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.’
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