to our own day. And here it becomes clear that if Jameson has downplayed sublimity in these recent writings, it is not to discount “the sublime” itself, but rather to deny its continuing potencies to “the postmodern.” This move directly reverses that of the 1984 essay, in which the thwarted energies of a “cramped” and “frozen” modernism were relieved in the “thunderous unblocking” of a postmodern sublime. That was then, this is now: in these two new essays, it is the “anti-aesthetic” of modernism that authentically mobilizes “the sublime”; postmodernism, by contrast, works merely reactively to secure the commodification of all sensuous experience to the “pleasure” of the merely “culinary” or “consumable” (in the “Transformations” essay, to the visual, to the “image” in Guy Debord’s sense, “the final form of commodity reification”):


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The image is the commodity today, and that is why it is vain to expect a negation of the logic of commodity production from it, that is why, finally, all beauty today is meretricious and the appeal to it by contemporary pseudo-aestheticism is an ideological maneuver and not a creative resource (CT 135).

Compare this dour pronouncement with the brighter prospects on “the visual” in Signatures of the Visible, which attest that Jameson himself had once entertained some such hope of “a negation of the logic of commodity production from [the image].” All these moves revisit, and revise, Jameson’s perennially in-process triad of realism/modernism/postmodernism; and in the present discussion, “theory” itself is drastically dichotomized: there is a “heroic” (that is, still-modernist) founding cohort—“from Lévi-Strauss to Lacan, from Deleuze and Barthes to Derrida and Baudrillard” (CT 85)—followed by more recent (unnamed) epigones whose premature and depoliticized celebrations of utopian jouissance, as in some “theory” avatar of “infantile leftism,” effectively domesticated jouissance itself (along with such other once-subversive themes as deconstruction, negation, dedifferentiation, and so on). Thus do our utopian and revolutionary inventions reify, in our very hands, into clichés : consumables, commodities, staples, fixed relay points in a routinized stimulus-response circuit of a variously libidinal and cerebral, but in any case depoliticized, “desire.” (Jameson has attempted to prevent, to repoliticize, this temptation of theory before, in “Pleasure: A Political Issue” [1983].) Onto this binary of “modern” versus “postmodern” varieties of theory, Jameson projects that of “the [critical, self-transcending or -negating, anti-aesthetic] sublime” versus the “domestic,” “culinary,” neo- or pseudo-aestheticizing of “the beautiful.” But for the Hegelian Jameson, no “end of ” thematic can evade the question of its own aftermath, and thereby the question, and the necessity, of continuations—of “the sublime,” of “the modern,” of “theory” in the heroic mode—in however altered a form. In thus “preserving” what (some) theory too hastily (and complacently) “cancels,” Jameson, as usual, opposes the foreclosures of such contemporary ideological inflections as Fukuyama’s “end of history,” whose “end of ” refrain Jameson startlingly, and cogently, compares to Turner’s closing of the frontier thesis a century ago. Here the point above—that Jameson aims not to discount “the sublime,” but to align its force rather with “the modern” against postmodernism—unveils its utopian potential: Whether the Sublime, and its successor Theory, have that capacity hinted at by Kant, to . . . crack open the commodification implicit in the Beautiful, is a question we have not even begun to explore; but it is a question and a problem which is, I hope, a little different from the

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alternative we have thought we were faced with until now: whether, if you prefer modernism, it is possible to go back to the modern as such, after its dissolution into full postmodernity. And the new question is also a question about theory itself, and whether it can persist and flourish without simply turning back into an older technical philosophy whose limits and obsolescence were already visible in the nineteenth century (CT 87).

We can take this passage as clarifying the oft-mistaken aims of the “Postmodernism” essay, and in particular the conflicted motivations of its appeal to “the sublime”: as figure not of an achieved utopian jouissance, but as condition and cathexis of the ambition to “crack open the commodification implicit in the beautiful.” But the view from here is prospective as well as retrospective: having lamented the closure of the postmodern, thus to contrive a fresh opening, to pose a fresh set of questions, to propose a fresh (daunting: impossible?) project for any “theory” aspiring to be worthy of the name to succeed or fail at. The sheer liberty of this move exemplifies another feature of recent Jameson that we must not overlook. This chapter has been stressing the many ways in which Jameson post-Postmodernism has reverted to the Hegelian, diachronic, hermeneutic themes and programs from which the allure of “the postmodern” had for a decade seemed to distract him. But my previous chapter’s configuration of “failure and the sublime” attested in Postmodernism a “thunderous unblocking” of which Jameson’s recent work, even as it repudiates infantileleftist versions of this motif, contrives to remain the beneficiary: amid the renewal of hermeneutic and of temporality, and the return to Hegel, one motif that has not revived is the most debilitating one of all, and the one from which “the sublime” in particular, I argued, enabled an escape, namely the inexorable “winner loses logic” of “inevitable failure” that Jameson in The Political Unconscious posited as the necessary condition, the specific “vision” incumbent upon “dialectical historiography” as such. “Inevitable failure” began as Jameson’s prophylactic against premature utopianisms, against the temptation of mis-taking critical success as “imaginary solution” to the real contradictions of the intractable social given. The failure imperative was a chastening reminder of the limits of critique, that (in the terms of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach) critique’s power to assist understanding of the world must not be made a false consolation for critique’s impotence to change it. In Postmodernism, “the sublime,” dialectically, both culminated and “relieved” the impasse of this increasingly “antinomic” dilemma. In these recent writings, “the sublime” again, and more overtly, performs the critique of infantile leftism, but this time without reinscribing the failure imperative itself. The consequent “textual effect” is of a discussion able to proceed with evident


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confidence in the programs it proposes for itself, the ambitions it entertains, the desires it hopes to realize, operating in the process a renewal of the genuine utopian potential of “the sublime” and of sundry other critical projects or “desires”—including not least that generic hybrid, or hubristic genre, where critique aspires to sublimity, in “theory” itself. This latest enactment of the question of the success and failure of theory licenses our return, by way of concluding, to this study’s title, and its question: the success and failure of Fredric Jameson. As I advised in my introduction, the terms in which this question is usually posed interest me very little. The smallest of Jameson’s detractors—the ones, say, who establish a “bad writing” contest for the express purpose of annually awarding him the first prize—need not detain us, of course. Of those who actually engage with his work, the usual strategy of complaint is to take some passage or crux from Jameson and take exception to the details; the usual recourse of panegyric, on the other hand, is to posit as axiomatic at the outset the “rigor” of Jameson’s “system” and proceed from there. Both styles of response assume that expository and argumentative cogency, a syllogistic logic of antecedent and consequence, and due regard for the law of non-contradiction must be the sine qua nons of any judgment for or against the value of Jameson’s work. Well, Jameson’s critics can reasonably complain that his (Hegelian) synthesizing threatens to homogenize the antitheses he brings together—the best-known example is doubtless the Hegel/Althusser accommodation for which Jameson got so little thanks in chapter 1 of The Political Unconscious—and there is always value in putting asunder what Jameson has joined, to see at what costs in omission and contradiction his syntheses are assembled. Jameson’s startling and ambitious juxtapositions leave hanging all sorts of questions that are well worth working out in detail; it is only unseemly when the critic proceeds as if triumphantly exposing Jameson’s failures; for the critic, after all, would not have had the occasion without Jameson having set so challenging (and so unfinished) an agenda. As for the disciples, words like “rigor” and “system” strike me as just the sort of analytic shibboleths it is Jameson’s particular genius, his peculiar “dialectical” success, to elude. I say elude, not (entirely) repudiate, much as Jameson cautions that we should not let Adorno’s programmatic contempt for “system” blind us to the vestigially systematic in his thought (LM 247). I want here to make the inverse point about Jameson: “system” is part of the generic “sedimentation” of his project and must be acknowledged as such, but we should not allow the presupposition of “system” to render invisible the large-minded freedom (if I may use the word) of Jameson’s work. To revise Blake, Jameson resists system in order not to be slave to anyone else’s system or to system as such; even as, to adduce Stevens, it is in the nature of his project that it must resist system “almost successfully.” The result stands as a

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counterexample, and an implicit critique, of an academic “rigor” that is too often rigid, and a fetishization of “system” too often proceeding from premises whose Durcharbeit and eventual conclusions are drearily predictable as soon as the premises themselves are announced. Whatever the vices of Jameson’s work, rigidity and predictability are not among them. No, Jameson’s “dialectical writing” aims at wholly other kinds of success, and risks wholly other kinds of failure. His long, poised, patiently exfoliating but wildly allusive and grand(iose)ly far- (and sometimes over-) reaching “dialectical sentences” display a mighty strength, a verbal, syntactic, and intellectual resourcefulness amid the stops and starts and startlements of what Jameson hopes to project and enact as nothing less than the dialectic itself. Hence contradiction, that engine of the dialectic, is not only Jameson’s focus and target, but also, necessarily, his method and his effect. Insist on the law of non-contradiction, and you will have difficulties, the wrong kind of difficulties, reading Jameson. To read Jameson is to be parsing his contradictions constantly; there is no theorist writing for whose readers the “hermeneutic of suspicion” is more imperative. The catch is that the suspicion must be sympathetic; the vigilance Jameson’s prose exacts is such as to require his reader to be his collaborator. Such a program has been a convention, even a cliché, of theory writing for a generation now, but evidently more honored in the breach than the observance, given that discussion of Jameson still tends to turn on terms like “rigor” and “system.” Jameson is better taken, first and last, as a kind of poet in Aristotle’s sense, which discounts verbal form (versifying) in favor of “the quick perception of obscure relations.” That formula seems to me apt for the contriver of a scriptible sufficiently supple and versatile to evoke the vast and conflicted mess of our contemporary or postmodern condition, to engineer confrontations and juxtapositions of what had seemed incommensurable domains of problem and feeling, to rotate their constituent elements constantly into new permutations, to spin between them filaments of insight, imagery and allusion informed by the most ambitious intellectual currents—social, political, cultural, aesthetic, economic—of our time. To those whose “antinomic” logics insist that this is to aestheticize Jameson, or to expose him, will I or nill I, as having been “only” aesthetic all along, no reply will pry them loose from their victorious “point.” For the more dialectically minded, my treatment throughout this book should already have sufficiently evoked Jameson’s subtler sense of the aesthetic as among the “ideological closures” inevitable for critique and/or theory, one of its limits, or determinants, one of the ideological crosses it must bear: not an apolitical escape from real-world anxieties, but itself an inescapable anxiety for critique insofar as critique is fatedly condemned to written-ness—to being, whatever else it may be, “a kind of writing.” To speak, in that sense, of the “aesthetic” of Jameson’s “kind of writing” is not to reduce it


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thereby to nothing but “a kind of writing.” Richard Rorty, who gave us the formula of “philosophy [or any other discourse claiming “truth”-value] as a kind of writing” advises that we should read such texts not as “philosophers” but as “literary critics”; and Jameson would seem the perfect example of such a reader, his work the perfect example of texts to be so read—though Jameson would doubtless dislike the atmospherics of Rorty’s formulation, his evident will to deflate critical activity as such. Rorty indeed has recently joked about “the Walter Mitty-like role” puffed up culture-critics assign themselves in “the immanent teleology of world history”13— though I wonder if the identificatory pleasures of Rorty’s cutting a Jameson down to Walter-Mitty size don’t themselves display elements of the Walter Mitty-esque. (Then again, Rorty does not name Jameson; he may have in mind the same infantile leftists of theory that Jameson disdains.) Jameson’s chronic harping on failure itself intends a prophylaxis against just such grandiosity as Rorty mocks; it is one of his chronic themes that “the immanent teleology of world history” (to call it that) is something none of us can escape (“its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them” [PU 102]). The success and failure of Fredric Jameson must, in other words, be assessed in relation to the relevant ambitions, political success and failure included: I confess to some disquiet about what seems to me an obstinate “political” defect in the very program of the scriptible, the (ideally) non-thematizable, as reducing reading to the sheer sentence-by-sentence experience of it, ideally leaving the reader nothing portable for (“revolutionary”) use (we have seen Jameson chiding Derrida in these terms [“MPL” 81/33]). More pertinently, I suppose, the “resistance to thematization” should be read as a response to the “guilt of art [and critique]” motif that (we saw in chapter 2) so agitated Jameson’s early transactions with Barthes: the question whether “white [or any other “kind of ] writing” can exculpate itself from the nightmare of history—and the further question, whether it should (that is, whether success in thus absolving itself wouldn’t be the most abjectly ideological sort of failure after all). Here, some might wish to implicate the Jamesonian scriptible in that “rhetoric of innocence” recently elaborated by Franco Moretti. It is a problem, in any case, that Jameson acknowledges frequently, if sometimes quite obliquely. When, for example, he identifies Lukács as “the greatest Marxist philosopher of modern times” (PU 13; my emphasis), I take him to be reserving the category writer for other figures like Adorno (and himself )—a gesture that exempts Lukács’s achievement from the problematics the scriptible is meant to engage and perform. On a rather different plane, when Terry Eagleton writes If “literary criticism” is to be one day justified at the judgment seat of history—if we will be able to claim that it played a bit part in the averting of fascism or nuclear holocaust—Jameson may have the

