Re-reading Jameson's Late Marxism
[UNLOCKED content] Our first stinky-type work of literary theory...
Fredric Jameson: Late Marxism—Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. Verso: 1990. 270 pp.
Am I a snob? Yes.
Do I position myself as above the trash of popular culture with its eroticism and other petty-bourgeois nonsense? You bet.
Do I consider formulaic garbage of the MCU-type to be, at best, training wheels for engaging with serious narrative art, and believe that the willingness of a critic to “let people enjoy things” amounts to a crime of aesthetic pedagogy? Correct.
Isn’t life too short to worry about what other people enjoy? Nope!
And that’s partially why we keep coming back to the damned questions of high and low culture here on SF. Actually “high and low” belong to the liberal period of capitalism in the 19th century. Now there’s mass culture and an all-but-irrelevant “high art” that often doesn’t seem to have much to say aesthetically beyond “the avant-garde is far behind us.”
So we may as well consult our guy Fredric Jameson for his views on “Late Modernism” and all the lore accumulated around artistic production in advanced capitalist countries.
Late Marxism (1990) was not included in the Jameson Reading Group series. A wise decision! According to the jacket copy, “In this powerful book, Fredric Jameson proposes a radically different reading of Adorno’s work, especially of his major works on philosophy and aesthetics: Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. Jameson argues persuasively that Adorno’s contribution to the development of Marxism remains unique and indispensable.”
I remembered it as one of Jameson’s most difficult texts, yet being useful for engaging with modernist literature and the Frankfurt School people. But reading it again many years later, my views on it have done a 180.
Late Marxism just feels rushed, and its ideas don’t sound fully under control. Jameson seems to be shooting from the hip, painting mimesis as such as some kind of shamanistic thing, linking Adorno to Karl Kraus, then quickly moving on to the next oddball postulation.
Sometimes (as with this book and the monograph on Walter Benjamin, which I still haven’t finished), your host reads a Jameson text and thinks, “This must be how Jameson-haters see all of his work.” Jameson at his weakest is also at his most Zizekian. As off-the-cuff as these pages read, the book is also compulsively readable despite its jargon, in a derogatory way, like intellectual potato chips.
Jameson’s book is not just his idea of a “popular” introduction to Adorno (and to some extent Benjamin). His project is also in part to defend “totality” and “Utopia” among other categories from post-Marxism.
But then, who is gonna defend Marxism from the type of “Marxism” exhibited below:
It is with culture as with philosophy, which famously ‘lived on because the moment to realize it was missed’; there is, as we shall see, a utopian power in keeping alive the Impossible idea of philosophizing (as of producing culture) even while ruthlessly exposing the necessary failure to go on doing it today. (In the same way, according to my own proposal, the stigmatizing term of superstructure needs to be retained in order to remind us of a gap that has to be overcome in some more adequate way than forgetting about it.)
And there it is: this is how Jameson articulated his “post-Marxism.” In the spirit of a modernism that denounced its restriction to the cultural sphere while at the same time perpetuating it, we can disarm the language of Orthodox Marxism precisely by retaining it as a memorandum of what still needs to be intellectually overcome. It’s an implication of the “original sin” of the social division between mental and manual labor.
Among the forms of Marxist lingo to be retained is naturally the question of “Darstellung” which is translated as presentation or representation. The term appears quite a few times in Volume I of Marx’s Capital. The work itself is the presentation — Die Darstellung — of an argument in the form of logic and concepts (as opposed to hard objective reality). This presentation is informed by dialectics in every pore, from the dual character of labor, to the development of the value-form, to the opposition and interdependence of labor and capital, such is the method of presentation, or “die Darstellungsmethode.” Such are the parameters of a theoretical investigation (“theoretische Darstellung”).
Further: Exchange-value is a representation (Darstellung) that independently expresses the value of a commodity. In a barter economy, before the money commodity has been fixed, a product only expresses its value relatively to the whole proliferation of commodities on the market, which is a never-ending series of representations, or “Darstellungsreihe.” Products present themselves as commodities (“Die Darstellung des Produkts als Ware”) at a certain level of the development of the social division of labor. Coins are tokens that symbolically represent (“symbolischen Darstellung”) the value that strictly speaking only exists in useful articles.
All of this seems straight-ahead. Darstellung points to the aspects of expository writing (organizing arguments to describe a complicated object), and it also captures processes of representation as well as arithmetical expression.
