Re-reading Jameson's Political Unconscious

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Fredric Jameson: The Political Unconscious—Narrative as a socially symbolic act. London: Routledge Classics, 2002 [1981].

Everyone knows Jameson’s book opens with the slogan “Always historicize” but how well do we understand this imperative, considering the argument of this book takes up the notion that history strictly speaking doesn’t exist?

Political Unconscious is where curious readers (who don’t want to go in publication order) should begin with Fredric Jameson’s work. This is where the principles of his interpretative doctrine were most clearly spelled out.

On this go-round, your host tried to pay attention to the concept of Desire, the methodological questions at play, where Jameson slyly deviates from a materialist understanding of history and culture, and the massive role played on this project by Northrop Frye.

What follows is my summation of Jameson’s opening chapter, as accessible as I can make it. Below the pay gap, we go further into the brass tacks of PU.

After seven years or so of studying Jameson’s PU and the chapter “On Interpretation,” the business of Jamesonian criticism has sedimented itself for me like this.

Marxism is the ultimate horizon (in a Sartrean sense of semantic preconditions) of intelligible literary criticism. This horizon is actually three concentric horizons, in order of narrower to wider scope, from political history, to class struggle, to the sequence of modes of productions. But all three horizons are (indirectly) perceptible only in language: in practice we’re dealing with socially symbolic acts, based on the work of Lévi-Strauss (representation of politics), ideologemes (censorious linguistic registers of class struggle), and ideology of form (Don Quixote as the overcoming of feudalism by capitalism, etc.).

This time around, I read this text wondering why Jameson got so stuck on desire, wish fulfilment, and the unconscious in the first place. Turns out it’s because they are intrinsic categories to the human imagination, along with ideology, representation, the capacity for cultural production and…History itself(!).

The second part of the first chapter is a long rehearsal of past hermeneutics, including the Freudian one, which includes the category of desire. Psychoanalysis here is an allegory for the historical narrative of desire coming up against necessity. This is the background for the famous lines at the very end of this chapter, about “History is what hurts” and so on.

Desire, its limitations, and its taboos — all are implicated, especially taboo, in the ideologemes because that is the business of ideological and linguistic censorship, of drawing the line between what can and cannot be said about desires on a collective (class) level.

In the long opening section, which Jameson amusingly gives the reader permission to skip if it’s too boring, the theorist stages a great methodological debate, one that’s basically asking: do the categories of Marx’s political-economy proceed logically or historically (assuming there’s a distinction)?

The easiest way to think about it is how Marx talked about it in the 1857 Introduction: with the question of where to begin, methodologically speaking. Do you start with population? That seems to be the most immediately concrete element of an economy — but then again, subdivisions of population, namely social classes, are more logically fundamental, due to being more abstract. Everybody knows Marx set up his analysis of capital with the commodity, not just because it is the most immediate and present phenomenon of a developed capitalism, but because it is the logical and the historical starting point at once. (That is, capitalism starts its development with a commodity-money economy, which have been around since ancient times; but it’s not until commodity production is the dominant and only way of doing things can we say that we have capitalism.)

In other words, it’s a problem that only exists in the Western “Marxist” current, so I can’t blame readers who don’t have the patience/interest for it. Nevertheless, Jameson stages a great debate, with Lukacs and Sartre on one side, and Althusser (with Spinoza) on the other. The keywords are Diachronic vs. Synchronic: thinking historically or systematically. The structuralist side of Althusser, condemn the historical side as giving into “expressive causality” like Hegel presupposing an intellectual essence expressing itself in matter. For the synchronic team, causality can’t be explained since we’re outside of time: the cause is absent (hence Spinoza).

Jameson digests this whole line of debate, since that’s part of his own methodology.

Marxism subsumes other interpretive modes or systems; or, to put it in methodological terms, that the limits of the latter can always be overcome, and their more positive findings retained, by a radical historicizing of their mental operations, such that not only the content of the analysis, but the very method itself, along with the analyst, then comes to be reckoned into the "text" or phenomenon to be explained.