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oppressive pleasure of knowing that his is one of the few names we will stammeringly evoke (Against the Grain 66)

—I am afraid the just-banished shade of Walter Mitty suddenly looms again. Better known, in any case, is Eagleton’s brittler query about The Political Unconscious: “how is a Marxist-structuralist analysis of a minor novel of Balzac to help shake the foundations of capitalism?” (Against the Grain 64)—a (rhetorical) question from an essay chiding “The Idealism of American Criticism.” But Eagleton’s sarcasm, no less than Rorty’s, pales beside Marx’s sober adviso that consciousness is determined by, it does not determine, material conditions. Whatever the eventual decree of “the judgment seat of history,” the success of Jameson’s work, measured in the most “material” terms of professional eminence, is for our generation beyond question. The irony is the readiness even of some of Jameson’s most respectful readers to speak as if his success were despite, rather than because of, his prose style. I have tried in this study not to flinch from the vexations of reading Jameson—indeed, I have foregrounded them; some may even think I have exaggerated. Jameson’s subject matter alone guarantees a high level of difficulty, and the synergies between his smallest verbal tics and his largest intellectual and critical ambitions work to augment rather than mitigate the difficulty. His wariness of “thematization” and “premature clarification,” his imperative of “dialectical writing,” make for multifold challenges as much to to a reader’s patience as to her “literary competence.” But granting every exasperation of Jameson’s prose—the obscurity, the inconsistency, the inconclusiveness, the occasional evasiveness, the unfinished, unfinishable quality, the “as if-ness”—still, I maintain that any reading of Jameson that fails to reckon with these as part and parcel of Jameson’s “writerly” ambitions, that fails to grasp that these putative deficits are the very condition (necessary, though not sufficient) of Jameson’s whole project, is missing something vital. I have tried in this study to show how the ways Jameson’s writing is written affects what he is ostensibly saying; I have tried to show how his writing and his thinking work, to show how and why his themes interact as they do—why, for example, “the sublime” waxes or wanes in inverse proportion to “hermeneutic”—as well as to demonstrate that such interactions are fully as much a matter of writing practice as of thetic or thematic investment. If nothing else, I hope I have helped the reader to discover kinds of interest and surprise, to describe and account for kinds of power, in Jameson’s writing that preceding discussion of him has missed. I do not hold that these terms suffice to account for all of Jameson’s variously successful efforts, but I do insist that all of his successes are inextricable from, even conditional upon, the resourcefulness and versatility of his writing. The not


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uncommon view that Jameson’s work is important despite the turgid writing seems to me a failed reading altogether, and of a peculiarly ironic sort. Jameson himself insists that “dialectical” writing itself must be the measure and the authentication of any project of critique, and to miss that—not as a talking point but as the very quick and shudder of the experience of reading Jameson—is to miss very nearly all. It is on grounds of such interest preeminently that I reckon Jameson’s success, and on such grounds that I recommend him—as reading matter —to an admittedly limited subculture of readers. It is customary these days to deplore criticism’s vainglorious usurpation of the privileges properly attaching to “literature,” but, our well-advertised “information glut” notwithstanding, just what “literature” is there, these days, for people like us to read? To say that the two most interesting things going on in “postmodern” America have been academic “theory” and Washington politicking may sound like satire or dyspepsia, but, all laments about “minority culture” or “elitism” granted, for me it is a simple statement of fact that “the way we live now”—or at least the way some of us read and (try to) write now—becomes actually exciting almost nowhere else than in the writing of a very few highrolling superstar professors. A few writers of other kinds—for me, poets and some first-person journalists—make it interesting in other ways, but actually exciting only via a kind of restraint: that more exhilarating, not to say “sublime,” effect of large powers dilating to the largest scope they can encompass belongs almost entirely to figures like Jameson and Derrida, who enact it far more impressively than any contemporary poet, novelist, painter, sculptor, filmmaker or musician I can think of. It is as if the increasingly tyrannizing hegemony of commodification dictates a programmatic modesty in any individual cultural productions obsequiously offering themselves for purchase. The word “energy,” with eye-catching exclamation marks, adorns every barcode-accommodating package, but smallness of ambition is the obligatory decorum, not least in products (gangsta rap) avowedly anti-”decorum” as such. Except in “theory” among a very few other places. Not that anyone wants an exclusive diet of Jameson or Derrida; one is grateful for the many fine novelists, poets, memoirists, travel-writers, and journalists, at work today (as well, of course, as for Rorty, Eagleton, and many others). But for a few centuries now our culture has produced a minority audience that hungers to see the challenges of its own time written about in relevantly challenging ways. The greats of the past are still great, but they are not our greats. Nor is there any question of Derrida being “as great” as Joyce, or Goethe or whomever; it is rather that the sort of intellectually ambitious reader who sought out Joyce or Goethe in their day is the sort of reader who today will find the challenges of Derrida or Jameson more demanding, the difficulties more difficult in pertinently “contemporary” ways, the rewards proportionally more

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complicatedly satisfying, than those of Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, or—who you will. (Saul Bellow?) I allow myself that indulgent paragraph to evoke something of what I take to be the Lebenswelt within and against which Jameson writes, and within and against which “people like us” read. The “sublime” (unless you think Hollywood special-effects “sublime”), the grand work of large ambition, is to be found almost nowhere else today than in the productions of what for a generation now we have been calling “theory.” In a passage quoted above, Jameson asks whether the sublime may yet “crack” the commodification of the beautiful, and develops from this the further question whether “theory” can persist and flourish. To anyone open to the force of such questions, it will seem evident that, just as only a Jameson can have had the largeness of mind to think of them, and the standing to pose them, so it can only be to a Jameson that we must look for something like an answer. Not an “answer” that will finish the question, to be sure, but rather a continuing, elaborating response that will compel such questions into further questions ever larger, more far-reaching, as-yet unthought of—questions as “inevitable” once he has asked them as they will be “impossible,” for him or for anyone, to answer. Let that stand as a concluding evocation of the success and failure of Fredric Jameson.

CODA

Beyond Success and Failure

Brecht and Method

Jameson is so prolific that bringing this book to an end has been problematic: my flourishes of finality (look no further than the preceding page) have been continuously overtaken as his production has outstripped mine. Jameson shows no sign of slowing down, so I could apparently add to this manuscript well into any foreseeable future, vainly playing catch-up as in some Dario Fo version of Zeno’s paradox in which Achilles rather than the tortoise gets the headstart. The publication of Brecht and Method, however, has provided an agreeably motivated stopping place—and explaining why will make a useful pretext for a concluding review. As we have noted, throughout Jameson’s large and “curiously unimpassioned” corpus (Terry Eagleton’s words [Against the Grain 74]) there are seams of warmer feeling, when Jameson touches on figures he particularly admires—Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes, Gissing, to name a few. He has often enough indulged this impulse at book-length; hence there’s a special category or genre of work within his oeuvre, which, without losing critical measure, nevertheless functions as celebration of, and hommage to, writers who are especially important for him. His first book, Sartre, is an example; Marxism and Form likewise celebrates the canonical figures of Western Marxism (and enrolls Sartre among their company). A cooler, 149

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but still unmistakably appreciative, survey occupies The Prison-House of Language (the pages on Barthes and Lacan are especially warm); Late Marxism renews and expands the Adorno chapter of Marxism and Form. The most conflicted, and to that extent the most interesting case is the book on Wyndham Lewis, in which Jameson advocates for a literary achievement committed to a politics he abhors. Brecht and Method belongs in this special category of Jameson’s “appreciations” or homages. And yet this new book also belongs in a category of its own— so much so that I am tempted to declare it the most unusual work within Jameson’s corpus. For in it the success/failure dialectic that has been this book’s focus is, for once, “relieved.” To rehearse the theme one last time, Jameson’s writing, for all its difficulty and despite its sometimes dispassionate-seeming hauteur, has always been very dramatic, agitating a continuous anxiety about critique’s, or revolutions’s, or socialism’s ambitions and possibilities, their possible success or failure. And his “dialectical sentences” are calculated to dramatize or enact these mutually inciting anxieties as a chronic self-consciousness about his own project’s success or failure. His topic, whether a problem or a figure, has invariably been a vehicle and a model of our (yours, my, Jameson’s, everyone’s) entrapment in the prison-house of “ideological closure,” and of our efforts to break out. Throughout his career, Jameson stipulates this “mimetic” or performative ambition for “dialectical writing” as such, under whatever names (theory, critique, scriptible, “dialectical historiography,” and the like). In his homages, the celebrated figure (Adorno, Lewis) appears in heroic colors (in Jameson, as elsewhere in “the modern,” motley can be the heroic’s most salient marker), and the “linguistic optimism” that always attaches to such figures (even Lewis) is held in tension with the “stoic” and “tragic” accents Jameson has praised in the prose of Lacan (IT1 98, 112). (Jameson’s “sublime” mode tends not to attach to these works of homage, except perhaps to Adorno, in Late Marxism.) Hence the novelty of Brecht and Method. Jameson’s “stoic” or “tragic” (sc. “sublime”) rhetoric might seem tailor-made for Brecht, politically partisan avantgardist, cathexis-object for Cold War passions, refugee in America from Hitler during the war, state-sponsored dramaturge to the Stalinist GDR after it—this last, I expected, an especially potent theme, for few critics are as alive as Jameson to the ironies of “success” in the fields of cultural production. So you might assume that Jameson’s Brecht was foreordained to a certain angst-charged treatment. But Jameson surprises us again, with a book almost—what to call it? tranquil? serene? (the mot juste will not come)—in its assurance of and pleasure in Brecht’s interest and relevance, his “usefulness,” Jameson avers, for us, whether we ever realize it or not. The book’s ease and brevity—a mere 180 pages in 20 bite-sized chapters—presents the reader with (by Jamesonian standards) an unwontedly low-

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pressure reading experience. As for tone, Jameson’s usual accents of the “stoic” and “tragic” are gone—so much so as to tempt recourse to the word “comic,” if we stipulate that comedy need not mean laughs. Brecht at least has laughs (Jameson, no), but if “comedy” seems an anomoly in this connection, that only attests the extent to which Brecht’s art manages to circumvent, or dialectically outleap, the stale binary of comedy/tragedy. (For a suggestive re-dialecticization of it, see Jameson’s 1987 reconsideration of Hayden White’s Metahistory [“Greimas” xvii–xxii].) And as if in some bodily sympathy with or methexis in the Brechtian gestus or “method,” Jameson’s own prose here seems for once to have left behind his chronic preoccupation with the danger of critique’s unavoidable stylistic or textual effects vehiculating themselves as Weltanschauungen or ideologies (here the stale binary is “optimism/pessimism”). Which is to say, he here leaves behind the predicaments that throughout his work so far have, both programmatically and practically, entailed upon “dialectical critique” and “dialectical writing” the dialectic of success and failure that has given his oeuvre so much of its urgency and so much of its interest as writing. This is why Brecht and Method seems to me a book unlike any of Jameson’s other writing. For once, anxieties inevitable elsewhere in Jameson are gone. They are apparently not, at least in connection with Brecht, “useful”—and “usefulness” is a motif sounded from Brecht and Method ’s opening sentence: Brecht would have been delighted, I like to think, at an argument not for his greatness, or his canonicity, nor even for some new and unexpected value of his posterity (let alone for his “postmodernity”), as rather for his usefulness —and that not only for some uncertain or merely possible future, but right now, in a post-Cold-War marketrhetorical situation even more anti-communist than the good old days (B&M 1).

