17. Fredric Jameson¹

[1 The key for Jameson  citations is: IT: “The Ideology of the Text” (1975-76); MF: Marxism and Form (1971); PL: The Prisonhouse of Language (1972); and PU: The Political Unconscious (1982).]

        Whereas our other critics typically disregard Marxism (e.g., Culler, Bloom) or else stake out their own position against it (e.g., Fiedler, Jauss), Fredric Jameson makes Marxism the centre for critiquing or reformulating all other positions. He continually sets literature and criticism into motions that illustrate the movements he defines for the Marxist modeling of thought. In the process, familiar issues and theories are recontextualized in fresh ways that might regenerate their critical potential and their relevance for an analysis of society at large.

        Jameson rates Marxism above any “philosophy which does not include within itself a theory of its own particular situation,” an “essential self-consciousness along with the consciousness” of its “object” (PL 207). Although he doesn't “defend Marxism as the most suitable and all-embracing orthodoxy” for “literary critics,” he “thinks such a defense might well be made” (MF 321). “Marxism” can “claim to be an interdisciplinary and universal science” by accessing “textual and interpretive problems” not only in “cultural studies,” but also in “philosophy,” “political science, anthropology, legal studies,” and “economics” (PU 37f.)

        “Marxism subsumes other interpretive modes or systems”; “the limits of the latter can always be overcome, and their more positive findings retained, by a radical historicizing of their mental operations” so as to include “the content of the analysis,” “the method,” and “the analyst” within “the “text” or phenomenon to be explained” (PU 47). “Only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism”: the “double bind between antiquarianism and modernising “relevance” (PU 18f.) “Marxism” retells” history “within the unity of a single great collective story” based on “a single fundamental theme”: “the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity” (PU 19).

        Jameson  is anxious to deflect commonplace, old-fashioned, or rigid conceptions of Marxism. He strongly repudiates “vulgar Marxism,” alternately called “economism” or “orthodox” or “classical” “Marxism,”² [2. The equation between these terms is made by  indexing “economism” under “Marxism,” (MF 429); compare also MF 221f, 292f. Still, Jameson  uses the “economic” in many ways, such as a means to “approach the concrete” (MF 322)], namely the doctrine of “'ultimately determining instance” of the economic” (PU 32). In that “theory of levels,” the “base or infrastructure” (alternate translations for Marx's German word “Basis”) is constituted by “the economic” or the “mode of production,” and the “superstructure” (Marx's “Überbau”) by “culture” and “ideology,” along with the “legal” and “political” systems. “The conception of class interest supplies the functional link between a superstructural symptom or category and its “ultimately determining” reality in the base” (PU 33).

      This model is suspected of “allegorical” or “idealistic” overtones: it “translates” the “concrete” into the “abstract” and takes “the cultural text” as “an essentially allegorical model of society as a whole” (PU 32f; MF 215; cf. PL 181; MF 375; cf. Jauss, TAR 172). It “stresses the imaginary status of the symbolic act so completely as to reify its social ground” into an “inert given that the text passively or fantasmatically “reflects” (PU 82). It “reduces characters to mere allegories of social forces” and “symbols of class,” thereby “presupposing immutable forms, eternal Platonic ideas” that “leave out” “the unique historical situation,” as “Sartre has pointed out” (MF 193; cf. PU 33; Frye, AC 113, 346).

        For Jameson, genuine “Marxism” is “a form of understanding,” “a mental operation” “characterized as a kind of inner “permanent revolution”“; “every systematic presentation of it falsities it in the moment in which it freezes over into a system” (MF 378, 362). In this sense, “system” is associated with “metaphysical content” “resulting from a hypostasis of the mental processes, an attempt to hold something aside from the concrete operation of the mind” in order to “treat” it “in absolute fashion, as the universally valid” (MF 361f.)

        Hence, “Marxism takes as its object something utterly distinct from the object of the more academic philosophical systems” (MF 208). It “may be seen as the “end” of philosophy, in that in its very structure it refuses system”; and “philosophy” “abolishes itself as thought grows increasingly concrete” (MF 361, 331). Still, “Marxism” “does not seem to exclude the adherence to some other kind of philosophy,” such as “existentialist, phenomenologist,” “realist,” or “empiricist (MF 207).³ [3. This tolerance is limited, though. At one point, “realism” is termed a “philosophical enemy” of “the materialist dialectic,” though as a literary style, it is “central” to “Marxist aesthetics” (MF 366, PU 104). “Empiricism” is even more severely denounced (MF x, 54, 367; PL 23f.) “Existentialism,” thought to be a “conceptual containment strategy,” is condoned, provided it is not a “metaphysic” or “ideology,” but a “properly existential analytic” of the kind developed by Sartre (PU 216, 259). Lukács” Marxist critique of existentialism is decried as a “crude effort” based on “clumsy mediations” (PU 259f).  Moreover, “the attempt to dispense with the baggage of system or metaphysical content,” as undertaken by the “formalism of all the great schools of modern philosophy,” “veers about” into “the “absolute formalism” of Marxism” (MF 373).

        Jameson  centres his powerful claims for Marxism on its special “mental operation” of “dialectical thinking,” which he likes to call “thought to the second. power” (MF 372f, 45, 53, 153, 307).⁴ [4. Jameson  finds “the non-dialectical character of much of what passes for Marxist criticism” even in such major figures as Christopher Caudwell, who is barely mentioned: and Lucien Goldmann , who is so marginalized (e.g., for being “not properly Structuralist,” whatever that means) that Jarneson devotes a mere ootnote to a “reminder” of Goldmann's “incomparable role” “in the reawakening of Marxist theory” (MF 375; PL 128, 213, ix; PU 44).] It is a.self-conscious” “attempt to think about a given object on one level, and at the same time to observe our own thought processes,” thereby “reckoning the position of observer into the experiment” (MF 340). Via a “conscious transcending of an older, more naive position,” “the mind reckons itself into the problem” and “deals with itself just as much as the material it works on” (MF 308, 45). If “the potentialities for development of a given mode of thought lie predetermined” “within the very structure of the initial terms,” “genuinely dialectical criticism” must always “question the sources of its own instruments” and evade “preestablished categories of analysis” (MF 9, 399, 333). “Such thought” “recites its own inevitable falsifications at every moment”; its “thoroughgoing critique of forms” “destroys” “every possible hypostasis of the various moments of thinking” (MF 56).

        Appreciating that the “whole” “thought process” is “implicit in any given object” “dramatizes the irresistible link between a formal concept and the historical reality in which it originated” (MF 338, 335). “The mind” thereby “restores and regrounds its earlier notions in a new glimpse of reality,” and is “reminded” that “the self-evident draws its force from hosts of buried presuppositions” (MF 372, 308).⁵ [5. This process is divided into two stages; first, the “Hegelian” “consciousness of the way in which our conceptual instruments” “determine the shape and limit of the results”; and second, the “specifically Marxist consciousness” of “the profoundly historical character of our socioeconomic situation” (MF 372f)].The “dialectical process” was thus “designed to dispel” that “substantiality of thought” whereby a “theory about the world” “tends to become an object for the mind” with the “permanency of a real thing,” as in the “academic thinking which mistakes its own conceptual categories for solid parts” of “the real world” (MF 56f.) “There is a profound incompatibility between a “scientific” method, which seeks to restrict its work to pure positivities, and a dialectical one,” which, pursuing the “paradoxical element of the negative, is alone capable of doing justice to “mixed” phenomena like ideology” (IT 211).
       Hence, “dialectical thinking was designed to overcome” the “positivistic and empirical illusion” that “emphasizes” the “individual fact or item at the expense of the network of relations” and pursues “the overt presentation of content in its own right” (MF 54, x). “Anglo-American empiricism” has a “preference for segments,” “isolated objects,” and “free-standing elements” in order to “avoid observation of those larger wholes and totalities which if they had to be seen would force the mind” “into uncomfortable social and political conclusions” (PL 23f; cf. MF 183).

        “Marxism,” in contrast, implies an “imperative to totalize,” that is, to put “details” “in perspective as parts or functions of some larger totality” (PU 53; MF 183). This “totalisation” is a not merely a harmonizing or levelling, but a “dialectical” “project” “involving” “negation” (MF 231). The “profoundly comparative character” of “dialectical work” depends on the “differential perception” that “allows us to see what something is through the awareness of what it is not” (MF 311; cf. PL 119, 168). In “dialectical thinking,” “phenomena are defined against each other” (MF 95f.) “Ideas are best located and defined with respect to their opposites” (MF 287).