The theoretical output is an argument that says the capitalist mode of production is both the sole predominating structure of social existence and also the absent cause of history.

It’s a confusing picture because Jameson is popularly understood as a stickler for historical materialism and Hegelian notions of totality. But this foundational chapter is all about taking up Althusser, an ultra pragmatist who condemns Hegelian Marxism as humanist, expressionistic, and organicist (with changes in production coming from within); as well as Deleuze and Guattari, who oppose any interpretation or allegory as a historicist assertion of some totalizing thought or another.

It’s hard to identify which side Jameson himself favors. Considering Jameson’s work that I’ve read, he seems to admire D&G as genuine avant-gardes in the field of critical theory, even as he remains stubborn to the labor movement and totalizing thought. One passage in this book suggests he would want his method to be seen as the perpetual staging of the problem itself, within the reading of literary text — the problem is that texts can’t represent History, the Absent Cause, nor the Real; if these things are to be found at all, they are ‘immanent’ effects or a ‘subtext.’

Jameson is getting enthusiastically taken up by Deleuzians and left-Nietzscheans these days, and on this read through the appeal was clear. The Anti-Oedipus — the bibliographic equivalent of a hall of funhouse mirrors — is cited in PU for its framework of the capitalist system as a process of decoding flows by revealing their ultimate nature as privatized organs. Translated from francophone postmodernese: capitalism combines the means of production with labor power and extracts a surplus-value from the combination. (This is the connection of deterritorialized flows and a picture of two organs, laborer and capitalist.) This surplus is appropriated into the hands of the independent private capital holder. The private character of appropriation is understood as an oedipalization of social labor, tying it to the oppressive family structure.

These notions don’t get their follow-up till the final pages of this book. Before that, we need to shout out a heavily influential literary theorist on this book, namely the Canadian Northrop Frye. Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is a great book, an act of resistance against the formalism of dominant New Criticism, and a cheer for underlying mythical patterns to literature going back to ancient times. This book is where Jameson took the names for his allegorical levels!

Frye also speaks of “Desire,” the word points to a deep impetus to convert nature into a “humanized” image, and further civilization: from the wilderness to the garden, etc. It’s a kind of socialized emotion.

Of course, for all his sensitivity to society, Frye was no Marxist but a Christian idealist and neo-Platonist. His mythopoetic system is a ziggurat floating in the air—or is on the square middle earth of ancient religions. And yet, we have an immaculately wrought tapestry organizing Western literature into modes (Myth, romance, high and low mimesis, thematic irony) and levels (the same as the levels of allegory in Jameson), including a place worked out with geometric precision for every king of symbol, archetype, ritual, and so on. Frye was an anti-Communist but Jameson clearly admired his drive for systematic thought and, most importantly, his concern for the function of culture in social formations.

In a way, Frye was to Jameson as Quesnay was to Marx.

Before the relatively “practical” chapters on Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad, there’s a transitional chapter headed “Magical Narratives” that is nominally a defense of genre theory, like that of Frye’s.

To study a literary genre — in this case medieval romances — means in a structuralist or semiotic perspective to bring readymade concepts to the object. Jameson wants to historicize these concepts and the whole method.

A first step in this direction has been taken when you come to understand that they are not the result of purely philosophic choices or options in the void, but are objectively determined: and this is what has happened when we come to understand that the apparently philosophical alternative between the two " methods" was in reality the projection of objective antinomies in language.

The syntactical structure of language was objectively determined by “objective antinomies in language,” so language has been projecting the methodological split the whole time. Meanwhile, Frye’s theory of genres as modalities of literature is advanced to analyze ideologemes as “semic projections” of values — It reads to me that Desire means the humanization of productive forces.