Useful, Jameson explains, in the way that Brecht judged drama, or learning things, or Stalin (!) useful: useful as provocation to new thought, as substance of new experience, useful above all as (that eminently useful thing) pleasure. Brecht’s assumption that useful things will normally afford some not negligible quantum of pleasure helps motivate the (by Jamesonian standards) uncomplicated pleasures of this unique Jamesonian text. Hitherto, as we have seen, Jameson has been chronically wary of pleasure, or at least of the ideological uses to which it is put, especially in the discourses of theory. Plaisir, jouissance, dérive, intensité : such watchwords of blissful consummation usually figure, in Jameson’s quotation marks, as symptoms of a premature and unearned utopianism, a sort of “infantile leftism” of theory generally, and of “The Ideology of the Text” (see the mid-1970s essay of that title) in particular. In

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“Pleasure: A Political Issue” (1983) Jameson worked to redeem Barthesian plaisir and jouissance from the naiveté of Barthes’s more libidinous disciples, by infusing it with the angst, terror and dread of “the sublime” (shortly to become a key theme of the crucial 1984 “Postmodernism” essay). In Brecht and Method, “the sublime” itself is reconfigured as encompassing, not oppositional to, the ridiculous; Brecht’s power to conflate the revolutionary apprehension of history with farce becomes a kind of sublimity (an effect not, however, unique to Brecht: think of Joyce’s “Ithaca,” Pound’s Hell cantos, Eliot’s “Mrs. Porter and her daughter / Washing their feet in soda water”). Elsewhere in Jameson, the effect of such a conflation of binaries would be to augment the angst of both; here the gesture affirms an aplomb as much Jameson’s own as Brecht’s. As usual, Jameson’s own corpus provides a theorization of this new Jamesonian textual effect. The 1977 essay, “Islands and Trenches,” opened a space for the “neutralizations” of antinomic ideological closures (stale binaries), to enable “the production of utopian discourse.” I am shy of calling Brecht and Method a “utopian discourse,” nor does Jameson call Brecht’s work in any simple way utopian, but “neutralization” will do as a characterization of the book’s unprogrammatic program. Or I should rather say, its “method”—in senses the book develops from its very title on. A long if shaggy tradition (from, say, Pascal and Swift, to, say, Gadamer and Sandra Harding) has indicted the ideology of “[scientific] method” as a content-neutral procedural program, the content-neutrality offered as the guarantee of unbiassed, objective “truth” in the method’s results. (Positivism, as someone joked, is a game whose first rule forbids you to know what you’re talking about.) Marxism’s claim to be a “science” has always bidden defiance to this supposedly non-partisan premise (though too rarely in a way to assimilate hermeneutics, as Jameson urges it should in Marxism and Form). Jameson recalls Lukács’s effort, in “What is Orthodox Marxism?,” to deploy the notion of Marxism as a distinctive method of open-ended inquiry against the threat, under Stalin, of its rigidification into dogmatism. In Jameson, as in his models, “method” (however named) must be autocritical, must question its own presuppositions, and distrust its results even as it elaborates them: it must anticipate and resist their reification and attempt, however impossibly, their dereification in advance. Operatively, this effort should enact that “unity of theory and praxis” that can figure for us here as one of Marxism’s longest-standing “neutralizations” of a sterile binary. And the locus for all this, not merely the model but the substance of Brecht’s “method,” is of course his practice as playwright, dramaturge, activist and impresario. Jameson understandably resists putting any of this in terms of a Brechtian “aesthetic”; his suggestion is that drama, since it is performance- rather


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than text-based, is generically more resistant than other artforms to the reifications and (some of the) other liabilities of the aesthetic that the term has come to connote in the usages of recent theory. All of this matters because orthodoxy and dogma are terms so often mobilized against Brecht’s “didactic” achievement. Jameson cites the Horatian ut doceat, and remembers that Brecht’s urge to teach has long disqualified him from validation as “modernist,” to the extent that modernism proscribed didacticism (compare dismissals of Pound on similar grounds), or indeed, discursiveness itself (Eliot’s denigration of “meaning” as a lure, like the meat the burglar brings for the watchdog; cognate suspicions of any meaning or sense legible by the codes of a received semiotic still inspire, and encumber, the higher-brow cultural productions of postmodern “theory”). We have already seen Jameson, in the sentence quoted above, warding off any conjuration of a “postmodern” Brecht; likewise the question of Brecht’s modernism barely ripples the surface of the text. (Modern/ postmodern: another binary neutralized.) Rather, Jameson dissolves the complaint of Brechtian “doctrine” itself, daring any complainant to specify, on any issue, a particular Brechtian “dogma,” let alone a system of doctrine or a doctrinal cast of mind more generally. (Brecht’s very detractors make this point negatively when they dismiss Brecht as a failed dogmatist, his “doctrine” falling short of systematic consistency, and lapsing into mere plumpes Denken.) Rather, Jameson insists, Brecht’s “method, and even his dialectic” (B&M 25) is an un- and anti-systematic, un- and anti-doctrinal “pragmatism” among whose choice gambits is to turn a problem into its solution, thereby coming at the matter askew and sending the projectile off into a new and more productive direction than the dead end in which it was immobilized (B&M 24)

—a “method,” please note, inverting Jameson’s own usual method, which, we have seen, is to problematize what had hitherto passed for at least working solutions. Not that Brecht does not problematize—the point of the famous (too-famous) “Veffect” (from the German Verfremdungseffekt : Jameson explains that the usual translation, “alienation effect,” misleadingly assimilates Brecht’s term to Marx’s Entfremdung). Jameson translates Verfremdung, with an eye on Shklovsky’s ostranenia, as “estrangement,” and stimulatingly operates, in the words of one of the book’s chapter titles, some “Estrangements of the Estrangement-Effect.” The point here is that “estrangement” provides another “neutralization” of Brecht’s alleged dogmatism problem, for if the ruse of dogma is to inscribe itself into the subjectivity of the addressee, the V-effect tends the opposite way. Brechtian “estrangement,” we might say, operates not merely as “interpellation” ’s conceptual opposite, but also its specific antidote in practice.

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So “doctrine,” too, is “neutralized,” and therewith the liability of “ideology” Brecht might be charged with. We evoked above Jameson’s “neutralization” of the Weltanshauung impasse (continuous with, or a version of, that of ideology); Jameson here prefers to speak of Haltung and gestus, and he posits early in the book a Brechtian sinité, a “Chineseness” of bearing or “persona” (Jameson here declares a heavy debt to Anthony Tatlow), “paradigmatic of the expansion of Brecht’s work into that ultimate frame of the metaphysic or the worldview”: Hermeneutics of belief, hermeneutics of suspicion: the option is suspended when the Tao itself opens up around a secular and cynical Western writer like Brecht, who cannot be assumed to believe in this immemorial “world-view” . . . but takes it as what Lacan would call a “tenant-lieu,” a place-keeper for the metaphysics that have become impossible. Thus, not a “philosophy” of Marxism exactly (for such a philosophy would immediately fall back into the category of degraded world-views . . . ), but rather what such a philosophy might turn out to be in a utopian future . . . Yet Brecht’s theatricality saves his sinité even from this provisionality (B&M 12).

Above I tried “tranquil,” “serene,” even “comic” as possible characterizations of this book’s unique Jamesonian effect or affect: perhaps I can now propose “Chinese” as the (admittedly recherché ) mot juste that eluded me before for what Jameson, with a finely calculated diffuseness, variously evokes as “the Brechtian”: an “ ‘idea of Brecht’” a “general lesson or spirit” not identifiable or simply coextensive with the Brechtian written corpus itself. Its usefulness, Jameson urges, is nothing less than that of “offering Marxism its own uniquely non-Western—or, at least, nonbourgeois—philosophy in the form of a kind of Marxian Tao . . .” (B&M 30) The projection of “our” tradition’s ideological binaries onto Chineseness at once neutralizes and estranges the charge intrinsic to them in a Western habitus of psychology, thus enabling their function as if (in the Althusserian formula) “without a subject.” That Brecht’s Chineseness is an elected rather than a native affinity promotes rather than vitiates this effect—an instance, you might say, of “problem” made over into “solution.” We hear less and less nowadays of the “without a subject” problem or project, as if this utopian aspiration of a generation ago has been tacitly dropped as unworkable. Jameson’s implication is that Brecht met this predicament long before theory did, and negotiated it better, and in still “useful” ways (on which, more later). I have just indicated how Jameson projects all this under the rubric of “doctrine”: “Doctrine” is the first of the three headings under which the book’s twenty brief chapters are gathered. The second is “Gestus,” a term which has long encoded for Jameson that Barthesian “writing with the body,” that penumbra of textual ef-


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fect or affect exceeding the mere words on the page (again, the opening sentence of Sartre) that has been Jameson’s quiet, career-long (and mostly unnoticed) heresy, in our age of the linguistic turn, against the orthodoxy of nothing-outside-thetext. Brecht’s working methods—workshop, collaborative, the whole process from composition through final performance best envisioned as continuous rehearsal (perpetual revolution by other means)—his gestus as writer and dramaturge, in short, similarly sublates Brecht’s own subjectivity into the work. The book’s third section, headed “Proverbs,” implicates similar motivations and/or effects in Brecht’s penchant for (reinvention of ) folk- and peasant-forms, in which something like a collective voice submerges the individuality of a particular speaker— an effect as salient in Brecht’s poems (since Romanticism, the normatively most “subjective” of genres) as in his playwrighting—and, Jameson’s closing “Epilogue” suggests, as characteristic of Brecht’s embrace of the modern as of his penchant for settings suggestive of “Chinese” remoteness (Asiatic despotism). Jameson’s almost nostalgic evocations here of Brecht’s sense of the modern (the human scale and heroic mystique of Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St Louis”), sheerly as writing, make an interesting contrast with similar passages in Fables of Aggression : Jameson’s prose here evokes not only the Brechtian impersonality, but also something of the nostalgia for personality itself of Brecht’s greatest Anglophone emulator of the 1930s, W. H. Auden, in contrast with the Lewis-like energy and Luciferianism inflecting Fables of Aggression. The “Epilogue” to Brecht and Method is a prime example of Jameson’s power as a writer to offer hommage in the evocation less of a verbal style (Brecht’s, Lewis’s) than of a whole authorial (or even period, trans-authorial) body language or scriptible. The scriptible, with its Barthesian provenance, prompts the observation that Barthes’s presence is constant throughout Brecht and Method. A virtual leitmotif of the book is that, by way of Barthes, Brecht has had his impact on “theory” no less than on theater. Not merely that Barthes’s Mythologies is satirical “very much in the tradition of Brecht,” nor even that it “paved the way for the triumphant entry of the estrangement-effect into French theory” (B&M 38; Jameson has in mind the “denaturalizations” of Mythologies as estrangements Brechtian as much in their humor as in their political point). Brecht’s mobilization of theater “as the very figure for the collective and for a new kind of society . . . in which the classic questions and dilemmas of political philosophy can be ‘estranged’ and rethought” (B&M 11) transmitted itself first of all in the example of Brecht’s own “theoretical” writing, more recently by way of Barthes, to the practice of “theory” as the present generation has known it. Indeed, in the most elusive and difficult pages in the book, Jameson massages the “proairesis” of S/Z into something rich and estranged to a degree exceeding any