         In “a genuine dialectical opposition,” one term is “positive” and the other is negative” (PL 119). “The dialectical reversal” “turns” a “phenomenon into its opposite,” “transforming from negative to positive, and from positive to negative” (MF 309). Such a “changing of valences” (as “used by Bloch”) “suggests” “that every negative” “implies a positive which is ontologically prior to it” (MF 132f) -- a converse of deconstruction's privileging of absence over presenee.⁶ [6. Jameson suggests that “Derrida's” “entire work may be read” as a “demystification of a host of unconscious or naturalized binary oppositions in contemporary and traditional thought” (PU 111). But seeing “the ultimate origin of the binary opposition in the older “centered” master code of theocentric power societies” leads from “metaphysics” to “ethics” as “the ideological vehicle and legitimation of concrete structures of power and domination” and therefore advocates a move “from Derrida to Nietzsche.”] In an “abundant society,” “the philosopher” must attempt the “revival of negation” as the “process,” according to Marcuse (1955), whereby “a genuinely human existence can only be achieved” (MF 110, 108). Marcuse fears that “the consumer's society, the society of abundance, has lost the experience of the negative” because “the system” wields “the power” “to transform even its adversaries into its own mirror image” (MF 108, 111). “The Utopian idea, on the contrary,” “takes the form of a stubborn negation of all that is” (MF 111). “Happiness” can be “a measure and an enlargement of human possibilities” only “as a symbolic refusal of everything” the “consumer's society” “has to offer” (MF 112). “Negation” is thus essential to “the revival of the Utopian impulse” (MF 110), as will be noted further on.
         A mental movement related to the dialetical reversal is the polarizing of contradiction,  a “notion” “central to any Marxist cultural analysis” (PU 80). “The practice of negative dialectics” moves “away from the official content of an idea” toward the “contradictory forms” “such ideas have taken” within “the concrete social situation” (MF 55). The “antinomy, a dilemma for the human mind” “on the level of pure thought,” “reflects” some more basic contradiction in social life” (PL 213, 161; cf. PU 117, 166).⁷ [7. Elsewhere, Jameson  distinguishes between the “dialectical” “contradiction” and the “semiotic” antinomy” (PU 166). He suggests that since the “contradiction” is not “immediately conceptualized by the text,” it finds “symptomatic expression” in “a system of antimonies,” whose “privileged form” is the “binary opposition” “articulated” in the research of “semiotics” (PU 82f.) However, “Soviet semiology” “explicitly assimilates the binary opposition to a dialectic of presence and absence” (PL 120).]

       “The imaginary resolution” of “an “objective contradiction” is termed an “ideologeme,” constituting “the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social class” (PU 118, 76, 87).⁸ [8 The “-eme” ending marks the word as a calque from descriptive linguistics with its “phonemes,” “morphemes.” and so on. Yet whereas those “minimal units” could be almost mechanically isolated and identified by the analyst, the “inventing” of “ideologemes” is an “immense” “task” “scarcely even begun” (PU 88). Jameson makes them all “essentially narrative,” presumably to link them to “history”; one example is “ressentiment” (PU 88, 201).] “Class discourse” is “essentially dialogical,” and “normall antagonistic”: “two opposing discourses fight it out within the general unity of a shared code” (PU 84) (cf. Bakhtin, 1973a, 1973b). All this fits the tenet of “Marxism” that “the constitutive form of class relationships is always dichotomous” “between a dominant and a labouring class,” with the corollary that "capitalism,” unable to “understand” the “historical existence of the environment,” “is the primal contradiction upon which all later, more specialized and abstract dilemmas are founded” (PU 83; MF 186).

        Because “for dialectical thinking,” the “ultimate system of systems” is “history,” Jameson 's “imperative” is “always historicize!” (PL 93; PU 9). But like Jauss,⁹ [9. Although Jauss and Jameson  don't notice each other in their books I read, they agree on many points: the paradigm character of art for history, politics, or sociology; the question-answer character of the art work; the situating of each art work in its historical series; the interface of synchronic with diachronic; the historical variability but non-arbitrariness of interpretation; the allegorising tendency of orthodox Marxism; the construal of Freud's work as a theory of human relations to the past; and so on.]

he warns against “naive historicism” that records “only individual changes, isolated facts” in a “scientific but meaningless” fashion (PL 97, 5) (cf. Eikhenbaum, 1936). “Marxism” is a “concrete movement of reflection” “in a consciousness of ourselves as at once the product and the producer of history” (MF 372f.) The “historical situation” does not operate in a direct “causal” fashion, but “shuts down” some “possibilities” and “opens up” “new ones” (PU 148; cf. MF 345). That is, “history” “pre-selects a certain number of structural possibilities for actualisation” from among “the total number of permutations and combinations inherently possible in the model in question” (PL 128).

         “For Marxist historiography,” “permanence and continuity” “are the illusion, and change and struggle the reality” -- “a constant working out of hidden contradictions, a perpetual but concealed violence which comes to the surface from time to time” (MF 259; cf. MF 219, 288, 325). However, “Marxism” offers “two alternate languages” “in which any given phenomenon can be described”: “history can be written either subjectively, as the history of class struggle, or objectively, as the development of the economic modes of production and their evolution from their own internal contradictions” (MF 297).

        “Marxists” “hold” that “the forms of human consciousness and the mechanisms of human psychology are not timeless and everywhere essentially the same, but rather situation-specific and historically produced” (PU 152). Not only the theories, but the very problems and categories of thought” are “in constant historical change and have no fixed and objective reality” (MF 343). Hence, “the problem of the concept of history is essentially a question of models and not of realities” (PL 188). “All conscious thought takes place within the limits of a given model” and “is determined by it” (PL 101). So “the history of thought is the history of its models,” which, “for the Structuralists” at least, would “replace” the “history of objects” (PL v, 129).

        Each “model” has a “lifetime” during which it first “permits hosts of new perceptions and discoveries” and “enlarges or refocuses corners of reality which the older terminology had left obscured or had taken for granted”; it then “declines” as it demands frequent “readjusting,” and is finally “exchanged for a new one” (PL v, 132). Jameson  feels “certain” that “such a replacement marks an absolute break” and “the beginning of something hitherto unprecedented” (PL vi). “The new” cannot be “consciously prepared” or “devised” “out of whole cloth.” This rather Kuhnian emphasis on discontinuity matches Jameson 's “dialectical” determination to “define” “phenomena” “against each other” (MF 95f.) ¹⁰ [10. Kuhn is said to have “independently” illustrated the “structuralist theory of models” (PL 136). I find Kuhn's meta-science hardly dialectical in a Jamesonian sense, but rather like Bloom war of “strength”. The history of science is treated as a matter of facts about scientists and discoveries.] We may also appreciate his focus on the “originality” of a person or source.¹¹ [11. MF 12, 31, 66, 87, 106, 163, 184, 317; PL 4, 26, 39, 58, 82, 10 5f, 111, 136, 157, 177; PU 29, 57, 93, 126, 133, 156, 191, 257),]

        This interest in mental models does not, however, lead toward idealization. “Genuine dialectical thinking” must avoid “the idealizing tendency inherent in abstract thought” by attaining a “more vivid apprehension of reality” (MF 371f.) “Abstraction” is “a reduction” whereby we “substitute” “simplified models, schematic abstract ideas,” and thereby “do violence to reality” (MF 222). “Alienation” may set in, and “the abstract mind” may be “powerless” to “analyse genuine three-dimensional action” (MF 164, 211).¹² [12. The concept of “alienation” diverges from the “Hegelian opposition” of “the concrete and the abstract” by “quietly eliminating” “the Utopian moment” (MF 163f.) The “powerlessness” alluded to here is “demonstrated” in Sartre's “earlier. plays” (MF 211f.).

       “The dialectical method,” in contrast, “can be acquired only by a concrete working through of detail, by a sympathetic internal experience of the gradual construction of a system according to its inner necessity” (MF xi). “Concrete reality” enters “knowledge” as “concrete thought” (PL 107; cf. Althusser, 1965), “The hermeneutic dimension of dialectical thinking” can “restore to the abstract cultural fact” “its concrete context” (MF 348). Since “the ultimate object” is “the concrete,” “the method” maintains “preference for the concrete totality over the separate abstract parts” (MF 309, 45). This “totalising, wholistic character” creates “the peculiar difficulty of dialectical writing” -- 'as though with each new idea you were bound to recapitulate the entire system” (MF 306).

       “Totalising-thought” might “lead to a vision of social life as a whole” (MF 368; cf. MF 232). Within this project, “the concrete” allows us to “mediate between one level and another of reality, and translate technical analysis of the idea into its truth in the lived reality of social history” (MF 354). “Mediation” is here “characterized” as “the invention of an analytic terminology or code which can be applied equally to two or more structurally distinct objects or sectors of being” (PU 225). Against the notions of “homology (or isomorphism, or structural parallelism),” ¹³ [13 A negative opinion is given on the “homologies” developed by Lucien Goldman (1964,1973) (PU 43f; MF 375) (cf. Note 4). Such a conception is said to be the true target of Althusser's attack on ,”mediation” as “the establishment of symbolic identities between the various levels” which “thereby lose” their “constitutive autonomy” that Althusser insists must be “respected” (PU 39, 44). Against the “Hegelian” “expressive causality” of “classical “mediation,” he argues for “structural causality,” wherein “mediation” must “pass through the structure” of the “totality” (PU 39, 41).]

         Jameson  argues that “it is not necessary” that “each of the objects” “be seen” as “having the same structure or emitting the same message” (PU 43, 225f.) “Mediation” is rather a “dialectical mechanism” for applying “the same language” to “quite distinct objects or levels of an object,” for “moving or modulating from one level or feature of the whole to another,” and for “adapting analyses and findings from one level to another” (PU 28, 226, 39).

