American cultural critic Jameson, Fredric’s term for his comparative analysis of what he calls theoretical discourses or codes, such as deconstruction, structuralism, post-structuralism, and so on. He suggests that the key issue to be decided is what kinds of thoughts and ideas are possible in one theoretical code and not another and what the relative advantages and disadvantages of each code are in consequence. By the same token, this comparative viewpoint itself implies still another code that is itself ‘untranscendable’ to use Jameson’s famous description of Marxism from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981). See also metacommentary.