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Verfremdung of Brecht’s own that I can recall. (If Mythologies seems, yes, Brechtian, S/Z is very clearly, or very obscurely, something else altogether.) Jameson assimilates “proairesis” to “autonomization” (one of the richest motifs of his work of the past decade), a de-linking or de-motivating of coincident features or effects that he registers sometimes as a loss (as with the famous parody/pastiche binary in the “Postmodernism” essay), but at other times as a gain (as here, when the “becomingautonomous” of familiar associations permits their dissociation—or defamiliarization, or estrangement—into new configurations.) In this very specific case, Jameson projects the Barthesian “proairesis” as a delinking of “agents” from their “acts”—a way of putting it that would seem to owe much to Kenneth Burke’s “dramatistic metaphor.” Whereas Kant (Lukács’s type of the bourgeois philosopher) reposed all virtue in our assent to the categorical imperative to own our acts (choose our fate, enjoy our symptom), Brecht and Barthes, Jameson suggests, aspire to a syntax in which “acts” are, as it were, their own agents—or rather, projectable in a hermeneutic which contrives to bypass the problem of their agency altogether. Verbs, that is to say, “without a subject”—but this is not merely to reprise, but to reinvent the now-passé prospect of a radical defamiliarization of the ideology of the bourgeois self, and I regret the extent to which my brief sketch refamiliarizes it again. Jameson’s beautifully evocative prose evades, as mine cannot, those familarizations, in the process enacting the utopian impulse specific to “theory” itself, of a writing not reducible to the “property” of the writer. And (at the risk of making it sound familiarizing), it collects a “useful” sense from those pages of S/Z, the most impenetrable in the book, in which verbs in the infinitive become, by fiat, “names” (“What is a series of actions? The unfolding of a name”). And by elaborating a single instance in which Brechtian “methods” project themselves into applications usually no more than merely latent in Brecht himself, Jameson here makes the case, proposed at the outset of the book, for Brecht’s continuing “usefulness” for us here and now: a usefulness predicated on the continuing rehabilitation of modernism in Jameson’s work of the 1990s, that “uneven development” whereby the still-modern, in our postmodern time, emerges as more modern than we. A cognate hope for the continuing potencies of an uncanonized, still-fresh, modernism animated the book on Lewis—but in a very different key: the reinvention of Lewis needed ingenuity in its evocation and evasion of Lewis’s retroness (not to mention his rightist politics). I projected the Lewis book above as only one extreme of a dynamic whose terms include “stoic,” “tragic,” and “sublime,” each maintained in constant if varying tension with the others, and with another, more directly contrary: that “linguistic optimism” whose implication, against theirs, is utopian. The tensions of this dialectic, I have argued, underwite the


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success/failure dynamic that gives Jameson’s writing so much of its power. But in Brecht and Method, these predicaments find their “relief ” in an axiomatic much more forgiving than Jameson’s career-long norm: it does not seem certain that all appeals to judgement necessarily ratify the Law as such: appeals to the latter tend to have a Stoic or even a tragic character, reconfirming some inevitable failure of desire or of the utopian, a breaking against inevitable limits, the need for renunciation and a submission to order. This, however, is the moment to remind ourselves that Brecht made a significant move when he decided to substitute for Me-ti’s Great Order, which was to characterize socialism as opposed to the chaos of capitalism (the Depression, the jungle of cities, war itself ), a new slogan to characterize the postwar construction of socialism, namely the Great Production (B&M 119).

“Inevitable failure” here sounds less inevitable than before. But if this passage provides something like a formula, a theorization, of the success/failure predicament’s “neutralization,” the note of “production” returns us from the plane of the thetic to the very act of critique, and of its writing: of that scriptible in which Brecht and Barthes and Jameson’s many other avatars meet in a “Great Production,” Jameson’s, that here offers to redeem the aesthetic liabilities of a merely “textual productivity.” The scriptible, Jameson has explained, involves what we may now call the production of “sentences whose gestus arouses the desire to emulate it, sentences that make you want to write sentences of your own” (IT1 21). I quote this passage one last time to suggest that as with Lewis, as with Sartre, Adorno, Barthes, and his many other models or avatars, Jameson’s “emulation” of Brecht “neutralizes” the success/failure problem to the extent that Brecht himself is a figure for whose production this problem did not occasion the self-conscious angst that has been a virtual genre-convention of culture-criticism in our century: think of instances as ideologically diverse as Freud, Sartre, Spengler, Mann, Grass, Ortega, Adorno, T. S. Eliot. Lacan’s “castration,” Barthes’s “history,” Derrida’s “mourning,” Baudrillard’s “sleep/death,” sufficiently attest that this accent reproduces itself well within the precincts of that utopian, jouissant postmodern “theory” in which it is nominally under ban. Thus put, the new book’s “relief ” of the success/failure problem might seem a mere accident or coincidence of a chameleon-like Jameson’s encounter for once with a writer unburdened by it; and no doubt, chance—the commission to write a book for Brecht’s centenary—played its part. But the timing, whether or not accidental, is telling, for Brecht has been all along an obvious figure for Jameson to treat, and he has not done so till now. When, in the Lewis chapter above (written before the appearance of Brecht and Method ), I posed the question why Jameson

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doesn’t write about a “successful” left author, Brecht was the figure I had in mind. (The 1977 “Reflections on the Brecht-Lukács Debate” [IT2 133–47] does not engage Brecht himself at this level.) Lewis the un-canonized fascist; Brecht the sainted communist: the two can summon almost too schematically the combinatoire of (critical or ideological) success and (inevitable? deliberate?) failure—but my discussion of Jameson’s Brecht here has been haunted by Jameson’s Lewis rather because I want to suggest that in Brecht and Method, as in Fables of Aggression, the alembications of the scriptible have produced in Jameson’s writing something of the distinctive gestus—tone, motivation, démarche ; we lack a precise vocabulary for this—of the figure he is writing about. I puzzled a few pages ago over how to name this effect of Brecht and Method—tranquil? serene? even comic?—and perhaps, indeed, the word should simply be “Brecht.” I fretted above over the anomolousness of “comedy” as a possible term for what I was getting at, but if we can suspend some of the word’s connotations (laughs, facility, immediately happy endings), we might summon something like a Marxist “comedy.” Terry Eagleton, himself an instance of that rare thing, the (Marxist) critic as comedian, whose criticism actually does offer laughs, if of a rather harsh kind, nominates Brecht as an exemplary figure here, in his essay “Carnival and Comedy: Brecht and Bakhtin.”1 If the farceur Eagleton stresses the farcical in Brecht, Jameson in Brecht and Method seems drawn rather to that note in Brecht he denominates as “sly”—as if building a Utopia in ideology’s despite might be an affair of something between a behind-the-hands snicker and an impassive poker face. Farce, slyness, laughs, happy endings as proleptic of grand, providential, ideological meta-narratives, including the Marxist “end of history”: yes, the word “comedy” threatens to overload our discussion with many more connotations, to require too many more discriminations, than we can manage here. But with our wariness sufficiently on guard, we may recur to Marx himself, by any rhetorical standard one of the champion mockers, ironists and farceurs of the rich tradition of Western (critical) dissensus from Thersites and Jeremiah on. The Eighteenth Brumaire, and its first-time-astragedy-second-time-as-farce motif, stands in Eagleton’s “Carnival and Comedy” as a kind of ur-text for a possible assimilation of Marxist critique with the comic; but in 1843, years before the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx had elaborated, in terms more useful because more broad, a world-historical role for a comic practice of criticism or a critical practice of comedy: History is thorough and passes through many stages while bearing an ancient form to its grave. The last stage of a world-historical form is its comedy. The Greek gods, who already died once of their wounds in Aeschuylus’s tragedy Prometheus Bound, were forced to die a second


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death—this time a comic one—in Lucian’s dialogues. Why does history take this course? So that mankind may part happily from its past.2

“So that mankind may part happily from its past,” that is to say, from those “good old days” that Brecht so sardonically insisted on calling “the bad old days.” We may say of late Jameson’s “comedy” what Jameson himself said, just as the U.S.S.R. was crashing, about “late Marxism”: “better late than never!” (LM 12)

WORKS CITED A. WORKS BY FREDRIC JAMESON “AEM”: “Actually Existing Marxism.” Polygraph 6/7 (1993): 170–95. All references in the text are to this version. An expanded reprint appears under the same title in Marxism Beyond Marxism. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, Rebecca E. Karl, ed. Routledge: New York, 1996. 14–54. A drastically shortened version appears as “Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism,” Monthly Review 47.11 (1996): 1–10. B&M : Brecht and Method. New York: Verso, 1999. CT : The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. New York: Verso, 1998. Diacritics : “Interview” with Jameson. Diacritics 12.3 (1982): 72–91. FA: Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. GA : The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, and British Film Institute Publishing, 1992. “GPI”: “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue.” Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyashi, ed. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998, 54–77. “Greimas”: “Foreword” to A. J. Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. vi–xxii. IT1: The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, Volume 1: Situations of Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. IT2 : The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, Volume 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. LM : Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. New York: Verso, 1990. M&F : Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971. “MPL”: “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” New Left Review 209 (1995): 75–109. Reprinted in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Michael Sprinker, ed. New York and London: Verso, 1999. 26–67. Page references are given to both texts, separated by a slash. NOR : New Orleans Review, 11.1 (1984). P : Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.

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PHL : The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972. PU : The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981. Retamar: “Foreword” to Retamar, Roberto Fernández. Caliban and Other Essays. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989, vii–xii. S: Sartre: The Origins of a Style. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Reprint, with a new “Afterword,” of the original edition, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1961. “Space Wars.” The London Review of Books 18.7 (1996), 14–5. ST : The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia UP, 1994 SV : Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1992. “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 65–88. “UIH”: “Ulysses in History.” James Joyce and Modern Literature. W. J. McCormack, Alistair Stead, ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. 126–41.

B. WORKS BY OTHERS Adorno, T. W. Aesthetic Theory. 1970. Trans. C. Lenhardt. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. ———. “Society.” Trans. Fredric Jameson. Salmagundi 10/11 (1969/1970). 144–53. Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory. London and New York: Verso, 1992. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. ———. The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. Ed. François Matheron. London: Verso, 1997. Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso, 1998. Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. ———. S/Z. 1970. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Bloom, Harold. The Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism. New Haven, CT: H. R. Schwab, 1988. Bowie, Malcolm. Lacan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. Burnham, Clint. The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Caws, Peter. “Sartrean Structuralism?” The Cambridge Companion to Sartre. Christina Howells, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 293–317. Dowling, William C. Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984.

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Derrida, Jacques. “Marx and Sons.” Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Michael Sprinker, ed. London: Verso, 1999. 213–69. ———. Points: Interviews 1974–1994. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995. ———. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain. New York: Verso, 1986. ———. “Ballad of Marxist Criticism (to the tune of ‘Say Something Stupid Like I Love You’).” New Literary History 28 (1997): v–vi. ———. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso, 1991. ———. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. ———. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. ———. Walter Benjamin, Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. New York: Verso, 1981. Foster, Hal, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983. Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. 1913. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1950. Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985. Habermas, Jürgen. “Modernity—An Incomplete Project.” In Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983. 3–15. ———. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1987. Harpham , Geoffrey Galt. The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Hegel, G. W. F. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Ed. J. Hoffmeister. Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1952. ———. Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie. 1910. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. ———. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. ———. Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. 1899. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991. ———. Science of Logic. Trans. A. V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Helmling, Steven. “Marxist ‘Pleasure’: Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton,” Postmodern Culture 3.3 (May 1993) . An expanded version appears in Essays In Postmodern Culture. Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth, eds. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. 239–63. Hertz, Neil. “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime.” The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. 40–60. Homer, Sean. Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998. Hoy, David Couzens. The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Jay, Martin. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept From Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

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Kaplan, E. Ann. ed. Postmodernism and its Discontents. London: Verso, 1988. Kellner: Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, ed. Douglas Kellner. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. Lentricchia, Frank. Ariel and the Police. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988. ———. “Foucault’s Legacy: A New Historicism?” The New Historicism. Aram Veeser, ed. New York: Routledge, 1989. 231–42. ———. “Reading Foucault: Punishment, Labor, Resistance.” Raritan 1.4 (1982): 5–32. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Overture” to The Raw and the Cooked. 1964. Trans. Joseph H. McMahon. In Structuralism. Jacques Ehrmann, ed. New York: Anchor, 1970. 31–55. ———. The Savage Mind. 1962. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966. ———. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, 1963. ———. Structural Anthropology: Volume II. Trans. Monique Layton. New York: Basic Books, 1976. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1971. Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993. ———. Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. Magnus, Bernd, Stephen Cullenberg, ed. Whither Marxism? New York: Routledge, 1995. Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. 1941. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1983. Marx, Karl. “A Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction.” Trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. Karl Marx: Early Writings. Quintin Hoare, ed. New York: Vintage, 1975. 243–57. Mehlman, Jeffrey. Revolution and Repetition. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977. Melville, Stephen. Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Moretti, Franco. Modern Epic: The World System From Goethe to Garcia-Marquez. London: Verso, 1996. Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt, ed. The Hermeneutics Reader. New York: Continuum, 1992. Ormiston, Gayle L. and Alan D. Schrift, ed. The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur. Albany: SUNY P, 1990. Ree, Jonathan. Philosophical Tales. New York: Methuen, 1987. Ricoeur, Paul. The Conflict of Interpretations. Ed. Don Ihde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1974. ———. From Text to Action. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and John Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1991. Rifflet-Lemaire, Anika. Jacques Lacan (Brussels: Dessart, 1970). Rorty, Richard. “The Pragmatist’s Progress.” In Umberto Eco, ed., Interpretation and Overinterpretation. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. 1943. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966. ———. Critique of Dialectical Reason. 1960. 2 vols. Trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith. New York: Verso, 1991. ———. Search For a Method. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Vintage, 1968. Sprinker, Michael. Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism. London: Verso, 1987. Weber, Samuel. Return to Freud: Jacque Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991. Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Yeghiayan, Eddie. A Fredric Jameson Bibliography. Irvine: Critical Theory Institute, 1991. ———. A Fredric Jameson Bibliography. Online (updated version of the above) . Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. New York: Routledge, 1990. Ziarek, Ewa Plonawska. The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism. Albany: SUNY P, 1996. Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. ———. Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993.