        We may thereby “restore, at least methodologically, the lost unity of social life” beset by “fragmentation” in “late capitalism,” and “demonstrate that widely distant elements of the social totality are ultimately part of the same global historical process” in their “underlying reality” (PU 226, 39f.) “Mediation” “establishes” the “background” of “general identity” against which “local identification or differentiation can be registered” (PU 42). We can for instance “unify a whole social field around a theme or idea”; or “demonstrate” that “the same essence is at work in the specific languages of culture as in the organization of the relations of production” (PU 28, 39f.)

        We see here a Marxism that reassembles as it dismantles. Such proceedings have “Utopian” overtones, above all in Ernst Bloch's (1959) “hermeneutic” whereby “everything” becomes “a manifestation of that primordial movement” “toward ultimate identity with a transfigured world” (MF 120). “All class consciousness” is “Utopian, insofar as it expresses the unity of a collectivity” as a “figure for the ultimate concrete collective life” of a “classless society” (PU 290f.) “Utopian thought”, though it diverted “revolutionary energy into idle wish-fulfilment” in “older society,” now “keeps alive the possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from this one”; “practical thinking” is “a capitulation to the system” (MF I 10f.) As Marcuse (1955: 144) insists, “the Utopian concept” is “'the attempt to draft a theoretical construct beyond the performance principle”(MF 111).

         “Utopia” is definable as “a world in which meaning and life,” “man and the world” “inside” and “outside,” are “at one”; or as a “moment” of “adequation of subject to object” (MF 173, 143, 146). “The transfigured time of Utopia offers a perpetual present” with a “total ontological satisfaction of every instant”; even “death cannot damage” such “a life fully realized” (MF 143).¹⁴ [14. “This deathless promise” is a “symbol of hope” that gets “distorted” in “otherworldly religious forms” (MF 114). But Frye managed to “assimilate the salvational perspective of romance to a re-expression of Utopian longings” (PU 104f.)] The nature of “the Utopian impulse” to “point to something other” and to “speak in figures” might explain why the “allegorical structure of being” is given “symbolic and allegorical expression”' by “art and religion” (MF 142f.) ¹⁵  [15. “Symbolic” and “allegorical” are opposed, following Bloch (19 59), as tendencies toward “unity” and “difference,” respectively (MF 146) (compare de Man's “temporal” account, pp. 270f.) Sometimes, Jameson  uses “allegorical” as a pejorative term, as in the reproaches he brings against “orthodox Marxism” (PU 32f.) Elsewhere, though, the “allegorical” is simply an aspect of “interpretation,” for example, to “open up of the text to multiple meanings, to successive rewritings and overwritings” (PU 10, 29) (cf.. 398).  “In art, consciousness prepares itself for a change in the world”; “the experience of the imaginary offers” “that total satisfaction of the personality and of Being” whereby “the Utopian ideal, the revolutionary blueprint, may be conceived” (MF 90).

        “The proving ground for all Utopian activity” is “concrete narration” (MF 173). “Narrative modes” lend a “Utopian significance” to “concrete experiences of time,” and “presuppose” a “mutual reconciliation” of “subject” and “object” (MF 149, 190) (cf. Lukács, 1917-18, 1962; and Iser, AR 135, 154). “The movement of the world in time toward the future's ultimate moment” parallels the “formal” “sense in which all plot may be seen as a movement toward Utopia” (MF 146). Jameson characteristically prefers a “formal” “notion of Utopia” enacted in the “novelists’ formal organization of their styles” rather than in the “use” of “Utopian material as content” (MF 145f, 174).

        This high regard for narration comes into sharper perspective when Jameson  avows that “history” “is not a text, for it is fundamentally non-narrative and non-representational”; yet adds at once that it “is inaccessible to us except in textual form” (PU 82, 35). Hence, he proposes to “restructure the problematics of ideology,” “of history, and of cultural production, around the all-informing process of narrative” as “the central function or instance of the human mind” (PU 13).¹⁶ [16 Compare Arthur Danto's (1965) demonstration (also cited by Jauss, TAR 60f) that “even so-called scientific historiography may be said to have an essentially narrative structure” (MF 205). However, Danto's “definition of historical narration as any form of causal explanation” (FL 66f) is so broad it would be hard to get outside it.] He agrees here with Lukács that “narration is our basic way of coming to terms with time itself and with concrete history” (PL 62).

        “Historicism” (or “expressive causality”) as envisioned by Althusser would be “an interpretive allegory in which a sequence of historical events or texts and artifacts is rewritten in terms of some deeper, underlying, and more fundamental” “hidden master narrative,” such as the “providential history” of “Hegel or Marx” (PU 28). “Such master narratives have inscribed themselves” in “texts as well as in our thinking about them” and “reflect a fundamental dimension of our collective thinking” and “fantasies about history and reality” (PU 34). Jameson  correspondingly prizes “the novel” as “a way of coming to terms with a temporal experience that cannot” be “dealt with any other way”; and as “a symbolic act that must reunite or harmonize heterogeneous narrative paradigms,” each with a “specific and contradictory ideological meaning” (PL 73; PU 144). The “novel” is “problematic in its very structure,” “a reflection on the very possibility of story-telling” (MF 172).

        The “Utopianism” of a “reconciliation between the subject and objectivity, between existence and world,” “would be possible only in a society” where “the individual was already reconciled” with “the organization of things and people” (MF 38, 49). In “the modern experience of the world,” however, “the primacy of the subject,” required “in Hegel” as the “foundation” of “the dialectic,” is an “illusion”; “subject and outside world can never find such ultimate identity” (MF 55f).. So “a negative dialectic” must “affirm the notion and value of an ultimate synthesis, while negating it” “in every concrete case” (MF 56).

        “The dialectic” also “provides a way for decentering the subject concretely, and for transcending the “ethical” in the direction of the political and the collective” (PU 60). The “'decentering” of the consciousness of the individual subject” becomes a “painful” step in “the dialectical reversal” between “individual and class” (PU 283). For “structuralism,” “the subject is a function of a more impersonal system or language structure” (PL 134; cf. Culler, PO 28, 258). But for “a Marxist point of view, this experience of the decentering” and “the theories” “devised to map it are to be seen as the signs of the dissolution of an essentially bourgeois ideology of the subject and of psychic unity or identity” (PU 12 5). “The disintegration of the autonomous subject” “marks” “the gradual alienation of social relations” and their “transformation” into “self-regulating mechanisms” that “reduce” the “independent personality” to a “component part,” a “receiving apparatus for injunctions from all levels of the system” (MF 27f)..

       When “the entire business system” “depends” on “the automatic sale of products” unrelated to any “biological or social need,” “marketing psychology” “reaches down into the last private zones of individual life” to “awaken artificial needs” (MF 35f.) “Thus the total organization of the economy” uses new “techniques of mystification” to “dispel the last remnant of the older autonomous subject or ego” (MF 36). “What remains of the subjective” can “no longer” “distinguish between external suggestion and internal desire,” or between “the private and the institutionalised.” This “death of the subject” in “post-industrial monopoly capitalism” is oddly parallel to “the collective structure of some future socialist world” (PL 140f).

        “The disintegration of the autonomous subject” in “Western middle-class society” is reflected in “psychoanalytic theories” and especially in “the Freudian topology of mental functions” (MF 27; PU 125 cf. Iser, AR 159). Hence, Jameson  envisions a reconciliation between Marx and Freud, the two “great negative diagnosticians of contemporary culture” who devised “two codes or languages into which behaviour may be alternately translated” (PU 281; MF 214). “Freudianism and Marxism” shared the “conviction “that understanding consists in the reduction of one type of reality to another; that true reality is never what is manifest on the surface; and that the nature of truth may be measured by the degree to which it tries to elude you” (FL 142; Lévi-Strauss, 1955: 49f.)¹⁷ [17. “Structuralism” was naturally prone to “read Freud and Marx” as “twin versions of the gap between signifier and signified”; and “either to ignore the specific content of the two systems, or else to interpret it allegorically” (PL 195; cf. PL 169).] The “confrontation between Marx and Freud dramatizes” the “fundamental contradiction” “between the outside and the inside, between public and private, work and leisure, the sociological and the psychological,” “between the political and the poetic, objectivity and subjectivity, the collective and the solitary-between society and the monad” (MF 85; cf. IT 219).