If this feels hard going, we’re only coming up to the most egregious moment of scholasticism in Jameson’s text, later on in this chapter. Jameson backpedals to the anti-historicist problem in the method. “The critique of linear or evolutionary history can be dramatized by the paradox of Raymond Roussel's anecdote about the traveler who claimed to have seen, under glass in a provincial museum, ‘le crane de Voltaire enfant.’”

For agnostic postmodernism history is always a retrodiction and therefore fallacious (Jameson takes this up in Singular Modernity with the notion of ‘We cannot not periodize.’)

Is this all Marx’s life’s work amounted to, saying that feudalism is a simple precursor to capitalism, because capitalism came after? Of course not, says Jameson.

But this is not at all what happens in Capital (nor in the works of Darwin, either, for whom a similar rectification ought to be undertaken some day) . Diachronic representation in Marx is not constructed along those principles of continuity which have been stigmatized as Hegelian or evolutionary. Rather, the constructional model is quite different one, which Nietzsche was the first to identify and to designate as the genealogy.

This is the methodological coup: how Jameson goes from Hegel and Marx to Nietzsche and Deleuze. Not historical materialism, where genealogy and theoretical logic line up on different planes of abstraction, but the constructivist genealogy offered here. Historical materialism is condemned as evolutionist, but that is precisely how the Marxist movement sees itself: Marx did for political economy what Darwin did for biology: and Hegel did the same for philosophy. Yes it was still mystical but it was quickened with historical dynamism.

We’re not quite finished. Jameson wraps up the book by relating Utopia to dialectics, collectivity, and culture. Dialectical thought appears here as the “anticipatory logic” of a future collectivity. The Utopian category reveals the ideological Utopian project in every class group, expressed through symbolic affirmation. Utopia is the positive answer to structuralism’s negative attitude toward historical effectivity.

Part of the argument is this passage about bypassing the public-private, art-artist dualism that has become prominent again, because of revelations that have come about after the deaths of Alice Munro and Cormac McCarthy.

The dilemma is intensified when we deny ourselves, as we just have, the solution of a coexistence of different functions, as when, for instance, it is suggested that the greatness of a given writer may be separated from his deplorable opinions, and is achieved in spite of them or even against them. Such a separation is possible only for a world-view — liberalism — in which the political and the ideological are mere secondary or “public” adjuncts to the content of a real “private” life, which alone is authentic and genuine. It is not possible for any worldview — whether conservative or radical and revolutionary — that takes politics seriously.

This is what the Internet calls an L-take for a couple of reasons. Jameson bluntly asserts that in the public-private dualism the private is principal and the public, the sphere of politics and culture, is a secondary phenomenon. Sure the point of the “liberalism” framework is that every opinion, work of art, and political platform in principle has a right to contest for itself independently on the “marketplace of ideas” or what have you, that is, an individualism of the public.

But even worse in my view is identifying the position of separating the art from the artist with “liberalism.” The notion that aesthetic greatness is achievable “in spite of” or “even against” reactionary positions is in fact orthodox Marxism. It is precisely how Engels described Balzac’s contributions to bourgeois literature. And if it weren’t for the fact that our contemporary culture is dripping with self-satisfied, petty-bourgeois moralism, we would accept the immediate reality that the artist and the work can’t be identical.

Surely, to take politics seriously means refraining from confusing it with the personal. But I digress.

Jameson’s insidious revisionism aside, his bigger concluding point is that Utopia is the watchword for cultural critique, if we’re looking for a paradigm that recognizes both the class-ideological content of a work as well as projects of some category beyond the individual, namely a polis or a collective. (Allegory as we’ve seen is the watchword for managing all these different social dimensions inside one text and keep them cobbled together in the critic’s argument.)

We started with Utopia as a simple synonym for Communism but now we see every class project necessarily betrays a Utopian aspiration, and the Utopian aspiration is present in both high culture (here synonymous with modernism) and the mass culture of bourgeois society (the Utopia of cyberpunk and epic fantasy series, e.g.).

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A short piece by Maria Elisa Cevasco on PU at the Verso blog.