NOTES CHAPTER ONE THE SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF CRITIQUE 1. Eagleton, “Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style,” Diacritics 14–22; rpt. in Against the Grain, 65–78; Helmling, “Marxist Pleasure.” 2. What I’m calling the “failure imperative,” what Jameson himself expounds and enacts as a “winner loses logic” (P 5), instantiates the larger cultural syndrome Geoffrey Galt Harpham explores in The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism. Harpham goes back to Augustine and beyond, but most immediately relevant for this study is the chapter called “Saint Foucault.” See also Ewa Plonawska Ziarek, The Rhetoric of Failure. 3. Cf. Jameson’s oft-expressed disdain for “vulgar,” “pseudo-,” “orthodox,” and “schematic” Marxism in Marxism and Form alone (M&F 215–6, 218–9, 362, 375, 398; see also PU 32). On the other hand, a scruple against elitism sometimes disposes Jameson more favorably to what Brecht called plumpes Denken (IT1 119); more recently he speaks up for (or distrusts the distrust of ) “vulgar Marxism” by that name in “MPL” 104–5/60–1 ( and cf. “MPL” 93/47, CT 137). 4. For the completest hardcopy bibliography available of Jameson’s works and discussion of them (including some 1500 brief mentions) up to 1991, see Eddie Yeghiayan, A Fredric Jameson Bibliography. For a continuously updated version, see Yeghiayan’s webpage, at . 5. Given that Marxist discourse in the Anglophone world especially has often been coarsened by its polemical burdens, it seems to me one of Jameson’s signal “successes” to have invented a formidable way of “doing Marxism” that eschews polemical affects. But Jameson cautions that his own non-polemical practice “should not be taken to imply that polemic interventions are not of the highest priority for Marxist cultural criticism” (PU 12); cf. his celebration of Roberto Fernández Retamar in a “Foreword” to the latter’s Caliban and Other Essays. 6. It should be acknowledged, however, that there are some problems Jameson refuses as “false problems,” associated in his mind with “vulgar Marxism,” that is, stale debates long since played out; “our old friends base and superstructure” is one example; that old polemical chestnut “idealism/materialism” is another. (The two are obviously closely related, and often appear in the weary fights of yesteryear virtually as versions of each other.) “Materialist” is consistently a term of praise in Jameson’s usage, but perhaps the closest he comes to taking the bait of “idealist” is in one of the epigraphs to Marxism and Form: it is from Lenin, and it advises that “Intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than 167

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NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

is unintelligent materialism.” (The other epigraph is from Mallarmé!—and cf. another quotation from Lenin, praising Hegel [M&F 359].) “Base and superstructure” is a trickier case (“not really a model, but a starting point and a problem” [Kellner 383, CT 47]), since Jameson’s own “Marxist hermeneutic” prolongs what amounts to a base-and-superstructure logic under more up-to-date (often Althusserian) names—“absent cause,” “structural causality”—as Jameson himself eventually admits (LM 45–8). Compare the motif, frequent throughout Postmodernism, of an inversion of the two terms (the latter under the name “culture”) sometimes as a symptom of the postmodern ideology, sometimes as a portent Jameson himself seems ready to see as hopeful. The problem is reprised, often under the name “autonomization,” in “The Existence of Italy” (SV 155–229). 7. For “History as the slaughterbench,” see Hegel, Philosophy of History, 21; for “Golgotha of Absolute Spirit,” see Phenomenology of Mind, 808. A. V. Miller’s more recent translation offers “Calvary” rather than “Golgotha” (Phenomenology of Spirit, 493). Hegel’s German reads “die Schädelstätte des absoluten Geistes ” (Phänomenologie des Geistes, 564); “Schädelstätte,” lit. “skull place,” is Luther’s rendering in all four gospels (I am indebted here to my colleague at the University of Delaware, the distingushed Hegel translator, Professor Robert M. Brown). 8. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Jameson will also of course have read Bataille, Hyppolite, Kojève, Sartre, and others on Hegel; he mentions Sidney Hook (M&F 365n30), and doubtless he read Walter Kaufmann as well. For an astute review of the Hegelian vogue and its decline from the 1930s to the 1970s in France, see Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in TwentiethCentury France, which illuminates what our current “dominant” obscures, how (Hegelian) “reason” could itself have ever been a “desire.” 9. PU 284; Jameson is slightly misquoting (and without a reference) from the passage in the “Preface” to the Phenomenology in which Hegel advises that religion (and, implicitly, any truth-discourse), “sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 10)—requirements, note, to be met (or shirked) only in the writing. 10. An ingenious, but never a persuasive reading—and less so now that the youthful Althusser’s essays on Hegel are available, especially “The Return to Hegel” of 1950 (Spectre of Hegel 173–84). 11. Hegel, in the “History as slaughterbench” passage, also warns against this pitfall: acknowledging that History presents “a picture so suggestive of gloomy emotions” that only breast-beating and moralizing seem appropriate responses, Hegel cautions that “it is not the interest of such sentimentalities, really to rise above those depressing emotions; and to solve the enigmas of Providence which the considerations that occasioned them, present. It is essential to their character to find a gloomy satisfaction in the empty and fruitless sublimities of that negative result . . .” (Hegel, Philosophy of History 21). The only note here that Jameson could not allow himself is the hubris about “solv[ing] the enigmas of Providence . . .” 12. Douglas Kellner took this passage from Postmodernism as epigraph to his casebook, Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique. 13. Jonathan Ree (Philosophical Tales 84–90) compares the “free indirect discourse” pioneered by Jane Austen and other novelists with Hegel’s way, in the Phenomenology, of de-

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limiting each moment of his historical fantasia in his own voice and continually shifting vocabulary, yet sympathetically with that moment’s limitations—as if from its perspective, and from within its suppositions or horizons: as if to render every discord and cunning of history in its appropriate style indirect libre. (Ree’s terminology readily “transcodes” into more fashionable ones—Bakhtinian dialogism, Barthesian “verbe intransitif ,” Derridean parasitism, and so on.) What Hegel attempts to do for actual moments of the historical past, Jameson’s “dialectical prose” attempts to do for present historical possibilities: to stage each as an “in itself ” in process of becoming a “for itself ”—and in a way that discloses each “moment” thus rendered “for us.” Again, Jameson takes pains to avoid the facility or “optimism” of Hegel’s writing, but his prose is comparably energetic, relentless, driven, and in that way more “like” Hegel’s than almost anyone else’s (except maybe, ironically, Derrida’s). 14. See Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, passim, but especially “The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought,” 110–49; Lukács’s construction of Kant/Hegel governs Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, and the same subtext cathects, if more conflictedly, all of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason—as the title signals. For Hegel on “spurious infinity,” see “The Infinite Progress” and “Idealism” in Science of Logic 150–6; and cf. the remarks on Kant, 233–40. I cannot claim Jameson’s license for the conjecture that in the roman à clef that is Hegel’s Phenomenology, Kant is often the discernible original behind such actantial guises as “The Law of the heart,” “Individuality which takes itself to be real and for itself,” “Spirit that is certain of itself: Morality,” “The ‘beautiful soul’,” and the like. “Antinomic logic” underwrites the “unattainable beyond” whose dialectic joins those seeming antitheses, “unhappy consciousness” and “the beautiful soul.” 15. Jameson’s own professional success lends a sharper edge to the self-consciousness Jameson has always insisted on as a necessary feature of “dialectical” criticism; it was at just about the time (1982) that Terry Eagleton likened the encyclopedic reach of Jameson’s work to “some great Californian supermarket of the mind” (Diacritics 17; Against the Grain 70) that Jameson began speaking with marked uneasiness of the “thematization,” even “commodification” (Diacritics 78; LM 182) of theory itself; he had reached the pinnacle of academic success at which he had to hear his own hardwon insights played back as cant by well-meaning but inevitably simplifying disciples—a kind of “failure” most professors needn’t worry about. A decade later, Postmodernism would appear with, on the front cover, a handsomely produced colorization of a Warhol print much of whose point, in Jameson’s text, was that the original had been a black-and-white; on the back cover, a blurb from Eagleton pronounced Postmodernism, in the most fulsome ad-speak available, “an intellectual blockbuster.” Meanwhile, in the “Introduction” to the book itself, Jameson uneasily avers that “The success story of the word postmodernism demands to be written, no doubt in best-seller format . . .” [P xiii], as if to ward off the thought that his own book tells that story, or aspires to be that best-seller—a thought the more inevitable in that his own 1984 essay, which Postmodernism reprints and whose title it repeats, had been, on any accounting, one of that story’s milestone events. 16. The most recent printing of “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of late Capitalism” in the book of the same title (P 1–54) substantially reprints the text as it appeared in New Left Review n. 146 in July–August 1984 (59–92); compare parallel passages here with the essay’s earliest printed version, the “essentially unrevised” text of a 1982 lecture, as “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic

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111–25. Asked by an interviewer about the difficulty of his prose, Jameson admitted taking a “handicraft satisfaction” in the work of composition (Diacritics 88).

CHAPTER TWO THE DIALECTIC OF THE SCRIPTIBLE 1. I here follow the schematic elaborated by Paul Ricoeur in, for example, “Structure, Word, Event,” in The Conflict of Interpretations 79–96; “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” ibid., 236–66 (especially 259ff.); and “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” in From Text to Action 144–67. 2. Thomas Huhn complains that Jameson’s own “decentering of the subject” is, in effect, mere lip-service, if not an actual repression of Jameson’s own too-subject-centeredness; see “The Postmodern Return, With a Vengeance, of Subjectivity” (Kellner 228–48). Huhn seems to me a textbook case of mistaking a utopian desideratum (decentering the subject) for an implemented policy. 3. Lyotard, Peregrinations 13; qtd. by Iain Hamilton Grant in the “Introduction” to his translation of Libidinal Economy xviii. 4. “[T]he illusory character of art is simultaneously its methexis in truth”; “The tension that art maintains in relation to the perpetual catastrophe presupposes negativity, which in turn is the methexis of art in the obscure. No existing phenomenal work of art can claim to have the non-existent positively in hand . . . Art is promissory despite its negativity, indeed total negation. . . . Aesthetic experience is the experience of something spirit per se does not provide, either in the world or in itself. It is the possible, as promised by its impossibility. Art is the promise of happiness, a promise that is constantly being broken” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 159, 196). 5. Later in The Prison-House of Language, Jameson charges against structuralist “metalanguage” that it “cannot perform the most basic function of self-consciousness, which is to buckle the buckle, to reckon the place of the observer into the experiment . . .” (PHL 208). Insofar as this is a caution against structuralism’s efforts to reconceive human action (in the Althusserian formula) “without a subject,” it bears a family resemblance to Ricoeur’s oft-repeated admonition that between “sign” and “language,” each of which can be treated as virtual and atemporal, and may therefore be the objects of an Erklärende analysis, there must intervene “discourse,” which inevitably reinstates meaning, time, the transactions of (speaking) subjects, and therefore a Verstehende “hermeneutic” or phenomenology to the field of inquiry. 6. Sartre remains an avatar for Jameson long after his fall from fashion in the same cultural shifts that elevated Barthes—and an avatar, specifically of the scriptible : Jameson quotes Sartre to the effect that “each sentence is as long as it is, as full of parentheses, of expressions between quotation marks, of ‘qua’s and ‘inasmuch as’s, only because each sentence represents the unity of a dialectical movement” (M&F 209). But for better or worse, Barthes is still up and Sartre still down; Jameson’s enthusiasm for Barthes is salient in his later work as well as earlier, and I tend to prefer the later. And Barthes conjures the libidinal in ways Sartre does not. For these and other reasons Barthes eclipses Sartre for my purposes here; but Jameson’s is

