Fredric Jameson's Inventions of a Present [1934-2024]

When we solve our problems with more problems, that basically is a utopia...

Oct 11, 2024

Inventions of A Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization [Book]

Fredric Jameson: Inventions of a Present — The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization. Brooklyn: Verso, 2024.

We are dusting off the SF Sub after an unexpected, unannounced and unusually protracted hiatus (sorry about that!).

Our cultural/intellectual climate (or weather zone) has been moved by the recent death of Fredric Jameson. Your host had already been touching on the ideas of this most cerebral and influential of literary critics, with more blogging on his work to come — only now these writings have also taken up the task of elegizing.

You don’t have to be a Jameson junkie to understand there won’t be another one like him. The current conditions of academia and the humanities would not allow it. He came up in the most rarified era of literary criticism in the early-mid 20th century, studied at Yale under the titanic philologist Erich Auerbach, wrote a diss on Sartre as mediated by German neo-Marxists like Lukacs, Benjamin, and Adorno, thereby dyeing himself in semi-Marxist existentialism. All this plus Althusser animated Jameson’s interpretive doctrine.

Jameson’s doctrine when it comes to reading texts goes like this. If “postmodernism” means the end of all master narratives, what happens when you figure out that this, too, is a master narrative? It gets repressed, and then returns as the political unconscious!

Jameson was in the right place at the right time: trained in comparative literature, able to read French and German, he was the man to absorb all the developments in bourgeois Continental philosophy, which in the 60s and 70s was studiously ignored by the analytical Anglo-American philosophers.

If the Frankfurt School “Marxists” and French critical theorists opened the door for modernism and postmodernism within academic discourse, Jameson opened the door for Americans to this material, in his own way of course. He established a trail followed by Gillian Rose and all the personalities that orbit around the English New Left Review.

A testament to Jameson’s personal reputation as a gregarious and professorial man, teaching regularly at Duke all the way to the end, the outpouring of fond remembrances and anecdotes (including a picture of Chairman Mao’s portrait hung in Jameson’s house) has been striking. There is a collection of review pieces and memorials at the bottom of this post after the dividing line. Particularly interesting are the ones by M Grief (including a comparison between Jameson and Harold Bloom) and RT Tally.

It was already a big year for FJ heads: the man had turned 90, and it was a significant publishing year for him too. Two giant seminar books came out — one on German aesthetics, and one on French theory — as well as one little book, a collection of review essays spanning his career.

Inventions of a Present is arguably a quite appropriate note for Jameson’s life’s work to sound off on. After ingesting every metaphysical system on the menu of Western intellectual history, this book feels like a return to the roots — to being an old-fashioned practical literary critic, reading books and interpreting them in a way that helps others appreciate what’s going on. And because Jameson stays close to the primary texts in these short essays, it’s easy to recommend to the curious.

There are some good descriptions of this book already (particularly by Grief) appended below. Your host decided to take a chronological approach, and deal with some of the 19 pieces in the order of publication, and see if there’s an outline of how Jameson’s thinking about narrative literature, specifically novels, evolved from the 70s to 2024.

The brief introduction by Jameson is remarkably tight. The novel has traversed the two stages of capitalism, from the liberal-competitive and heavy-industrial era of “realism” to the post-avant-garde, pluralistic situation that confronts us today.

Was then the continent of nineteenth-century “realist” fiction some uninterrupted temporal landmass one could cross by way of a continuous history? What is certain is that, in the twentieth century, this hypothetical mainland began to break up into any number of verifiable archipelagos and free-standing islands.

The concluding lines hone in on one of Jameson’s favored topics in his late career, namely the question of collectivity and representing it; Allegory and Ideology (2019) took concern with this idea as well.

Perhaps the secret is this: what is new and distinctive about the novel today, what is historically unique about the emergent situation of the works discussed here, is that they try to write the collective or at least register the crisis of the individual attempting to do so.