        Like Holland,¹⁸ [18. Holland's work is mentioned occasionally, e.g., his “powerful critique of myth criticism” (PU 67) (cf. Note 31), but not prominently used, perhaps because Holland focuses on individual identities, not social collectives. Jameson's conjecture that “the surface” of a “work” may be “but a pretext, serving both to divert the mind from its deepest operations and fantasies and to motivate those fantasies” sounds like Holland, except that a “fantasy” of “collective life” is at once appended (MF 406).] Jameson  eulogizes psychoanalysis. It is “the most elaborate interpretive system of recent times,” and “the only really new and original hermeneutic” since the “medieval system” of the “four levels” (PU 61, 31). Its “prestige and influence” “as a method and a model” have “never been so immense” (PU 65). Also, “Freud's topology is the most striking model of time oriented toward the past” (MF 128; cf. Jauss, AL 12).¹⁹ [19. Jameson in fact sees “analogies” between the “Freudian” “repressive simplification” and the “reduction” that “the medieval system of the four levels” creates in aligning the “collective history” of “the people of Israel” with the “individual” “life of Christ” (PU 30). Jameson  regards the two levels of the “moral” and the “anagogical” as “interpretations” whereby “the textual apparatus is transformed into a “libidinal apparatus,” a machinery for ideological investment.” The “moral” yields a “psychological reading,” while the “anagogical” yields a “political reading” (PU 31). Compare Note 23. ]

         Like Bloom (ANX 115), Jameson  has less “interest” in the Freudian “sexual symbolism” (PU 65) foregrounded by Holland, Bleich, and Millett. He merely remarks that the “symbolic possibilities” of “sexuality” “are dependent on its preliminary exclusion from the social field” (PU 64). Only its “isolation” made it “develop into an independent sign system” for decoding “overtly nonsexual behaviour.” The “priority” of “sexual oppression over that of social class” is deemed a “false problem”; “sexism and patriarchy” are “forms of alienation” arising from “the oldest mode of production” “with its division of labour between men and women” -- a thesis that makes “radical feminism” calling to “annul the patriarchal” “perfectly consistent with an expanded Marxian framework” (PU 99f.)

     Jameson prefers to focus on “the more burning question of interpretation” and the “contribution” of “such fundamental hermeneutic manuals as The Interpretation of Dreams and Jokes and the Unconscious” (PU 65), the works preferred by critics in general (e.g., Holland, DY 54). Like Freud, Jameson is attuned to “the essentially figurative quality of unconscious or regressive thought,” whereby "all drives are mediated through their object language” of “images or fantasies” (MF 99). “Freudian theory” envisions “two stories at work in the topology of the psyche”: the “surface story” as a “disguise,” and the “repressed, unconscious desire” or “fantasy-satisfaction” (MF 98). Freud first “supposed the unconscious fantasy to have actually taken place in reality”; but he later “abandoned” this idea and retained the “fantasy” for “its dramatic and narrative value as a scene” (cf. Fiedler, NT 308; Bleich, SC 30f; Culler, PS 180).

        Jameson  acknowledges Deleuze and Guattari's (1977) “recent attack” on “Freudian interpretation” for being “a reduction and a rewriting of the whole rich and random multiple realities of concrete everyday experience into the contained, strategically pre-limited terms of the family narrative” (PU 21f).. They “denounced” a “system of allegorical interpretation in which the data of one narrative line are radically impoverished” by “rewriting” them “according to the paradigm of another narrative” “taken as” “the master code” and “proposed as the ultimate hidden or unconscious meaning” (PU 22). Jameson  approves their intent to “reassert the specificity of the political content of everyday life and to reclaim it” from the “reduction to the merely subjective.” Indeed, his own proposal to integrate Freudianism with Marxism has much the same goal.

        A “substantial and reflective shift” of the “Freudian hermeneutic” occurred in “the Lacanian rewriting”: “consciousness” and its “illusions (feeling of personal identity, the myth of the ego or self, and so forth) become rigorous and self-imposed limitations” on “individual wish-fulfilment” (PU 66). Though still “couched in terms of the individual biological subject,” “Lacan's work” moves its concern from “unconscious processes or blockages” over to “the formation of the subject and its constitutive illusions” in a manner “not incompatible with a broader historical framework” (PU 153). He is credited with “underscoring the relationship between emerging psychoanalysis and its historical raw material” (PU 62).

        “Lacan's doctrine” resembles Structuralism by its “translation of the Freudian topology into linguistic terms” (PL 169). When children “acquire language,” he asserted, they enter “the Symbolic Order” that is “impersonal or superpersonal,” yet enables the “sense of identity” (PL 130; cf. PU 175f). The “structure of language” would then “determine” the “secondary phenomena” of “consciousness, personality,” and “the subject”; and “the unconscious” could be grasped as “language which escapes the subject in its structure and effects” or as “discourse of the other” (PL 130, 138, 171). For example, Lacan opined that “the dream has the structure of a sentence” beset by “syntactic displacements” and “semantic condensations” (PL 120f). “Neurosis” would be “a movement of repression” which “attempts to stem the flight from one signifier to another by fixating on a single one, by choosing for itself a transcendental signified”; “psychosis” would be “a writing out of all the possible variations of a given paradigm” (PL 138f.) Though Jameson is also preoccupied with language and appropriates “Lacanian terminology and thematics,” a model is still needed to “transcend individualistic categories and modes of interpretation” (PU 152f, 68).

          Accordingly, Jameson  advances his “doctrine of the political unconscious” (PU 152f, 68).²⁰ [20. This solution recalls Jung's expansion of the “unconscious” into a collective dimension. But Jameson  regards the Jungian “system” in Psychological Types as “historical thinking arrested halfway, a thought which, on the road to concrete history, takes fright and attempts to convert its insights into eternal essences, into attributes between which the human spirit oscillates” (MF 93f). Frye's approach is another target of this accusation.]”Our approach” to “history” “as an absent cause” and “to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualisation, its narrativisation in the political unconscious” (PU 35).²¹ [21. The “Real” is capitalized to signal its derivation from Lacan, for whom it is a “notion” of that which “resists symbolization absolutely”; Jameson  twice mentions it in close proximity to Althusser's “history as a absent cause” (PU 3 5, 82). For Lacan, the “Real” is an order opposed to the “Imaginary” and the “Symbolic,” but is nonetheless inaccessible (Ragland-Sullivan 1986:130f, 90; Lemaire 1977: 40f, 51f, 115f. ]

        “All literature” must therefore “be informed” by the “political unconscious” in the sense of being “read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community” (PU 70). Having “elaborate hermeneutic geiger counters,” “the political unconscious” can “raise, in symbolic form, issues of social change and counterrevolution”; reveal the “permanencies” of "material production” “underneath” the “formal structures” of a “text”; “restore to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality” of “fundamental history,” that is, the “uninterrupted narrative” of “'class struggle”; and so on (PU 173, 215, 20).

        Seen from this perspective, “the archaic fantasy material psychoanalytic criticisrn feels able to detect must always pass through a determinate social and historical situation” (PU 142). “The fantasy level of a text would then be something like the primal motor force” “diverted to the service of other, ideological functions, and reinvested” by the “political unconscious.” Jameson 's dialectical thought reappears in the idea that “the unconscious master narrative” -- whose “initial unworked form” is “the Imaginary” in “fantasy” and “wish-fulfilment” is a “contradictory structure,” whose “functions” and “events” “demand repetition, permutation, and the ceaseless generation of various structural “resolutions” which are never satisfactory” (PU 180).

        This merger of social, cultural, and psychological critique, as I have tried to outline it, yields Jameson 's foundation for a “theory” such as “literary-critical practice” “presupposes” (cf. PU 58). “The verbal construction of literature” “allows it” to “serve as a paradigm for other, more properly sociological, sign systems” (PL 146; cf. Jauss, TAR 62). “Cultural studies” can hence be a strategic place for Marxism to reassert its claim” as a “universal science,” because “textual and interpretive problems are in them more immediately visible and available for study and reflection than in the more apparently empirical sciences” (PU 38).

        Jameson  “argues the perspectives” and “critical insights” of “Marxism as necessary preconditions for adequate literary comprehension” (PU 75). Just as “Marxism” insists that “pure thought functions as a disguised mode of social behaviour,” our “analysis” can “explore the multiple paths that lead to the unmasking of cultural artefacts as socially symbolic acts” (MF 161; PU 20). “Literature plays a central role in the dialectical process” as a “privileged microcosm in which to observe dialectical thinking at work” (MF xi). “Literary criticism” becomes “dialectical” too when it “reconciles the inner and the outer, the intrinsic and the extrinsic, the existential and the historical” (MF 330, 348, 416). We can reveal how the “world of daily life” is “the determinate situation, dilemma, contradiction, or subtext” for which “the practice of language in a literary work” “comes as a symbolic resolution” (PU 42; cf. MF 43, 348, 383; PL 24, 161, 197, 212; PU 79f, 83, 85; Lévi-Strauss, 1958; Adorno, 1969-70). The “concreteness” of “art” “permits life and experience to be felt as a totality” (MF 169).

        Jameson  also “argues” the “priority” and “semantic richness” of “a Marxist interpretive framework” as compared to “ethical,” “psychoanalytic,” “myth-critical,” “serniotic,” “structural,” and “theological” “methods” (PU 10, 17). Since “the political perspective” is “the absolute horizon of all reading and all literature,” he presents “Marxism” as “the “untranscendble horizon” that subsumes such apparently antagonistic or incommensurable critical operations, assigning them an undoubted sectoral validity within itself,” “at once cancelling and preserving them” (PU 10).

         The “juxtaposition” of these other “methods” “with a dialectical or totalizing, properly Marxist ideal of understanding” should “demonstrate” their “structural limitations,” “the “local” ways in which they construct their objects of study,” and “the strategies of containment” for “projecting the illusion that their readings are somehow complete and self-sufficient.” The “contemporary American “pluralism” fosters “the coexistence of methods” in “the intellectual and academic marketplace” (PU 31). There, Jameson  suspects a “negative” “program”: “to forestall the systematic articulation and totalisation of interpretive results which can only lead to embarrassing questions” about “the relationship between them,” “the place of history, and the ultimate ground of narrative and textual production” (MF 32).