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an intelligence that, however boldly it takes on the new, doesn’t abandon what it has loved in the past. For Sartre’s continuing interest for him, beyond the 1961 study and the long penultimate chapter, “Sartre and History,” of Marxism and Form, see Jameson’s “Afterword” to the 1984 reissue of Sartre and his “Introduction” to Sartre After Sartre, a special issue of Yale French Studies 68 (1985), iii–xi. Resonant with the terms of my discussion here is Jameson’s 1981 citation of “an agonized and self-cancelling passage” of Sartrean scriptible “in which totality is affirmed in the very movement whereby it is denied, and represented in the same language that denies it all representation” (PU 55); cf. the remarks in the text below on “unhappy consciousness”). In “Periodizing the 60s” (1984), Sartre figures as a road (alas) not taken (IT2 187–8). I will cite here also Jameson’s praise of Sartre’s remarks on Flaubert’s style in a consideration of the schizophrenic sentence (P 29–30). And see any of the numerous references to Sartre in Late Marxism, especially the evocation on the very last page (LM 252) which, in effect, extends the book’s case on behalf of Adorno to Sartre as well. 7. One of the more interesting (non-“primary”) things I have read on these questions—“historicizing” the “end of philosophy” motif as an affair of Hegel-and-after, that is, as rather “modern” than “postmodern”—is Stephen Melville, Philosophy Beside Itself. 8. Fascism is utopian, Jameson explains (PU 291), because it is collective, rather than individualist in the manner of bourgeois liberalism. In this respect Jameson continues Hegel’s critique of liberalism, and its merely “negative freedom.” “Utopia” was not long ago sheerly a term of abuse, to left and right alike; it’s my impression that its rehabilitation is almost entirely Jameson’s doing. It is a complicated motif in Jameson, what Kenneth Burke would have called a “summarizing” one. It raises not only the issue of the social rather than the merely individual, but also that of the social as actual “content,” as more than the mere “referent” of a “representation,” or an “effect of the signifier”; and to this extent, Jameson’s investment in such motifs as “utopia” and “the social” brings him close (as Jameson acknowledges [PU 285]) to those Durkheim identified as characteristic of religion (a symbology whose symbols are not to be received as mere fictions). For an acute discussion of these issues, see John O’Neill, “Religion and Postmodernism: The Durkheimian Bond in Bell and Jameson” (Kellner 139–61). 9. Frank Lentricchia, “Reading Foucault: Punishment, Labor, Resistance” 7. For book publication, Lentricchia softened “counter-revolutionary statement” to “a testament of despair” (Ariel and the Police 31), but he gave the chapter itself a harsher title: “Michel Foucault’s Fantasy for Humanists.” See also Lentricchia’s “Foucault’s Legacy: A New Historicism?” For an acute treatment of this “Foucault problem,” see Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative 220–35. Jameson, observing critique’s “winner loses logic,” cites “the Foucault of the prisons book [as] the obvious example” (P 5). For Jameson’s lengthiest pronouncement on the Foucault problem, see CT 105–11.

CHAPTER THREE HERMENEUTIC AND/OR CRITIQUE 1. Some critics have objected to Jameson’s (Hegelian) synthesizing of such opposed figures; for example, Michael Sprinker, Imaginary Relations 153–205; Robert Young, White

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Mythologies 91–118. For similar disquiets about the synthesizing reach of The Political Unconscious, see James Iffland, “The Political Unconscious of Jameson’s The Political Unconscious” (NOR 36–45). 2. The debate’s principal texts by Gadamer and Habermas, as well as contributions by Emilio Betti and Paul Ricoeur, are usefully collected for the Anglophone reader in Ormiston, The Hermeneutic Tradition 147–334; see also Karl-Otto Apel, “Scientistics, Hermeneutics, Critique of Ideology: An Outline of a Theory of Science from an Epistemological-Anthropological Point of View,” in Mueller-Vollmer, The Hermeneutics Reader 321–45. The standard discussion of the debate is Hoy’s, in The Critical Circle 117–30. For Zugehörigkeit/Verfremdung, see Ricoeur in The Hermeneutic Tradition (299–301). 3. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project” in Foster, The AntiAesthetic 3–15; cf. Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. 4. Gadamer held himself sufficiently aloof from Nazism during the Hitler years to have had his career stalled; after the liberation, the Soviet authorities reckoned him ideologically clean enough to be appointed as Rector of the University of Leipzig. (He departed for the West in 1947.) For a discussion of Jameson’s use and/or elision of Ricoeur and Gadamer, see David Shumway, “Jameson/Hermeneutics/Postmodernism” in Kellner 172–202; in a comment on this essay Jameson mentions a work in progress, length unspecified, on Truth and Method (Kellner 384). 5. Unsurprisingly, Habermas’s chief interest for Jameson involves his account of postmodernism; see, for example, IT2 107–10; rpt. in P 58–61. 6. For a suggestive workout on Jameson’s conceit, to somewhat different effect from mine here, see Jerry Aline Flieger, “The Prison-House of Ideology: Critic as Inmate,” Diacritics 47–56. 7. See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction. 8. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” (1955; Structural Anthropology 209). For a complicating reconsideration of the Sartre/Lévi-Strauss standoff, see Peter Caws, “Sartrean Structuralism?” In “History and Dialectic” (the last chapter of The Savage Mind ), Lévi-Strauss is responding to the Critique of Dialectical Reason; but Sartre anticipated many of his objections two decades earlier in the “Conclusion” of Being and Nothingness, “In-Itself and For-Itself: Metaphysical Implications,” in which “metaphysical” turns out to mean “historical” (“metaphysics is to ontology as history is to sociology”), and as such imbued with all the “contingency” Lévi-Strauss charges Sartre with having forgotten: “The being by which the ‘Why’ comes into being has the right to posit its own ‘Why’ since it is itself an interrogation, a ‘Why.’ To this question ontology cannot reply, for the problem here is to explain an event, not to describe the structures of a being” (Being and Nothingness 758). The impasse between phenomenology and structuralism is figured here twenty years before the fact. Sartre’s stipulation here cautions, in effect, that a bracketing, like Lévi-Strauss’s, of “the subject” only defers its questions; it cannot evade them altogether. 9. Since my exposition here relies so heavily on this familiar quotation of LéviStrauss’s, it is with chagrin, and not merely on my own behalf, that I report that after some hours of searching in the likeliest places I am unable to find this formula in quite these words either in Lévi-Strauss’s writings or (in quotation marks and with a reference) in dis-

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cussions of him (or of myth, or of ideology). Jameson cites it frequently, usually without quotation marks, always without footnote (e.g., M&F 382–5; PHL 117, 161–2, 197, 212; IT1 12; IT2 77, 132; PU 77–80, 256; SV 59, 227). In Lévi-Strauss’s best-known essay (on the Oedipus myth), “The Structural Study of Myth,” two passages come close: “Mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution” (Structural Anthropology, 224); and, “the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real) . . .” (ibid., 229). Elsewhere, though, in “The Story of Asdiwal” (1960), Lévi-Strauss praises a myth in which the “failure [to “resolve” a contradiction] is admitted ” (Structural Anthropology: Volume II 170)—a suggestion with much point for an ethos of critique which insists on its own “impossibility” or “inevitable failure.” 10. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Overture” to The Raw and the Cooked (1964), in Ehrmann, ed., Structuralism 38; cf. 47. For the remark about Freud, see “The Structural Study of Myth,” Structural Anthropology, 217. 11. For a comprehensive discussion, see Michael Clark, “Imagining the Real: Jameson’s Use of Lacan,” NOR, 67–72. 12. For Marxism and psychoanalysis as “materialisms,” see IT1 104–5; for this critique of structuralism, see PHL passim, especially (for Lacan) 169–73, and “The Ideology of the Text” (IT1 17–71). 13. IT1 97, 195n33. Note that Jameson does not nominate Fables of Aggression as an example of “Lacanian criticism”—perhaps because though it deals with the problems he regards as belonging to “Lacanian criticism” (the insertion of the subject into ideology), it deploys Lyotard’s “libidinal apparatus” rather than any Lacanian vocabulary. Lacan persists in Fables of Aggression mostly via the mediation of Althusser. Still, the elision of Lacan, only two years after the programmatic claims based on him in “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” is notable. 14. For Jameson’s denunciation of “ethics” in “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1977), see IT1 58, 87, 95; cf “Criticism in History,” ibid., 123–6; Fables of Aggression (1979), 56; Political Unconscious (1981), 59, 234. (For a more hospitable take on “ethics,” see Jameson’s “Morality versus Ethical Substance; or, Aristotelian Marxism in Alasdair MacIntyre” [1983/4], IT1 181–5) For Lacan’s “stoic” and “tragic” “ethic” see IT1 98, 112. For the Jane Gallop passage, see Reading Lacan 59. 15. Two exceptions are Malcolm Bowie, Lacan, and Samuel Weber, Return to Freud: Jacque Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis. Jameson himself cites (as “the accredited exposition of the Lacanian ‘system’” [PU 153n3]) Anika Rifflet-Lemaire, Jacques Lacan.

CHAPTER FOUR “DELIBERATE FAILURE” 1. Another wrinkle: “To ask why Lewis did not simply become a fascist Shaw,” writes Jameson, “is to place ourselves squarely before the central issues of his work” (FA 88). But for such of Lewis’s novels as The Revenge for Love the epithet “fascist Shaw” might seem quite apt, not least since these are also the most popularly accessible—“successful,” that is,

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in something like Shaw’s way—of Lewis’s books. (I myself rather assimilate Lewis in this reach of his work to a fascist Aldous Huxley.)

CHAPTER FIVE “INEVITABLE FAILURE” 1. Jameson’s extensive engagement with the anti-historicist and -historicizing Althusser in chapter 1 of The Political Unconscious intended a Hegelian recuperation of Althusser—an effort that met with little thanks from (especially British) Althusserians. In the following decade, under cover of a nominally postmodern investment in “space” (rather than the bad old modernist or phenomenological “time”), Jameson’s writings play down the “historicist” (or “historicizing”) program. 2. See, for example, Jameson’s account of the Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri in “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (1985), in IT2, pp. 35–60; the caution about “post-Marxism” is on p. 38; cf. remarks on Tafuri in P 61. The point is that even Marxists can lapse into “post-Marxism.” Jameson rebuts any suggestion of his own putative “post-Marxism” in the opening pages of the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism (297–8); for his scorn of those who boast of their post-Marxism as an accomplishment, see the opening paragraphs of “Reflections on the Brecht-Lukács Debate” (IT2 133); cf. also “Criticism and History” (IT1 119–36, esp. 119–21) and “Marxism and Historicism” (IT2 148–77). Most sweepingly, Jameson has projected “post-Marxism” as a recurring and symptomatic feature of capitalism itself (“AEM” passim). He has recently reconsidered the Tafuriproblem more explicitly in terms of generic motivations in “The Brick and the Balloon” (CT 177–83). 3. Another variant on the question: “I think (rightly or wrongly) that most people are deeply (and often unconsciously) Hegelian in believing that if things happened in a certain way they somehow had to happen that way.” Jameson, “Space Wars,” The London Review of Books v. 18, n. 7 (1996), 15.