If this particular project for the novel is pretty much guaranteed to fail, there is the more promising road of the novel as a means to present the meaning of time itself, of temporality. In a review essay on A Hundred Years of Solitude, he writes:

Just as Le Corbusier described the dwelling as a “machine for living,” so the novel has always been a machine for living a certain kind of temporality; and in multiple differentiations of global or postmodern capitalism, we may expect a far greater variety of these temporal machines than there were in the transitional period we call literary modernism.

For the rest of this letter, however, we’ll look at some of the basic concepts in Jameson and how they appeared in this collection chronologically.

The earliest essay, called “Allegory of the Hunter” (1972), Jameson gives us a reading of Deliverance (1970) that fits in the “depth model” of hermeneutics. The appearance of a peculiar, atavistic image, in form of hillbillies who look like “bootleggers” out of the ‘30s, leads to this passage of ideological unmasking.

Now, perhaps, we are in a better position to understand what kind of a confrontation it was for which Dickey’s heroes had prepared themselves: it was the thirties they went forth to meet—in some obscure way they journeyed into the wilderness to settle their accounts with the great radical tradition of the American past. Not technological breakdown, not some nagging sense of the unfulfillment of middle-class life, not atomic holocaust, not the heroic attempt to overcome nature or to find the very outer limits of the self, no, the new heroes whose legend Deliverance passes down to us are the frightened men of the modern American suburb, men for whom Nature is a kind of unconscious synonym of underdevelopment, and whose systematic and self-punishing gymnastics are, like the classic Western theories of counter-insurgency warfare, a way of beating the enemy at his own game.

The next piece chronologically stands out as a pivot from American history (and its deflation via archetypes) to a fascination with the “world system.” It comes out in this passage from “Language and Conspiracy in DeLillo and Yurick” (1984). And as the map metaphor in a previous quote should indicate, Jameson presents this topic as a specifically spatial problem.

The “world system” itself is a pivot from the apparently classical version of the imperialist system, with great powers and colonies, into an enmeshed global economy, still with great powers, but their spheres of action are mediated by formerly colonial countries that are now capitalist states.

That dilemma can be schematically described as the increasing incompatibility — or incommensurability — between individual experience, existential experience, as we go on looking for it in our individual biological bodies, and structural meaning, which can now ultimately derive only from the world system of multinational capitalism. This tension — which ought not too rapidly to be assimilated back to the old ideological opposition between the “individual” and “society” — has of course always been present in earlier periods, where, however, the social frame was nowhere near so vast, and was always somehow closer to individual perception.

What the bourgeois novel foregrounds in this situation is the question of intelligibility itself. The main implication made by Jameson is that bourgeois modernist aesthetics register the inability of imperialism to represent itself to itself, as expressed in “Limits of the Gringo Novel” (1993).

We must resort to the third world literature, where a sense of place and continuity may still exist.

Indeed, if Faulkner is in any way the patron saint of the new regional literature, then, imperialism or not, we have to add that his new forms are our great gift to the rest of the world, and, in particular, to the Third World, whose extraordinary cultural production from García Márquez to the Chinese is inconceivable without Faulkner’s invention of a vertical regionalism that includes history and the experience of historical catastrophe within its small local confines.

With the 90s, we’ve come to pieces that lean on Jameson’s formulations in his one book that everyone’s read, the Postmodernism book (far from his most accessible writing). An analysis of the “Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” surely entails an analysis of language under the same “late capitalism.”

That seems to be the context for the following passage, in which the making-discrete of “living language” in our technological world represents a process of commercialization in a sphere where “capitalist social relations” did not previously exist. There is an odd note at the end about the labor theory of value (value as objectified labor) and the question of machines and living labor (the labor that creates surplus-value). What’s the difference, after all, between all the AI snake oil currently inflating the finance sector, and the old complaint Jameson mentions of the businessman on how no one knows how to write anymore (that is, a labor shortage)?:

These complaints [lack of available intellectual labor] unerringly pinpoint the place at which machines cannot replace living labor in the production process, the place, I am tempted to say, where the labor theory of value is still alive and minimally capable of undermining the post-industrial hypothesis about the primacy of knowledge over production.