        Dialectical as usual, Jameson  maintains that “literariness, the distinguishing element of literature,” “depends” on an “awareness of what the element is not, of what has been omitted from the work,” as well as “what the element is” (PL 43). “One of the terms of the dialectical opposition is always outside the work; it is the work's other side,” “its otherness in the face of history” (PL 120). It would be “undialectical” to seek “some ultimate and changeless element beneath the multiplicity of literary appearance” (PL 45). He therefore elects not to “study” “the “objective” structures” of the “text, the historicity of its forms and content,” its “linguistic possibilities,” or “the function of its aesthetic” (PU 9).

         Instead, he adopts the “organizational fiction” that “we never really confront a text immediately” as a “thing in itself,” but only “as the always-already-read” (PU 9).²² [22 The formula “always already” is traced to Althusser’s “toujours-déjà-donné” (PL 184), whence it passed through Derrida to the (un-Marxist) Yale group, who seem to feel it like a nervous tic, perhaps to elide causes and origins. “Capitalism” is an example of “just such an always-already-begun dynamic” (PU 279f.) Marx certainly didn’t think so!.] “We apprehend” texts “through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or -- if the text is brand-new -- through sedimented reading habits and categories” of “inherited interpretive traditions.” In Jameson's “method” of “meta-commentary,” “the object of study is less the text itself than the interpretations through which we attempt to confront and appropriate it,” where “interpretation” is “construed as an essentially allegorical act” of “rewriting a given text in terms of” a “master code” (PU 9f.) “Interpretation proper” is a “strong rewriting” and "presupposes” “some mechanism of mystification or repression,” some “censored dimension,” so that we need to “seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one, or to rewrite the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more fundamental interpretive code” (PU 60; MF 413). “Dialectical self-consciousness” supports this search by impelling “a sudden distancing which permits the most familiar elements of the reading experience to be seen again strangely, as though for the first time, making visible the unexpected articulation of the work into parts” (MF 52) (cf. Adorno, 1958-65).

        Jameson contemplates criticism as a “semantic enrichment and enlargement of the inert givens and materials of a particular text” (PU 75). This process is to occur “within three concentric frameworks”: “political history” as “a chronic-like sequence of happenings in time”; “society” as “a constitutive tension and struggle between social classes”; and “history” as “the sequence of modes of production and the succession and destiny of the various human social formations.” “These distinct semantic horizons” correspond to “distinct moments of the process of interpretation”;²³ [23. This division is likened to Frye's “successive “phases” in our interpretation” (PU 75), but no precise mapping between the two schemes is offered. Jameson 's first “horizon” appears to subsume Frye's first three, leaving the second and third to match Frye's “archetypal” and “anagogical,” respectively. But Frye's levels are designated in ways that I find scarcely historical, and not at all political; focused more on the “eternal essences” Jameson  in fact sees there (MF 93f.).]   “Each phase” “governs a distinct reconstruction of its object,” “the text” (PU 75f.) The project Jameson outlines might further Hegel's initiative to “subsume intrinsic and extrinsic criticism” by treating “the work of art on its own terms” and yet “replacing it” in its “larger external context” (MF 330). Yet the project is hugely ambitious and arduous, and Jameson concedes he has only made a modest start (cf. PU 88; MF xi, 339f.)

         “Within” the “first” “horizon,” “the object of study” is “the “text” “coinciding with the individual literary work,” although “grasped” “as a symbolic act” (PU 76)., This “act” “generates” its “own context” for purposes of “transformation,” and “brings into being that very situation” “to which it is also” “a reaction” (PU 81f.) The act thereby “encourages” “the illusion” that “there was never any extra- or non-textual reality before the text” (PU 82). Jameson  proposes a corresponding “type of interpretation”: “rewriting” the literary text in such a way that the latter may itself be seen as the rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext” “(re)constructed after the fact” of “external reality” (PU 81). “The literary or aesthetic act therefore always entertains some active relationship with the Real” by “drawing” it “into its own texture.” The “ideological” aspect of “the aesthetic act” also inheres in its (already cited) “function of inventing imaginary or formal “solutions” to unresolvable social contradictions” (PU 79). Discovering these “contradictions” reveals the “text's symbolic efficacy” and “construes purely formal patterns as a symbolic enactment of the social within the formal and the aesthetic” (PU 77).

        Within the “second” “horizon,” “the object” is “the great collective and class discourses” composed of “ideologemes,” the latter being, as noted above), minimal units representing “the imaginary resolution” of “an objective contradiction” (PU 76, 118, 87). The “illusion” of “autonomy which a printed text projects must now be systematically undermined” (PU 85). “Individual phenomena are revealed as social facts and institutions” when “the organizing categories of analysis become those of social class” (PU 83; cf. MF 376-382). In “dialogical” or “antagonistic” “class discourse,” the “ruling class” will “explore” “legitimation,” while "an appositional culture” will try to “undermine the dominant “value system” (PU 84). Here, the “text is grasped as a symbolic move” in an “ideological confrontation between the classes” (PU 85). The “contradiction,” which in the first “horizon” had been “limited to the situation of the individual text,” now appears “dialogical as the irreconcilable demands and positions of antagonistic classes.” The critic attempts an “artificial reconstruction of the voice” to which “cultural monuments” “were initially opposed,” especially the “voice” of “popular cultures” (PU 85; cf. MF 377). Jameson grasps “hegemonic forms” “as a process” of “the cultural universalisation of forms which originally expressed the situation of “popular,” subordinate, or dominated groups” (PU 86; cf. Wellek and Warren, TL 46).

        Within the third and “ultimate horizon,” that of “human history as a whole,” “both the individual text and its ideologemes” are “read in terms of” “the ideology of form, that is, the symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production” (PU 76; cf. PU 33). Here, “history itself becomes the untranscendable ground” and “limit” of our “textual interpretations” (PU 100). The “object of study” is nothing less than “cultural revolution, that moment when the coexistence of various modes of production becomes visibly antagonistic, their contradictions moving to the very centre of political, social, and historical life” (PU 95). This “concept” can “project a whole new framework for the humanities, in which the study of culture in the widest sense could be placed on a materialist basis” (PU 96). The “task” of “analysis” will be “the rewriting of its materials” such that “this perpetual cultural revolution” can be “read as the deeper and more permanent constitutive structure in which the empirical textual objects know intelligibility” (PU 97). Through “technical and formalistic analysis,” the “text” is “restructured as a field of force in which the dynamics of sign systems of several distinct modes of production can be registered” and aligned with “a number of discontinuous and heterogeneous formal processes” “within the text” (PU 98f). Marxism and Formalism emphatically unite in this stage.

        Despite Jameson 's avowed intent to absorb other critical methods into his encompassing project just outlined, he harbours distinct reservations about some. “Ethical criticism” – “still” “predominant” “despite repudiation by every successive generation of literary theorists” -- offers only “weak rewriting” and mistakes “historical and institutional specifies” of “class cohesion” for “permanent features of human experience” (PU 59f). “Immanent criticism,” from “New Criticism” to “post-structuralism,” is “argued” to be “a mirage” (PU 57). The “New Critics” “fetishised language and made it the source” of “ahistorical plenitude”; they remained “within purely ethical limits” and did not “translate those ethical categories” “into social and historical terms” (MF 332). “Post-structuralism” is termed “anti-Marxist,” “repudiating” “totalization in the name of difference, flux, dissemination, and heterogeneity,” yet “reconfirming the status of the concept of totality” by the “very reaction against it” (PU 60, 53) (as I remarked on de Man).

        Since “the appropriate object of study emerges only when the appearance of formal unification is unmasked as a failure or an ideological mirage,” Jameson 's version of a “properly structural interpretation” aims for an “explosion of the seemingly unified text into a host of clashing and contradictory elements” (PU 56). Yet the “post-structural celebration of discontinuity” should be followed by a stage where “the fragments, the incommensurable levels” and “impulses of the text” are “once again related, but in the mode of structural difference and determinate contradiction” (PU 56).²⁴ [24. “ln Althusserian literary criticism,” the authentic function of the cultural text” is “staged” as “a subversion of one level by another” (PU 56). “Althusser and Pierre Macherey” believe “the work of aesthetic production” to be “the objectification of the ideological” as “the privileged form of this disunity.”] Jameson has thus “found it possible” both to “respect” “totalization” and to attend to “discontinuities, rifts”; “the apparently unified cultural text” can also be viewed as “a synchronic unity of structurally contradictory or heterogeneous elements, generic patterns, and discourses” (PU 56f, 141).

