Notes on Fredric Jameson

A few young political Activists interested in the struggle for social transformation in Bangla-desh were talking about Jameson and his work the other day. In my very recent conversations with those supposedly "Marxist" activists, it became immediately apparent that they felt the need for making Jameson's work available in Bengali-particularly Jameson's Marxism and Form. Indeed, the need for translating many important works into Bengali is a crucial one, but one of my colleagues, who is also a committed political activist, raised his eyebrows and his questions together: Who is Jameson? And is Jameson at all important for those of us working at the grassroots level? Here I intend to respond to those questions, of course very briefly. In fact, my purpose here is to touch upon some of Jameson's important works that have been both consumed and contested in the West today.

Fredric Jameson was born in 1934 and is presently teaching English at Duke University in the United States. Interested in both Vico and video, in both Adorno and Tarantino, or in both China and the United States, Jameson is considered as one of the foremost Marxist literary and cultural critics writing in English today. Continuously under attack from the contemporary left of various persuasions (poststructuralists-postmodernists-postcolonialists including Marxists, neo-marxists and post-marxists, for instance) and certainly also from the right, Jameson himself tirelessly launches his kind of counter-attack on contemporary theoretical issues and concerns (Jameson's recent and repeated response to Derrida's newly designed deconstructionist Marxism is, indeed, a case in point). Both Terry Eagleton and Aijaz Ahmad-the two noted Marxists writing today from two different locations, namely Britain and India-have meanwhile justly realized that Jameson is perhaps the only American Marxist who has been under most severe attack, indeed for a long time, by the left and the right alike, although both Eagleton and Ahmad themselves, in their own ways, had already taken Jameson to task.

In other words, Jameson is one of the most talked-about Marxist literary and cultural theorists writing today-a theorist who can certainly provoke and cannot be simply ignored. Exemplifying his almost unswerving commitment to Marxism, Jameson ranges freely within the zodiac of his own interests (although his free-ranging discursive engagements cannot be characterized as "purposelessly eclectic," given his interest in synthesis and system-building even in the very system-allergic postmodernist spaces), and his range is no doubt impressively wide. But Jameson was not certainly a Marxist while he was a doctoral student at Yale. In fact, his writing career began with his study of Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist. Jameson's first book called Sartre: The Origins of a Style was based on his doctoral dissertation and was published in 1961. Preoccupations with Sartre's stylistic and rhetorical resources, a la Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, are evident in this book on Sartre, when Jameson was yet to ask that very crucial question-Is not "style" itself political and ideological?

But then Jameson asked the above question, among many others, while decisively turning against the dominant and conventional modes of literary criticism in his seminal work called Marxism and Form, published in 1970. Neatly divided into five chapters, this very book attempts to envisage and evolve certain versions of a Marxist hermeneutic through Jameson's sustained and unusually provocative readings of such "Marxists" as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Georg Lukács. Moreover, in this book, Jameson does not abandon his Sartre at all but only rigorously engages him. In his reading of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Jameson, for instance, shows us in a new light how Sartre's own attempt to "see himself" turns out to be an attempt to see "his own class from the outside," or an attempt to see "through the concrete class antagonisms of history." Jameson then concludes by saying that "working his way down through the layers of ideological mystification, through the sub-strata of fetishized cultural institutions, Sartre attains the ultimate and determining reality of social being." Thus, clearly, Jameson's emphases on class, on historical location(s) and site(s), on the dialectic of the self and the social being decisively replaced the earlier Jamesonian-Spitzerian kinds of microscopic neo-stylistic exercises that one abundantly finds in Sartre: The Origins of a Style.

But I find Marxism and Form significant for two other reasons. First, in its last chapter called "Towards Dialectical Criticism," Jameson succesfully accomplishes the task of evolving a Marxian mode of criticism that engages literary and cultural texts in terms of their physical-material situatedness-in terms of their mode of production that is not at all dissociated from, but is profoundly implicated in, the active and interactive forces of history. In other words, with Marxism and Form, Jameson succeeds in playing a historical role as a theorist by introducing a tradition of dialectical Marxist literary theory to the English-speaking world. Indeed, somewhat earlier, Jameson deeply realized that the American theory absolutely lacked what he calls "the dialectical habit of thinking," and it is with this very realization that Jameson turned to Marxism at that point of time in history. Now, the second significant aspect of Marxism and Form seems to reside in Jameson's apparently marginal note on the possible-and certainly underdeveloped-theoretical links between Mao Tse-Tung and Gramsci. Indeed, this note, rather a clever hint, has often been lost sight of by numerous Jameson-critics, while the Mao-Gramsci connections in the context of historical-materialist cultural critiques have been profitably explored only recently in Chinese cultural studies. One need, for instance, look only at the most recent issue of New Literary History devoted exclusively to the topic of "Chinese Cultural Studies and the West."While Jameson's real Marxist cultural criticism began in the early seventies, his other Marxist works include The Prison-House of Language (1972), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) and Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). He has also several volumes of essays, the most notable ones among them being The Ideologies of Theory (1988) and Signatures of the Visible (1991). He has also a book on Adorno called Late Marxism (1990) and a book on film and visual culture called The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992).