If anyone’s looking for a rationale for Jameson’s writing style, there’s one here. “…labor nakedly visible to the living eyeball, can only be glimpsed in a few unique and privileged places, one of which is the production of real sentences.” Belles letters as perceptible imaginative-human labor. I guess that’s something!

Robert Hullot-Kentor once said that Jameson was a “conventional thinker” whose desire for vanguardism in theory “led him into genuinely anticonventional work…” The thought came to mind while reading this moment in a piece called “Germany’s Double Plots” (1996), where Faulkner’s post-Reconstruction literary world is brought to bear on, of all things, the reunification of Germany and the literary prospects of Gunter Grass-type novelists.

This suggests (and the influence and authority of Faulkner confirms the hypothesis) that a true magic realism must always spring from defeat—that is, it must always somehow be post-colonial—and work on the materials of an essentially subaltern history. Does this account for its absence in Western Europe or augur its disappearance in a reunited Germany?

This is one of those howlers that points to one of the chief complaints of Jameson-haters, that his system (assuming he had one) remains external to his writings, and his material ends up being more scrambled than it needs to be.

This particular thought is part of FJ’s trend in spatializing economic transformation: the change in land ownership systems and its violent downstream effects. It comes up in a cotemporaneous book, The Seeds of Time (arguably more “postmodernist” in its style and organization than the actual Postmodernism book):

— East Germany in this respect today rather resembles what the American North had to do to the conquered South after the Civil War; while the Israeli settlements often remind one of the brutal displacement of Native American societies in the West of the United States.

Jameson’s style indeed functions like a kind of cement, smoothing things over, so that his doubtful claims and his genuine insights blend together, and his rare but incisive political assessments have to get picked out from within the walls of text, like this one from “Faith and Conspiracy in Japan” (2003) on the failures of New Left revolution.

The displacement and supersession of the Communist Party by New Left or extraparliamentary left movements — what the France of 1968 called “groupuscules” — meant not merely a draining away of the central ideological conflict of the Cold War (particularly since most of these small groups were more passionately anti-communist than anti-capitalist in the first place); it also meant the emergence of the new political dynamic epitomized by the fraternal conflicts of Oe’s Pinch Runner Memorandum, where it is difficult to distinguish between the revolutionary group and the counter-revolutionary group attacking it.

There’s a significant pocket of Jameson’s work that this collection doesn’t cover, which is his writings on science and fiction and films in the 80s. That’s probably because those essays have already been bound up in Archaeologies of the Future (2005). But his exploration of genre narratives appears in an essay on The Wire.

Here, society, on microlevels of various dimensions, is finding itself subject to deliberate processes of transformation, to human projects, to the working out of Utopian intentions that are not simply the forces of gravity of habit and tradition.

The negative reference to the “gravity” of habit should clue us that “Utopian” here points toward the genuinely “new,” how to define new here, your host doesn’t know. Jameson loved to locate “Utopian” moments in the texts he studied, and it is a common note in modern petty-bourgeois intellectual products, whether it’s Derridean poststructuralism and deferral of meaning, the freedom to kick the can down the road; or Adorno’s moment of rational identity where freedom as a property belonging to the concept in its most “concrete” (i.e. complete) ideal state is understood by the subject. Lordy lordy…

The twenty-teens brought a turn toward encyclopedism, to a certain extent. What are you supposed to include in an encyclopedia (and what kind of instutiton(s) approve it) are of course ideologically loaded questions. And then there’s the question of how long each entry should be, because in an encyclopedia size corresponds to importance.