        Somewhat surprisingly in a Marxist context, “the only philosophically coherent alternative” to an “interpretation out of the social substance” is asserted to be “one organized on a religious or theological basis, of which Northrop Frye's system is “only the most recent example” (MF 402). “The greatness of Frye” “lies in his willingness to raise the issue of community” and to “draw basic, essentially social interpretive consequences from the nature of religion as collective representation” (PU 69). “For any contemporary re-evaluation of the problem of interpretation, the most vital exchange of energies inevitably takes place between” “the psychoanalytic and the theological, between the rich and concrete practice of interpretation contained in the Freudian texts,” and “the millenary theoretical reflection on the problems and dynamics of interpretation, commentary, allegory, and multiple meanings” “preserved in the religious tradition.” Jameson also resembles Frye in “using the word ‘myth’ not in the negative sense of that which calls for demystification, but rather in the positive meaning” of an “ordering of experience” (MF 258).²⁵ [25. The illustration is the “myth of revolution” as a “notion” “best understood not so much in direct political and theoretical terms” as “in terms of time and of narration, in what are ultimately literary categories” (MF 257f.) This prospect would make “revolution” a matter of “form” via “the new temporal order of experience it permits” (MF 258).]

        Yet Frye is reproved for having propounded a “positive” hermeneutic, which tends to filter out historical difference and the radical discontinuity of modes of production and of their cultural expressions” (PU 130). “Political and collective imagery is transformed into a mere relay in some ultimately privatising celebration of the category of individual experience” (PU 74). A “negative hermeneutic,” in contrast, would “sharpen our sense of historical difference”; “a social hermeneutic” would “restore a perspective in which the imagery of libidinal revolution and of bodily transformation” “becomes a figure for the perfected community.” (PU 130, 74). Eventually, Jameson  “argues” for a “Marxist” “hermeneutic” that is both “negative” as “ideological analysis” and “positive” as a “decipherment” of “Utopian impulses” (PU 296) (though we recall the negation of current society by Utopian thought,  noted above).

         In a particularly thorough and sympathetic engagement with alternative approaches, Jameson  presents a “survey” and “critique of the basic methodology” of “Formalism” and “Structuralism,” whose “most tangible achievements” were in “literary analysis” (PL X).²⁶ [26. Culler's survey of Structuralist Poetics makes no reference to Jameson 's earlier one, which may not have appeared in time; and Culler would be inclined to leave Marxism aside in any case. Jameson critiques Culler's work on Flaubert (IT 225-32) rather genially, though it does “not really supply” the “framework” of “history” (IT 231.)] He proposes to “lay bare” as “intellectual totalities” their “absolute presuppositions,” which “are too fundamental to be either accepted or rejected.”

        Though “the Formalists” thought of “Marxism, in its Soviet form,” as “an ideological adversary,” they were “far more” “dialectical” than the “New Critics” (PL 102, 47). Hence, Jameson does “not regard Formalism” as “at all irreconcilable with Marxism”; its “aesthetic concept” of “making-strange” is a “manifestation” “on the aesthetic level” of “the movement of dialectical consciousness” (MF 409, 373f.) Such a reconciliation seems to be on the agenda of Marxism and Form, with its vision of the “absolute formalism” of Marxism,” its “essentially” “Formalist” “analyses,” and its insistence that all sorts of things --”sociology of culture,” “Marxist literary criticism,” “historical evolution” and revolution,” plus “all visible matter,” including “commodities” -- are “forms” (MF 373, 409, 4, 378, 58, 39, 96; cf. MF 196, PU 99).

        “Structuralism,” being “one of the first consistent and self-conscious attempts to work out a philosophy of models,” also merits a “genuine critique” so that we can “integrate present-day linguistic discoveries into our philosophical systems” (PL vii, 101). The “point of departure of Structuralism” was “the primacy of the linguistic model,” with “language” being the “master code” and holding an “incomparable ontological priority” among “all the elements of consciousness and of social life” (PL vii; PU 61; cf. PL 112, 193; cf. Culler, PO 4). The “signifier” “seems able to exist as a kind of free-floating autonomous organization,” while the “signified” is “never visible directly” unless “the analyst” “organizes it into a new sign-system” (PL 145, 149). Hence, the “arbitrary and absolute decision” was made to treat “reality in terms of linguistic systems” (PL 185). “Reality” emerged as “a series of various interlocking systems” of “signs” -- an “essentially cryptographic” entity (PL 33, 142). “Truth” would then be a matter of “translating from one code to another” -- an “exact formal definition” whereby “the Structuralist procedure” might become “a genuine hermeneutics” (PL 216; cf. PL 133).

        Jameson  would concur that “all perceptual systems are already languages in their own right” (PL 152). But he would not simply “displace the problem of the referent” by having the latter “constantly reabsorbed into language” (PL 212). He wants to “determine” “the precise nature of the relationship of such systems to those more overtly verbal ones which Marxism sees as forming the superstructure” (PL 212). Moreover, his “dialectical thinking” makes “history,” not “language,” the “ultimate system of systems” and rejects the “metaphysical presupposition as to the priority of the signifier” (PL 93, 131). Still, he can engage with a model despite such disagreements, because his own thinking is well adapted to “hold together in the mind” “distinct and even antithetical methods,” albeit his “terms are not what the Structuralists themselves would have chosen to describe their work” (FL 74f, 101).

         Whereas the “organic model” from “Romantic philosophy and nineteenth century scientific thinking” took “the organism as a prototype” and favoured “substantialism” by treating “objects of study” as “autonomous” and “stable entities,” Saussurian linguistics moved to a “relational type of perception” wherein “no object is given at any time as existing in itself” (PL vi, 36, 33, 13f.) When “atomistic empirical perception of an isolated thing-in-itself” had been “abandoned, “ “language” was recognized as a “peculiar entity” that “nowhere takes the form of an object or substance” and has “no immediate recognizable concrete units,” but “only values and relationships” (PL 33, 24, 15; cf. Saussure 1966 [1916]: 149). “The category of the class” rested on “opposition or difference” rather than on “the resemblance or identity” among “elements” (PL 116). Moving in the reverse direction as Structuralism, that is, from language to society, we might detect here a parallel to Jameson 's “differential concept” of social “class” with “each class” “defining itself against the other” (MF 380, 301); and, as we'll see in a moment, he has a similar idea.

        By “reckoning in the position of the observer” (cf. MF 340), Jameson can see the “binary opposition” “both as underlying structure and as a method of revealing that structure” (PL 115). It functions as a “basic mechanism of thought” and a “technique for stimulating perception” or for “generating order out of random data” (PL 113, 117). If any “concept or term” “structurally presupposes” a “binary opposition” as the “basis for its intelligibility,” Jameson can call “Saussure's opposition” “dialectical”: “every linguistic perception holds in its mind at the same time an awareness of its own opposite” and of “the interplay of the same and the other” (PL 164, 24, 35, 168) (cf. Trier, 1931; Trubetzkoi, 1939). The “most profoundly dialectical” “opposition” is the “tension between presence and absence, positive and negative,” in accord with “the Hegelian law that determination is negation” (PL 34f; cf. PU 49).

        Yet Jameson  acknowledges that “semiotics” saw “the binary opposition” as a “static antithesis,” an “insoluble” “antinomy,” or at best an “arrested” version of the truly “dialectical” “contradiction” (PL 36; PU 166f; PL 119; PU 50, 83, 117). This “model of ideological closure” “can be re-appropriated” for “dialectical thinking” if we make “the concept of the signifier” not just “a series of binary oppositions,” but “an attempt to resolve such oppositions, now thought of as contradictions” (PU 47, 83; PL 161; see p. 388). In a “dialectical re-evaluation of the findings of semiotics,” “this entire system is taken as a projection” of “a social contradiction” not “directly or immediately conceptualized by the text,” but finding “symptomatic expression” in “a system of antinomies” (PU 82f.) “Narrative” attempts to “address and “resolve” this; the “antinomy” “cannot be unknotted” by “pure thought” and must “generate a whole more properly narrative apparatus -- the text” -- to “dispel” “its intolerable closure.”

        This tactic of moving to a higher and broader dialectical plane might also mediate “between the synchronic methods of Saussurian linguistics and the realities of time and history” by “resolving” into a “synthesis” Saussure's “ahistorical and undialectical” “distinction between synchronic and diachronic” (PL 18, x, 22). In the Formalism of Tynjanov (1924), “the synchronic structure of the work includes diachrony in that it carries within itself as a negated or cancelled element” those “modes” against which it “innovates” (PL 92f.) Conversely, a “genuine law of the story” demands “transposing” the “diachronic sequence of narrative events” into “a synchronic structure”; the same occurs in “periodisation” (PL 69; cf. PL 96; PU 218). Moreover, Jameson 's vision of “time” inherent in “the form of the sentence” and his linking “syntax” with “history” and “change” (MF xiii; PL 39) suggest a diachronic dimension even in grammatical patterns, though linguistics very seldom saw it (cf. Morgan, 1975). ²⁷ [27. Jameson's uses of “synchronic” and “diachronic” are hardly Saussurian. “Synchronic linguistics” concerns “the logical and psychological relations that bind together coexisting tenns and form a system in the collective mind of speakers”; “diachronic linguistics” concerns “relations that bind together successive terms not perceived by the collective mind, but substituted for each other without forming a system” (Saussure, 1966 [1916]: 99f.) Jameson goes in different directions, such as “the diachrony or sequentiality of narrative discourse” and of “the novel's form” up to the “synchrony” of its “ending” (IT 219; PL 74f.)]