Given Jameson's wide range of engagements in his books somewhat randomly listed above, it is virtually impossible to deal with all of them, even briefly, within my space-limit here. I will, therefore, only quickly touch upon some significant trajectories of Jameson's two works which I find crucially important for a number of reasons that I will state later. These two works include The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

As was already indicated, Jameson is interested not only in literary criticism but also in diverse cultural studies that embrace science fiction, film, magical narratives, painting, and even architecture. But what particularly characterizes Jameson, despite his diversity of concerns, is his unmistakable penchant for "theoretical synthesis"-an inclination that Jameson seems to inherit from the Hegelian tradition of Marxism itself. Douglas Kellner, perhaps the most notable Jameson-critic writing today, justly observes that "Jameson's theoretical synthesis is most systematically presented in The Political Unconscious." Now this very notion of "the political unconscious" that Jameson envisages and engages in terms of various cultural productions is inspired and informed by certain Lukácsian insights. Indeed, Jameson, almost in the manner of Lukács, engages the entire history of literary and cultural forms-and also modes of subjectivity-in an attempt to show how a given narrative, for instance, can be excavated and re-excavated to the extent that it can reveal certain "buried" or "concealed" forms and narratives that further reveal what Jameson calls "the political unconscious." Indeed, thus begins Jameson's massive hermeneutical project which, as Kellner further points out, "boldly attempts to establish Marxist literary criticism as the most all-inclusive and comprehensive theoretical framework." The notion of "the political unconscious," understandably, has meanwhile inspired many political readings of various cultural forms and texts, establishing Jameson as a master of a "double hermeneutic" of ideology and utopia, a hermeneutic that digs up buried forms and also critiques ideology but does not dispense with utopian moments which are, in fact, preserved to the end. In fact, with The Political Unconscious, Jameson has done important work in making it more difficult for conservatives to mask their political interpretations as neutral, commonsensical, transcendental, or purely aesthetic, and in making oppositional voices a part of the curriculum.

Now to move on from Jameson's "double hermeneutic" to his work on "postmodernism" is to face that very familiar debate on the "postmodern condition" itself-a debate which is still continuing in the metropolis. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is also a massive work of cultural criticism in which Jameson's provocative thesis is that "postmodernism" is nothing less than the "cultural dominant" corresponding to and aiding the (re)production of "late capitalism." For Jameson, in other words, "postmodernism" is the culture that emerges from mass-mediated, multi-national capitalist production, a culture he reads as a virtually seamless web of hegemonic form. He argues, therefore, that "every position on postmodernism in culture...is also and necessarily an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capital."But there are many theorists and critics, located both in the metropolis and outside it, who do not-and would not-underwrite Jameson's homogenizing, macro-narrative of "postmodernism" envisaged as the cultural/superstructural logic of the base called "late capitalism," because there are reasons to believe that "postmodernism" is not a universal, monolithic, homogeneous category always neatly explainable in terms of a linearist model of the base-superstructure relationship (Marx's base-superstructure paradigm, however, is much more complex and much more both alinearly and disruptively dialectical than some Marxists have possibly imagined). Also, one has reasons to believe that numerous, conflicting versions of postmodernism are still being produced from different spaces with different political vectors and valences. Yet, while looking at this scene of differences and correspondences, one can easily recognize the fact (here Jameson will prove particularly useful) that there are certainly some, if not all, versions of postmodernism which bear the ideological traces of what Jameson calls, invoking Mandel, "late capitalism."Although we have so for engaged issues and concerns from Jameson's work extremely selectively and inadequately, it is not difficult to realize at this point that Jameson's "double hermeneutic" cannot be uncritically or unproblematically appropriated in our context, nor can that hermeneutic be uncritically dismissed. Certainly, Jameson's context is radically different from ours, and Jameson's kind of Marxism is predominantly Hegelian-Lukacsian in nature, while the tradition of such Marxism is virtually absent in our parts of the world (we are used, for instance, to Leninist-Maoist kinds of Marxism).

But, then, Jamesonian Marxism can, to an extent, provide an effective hermeneutic in the service of a global anti-imperialist struggle; while, again, that hermeneutic, howsoever clever and tactful, will surely fail to interpret what can be called "local knowledges." Moreover, for our understanding of what is going on at the discursive-ideological levels in the metropolis, and for our understanding of certain versions of postmodernism and late capitalism today, Jameson can certainly be used positively. But then I see at least two immediate dangers with regard to Jameson's "Marxism" and his hermeneutical methodologies. Firstly, they run the risk of homogenizing the diversity and complexity of issues and sites of struggles (Aijaz Ahmad's critique of Jameson was precisely directed against the latter's homogenizing hermeneutic) and, more importantly, they (Jamesonian methodologies and agenda) are almost blind to issues of gender and race (indeed, the most crucial challenge for any kind of Marxism today is how it addresses and accommodates issues of gender and race side-by-side with the issue of class). Secondly, to remind ourselves of Gramsci, Marxism without "organizations" only tends to be nothing but academic hot air, and Jamesonian Marxism-and by extension, academic American Marxism-suffers from "its relative isolation from any concrete political struggle."