Some fascinating lines on this train of thought come in “The USSR That Wasn’t” (2012), which looked at recent novels that approach a kind of encyclopedic naturalism, but in the “postmodern” way, naturally.

It is not until the collapse of the aesthetic systems of the modern that postmodern works such as this one can shamelessly include information as such and briefly function like textbooks. Whether this is the result of the aestheticization of information in an informational society or of the informationalization of aesthetics in a spectacular or image-saturated one I do not decide, except to underscore the ideological significance of the answer settled on and to note the availability of yet a third solution, which is the dedifferentiation of specialized fields in the postmodern. This is a kind of response to the problem of historical information as such in Red Plenty, and it is a kind of return to Brecht’s defense of the didactic—learning facts and skills is a pleasure in itself, which the work of art need never renounce.

Along with the revival of didacticism in postmodern aesthetics, we shall include the Butlerian Jihad, in the context of the utilization of Taylorism in the construction of socialism in Russia.

Yet the very sensitivity of the topic is also reflected negatively in the fact that there are no great utopian texts after the widespread introduction of computers (the last being Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia of 1975, where computers are not yet in service). Instead, we have the free-market deliria of cyberpunk, which assumes that capitalism is itself a kind of utopia of difference and variety. I think this failure of imagination on the left can be attributed to the assumption that computers are enough to “take care” of totalization.

What kind of Marxist Jameson was, and how Marxist was he, deserve a lengthy answer. However, it’s true that he remained “stubborn” in discrete commitments to revolutionary Marxism, whether justifying revolutionary violence, supporting the Cuban Revolution, holding it down for the category of totality, and recovering translated literature from Russia and Eastern Europe from easy liberal anti-Communism. Take for example “Immortal Stalingrad” (2015), on Lev Grossmann.

Meanwhile, the translator has taken innumerable diatribes on freedom in the novel to justify the characterization of Grossman as a dissident, forgetting Adorno’s maxim that the ideas in a work are its raw material and not its meaning, and also ignoring the historical emergence of this term only later, in the 1960s, when it was borrowed from the Western languages. It would be desirable, if possible, to dissolve such inevitable Cold War accretions by taking a more formalist approach to this historical novel about the years 1942–43.

The commitment to totality, which triggers allergic reactions in postmodern thinkers, is the basis for Jameson’s playing around with allegory and semiotic diagrams, which he neatly expounded on in “Form Problems in Henry James” (2015)

I sympathize with the reaction but still believe that we must somehow sort out the mixed feelings this unique and extraordinary figure continues to inspire. The problem for me personally (or theoretically) is the reconciliation between two schemes to which I find myself committed: one is the four-fold medieval schema of the allegorical levels; the other the Greimas semiotic square (which in fact goes back to Aristotle).

Allegory has been put to work by Jameson since essentially the beginning, with his Political Unconscious. There it did the work of hermeneutical de-coding, accounting for textual distortions motivated by ideology. Greimas squares meanwhile serve as mediations between the allegorical “levels.”

It occurs to your host while writing this that these two devices stand in for Jameson the Giant’s two feet, one standing in post-German idealism, (Frankfurt School + Lukacs) and the other in France (Derrida, semiotics, Lacan, and indeed Deleuze).

Indeed Deleuze. Jameson’s appeals to anarchistic Constructivist aesthetics in his Allegory and Ideology came as a surprise to me, but I should not have been shocked. For Deleuze has also been there since the beginning, his “schizo text” concept is at play in Political Unconscious, as a kind of negative attitude toward the totality.

Here is the most recent essay I’ll quote here (though his last essay on Conrad is also superb), from “Flashes of WWII” (2020)

The War is a rhizome, striated by encyclopedic information, and delivered in intelligent sentences, the like of which, as Chandler observed long ago, always exasperate the readers of airport paperbacks: boundaries expanding and contracting and the series delivering unpredictable spots of time.

A roundup of reviews for Inventions of a Present:

Essays in memoriam for Jameson:

Silent Friends

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