        Still, Jameson  shares the “suspicions of a dialectical tradition” about the “distortions,” “problems,” and “dangers” of “synchronic thought” -- seeing “change and development” as “contingent” or “non-meaningful”; fostering a model of the “total system” devoid of “the negative”; and so on (PL x; PU 95, 91f.) His comment on “ontological foundations,” with the “synchronic” based on “the immediate lived experience of the native speaker” and “the diachronic” based on a “construction” “substituting a purely intellectual continuity for a lived one” (PL 6), discounts the way academic linguistics used synchronic models to suppress the “lived experience” of language. Symptomatic tendencies emerge when Saussure's “system of signs” “is deflected from the whole question” of “referents” or of the relation of “word to thing”; or when “structuralism” “isolated the signifier” “from what it signified” (PL 32, 111; cf. PL 83, 105f, 131, 198, 212).

        A different but equally familiar dichotomy, namely “form and content,” is mastered by Jameson 's “dialectical notion” wherein “either term can he translated into the other” (MF 403). For him, “Saussure's concept of the “system” implies that “content is form” (PL 14; cf. PL viii). Correspondingly, “Formalist” “analysis” “refuses content and transposes” it “back into projections of the form” (PL 88). “The implication is that a work only seems” to “intend a determinate content; in reality it speaks only of its own conditions of coming into being, its own construction” in respect to “formal problems in the context” (PL 88f.) Thus, a Formalist like Sklovskii “leaned toward” an “art which takes itself for its own subject matter” and “presents its own techniques as its own content” (PL 76).

        This “optical illusion projected by the Formalist procedures” in analogy to “Saussure's disconnection of the referential” (PL 89, 83) has consequences a Marxist might regard with dismay: that “ideological content” is “only the result of the form”; that “social critique” is “merely a pretext” for “concrete technical effects that “'art is beyond emotion”; that “psychological” “insights” are “mirages of ‘truths’ given off by the operation of the artistic process”; and so on (PL 78, 57, 83f). But Jameson hopes to rescue “the social basis of Formalism” by making “literature” a “double-functioning substance”: “all literary works” both “speak the language of reference” and “emit” a “lateral message about their own process of formation” (PL 154, 89).

         Along similar lines, the “most characteristic feature of Structuralist criticism lies” in a “transformation of form into content” (PL 198f.) Here too, “literary works are about language” and are “a construction to a higher power”; “the ordinary signifier/signified relationship is complicated by yet another type of. signification which bears on the nature of the code itself” (PL 199, 155). The “formal distortion inherent in the model” made “Structuralists read the content of a given work as Language itself” (PL 200f.)  'Poetry” in particular would be “a total linguistic system” designed for “renewed perception of the very material quality of language” (PL 49f.) Again, Jameson refers us back to the “double-functionality” that got “simplified” (PL 198).

        In any case, such formulations are not too uncongenial for Jameson 's own interpretive program, which “construes purely formal patterns as a symbolic enactment of the social within the formal and the aesthetic” (PU 77). “Dialectical thought” is a “reversal of the form-dominated, artisanally-derived model” of “Aristotle”; “form is regarded not as the initial pattern or mould,” “but the final articulation of the deeper logic of the content” (MF 328f; cf. MF 402f).. “Content, through its own inner logic, generates those categories in terms of which it organizes itself in a formal structure”; and “favours or impedes the development of the literary form which makes use of it” (MF 335; PL 96). “Form” is “the working out of content in the realm of the superstructure,” and hence a kind of “conceptual operation” or “process of thought” (MF 329, 4; PL 13 2). In “the ideology of form,” “form” is apprehended as content”; via a “dialectical reversal,” “formal processes” are “grasped” as “sedimented content” “carrying ideological messages of their own, distinct from the manifest content of the works” (PU 99). The “diachronic sequence” can also he “expressed as a contradiction between form and content”; in “Marx's model of revolutionary change,” “latent content works its way to the surface to displace a form henceforth obsolete” (MF 327f.) ²⁸ [28. Hjelmslev's (1953) concept of “the “content of form'“ is also cited and “adapted” (PU 99, 147). A more energizing source is “Marx's economic research,” being “the most striking model” of how content” “generates those categories” whereby it organizes itself in a formal structure” -- his insight that “change” arises from this process has “an explosive and liberating effect” (MF 335, 328).]

        If “for Marxism the adequation” of “form to content” is “an imaginative possibility only where” “it has been concretely realized in social life,” “so that formal realizations” are “signs of some deeper corresponding social and historical configurations” for “criticism to explore,” then “our judgments on the individual work of art, are social and historical” ones (MF 331, 329). “Content does not need to be” “interpreted,” because it is “immediately meaningful” and “already concrete,” being “essentially social and historical experience” (MF 403f; cf. MF 169). “Criticism” is less “an interpretation of content than a revealing of it, a restoration of the original message” “beneath” the “censorship” -- a claim “implying” that “the surface of the work is a kind of mystification” (MF 404, 413).

        If “form” is “the final articulation,” then “content” could be described as “raw material” (PL 95f; MF 11, 27, 153, 196, 328, 402f, PU 147; cf. Wellek and Warren, TL 140f). This domain is said to possess a “logic” and a range of “possibilities” or “potentialities” (MF 328, 348; PU 147; MF 315, 39). The variety of “raw materials” mentioned in Jameson 's books is extensive: “life,” “society,” or “social life”; “contemporary reality”; the “moment of history” and “historical sensibility”; “language”; “ideologemes”; “the human elements of the work, the characters”; “sedimented types of generic discourse”; “inherited narrative paradigms”; “associative clusters of mythology”; the “musical realm”; and so on (PU 238; MF 164f, 169, 153, 328, 403; PU 147; MF 278, 52; PU 147, 185; MF 196; PU 144, 151; PL 115; MF 30, 39). The “raw materials” from “the system of “everyday life” with its “subsystems of verbal expression” are the “closest to the literary system” (PL 94). Of course, “the development of the work of art is seen to be influenced by the availability of the proper raw material” (FL 95). And Jameson escapes “the windless closure of the formalisrns” (PU 42) by pointedly discovering “object lessons” that bring up “social,” “historical,” “political,” “didactic,” and “existential” aspects of both literature and criticism (MF 7; PU 173, 198; MF 17, 338; PU 168; MF 159; PU 164, 174, 217, 259).

        For Jameson, a “shift from considerations of form” to those of “content” "coincides” with a “shift of consideration” from “the writer” to “his public” (MF 384f.) Authorial intention is marginalized when the critic “sees the individual writer as the locus or working out of a certain set of techniques, as the development and exhaustion of a certain limited set of possibilities inherent in the available raw material” (MF 315). “The profound impersonality of the logic of content” renders “the artist” “merely an instrument” and “uses the accidents of his personal life” “according to its own intrinsic laws” (MF 329; cf. PU 246). Contemplating “the death of the subject,” Jameson  comments: “our possession by language, which writes us even as we imagine ourselves to he writing it,” is “a limiting situation against which we must struggle at every instant” (PL 140).

        In a “dialectical reversal,” “our model readjusts from an active to a passive conception of the way in which art reflects its social ground” (MF 384). “Our judgments” of “great novelists,” for instance, “fall not on them, but on the moment of history they reflect” -- as befits the “insignificance of the individual actor”  facing “the impersonality of history” (MF 42, 225). Yet an author can be reprimanded for the “inadequacy” of a “work to its raw material,” or for the failure to give a “genuine model” of an “objective” “situation,” as when Marx and Engels rebuked a play by Lasalle (MF 193).

         The author's relation to society may vary considerably: at one end, “art for art's sake” signals a “hopeless disaccord with the social environment”; at the other end, “utilitarian art” that “participates in social struggles” signals a ”mutual sympathy” between artists and “some considerable part of society” (Plekhanov 1936) (MF 386). The “dialectical critic” naturally “plots” the “Change” in an “artist's development” as “a series of moments which generate each other out of their own internal contradictions” (MF 51).

        The loss of “attention to the artistic process” is offset by the “greater precision with which” “the class uses of artistic form are described.” In Sartre's view (1964a), “the public” as “a group possessing certain social characteristics” and “certain types of knowledge” “is implicit in the writer himself and follows logically from the choices of material and the stylistic formations which are the acts of his own solitude” (PL 28). “The monographic study of an individual writer” “imposes an inevitable falsification,” an “artificial isolation” for the sake of an “illusion of totality” (MF 315). When Jameson  does “violate” the “taboo against biographical criticism,” he typically brings in the social and political affiliations of an author or of the author's family, as adduced by Sartre for Flaubert and by Jameson  for Sartre (PU 179; MF 382ff, 218f.)

        Social criticism strikingly merges with Formalism when Jamesonian analysis proposes to show how society and language join forces to control an author. We are told that “the shape of the sentences determines the choice of the raw material” (MF 53). “Hemingway,” for example, “wished to write a certain kind of sentence” because “the experience of sentence-production” would he “non-alienated work”; yet since “American social reality is clearly inaccessible to the careful and selective type of sentence he practices,” the repatriated Hemingway was driven to “stylistic impotence and suicide” (MF 409, 41Iff).