It’s not so clear in the section of Late Marxism that covers this “issue” of systematic thought. The gap between the presentation and the real object is exposed in the capacity for the presentation to be potentially arranged differently. This is like the dorm-room smoke sesh question of “Why did Marx start with the commodity? Why not something else?”
There’s always a “gap” between the representation and the thing represented, that’s part of the ABC of dialectics! But Jameson fastens on to this gap to advance notions of the “pseudo-totality.”
Pseudo-totality: the illusion of the total system is aroused and encouraged by the systematic links and cross-references established between a range of concepts, while the baleful spell of system itself is then abruptly exorcized by the realization that the order of presentation is non-binding, that it might have been arranged in an utterly different ' fashion, so that, as in a divinatory cast, all the elements are present but the form of their juxtapositions, the shape of their falling out, is merely occasional. This kind of Darstellung, which seeks specifically to undermine its own provisional architectonic, Benjamin called configuration or constellation, terms to which Adorno added the apparently more awkward 'model', offering three formal demonstrations of it in the second half of Negative Dialectics.
So the tightened, refined, perfected argument of Volume I — as well as the petty-bourgeois leftist texts of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin — must be seen not as attempts to reflect objective social realities, but as a mimesis of the pseudo-totality, which is the “mirage” of a complete system. The fragmentary, modernism-adjacent styles of the Frankfurt School people is a mimesis of a fragmentary social situation.
Much is made of Schoenberg’s pedagogical “models,” his 12-tone pointillistic system — all of which fuels a critical “aesthetic” of the constellations: all variations with no exhausted theme, just recapitulating everything at every moment.
Then, to swing back to the contesting of instrumental rationality, there’s a bizarre analogy between the human psyche and the organic composition of capital (the ratio between machines and applied labor-power), as a ratio between programed administrative operations and one’s “free” spontaneous subjectivity. And they say the orthodox Marxists are mechanical and reductive!
And then, after riffing on Adorno’s relation to Kant’s aesthetics (did he “wrap” Aesthetic Theory around the “core” of Critique of Judgment a la postmodern architecture? and so on), and the base-superstructure paradigm as the last doctrine in which the bourgeois enlightenment used causality as a political weapon, Jameson suggests that attacking causality (and the Hegelian notion of historical progress) is the basis for postmodern attacks on the enlightenment, which is the vehicle for attacking historical materialism. Progress is the main target, primary even over the positivistic climate of sociology of the time.
And so this argument climaxes with contemplating natural history, and the very postmodern feeling of there being no more history, that is our own shorted out feeling of “temporality.” There’s a very Northrop Frye kind of thought here: the brute fact of our material existence — we need to eat — in relation to the most demonic and hellish action in the system of archetypes — namely cannibalism — the axis forming the “nightmare of natural history.”
And the punchline of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is that the modern imperialist society of monopoly capitalism is our “second nature,” and the enlightenment “always-already” contains its antienlightenment.
And all that is just from Chapter 1, there’s still three to go (heaven help us).
The next two chapters focus on aesthetics and philosophy in Adorno’s work, respectively. But in your host’s experience, there’s more to learn about what Jameson thinks about “postmodernism” than about the author of Aesthetic Theory.
Late Marxism is a significant counterpart to the Postmodernism book, and they both came out around the same time. Each is like the other’s shadow. Here is where all the semi-Marxism is martialed to inform what was happening in the presentation of “Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”
The first major point is made in the context of Jameson’s views on the “Culture Industry.”
What could Culture Industry mean in the post World War Two world? By the 1960s, modernist art has been canonized, American-style anti-intellectualism is on the order of the day in France, and developments in technology have impacted culture to the point of producing mass media content. Buried under this situation is a vague sense of collectivity — it’s the repressed political unconscious again. And postmodernism describes a situation where proliferating theoretical discourses on mass culture confront us.
The belated theorization of the new forms of mass culture as so many manifestations of 'postmodernism' now seems to complete these new positions at the same time that it profoundly problematizes them.
What do postmodern “theoretical discourse” and the “utopian component” do for the big Frankfurt School picture of society’s domination by instrumental (means-and-ends) rationalization and reification, via the mental operations of identity thinking? The answer involves a reaching reading of Chapter 1 of Volume I of Capital.
