The Jameson Arras

In good dialectical fashion, the eulogies preceded the death, with no one knowing that was what they were writing. In the spring we all marveled at and toasted Fredric Jameson’s 90^th year, his six-odd decades of writing: Verso ran a whole series of blog posts; a few major publications took note. No one spoiled the fun by wondering how many more times we would do this. With his death on September 22 we find ourselves, so soon, (re)considering Jameson, for the first time, in past tense.

There are more personal tributes and better accountings of the whole oeuvre readily available—I won’t try to offer those here. If a biography of Jameson is ever to be undertaken and done properly, it would also have to be a history of the American academy from WWII until the present day and the political-economic and ideological forces that have made and unmade it. But, briefly: it should be noted that Jameson was among the first to write—in English—about the great Marxist thinkers of the first half of the 20^th century, primarily due to the fact that he could read them at a time when they had not yet been translated into English. Unbounded by the provincialism of American English departments (which he managed to remain outside of throughout his career), this made him among the first to encounter and import to this country the continental philosophy of Europe that would come to be called “theory”—or Theory, depending on how much you want to frighten your reader—and from his debut in 1961, Sarte: The Origins of a Style, to this month’s The Years of Theory his engagement with these philosophers remained a constant. An ungenerous commentator would, if pressed, probably have to credit him with at least three field-making books: Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, and Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Of course, he managed to seemingly read everything, too, and still find time for movies and architecture and music and teaching (among the most affecting tributes have been those attesting to his care and generosity as a teacher).

It has been much remarked upon that Jameson kept the faith, as it were (and maybe those religious overtones should not be downplayed), for a Marxism that from the late 1970s until the financial crisis of 2008 seemed dead and decomposing further with each passing day. Even as Theory took the left both Old and New as a punching bag through its “high” decades of the 80s and 90s, Jameson remained firm. His claim at the end of the day was that dialectical, Marxist (or, let’s pull it from the mothballs and take it out for a spin again in our ever less-fresh air: communist) analysis was the only one broad enough to include everything, and the only one agile enough to analyze that same totality, but he did not reject out of hand the critical-theoretical challenges to Marxism that sprouted up in the academy and elsewhere (a courtesy not usually returned): he took these thinkers to task and in doing so incorporated their analysis into his capacious dialectic. This principle—that one must work one’s way entirely through the best version of a given theory—is, to those who are familiar with Capital in particular, Marx’s as well.

In an ironic reversal, the prospects of Western Marxism and the American academy have seemingly swapped places since Jameson first published his study of the former. And yet some have lamented the fact that the world that produced Jameson seems irrevocable. But to speak of a Jameson Era—stretching across his six decades and casting his shadow no less immensely than Hugh Kenner’s version of Ezra Pound—is something of a misunderstanding. Jameson himself should be historicized in the way he called on all critics to: historicization not as container, not as a sanitation practice, but as the recognition of points in a process. If Fredric Jameson was only possible in the conditions of a post-war U.S., the spicket fully spewing imperial largess all over the place, even onto and into its institutions of higher education, then there is a maybe a moment of despair as one compares those conditions of the Eisenhower years to now: so much has changed. But so much has changed! We, for one, have the almost unbelievably capacious body of work by Fredric Jameson that we can now draw on, and that of his students, and that of his student’s students, etc. To treat Jameson as a miracle of the historical process is a mistake—equally so to treat him as its mere byproduct, one that can be left behind.

Jameson once wrote regarding the Marxist theorist György Lukács that “classification determines readership.” By this he meant that Lukács’ range as a thinker (and, of course, his politics) played havoc with his reception in the West; it was “uneven”. Perhaps the same cannot be said of Jameson: the remembrances and tributes that have come flooding in the wake of his death attest to his preeminent place in literary, cultural, and political theory (not to mention film and architecture—and this, again, is not to speak of his reception and influence outside the West), but there is in some of these a note (sometimes dissonant, at other times harmonic) of apology, a sheepishness when faced with summing up a career and a life made in letters: something like it’s a shame about the sentences, though. This attitude results in a perverse unevenness, whereby Jameson is appreciated as a towering figure for all but the writing.

For his sentences he remains something like infamous—“winning” not once, but twice, the braindead academic game called the Bad Writing Award—but I stand by a claim I made once that he is one of the greatest living prose writers in English; now, he is one of the greatest amongst our dead. It is something of a cliché to point out that we allow the physicist and the biologist their technical language without complaint, but that uproar always occurs when the so-called humanists appear to write for any but the broadest of publics; to defend Jameson as a gnostic or mere specialist would be to reduce him or, worse, to fundamentally misapprehend his project, which finds its base expression at the level of the sentence. To think two opposing things at once is difficult enough—and is, as Scott Fitzgerald had it, the mark of no less than genius—but to think everything at once, and then to say it: this is the mission of dialectical criticism, and such a criticism demands much of the language used to communicate it, language that, though inherently bound in its chains of event, must come to the brink of bursting forth with all its insight all at once.

Jameson’s work could be by turns grammatically baroque—not unlike, say, László Krasznahorkai—and pithily aphoristic. Like how his claim “Always historicize!” is followed by an immediate recognition—buried in an em-dashed aside—that such a directive was, of course, itself transhistorical. Or take one of the sentences, from Signatures of the Visible, that earned him the Bad Writing award:

The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer).

Forget, for a moment, that the pair of semicolons keep things well-separated and more than sensible; forget even how the rhythmic and sonic qualities of “rapt, mindless, fascination” echo the process of slipping into the very state described (or how the near-rhyme of “repress” with “excess” forms the imperative of the austere films described); if one still loses the thread by the end of this sentence for reasons of grammar or vocabulary there is, aside from the dictionary, that key function of all writing longer than a single sentence: the next one. And here it is to offer a resolution to the claims of its partner: “Pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body.” The initial claim is brought to its furthest point and resolved in an image: the world (objectified) as a naked body.