        All in all, Jameson  remains confident that “each literary work,” “beyond its own determinate content  “ also signifies literature in general” (PL 155). This claim is universalized still further: “there is a sense in which every enunciation involves” a “lateral statement about language” and “includes” an “auto-designation within its very structure, signifies itself as an act of speech and as the reinvention of speech in general” (PL 202, e.a.; cf. Jakobson, 1960). Yet Jameson is not totally clear about whether “ultimately, all literary structures may be understood as taking themselves for their own object, as being about literature itself”; or whether such occurs only in a specific historical situation., such as “literary modernism” (PL 89). It is similarly uncertain whether the technique called “baring of the device” is “characteristic of all literature” or only Sklovskii's hypostasis of “his own unique personal and historical situation” (PL 89f).

        And “modernism” is itself a slippery notion, especially if thought to be the converse of “realism.” “From a historical point of view,” “this opposition is an unsatisfactory one” (IT 233). “Realism” is only “a “ground” or blurred periphery” that “permitted the phenomenon of modernism to come into focus.” If we scrutinize the realists, we “discover that, as though by magic, they also have every one of them been transformed if not into modernists, at least into precursors of the modern -- symbolists, stylists, psychopathologists, and formalists.”

        Historical conditions naturally determine how we see modernism. For Jameson , it is not a “mere reflection of the reification of late nineteenth-century social life,” but a “revolt against” that process -- a “Utopian compensation for increasing dehumanization on the level of daily life” (PU 42). The “overexposure to language” “in the commercial universe of late capitalism” “obliges” “the serious writer” “to reawaken the reader's numbed sense of the concrete through the administration of linguistic shocks, by restructuring the over-familiar” (MF 20f.) “Modern literature has developed special techniques, elaborate methods of symbolism, in the express hope of giving meaning” to “stubbornly resistant things” (MF 168).

        Even so, “the framework of the work of art is individual lived experience,” in which “the outside world remains stubbornly alienated” and “we are incapable of living directly” “what we can understand as abstract minds” (MF 169). The collective dimension” where “human institutions” “become transparent” is the realm of disembodied abstract thought,” and not of “the work of art.” Here, modernism figures as an evasive hope, a promise forestalled by that same alienation in modern society that it sought to subvert. A pessimistic conclusion, adverse to the Utopian perspective of recent Marxism, impends: “it is irreconcilable with the very form and structure of literature” for “the modern work of art” to cause “the illusion of inhumanity” to “disappear” by “making enough connections between” “disparate phenomena and facts” until “the content of the work would be completely comprehensible in human terms” “on a far vaster scale than before” (MF 168f.)

        Still, “modernism” is an effective force in all eras to the degree that “aesthetics” entails some “renewal of perception,” even if not always the total “primacy of the new” which Jameson  associates with “modern aesthetics” (PL 54). Sklovskij's "psychological law” of “defamiliarisation” (“ostranenie”), serving to “distinguish literature” from “other verbal modes,” “describes a process valid for all literature” without “implying the primacy of one particular literary element” or “genre” (PL 51f.) “Defamiliarisation” is “always” “polemic” and “depends on the negation of existing habits of thought,” “perception,” and “presentation”; it is a “transitional, self-abolishing” “concept” comparable to an “artistic permanent revolution” which might justify “a new concept of literary history” as a “series of abrupt discontinuities” (PL 90, 75, 52).

        Here, we can “turn our attention from the history of works to the history of perception” by “trying to account for” the “mystification” or “perceptual numbness” that art “attempts to dispel” (PL 59; cf. MF 374; cf. Iser, Ch. 8).²⁹ [29. Such passages appear ambivalent alongside the claim that “the surface of the work is a kind of mystification” (MF 413, c. a.). The ambivalence of art is discussed later in this chapter.] In Tynjanov's (1924, 1929) “dialectical” “model,” “dominant techniques are perceived in a tension with the secondary” ones; “one group of factors” is “promoted” “at the expense of others” (PL 92). This account, later termed “foregrounding” by the “Prague Circle,” “has the advantages of including the norm within the work of art” as “the older elements relegated to the background and of “grounding” “innovation” in “the very structure of the literary object” (PL 92, 128).³⁰ [30. However, it “undermines any general historical awareness” to treat “literary change as a uniform mechanism” (PL 59). This complaint should disparage Eikhenbaum (1936), for whom “history” is “'scientific only to the degree that it succeeds in transforming real movement into patterns and models”; and Propp (1928), who “reduced the individual events to various manifestations of some basic idea” and hence to “a single timeless concept” (PL 97, 69f.) Yet Propp is also faulted because his “functions” “fail to attain an adequate level of abstraction,” not being “suffciiently distanced methodologically from the surface logic of the storytelling text” (PU 120f) (cf. Lévi-Strauss, 1960).

          The “analysis” of “the structural approach” concerning “the play  of structural norm and textual deviation” can then be taken as “a three-term process,” with “history” as the “non-representable” “third variable” (PU 145f.) “The deviation of the individual text from some deeper narrative structure” is traced to “those determinate changes in the historical situation that block a full manifestation” “on the discursive level” (PU 146).

        A Marxist should hardly relish the “advantage” that the Formalists” “model” did “not spill outside the work” into “social problems”; nor their “denouncing as eclecticism” the “explicit attempts to connect literature with the systems farthest away from it, such as the economic” (PL 92, 94). Jameson himself continually probes “the relationship” of “the literary system” to “neighbouring and more distant ones in the totality of experience” (PL 96). He finds in Tynjanov's work “two possible movements of relationship from one system to another” (PL 93). The “autonomous evolution” of “literature” is upheld when “the literary system” “absorbs elements of other systems into itself and uses them according to its own laws,” but is “suspended or even altered” when “literature is absorbed into some other system. “

        Whether some such absorption might occur between literature and criticism is uncertain. Unlike the Yale group, Jameson  finds it “not becoming in critics to exalt their activity to the level of literary creation” -- claims he notes in “France” too (MF 415). But the opposite extreme is also castigated. it is “fatuous” “to glamorise” the “critique of ideology” by likening it “to real work on the assembly line” and “genuine manual labour” (PU 45). Still, he argues that “theory is a kind of production: it works with tangible objects and transforms them” “as in the production of the material world” (PL 107).

        In structuralist research, criticism could be a “meta-language” that “abstracts the structure of another more primary language” and becomes the “signifier,” making the other its “signified” (PL 159; cf. Culler, PS xi). “Meta-language” is “the form that self-consciousness takes in the realm of language,” and “a set of signs whose signified is itself a sign-system” (PL 207). Whereas “older literary history” was “metonymic” in linking the work to “the influences and the historical period which surrounded the absent moment of creation,” “literary criticism” can now be a “metaphorical” practice that “seeks to replace the work with a description of its structures, with a new “meta-language” that resembles it” (PL 123). The newer method performs “interpretation” by “unfolding successive layers of the signified, each of which” is then “transformed into a new signifier”  -- an “infinite” “process” (PL 176). In a related vein, Derrida's display of “the instance from itself that all language bears within itself” “means” “that “interpretations are generated out of an ontological lack within the text” and “that the text can have no ultimate meaning.”

        This line of argument should dissolve the struggle over right or wrong interpretations. Jameson does confess “devoting” “little attention” to “interpretive validity and to the criteria by which a given interpretation may be faulted or accredited” (PU 13). He “feels that no interpretation can be effectively disqualified on its own terms by a simple enumeration of inaccuracies or omissions.” Without mentioning him, he follows the totally un-Marxist Bloom (cf. MAP 29) in declaring that “interpretation” “takes place on a Homeric battlefield” as a “conflict” of “a host of interpretive options. “ “If the positivistic conception of philological accuracy be the only alternative,” Jameson prefers to “celebrate” "strong misreadings over weak ones.”

         We are reassured, however, that “the interpretation of a work can never he an arbitrary process” (MF 403). Against “the infinity of possible meanings and their ultimate equivalence” maintained by “pluralism,” Jameson argues that “there are only a finite number of interpretive possibilities in any given textual situation” (PU 31f.) “As a matter of practical criticism,” “the mind is not content until it” “invents a hierarchical relationship among its various interpretations” (PU 31f.)  All the same, the Derridean implication that “the process of interpretation is infinite” (PL 176) might attract a critical profession in search of inexhaustible challenges.

        Philological accuracy could hardly be decisive for a critical method which constantly expands the work's horizon outward toward the totality of society. A “genuine literary sociology” can adduce only “mediated and indirect relationships” (PL 95). Jameson continually points to “absent causes,” which are “non-representable,” “cannot be directly or immediately conceptualised by the text,” and are “nowhere empirically present as an element”: “social contradiction,” “history,” “mode of production,” “the synchronic system of social relations,” and so on (PU 146, 82, 35f.) The critic must deal not only with “the manifest text” and “the deep structure tangibly mapped out before us in a spatial hieroglyph” (and how that can be “tangible” is a bit mysterious), but with a “third term” which is “always absent,” namely, “history itself” (PU 146) (for Althusser the “absent cause”, PU 3 5, 82).

        Somewhat like Ingarden (1931), Jameson envisions a “layering” of the text, except that here, “sedimentation” designates