The first chapter of Capital, indeed, stages 'equivalence' as anything but a natural process [!], and shows it to be at one and the same time a creative mental act, an extraordinary cultural invention, which is also a brutal and revolutionary intervention into the objective world: nothing in the senses endorses the conceptual leap whereby the famous coat becomes equivalent 'in value' to the equally famous twenty yards of linen. Nor can a metaphysics of Number — according to which, eventually, one pound of iron shavings is discovered to be equivalent to one pound of feathers — ground this new value form, whose historical evolution culminates in the so-called 'general form of value' or money: it has not been sufficiently appreciated that Marx's four stages of value project a whole history of abstraction as such, of which the commodity form is but a local result (and Weber's rationalization, Simmel's intellectualization, and Lukacs's reification constitute its global generalization, at the other end of time).
We take FJ’s point that Marx’s point is that value isn’t directly available to the senses (but it’s still real, it’s a real social component of commodities and is really tied to labor input). And it’s true that abstraction plays a role in exploring the dual character of labor.
But to make a big deal about the seeming appeal to “equivalence” in Marx, in the vein of the Frankfurt Guys (Eek! the exclusion of difference and heterogeneity! the intolerance of that which is incommensurable!) breaks Marx’s political economy from the materialist monism that drives the whole thing. How do we square the notion of equivalence as “anything but a natural process” with Marx’s famous line in the Preface to the First German edition: “My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process as natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them”?
Jameson is doing the classic Western “Marxism” move: reducing Marxism to a mere methodology (see the opening paragraphs of Lukács’s “What is Orthodox Marxism?”), and not a reflection of what’s really going on in the capitalist world.
For Chapter 3 we have to shift gears to technical philosophy, and take up the question of nominalism. Nominalism sees only concrete things in their particularity as effectively existing; the concept for things is just an abstract category, it exists in name only, it’s nominal. Nominalism was a powerful materialist critique of Catholic orthodoxy in the middle ages. But the persistence of this perspective leads to the early-century positivism that the Frankfurt School had been contesting.
Jameson suggests that nominalism is a characteristic also of the “minimalism” of late modernist works, like Beckett’s Endgame. The basic themes of postmodernism (the schizophrenia, the destabilized subjectivity) are revealed as modern forms of nominalism. And now “high art” is in a groundless nominalist feedback loop, formally “innovating” itself to no external purpose.
So much then for the philosophy of aesthetics, in our overripe level of “rationalized” productive forces.
Now, in the concluding chapter, we’re about to witness something momentous. We established in the letter on Political Unconscious that Jameson is a post-Althusserian literary theorist by tendency. Now we see how the great Pac-Man of Jameson’s doctrine swallows up Adorno’s negative dialectics and constellating practice, and assimilates it to the existing eclectic mashup. He does it by saying the constellating method of Benjamin and Adorno is pre-Althusserian.
The “constellation” style of writing is “a mobile and shifting set of elements in which it is sheer relationship rather than substantive content that marks their structure as a whole.”
In a constellation there can be no 'fundamental' features, no centers, no 'ultimately determining instances' or bottom lines, except for the relationship of all these contents to each other. The notion is virtually Althusserian avant La lettre[.]
The method of constellation is the appearance of Althusser’s “structural causality.” There you go!
Now, this book is subtitled The persistence of the dialectic. How should the dialectic persist? Says Jameson:
His [Adorno’s] introspective or reflexive dialectic befits a situation in which — on account of the dimensions and unevenness of the new global world — the relationship between the individual and the system seems ill-defined, if not fluid, or even dissolved.
Marxism, like a man, can be destroyed but never defeated! Because even if it’s “discredited” by the “triumph” of global capitalism (how different the 90s seem with 30 years of retrospection!), Marxism, Jameson admirably wagers, is still the best method for understanding the situation.
Now, this is a fine statement coming from the internal opposition to post-Marxism, understood as the left-liberal corner of academia that cooks up “Marxist” arguments for how Marxism is now safely in the past. (I’m lookin’ at you, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau.)
But so long as we take up Jameson’s two interlinked ouroboroses, (1) the Althusserian over-scientistic denial of ideology’s objective character and (2) Adorno’s parallel disdain of “identity thinking,” it is also an intellectual defense of mysticism.
One more thing, about this book’s organization. There are four main chapters, but they’re hacked up into various amounts of subsections. One has 12, Two has 5, Three has 9, and Four has 4. Twelve is pretty on-the-nose as a reference to Schoenberg and the twelve chromatic tones. Then five, the number of black magic, of four cardinal directions plus one center. Nine is the number of greatest elaboration (the square of three), the most significant magnitude in medieval cosmology. And the concluding Chapter 4 appropriately brings us back to the regulated square coordinates of the ground.
The sum of all the numbers is 30. Do we think this seriously means anything? Not really.