Take another of Jameson’s aphorisms: “History is what hurts.” This arrives amid the final paragraph of the first chapter of The Political Unconscious in which he reformulates the famous Marx passage about men not making history as they please and seems also to suggest this History as something like the Lacanian notion of the Real: a thing we can only know through its effects. This is to say that it’s a complex passage that concludes the opening essay (and with all this talk of books, it is worth mentioning that Jameson was really a prolific essayist above all, his books being often collections of works across decades brought into a new, dare I say, almost novelistic relation of concepts), but that the aphorism that’s passed around encapsulates this with the force of poetic compression; again, we could attend to the sonic and rhythmic qualities, but they are here more apparent than in the previous passage, and it is here that one can begin to glimpse the Jameson of whom Edward Said claimed was “in his way a poet.”

I belabor this literary reading because it is a reflection of the method as we move outward, through the layers and levels of each piece of writing until we have the whole of Jameson’s life’s work in our scope. To appreciate the sentences requires us to move through them with patience and respect for the spatial-temporal limitations of the written word—while appreciating it’s possibilities for repetition, reversal, and rhythm—in order not to settle for surfaces, and this is replicated at the highest conceptual level of Jameson’s work: to look at the world of shallow so-called common sense—of the “natural,” dehistoricized world—and show how it is not commonsensical, natural, or beyond history: to find the things behind things behind things—an arras pulled back to reveal not a wall, but a passageway.

This, anyway, is the generous pedagogy of the works as I, a mere reader, receive them. This is their “usefulness”—a term of praise Jameson applied to Brecht—useful both in the way they illuminate the world capitalism has made and its own betrayals: the simultaneous presence of reification and utopia in the most exalted or degraded artifacts of our time. Jameson’s appraisal of Brecht might also serve as a means by which we can begin to appreciate the Jameson-beyond-Jameson. Like his imperative to historicize, Jameson’s insistence on finding utopia’s glimmers everywhere might strike us as simplistic, not so far off from Brecht’s “vulgar Marxism” or “crude thought”. But Jameson argues in Brecht and Method that this constitutes the essence of Brecht’s “well-known slyness that is his method, and even his dialectic: the inversion of the hierarchies of a problem, major premise passing to minor, absolute to relative, form to content.” Such operations turn the “dilemma in question . . . inside out,” opening up “unexpected” and “unforeseeable lines of attack.” This is Jameson’s pedagogy.

And then there is the generosity, the overcoming of the individual. Jameson notes that when we talk about Brecht, we also talk of “Brecht,” which is, as he puts it, “the place of collective work as such,” of individuality ascended into a collaborative subject. The excitement of the plural Brecht is “the promise and example of a utopian cooperation, down to the very details of those literary sentences which our tradition has attempted to reserve as the last refuges of true creation and individual genius.” The collective spirit of Jameson is less literal than that of Brecht’s stage, but requires even more collaborators: other readers and writers brought into a project whose utopian fulfillment (the “untranscendable horizon,” as Jameson wrote, of Marxism toward which it must inexorably move) is unbounded by individual genius. Such a world is the only one in which what Jameson writes in The Seeds of Time becomes legible; that world “obliges us to confront the most terrifying dimension of our humanity, at least for the individualism of modern, bourgeois people, and that is our species being, our insertion in the great chain of the generations, which we know as death. Utopia is inseparable from death in that its serenity gazes calmly and implacably away from the accidents of individual existence and the inevitability of its giving way: in this sense it might even be said that Utopia solves the problem of death, by inventing a new way of looking at individual death, as a matter of limited concern, beyond all stoicism.”

Perhaps something more grounded is needed, for now. In the late 60s, Jameson and some colleagues started the Marxist Literary Group, which exists to this day, and which, every year, holds a summer institute. In Bruce Boone’s novel Century of Clouds—an account, in part, of the early iterations of this summer gathering—Jameson cuts a contradictory figure: the droning lecturer whose pontifications Boone zones out to sits alongside the relaxed figure in cowboy garb at the karaoke bar. Boone does not shy away from the contentious arguments of the period involving himself and Jameson, in which they often were opposed, but thanks him in the end for having taught Boone to perform “both thinking and feeling, the two together.” What I found when I attended this year—my first, and the group’s 55^th—was a collegial and brilliant atmosphere, welcoming and rigorous, as concerned with the vagaries of the value form as it was with demonstrating material solidarity with the Palestine encampment at the university down the street from where the conference was held. Four or five generations of Marxists were gathered in collective struggle: arguing over some of the old things, some of the new things; sometimes one disguising itself as the other. The impression was that everything is important, and if everything is important, then it will take everyone to understand it.

There is a joke I sometimes tell; it is not particularly funny: I say that I write fiction rather than literary criticism because every time I think I have an original literary-critical thought it turns out that Jameson had it first and, usually, before I was even born. And of course he wrote it better than I ever could. It’s the sort of self-deprecation that comes easily—not “naturally”—to people from my part of the country. Aside from not being particularly funny, it makes the mistake of false modesty, and also the mistake of exceptionalizing Jameson as an oracle or mystic, but reading Jameson is not like climbing up the mountain to the Temple of Apollo and being told the final word, though we might approach with a question anyway: what is it we want from art, from literature, from life; to whom does it belong? The answer, reading Jameson, is that we must want everything for everybody, and that it is possible for this desire to be fulfilled.

Ian Maxton is a communist writer and critic. His work has been published in Always Crashing, Boston Review, Protean, and elsewhere.