CHAPTER SIX FAILURE AND THE SUBLIME 1. For a critique of Jameson on these grounds, see Mike Featherstone, “Postmodernism, Cultural Change, and Social Practice,” in Kellner 117–38 (especially 125–34); for Jameson’s reply, see ibid., 380–1. 2. Perhaps this is the place to note that Jameson’s “sublime” not only materially and usefully complicates the figurations of these precursors, it also has exerted an obvious influence on Slavoj Zizek’s ingenious elaborations of Lacan; indeed I sometimes suspect that Zizek’s wit too promiscuously assimilates to each other the “symptom,” the “sublime object,” the “big Other,” the “gristle,” the “irreducible kernel,” etc. (It’s easy to feel that Zizek is always rewriting the same book.) But the Jamesonian provenance of much of this prob-

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lematic in Zizek is evident—though rarely so explicitly as in this account of “the postmodern Thing”: “. . . the paranoiac vision of social totality itself as the ultimate fascinating Thing, a vampire-like spectre . . . today more than ever, capital is the Thing par excellence : a chimeric apparition which, although it can nowhere be spotted as a positive, clearly delimited entity, nonetheless functions as the ultimate Thing regulating our lives. . . . the Thing is not simply a foreign body, an intruder which disturbs the harmony of the social bond; precisely as such, the Thing is what ‘holds together’ the social edifice by means of guaranteeing its fantasmatic consistency” (Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out 122–3); it is worth pointing out that Zizek’s figure of the “spectre” here predates Derrida’s Specters of Marx). A recurrent adviso in Zizek is that the “symptom” (etc.) specific to Left intellectuals is that of the problem (hangup, trauma, bereavement, mourning/ melancholia, hysteria, in short “failure”) of Marxism-as-lost-cause. 3. For Eagleton on postmodernism, see the last chapter (“From the Polis to Postmodernism”) of The Ideology of the Aesthetic and The Illusions of Postmodernism. Ponder, as symptom, that Jameson is not mentioned in either of these texts—though he does appear in Eagleton’s doggerel “Ballad of Marxist Criticism (to the tune of ‘Say Something Stupid Like I Love You’).” 4. See, for example, Eagleton’s reservations about Jameson in “The Idealism of American Criticism” (Against the Grain 49–64, especially 57–64); see also Eagleton’s “Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style” (ibid., 65–78). 5. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime 28–31. In view of Jameson’s (sublime) image of postmodernism’s “thunderous unblocking” of long frozen energies (P 313), as well as the registration of the “inevitable failure” as “failure or blockage” in the “History is what hurts” passage (PU 102), I recommend here as well Neil Hertz’s reading of Longinus, “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime.” On another of the “Postmodernism” essay’s inflections of “blockage,” as a defense mechanism against intolerable realities, see David S. Gross, “Marxism and Resistance: Fredric Jameson and the Moment of Postmodernism,” in Kellner 97–116.

CHAPTER SEVEN JAMESON POST-POSTMODERNISM 1. I do not pretend to be the keenest-eyed of Jameson-watchers, but I was writing on Jameson in this period, and stumbled across “Actually Existing Marxism” only in 1997. Its original appearance was in Polygraph 6/7 (1993); a much-truncated version, “Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism,” came out in Monthly Review (April 1996); and an expanded version appeared in Marxism Beyond Marxism. (For full bibliographical information on each of these versions of the essay, see “AEM” in section A of “Works Cited.”) 2. These would include not only “Postmodernism” itself, but also, on realism and modernism, “Modernism and its Repressed” (IT1 167–80), “Beyond the Cave” (IT2 115–32), “Reflections on the Brecht-Lukács Debate” (IT2 133–47), and “Ulysses in History,” and (as we shall see below) the latest essays in The Cultural Turn. (The realism/modernism binary is also a major subtext in both Fables of Aggression and The Political

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Unconscious.) For an incisive discussion of the modern/postmodern binary in Jameson, see Martin Donougho, “Postmodern Jameson” (Kellner 74–95); Lambert Zuidervaart considers the problem via the Lukács/Adorno standoff in “Realism, Modernism, and the Empty Chair” (Kellner, 203–27). Sean Homer (Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism 118–25) considers the triad in the context of the more general problem of periodization. 3. To clarify the point about “deliberate anachronism”: such stability as the realist/modernist/postmodernist periodization has in Jameson, it owes to its correlation with Ernest Mandel’s account of the three “stages” of capitalism; thus “realism” coincides with the national market capitalism of Marx’s day; “modernism” with the monopoly capitalism, theorized by Lenin, of the imperialist era; “postmodernism” with the multinational, postindustrial, consumerist capitalism emerging after World War II. Film history, of course, has different chronological coordinates, so Jameson articulates it with the realist/modernist/ postmodernist triad frankly as a methodological fiction; he takes care not to commit himself to relating film history to technological history in any ontogeny-recapitulatesphylogeny fashion. 4. Jameson’s best-circulated essay on these issues is “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”; the paradigm of “national allegory” persists throughout The Geopolitical Aesthetic. For an impassioned if rather predictable critique, see Ahmad, In Theory 95–122. It is worth noting that Jameson first elaborated “national allegory” in Fables of Aggression (that is, in connection with the problematics of a distinctly first-world writer). 5. Consider, for example, Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, and the 1993 conference at which Derrida originally gave the paper on which his book is based; the conference papers are collected in Magnus, ed., Whither Marxism? Clint Burnham lists other evidences of a post-’92 “extraordinary renaissance of French Marxism” in The Jamesonian Unconscious 55n. 6. Among Jameson’s numerous discussions, see especially P 331ff., in which “totalization” is projected as another “inevitable failure”; see also, for Jameson’s most straightforward defense of “totalizing,” Kellner 370–6, rpt. CT 34–40. For me, the most eye-opening reading on “totality” is the passage in which Sartre all but acknowledges the affiliation of his own “totality of in-itself and for-itself ” with Hegel’s “identity of object and subject” (I reverse the usual order of Hegel’s words to highlight the alignment between the two formulae [Sartre, Being and Nothingness 761–5]). For a comprehensive survey of the issue, see Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality. 7. There is not space here for a detailed consideration of Jameson’s enagagement with Derrida in “Marx’s Purloined Letter” (Derrida has now responded, “Marx and Sons”); perhaps the most interesting topos for such a consideration will prove to be the emergence, both in Derrida and in Jameson, of religion (here, the appropriation by both of Benjamin’s motif of messianism, and its distinction from apocalypticism). For religion (whose reemergence Jameson cites as a sign of postmodernity) interestingly resembles politics in being at once a locus of sheerest ideological mystification and a belief system, language game, or system of representation whose aestheticization its adherents vehemently resist: both Marxism and Christianity insist on the “truth claims” of their respective “constructions of reality.” Religion is also (again like politics) a phenomenon of collectives—for Jameson, the sine qua non of “the Utopian” as such (see John O’Neill, “Religion and Postmodernism: The Durkheimian Bond in Bell and Jameson,” in Kellner 139–61).

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN AND CODA

177

8. Specters of Marx, 10; cf. “MPL” 86/38. It is symptomatic that neither in Derrida’s trés grand sérieux nor in Jameson’s response to it is this portmanteau word evoked even remotely as funny. In French, the term also implies an overtone lost in the English, of shame (French, honte). Thus “hauntology” suggests, besides spectrality, a certain shame of the ontos or of ontology—a consideration relevant for Jameson’s interest, in “MPL,” in the problem of Marxism’s conflicted relations with “philosophy.” 9. Marxism Beyond Marxism, ed. Makdisi et al.; for full bibliographic information, see “AEM” in section A of “Works Cited.” 10. “Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism,” The Monthly Review; for full bibliographic information, see “AEM” in section A of “Works Cited.” 11. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” originally a 1982 lecture, was first printed in Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic 111–25. The expansion appeared as “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in New Left Review n. 146 (July–August, 1984), 59–92; and in substantially the same form as the first chapter of Postmodernism (P 1–54). For a further textual wrinkle see below, and the next note. 12. For early variant states of the “Postmodernism” essay, see the preceding note. The information that needs to be added here is that the earliest version, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” was also “reprinted” in 1988, four years after the “big” essay’s appearance (Kaplan, Postmodernism and Its Discontents 13–29), but with a consequential alteration: the section on “schizophrenia” and Language Poetry was cut and a discussion of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, cannibalized from the “big” essay, put in its place. It is this, the Kaplan version, that The Cultural Turn reprints. 13. Richard Rorty, “The Pragmatist’s Progress” 92. Jameson has recently answered (in effect) that Rorty’s destruction of philosophy “as a history and as a discipline . . . leaves its Samson-like destroyer in the self-trivialized role of an aesthete and a bellettrist” (“MPL” 82/34; but cf. Jameson’s own preemptive self-accusation in exactly the same terms just a few pages later [“MPL” 91/44]). Despite the swipe at Rorty, Jameson goes on to ask whether Rorty’s project isn’t indeed more radically (or successfully) un- or anti-metaphysical than Derrida’s (since Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysics seems unable to sustain itself except on the condition of a continuous, covert reinvention of metaphysics)—an example of Jameson’s intellectual generosity beyond the making of polemical points.

CODA BEYOND SUCCESS AND FAILURE 1. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin 143–72. I develop the contrast of this essay’s “comic” program with Jameson’s “stoic,” “tragic,” and “sublime” tones in “Marxist Pleasure.” 2. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction” 247–8.

INDEX Adorno, Theodor, 6, 11, 15, 16, 27, 28, 29, 35–45, 47, 48, 50, 53, 57, 79, 95, 96, 101, 108, 111, 115, 117, 121, 136, 143, 150, 157, 170n. 4, 171n. 6 Aeschuylus, 158 Ahmad, Aijaz, 176n. 4 Althusser, Louis, 9, 11, 33, 50, 53, 56–57, 61, 88, 94, 113, 118, 143, 154, 168n. 6, 10, 174n. 1 Anders, Gunther, 123 Apel, Karl-Otto, 172n. 2 Aristotle, 144 Arrighi, Giovanni, 139 Auden, W. H., 155 Augustine, Saint, 167n. 2 Austen, Jane, 168n. 13

Bowie, Malcolm, 173n. 15 Brecht, Bertolt, 35, 124, 149–59 Brezhnev, Leonid, 13 Brown, Robert M., 168n. 7 Burke, Edmund, 14, 107–08, 113 Burke, Kenneth, 14, 54–55, 156, 171n. 8 Burnham, Clint, 176n. 5 Butler, Judith, 168n. 8 capital-logicians, 108–09, 115, 131–32 Caws, Peter, 172n. 8 Clark, Michael, 173n. 11 Clinton, Bill, 136 Conrad, Joseph, 24, 50, 67, 84, 87, 88, 98 critique, 5–6, 15, 18–19, 39, 41–43, 46, 47–65, 81, 85, 87, 92, 97, 101, 105, 107, 142–44 See also theory

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 22, 158, 169n. 13 Balibar, Étienne, 53 Balzac, Honoré de, 24, 50, 60, 67, 87, 88, 93, 98, 146 Barthes, Roland, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22–25, 27, 28, 29–35, 38, 39, 42–45, 56, 57, 76, 81, 84, 85, 86, 101, 107–08, 112–13, 116, 118, 141, 149, 155–57, 169n. 13, 170n. 6 Bataille, Georges, 168n. 8 Baudelaire, Charles, 18, 28, 33 Baudrillard, Jean, 12, 116, 120, 141, 157 Beckett, Samuel, 116, 131 Bell, Daniel, 101 Bellow, Saul, 148 Benjamin, Walter, 35, 47, 108, 117, 121 Bentham, Jeremy, 53 Bernstein, Charles, 116 Betti, Emilio, 172n. 2 Blake, William, 40, 143 Bloch, Ernst, 47 Bloom, Harold, 22, 35

Debord, Guy, 140 Deleuze, Gilles,10, 15, 26, 64, 68, 71, 106, 110, 111, 137, 141 DeLillo, Don, 148 de Man, Paul, 8, 22, 62–63, 114–15 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 6, 8, 9, 16, 22, 27, 31, 35, 85, 116, 118, 134–36, 140, 141, 145, 147, 157, 169n. 13, 174–75n. 2, 176nn. 5, 7, 177n. 8 dialectic, 7–9, 14, 15, 37, 39, 40–42, 53, 79, 91, 101, 102, 106–09, 111–13, 122, 125, 133, 144 dialectical writing, 2, 4–8, 12–14, 19, 22, 36–37, 40–41, 43, 48–49, 86, 106, 111, 114–15, 122, 136, 139–40, 144, 146–47, 150–51 See also scriptible Dick, Philip K., 96 Dickens, Charles, 84 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 52–53 Doctorow, E. L., 68, 120 179

