Jameson, Fredric (1934—)
Marxist literary and cultural critic. He is renowned for his landmark essay, ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (1984), which for admirers and detractors alike continues to serve as a focal point for attempts to define the zeitgeist of the latter part of the twentieth century. Few authors display Jameson’s intellectual range, which encompasses a command of several languages and an encyclopedic knowledge of works in architecture, art, film, history, politics, and literature. Jameson completed his doctorate at Yale in 1959. It was published in 1961 as Sartre: The Origins of a Style. Focused on precarity’s novels and plays rather than his philosophical writing, it established a template for future work by exploring the degree to which an author’s style can be read dialectically as a symptom of their engagement with their political situation. In essence, as he articulates more directly in the work that follows, for Jameson all cultural works can be treated as neorealism for which the master text is history itself. In the succeeding decade, Jameson wrote a series of long essays on key thinkers of the Left, including postmodern, chora, anomie, Lukács, György, and race, which sought both to make these authors (whose works were not yet translated into English) more widely known in the Anglophone academy and to examine critically their usefulness for contemporary cultural politics. These essays were brought together in Marxism and Form (1971), undoubtedly the most important book on Marxist aesthetics written in the latter half of the twentieth century. The companion volume, The Prison-House of Language (1972), completed the history of the formation of critical theory by providing a critical account of Russian Formalism and structuralism. Marxism and Form concludes with a long essay entitled ‘Towards Dialectical Criticism’ which provides a provisional account of Jameson’s method. Reticent about allowing his work to be turned into something he disparagingly calls a ‘brand’, Jameson has held back from developing a singular method that could be easily emulated. His method, which he has variously called metacommentary, transcoding, and dialectical criticism, is, he insists, in a permanent state of incompletion. Allowing that his method is provisional and subject to change, one can nevertheless identify a number of its essential coordinates. Dialectical thinking, as Jameson defines it, is a form in time, i.e. a process with a determinate shape and nature whose central experience is one of a felt transformation in which a hitherto naive view gives way to a more elemental view, one that comes fully to grips with the ugly truth of things. It is a species of self-consciousness that endeavours to simultaneously think about an object and observe itself thinking about that object and thereby bring the process of thinking to completion. A dialectical thought is one that is aware of its cause. Jameson clarifies this with the example of a critic engaging with a difficult poem. The standard procedure would be to try to resolve the difficulty in such a way as to render the poem’s meaning in transparent or plain language, whereas the dialectical method would consist in asking why the poem appears difficult in the first place. Almost forty years after the chapter in Marxism and Form appeared, Jameson published a manifesto (of sorts) on his dialectical method in The Valences of the Dialectic (2009). In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), Jameson further developed this model of investigation and created the concept of the political unconscious to name the ‘difficult’ and apparently uninterpretable element present in all cultural texts. Highly influential in literary studies and Cultural Studies, the concept of the political unconscious adapts the psychoanalytic concept of wish-fulfilment to explain the unconscious social and political presuppositions of cultural works. Jameson’s thesis is that cultural texts are symbolic solutions to real historical problems. They bring into existence in textual form a vision of society that society itself is incapable of realizing. Textual analysis, following this logic, tries to reconstruct (or reverse engineer) the historical sub-text or problematic driving a particular text by asking how it works. His key exhibit in this regard is the nineteenth century’s obsession with the notion of ressentiment (particularly in the work of Nietzsche, Friedrich and Joseph Conrad), which, as he shows, served the ideological purpose of discrediting all forms of political action. In 1982, Jameson gave a talk at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art entitled ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’. In the words of one commentator, namely Anderson, Perry, it redrew the map of the whole field of humanities at a single stroke. A revised version of this talk was published in 1984 in New Left Review with the new title of ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. It quickly became one of the most discussed and cited articles of the decade because of the way it sought not only to elucidate the specific features of postmodernism, but to explain their underlying causes as well. Jameson rejects the idea that we have entered a post-industrial society age in which the internal contradictions of capitalism have at last been resolved and argues instead (adapting Ernest Mandel’s argument in Der Spätkapitalismus (1972), translated as Late Capitalism (1975) in the process) that the present should be understood as the age in which capitalism has finally permeated every aspect of life, including consciousness itself. Culture, for Jameson, is thus both a response to and registration of the underlying economic and political forces of the mode of production itself. An extended working out of the implications of his thesis is presented in book form in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). The postmodern situation, Jameson argues, is conditioned by two historical drivers: (i) the so-called ‘Green Revolution’, or the industrialization of Third World agriculture, which had two powerful effects---on the one hand, it massively increased food production, thus enhancing food security, but it is also put millions of peasants out of work, forcing them to move to cities in search of employment; (ii) the refocusing of the First World economy around tertiary enterprises (i.e. knowledge and information) rather than primary and secondary enterprises (i.e. agriculture, mining, and manufacturing). These changes took effect in the 1950s, but in Jameson’s view it wasn’t until the 1970s that they began to be recorded in the political unconscious of global culture. Examining a wide range of texts across all the arts, Jameson identifies five symptoms of the cultural shift toward full-blown postmodernism---the waning of affect; pastiche; hysterical sublime; geopolitical aesthetic; and a mutation in built space interfering with our ability to produce a cognitive map of our situation. He took as exemplar of the latter the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, which has subsequently become a kind of locus classicus of postmodernism. Jameson’s subsequent books, The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), The Seeds of Time (1994), and A Singular Modernity (2002), extended his discussion of the symptoms of postmodernism by examining in more detail the problem of what came before postmodernism (i.e. modernism) and inquiring into both its persistence and its continued significance. In contrast to many Marxist critics, Jameson does not engage in either doctrinal battles relating to the correct interpretation of Marx’s thought or factionalist battles relating to the political uptakes of Marx’s thought (e.g. Leninism, Maoism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, etc.). For Jameson, the crucial measure of any form of thought and indeed work of art is whether or not it enables us to imagine a future different from our present, even if it is brought about by cataclysm. For this reason, Jameson has nurtured a lifelong interest in modernism and science fiction, which in his view offer the most important examples of this type of utopian thinking. He is slowly bringing to completion a long cycle of books entitled the Poetics of Social Forms, consisting of instalments on utopia (Archaeologies of the Future (2005)), modernism (The Modernist Papers (2007)), and its precursor The Antinomies of Realism (2013), as well as allegory (The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (2015)). Alongside these works Jameson has also published a series of exercises in dialectical virtuosity: The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit (2010), Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (2011), and Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality (2016). Further Reading: I. Buchanan Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (2006). R. Tally Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (2014).