180


Donougho, Martin, 176n. 2 Dowling, William, 5 Dreiser, Theodore, 16 Durkheim, Émile, 171n. 8 Eagleton, Terry, 3, 117, 121, 122, 145–47, 149, 157, 167n. 1, 169n. 15, 172n. 7, 175nn. 3, 4, 177n. 1 Eisenman, Peter, 134 Eliot, T. S., 6, 10, 73, 84, 152, 153, 157 failure, 2–6, 12–15, 19, 27–28, 34, 35, 37–43, 46, 49, 54, 58, 63, 65, 68, 70–79, 81–82, 83, 88–89, 91–102, 103–25, 128, 130, 132, 135, 138, 139, 142–45, 150–51, 157–58, 169n. 15 failure imperative, 4–5, 8–9, 12–15, 41, 43, 45, 96, 99, 100, 102, 142, 167n. 2 Featherstone, Mike, 174n. 1 Flaubert, Gustave, 16, 30, 171n. 6 Flieger, Jerry Aline, 172n. 6 Fo, Dario, 149 Ford, Ford Madox, 84 Foster, Hal, 169n. 16, 177n. 11 Foucault, Michel, 9, 16, 27, 45, 118, 119, 120, 124, 167n. 2, 171n. 9 Freud, Sigmund, 15, 34, 55, 61, 76, 79, 88, 93, 100, 109, 120, 123, 157, 173n. 10 Frye, Northrop, 6, 50, 85, 86 Fukuyama, Francis, 101, 141 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 26, 51–52, 57, 119, 152, 172n. 4 Gallop, Jane, 62, 173n. 14 genre, 69–71, 83–87, 101 Gide, André, 33 Gissing, George, 24, 87, 88, 98–100, 149 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 147 Gould, Glenn, 16 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 96 Grass, Gunther, 157 Greimas, A. J., 27, 50, 85, 89–91, 109 Gross, David S., 175n. 5 Guattari, Félix, 10, 15, 26, 64, 68, 71, 106, 108, 110, 111, 137 guilt of art, 31–35, 39, 42–43, 92–93, 121, 145 Habermas, Jürgen, 1, 51–52, 172nn. 3, 5 Harding, Sandra, 152 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 167n, 2, 171n. 9 Harvey, David, 119

Hegel G. W. F., 8–13, 15, 18, 33, 34, 38, 39, 53, 55, 61, 63–64, 84, 91, 92, 102, 104, 108, 113, 117, 119, 132, 137, 138, 139–41, 143, 149, 168nn. 6–11, 13, 169n. 14, 171nn. 7, 8, 176n. 6 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 16, 25, 26, 30, 52–53, 63–64, 69, 92, 117,149 Helms, Jesse, 120 hermeneutic, 15, 46, 47–65, 74, 85, 90, 105, 107, 113, 114, 118–21, 124, 128–29, 133–35, 137, 138, 142, 146, 152, 168n. 6 Hertz, Neil, 175n. 5 Homer, Sean, 176n. 2 Hook, Sydney, 168n. 8 Hoover, J. Edgar, 130 Hoy, David Couzens, 172n. 2 Huhn, Thomas, 170n. 2 Huxley, Aldous, 173–74n. 1 Huxley, Thomas, 53 Hyppolite, Jean, 168n. 8 ideology, 8–10, 12–15, 19, 43–44, 46, 50–51, 55–57, 62–64, 67–68, 70, 74, 86–87, 89–93, 95, 101, 102, 108, 133–35, 151, 154, 172–73n. 9 critique of ideology (Ideologiekritik) 46, 51, 54–55, 91–92, 95, 101 Iffland, James, 172n. 1 James, Henry, 84 Jameson, Fredric, works “Actually Existing Marxism,” 127, 131, 136 “The Antinomies of Postmodernity,” 14, 133, 134, 139 “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” 95–96, 101, 104 Brecht and Method, 149–59 “The Brick and the Balloon,” 92, 139 The Cultural Turn, 137–41 “Culture and Finance Capital,” 139 “‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History’?,” 139–40 “The Existence of Italy,” 21, 36, 128–29 Fables of Aggression, 13, 50, 52, 58, 65, 67–82, 83, 88–89, 98, 100, 111, 155, 157 “Figural Relativism; or, the Poetics of Historiography,” 53 “Foreword” to A. J. Greimas, On Meaning, 55, 90 The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 127, 129–30, 138 “The Ideology of the Text,” 11, 21, 23, 25, 44, 54, 105, 151

INDEX

“Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” 54, 59, 60 Late Marxism, 18, 30, 35–36, 41, 96, 131, 136, 150 Marxism and Form, 13, 14, 24, 35–38, 41, 44, 47, 48, 50, 108, 111, 113, 118, 149, 150, 152 “Marxism and Postmodernism,” 138–39 “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” 127, 134–36 “Metacommentary,” 47, 52, 54, 118, 130 “Periodizing the 1960s,” 97, 120 “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” 25, 44, 107–09, 111–12, 121, 141, 152 The Political Unconscious, 5, 8, 13, 26, 41, 47, 48, 50, 52, 55, 58–62, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 82, 83–102, 105, 111, 113, 118, 119, 122, 130, 131, 133, 138, 139, 142, 143, 146 “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 137–38, 156 “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Capitalism,” 14, 102, 103–25, 137–38, 142, 152 Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Capitalism, 25, 30, 32, 35, 49, 55, 58, 65, 103–25, 128, 129, 131, 133, 135, 136, 137–38, 139, 142 The Prison-House of Language, 13, 24, 28, 31, 34, 44, 47, 49, 52, 54, 59, 60, 69, 81, 118, 150 “Reflections on the Brecht-Lukacs Debate,” 158 Sartre, 1, 21–25, 27, 50, 55, 83, 98, 149 Seeds of Time, 119, 127, 130–34, 138 Signatures of the Visible, 16, 36, 127–29, 138, 141 “Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity,” 139–41 “The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller,” 10, 90 Jay, Martin, 176n. 6 Jeremiah, 158 Joyce, James, 84–85, 147, 152 Kant, Immanuel, 9, 13, 14, 15, 49–50, 57, 102, 113, 133, 139, 140–41, 156, 169n. 14 Kaplan, E. Ann, 177n. 12 Kaufmann, Walter, 168n. 8 Kellner, Douglas, 168n. 12 Kenner, Hugh, 73 Kline, Franz, 16

181

Kojève, Alexandre, 168n. 8 Koolhaas, Rem, 134 Lacan, Jacques, 14, 15, 22, 26, 29, 33, 46, 52, 59–65, 73, 92–93, 106, 110–13, 116, 131, 141, 150, 157, 173nn. 12–13 Laing, R. D., 110 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry, 16, 177n. 12 Lenin, Vladimir I., 77, 79, 167n. 6 Lentricchia, Frank, 45, 171n. 9 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 9, 33, 56, 57, 61, 85, 88, 90, 91, 124, 141, 172–73nn. 8–10 Lewis, Wyndham, 15, 16, 25–26, 30, 35, 51, 63, 67–82, 88–89, 98, 100, 150, 155, 156, 157, 158, 173n. 1 Lindbergh, Charles A., 155 Lucian, 159 Lukács, Georg, 11, 13, 27, 47, 50, 84, 145, 152, 156, 169n. 14 Lynch, Kevin, 119 Lyotard, Jean-François, 9, 11, 26, 76, 110, 111, 116, 119, 170n. 3, 173n. 13 Macherey, Pierre, 53 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 173n. 14 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 123, 124 Makdisi, Saree, 177n. 9 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 118, 168n. 6 Mann, Paul, 116 Mann, Thomas, 157 Marcuse, Herbert, 9, 12, 27, 47, 50, 168n. 8, 169n. 14 Marinetti, F. T., 25 Marx, Karl, 2, 11, 49, 53, 57, 91, 104, 113, 117, 118, 138, 142, 146, 153, 158–59, 177n. 2 Marxism, 2–3, 23, 49, 51, 53, 60, 87–88, 131, 152 Mehlman, Jeffrey, 117 Melville, Stephen, 171n. 7 Mendel, Gregor, 85 Mendeleev, Dmitri Ivanovich, 85 Michaels, Walter Benn, 114–15 Moretti, Franco, 145 Morrison, Toni, 148 Moseley, Henry Gwyn Jeffreys, 85 Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt, 172n. 2 narrative, 10, 58, 68–80, 82, 87–93, 106, 114, 119, 129, 133, 135 Nietsche, Friedrich, 40, 44, 55, 61, 99–100

182


Olson, Charles, 119 O’Neill, John, 171n. 8, 176n. 7 Ortega y Gasset, José, 115, 157 parody/pastiche, 25, 29, 109–10, 129, 132, 156 Pascal, Blaise, 152 pastiche, See parody/pastiche Paul, Saint, 22 phenomenology, 6, 8, 23, 24, 46, 52–53, 55, 57, 83, 90, 114, 119, 138–39, 172n. 8 Plato, 26, 29 Platonov, Andrei, 134 Popper, Karl, 117 post-Marxism, 12, 95, 101, 106, 108, 174n. 2 poststructuralism, 6, 29, 31, 52–54, 114, 120 Pound, Ezra, 38, 40, 152, 153 Propp, Vladimir, 90 Reagan, Ronald, 13, 96, 100 Ree, Jonathan, 168–69n. 13 Retamar, Roberto Fernandez, 167n. 5 Ricoeur, Paul, 26, 51, 57, 119, 170nn. 1, 5, 172nn. 2, 4 Rifflet-Lemaire, Anika, 173n. 15 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 30 Rorty, Richard, 145–47, 177n. 13 Rossi, Aldo, 134 Russell, Bertrand, 53 Sade, Marquis de, 33 Sapir, Edward, 40 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8, 12, 15, 21–25, 28, 31, 33, 34, 35, 46, 47, 50, 53, 55, 69, 87, 100, 104, 115, 149, 157, 168n. 8, 169n. 14, 170–71n. 6, 172n. 8 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 60 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 12 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 53, 119 Schoenberg, Arnold, 39, 42 scriptible, 16–19, 21–28, 32, 35, 43–45, 47, 51, 52, 58, 62–65, 67–68, 75, 79, 83–84, 86, 102, 104–05, 112–13, 115, 118, 144–45, 150, 155, 157, 158, 170n. 6 Shaw, George Bernard, 76, 78, 173n. 1 Shklovsky, Viktor, 153 Shumway, David, 172n. 4 Simon, Claude, 68, 114, 120 Soja, Ed, 119 Sontag, Susan, 10, 15, 118, 137 space, spatiality, 58, 90, 114, 119, 133, 137

Spencer, Herbert, 53 Spengler, Oswald, 157 Spinoza, Baruch, 94 Sprinker, Michael, 171n. 1 Stalin, Josef, 151, 152 Stravinski, Igor, 39, 42 Stendhal, Henri Beyle, 38 Stevens, Wallace, 143 structuralism, 6, 13, 24, 29–35, 46, 52–56, 74, 120, 172n. 8 sublime, 2, 8, 9, 11, 14–16, 45, 65, 102, 103–25, 127–43, 146–48, 150, 152, 156, 174–75n. 2 Swift, Jonathan, 152 Szasz, Thomas, 110 Tafuri, Manfredo, 12, 101, 139, 174n. 2 Tatlow, Anthony, 154 Thatcher, Margaret, 13, 96 theory, 5–6, 11–12, 45, 50, 57, 61, 62, 105, 110, 116, 140–44, 147–48, 151, 153–55, 157 See also critique Trilling, Lionel, 100 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 141 utopia, 8, 11–13, 15, 19, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 43–46, 57, 68, 70, 86, 89, 92–93, 102, 121, 131–32, 141–42, 152, 154, 156–57, 171n. 8, 176n. 7 Venturi, Robert, 134 Vico, Giambattista, 113 Warhol, Andy, 110, 169n. 15 Weber, Max, 10, 53 Weber, Samuel, 173n. 15 Weiskel, Thomas, 122, 175n. 5 White, Hayden, 54–55, 151 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 107 Whorf, Benjamin, 40 Wordsworth, William, 18 Worringer, Wilhelm, 115 Yeghiayan, Eddie, 167n. 4 Young, Robert, 171n. 1 Ziarek, Ewa Plonawska, 167n. 2 Zizek, Slavoj, 9, 61, 174n. 2 Zuidervaart, Lambert, 176n. 3

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Valences of the Dialectic

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