At Duke University, within the walls of an old-fashioned Southern institution, Fredric Jameson helped to build a world-famous home for the radical philosophical and critical traditions known throughout academia as “theory.” By the time I arrived there as a graduate student in 1999, Jameson, who died on September 22 at the age of 90, was already a legendary figure, the torchbearer of Marxist criticism in the United States. In Marxism and Form (1971), he had assembled a canon of theoreticians—Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and others—who developed Marxist thought not only as a set of arguments about economics but also as an approach to interpreting the arts. The Political Unconscious
(1981) defined Jameson’s distinctive approach, analyzing literature as the dream life of the societies that produce it. When he calls this version of the unconscious “political,” he means that what we find, churning beneath the textual surface, are large-scale social conflicts, not personal traumas. His monumental Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(1991) synthesized all kinds of apparently disparate tendencies, from pop art to poststructuralism, into a coherent picture of the world in transition. At a time when communism’s political edifices were collapsing, Jameson held fast to the Marxist worldview that, he believed, was uniquely capable of explaining the fantasies and nightmares that attended global capitalism’s ascendancy.
I had the chance to take just one of Jameson’s courses, a seminar on the German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin. Our main task was to make our way slowly, week after week, through Benjamin’s massive, unfinished study of nineteenth-century Paris, translated into English as The Arcades Project. Benjamin’s thinking on the page is beautiful but also strange, and even Jameson had to admit that parts of it were too obscure for him. I remember Jameson saying that there were two sides to Benjamin’s work. There was the political theorist: Marxist, revolutionary, concerning himself with the material conditions of modern social life. And then there was the mystic, a reader whose methods were sometimes more devotional than analytic, a writer who veered into the visionary and even the apocalyptic.
Jameson was clearly going to engage with the political Benjamin, but I had the impression, at first, that the mystical side was somehow embarrassing, or at least irrelevant, for the purposes of our seminar. I did not know much about Marxist theory, but I was sure that it was hostile to religion. I expected a materialist program of critique to demystify the world, to expose the realities of our situation, unvarnished, so that we could start transforming it. I had a lot to learn about the discipline of dialectical thinking as Jameson practiced it.
Marxist criticism is sometimes caricatured as temperamentally hostile to its own objects of study—an angry, aggressive, paranoid position. But this was never Jameson’s attitude. Again and again, in dozens of books and countless articles, he immersed himself in theories that were alien to his own. In his early study The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972), Jameson took on two major schools of thought that seemed to rival Marxism. Jameson wanted to confront Structuralism and Formalism, not to be converted to them. But the encounter nonetheless required a deep knowledge of the other side’s best insights. “My own feeling,” he wrote, “is that a genuine critique of Structuralism commits us to working our way completely through it so as to emerge, on the other side, into some wholly different and theoretically more satisfying philosophical perspective.” Jameson often wrote with exacting precision; here his phrasing becomes vague—“some” perspective?—but the uncertainty is itself a deliberate stylistic choice. Critique is not about defending a perspective that you already know; rigorously pursued, critique will change your own point of view in ways that you cannot anticipate. There is some uncertainty on the other side.
Jameson studied French philosophy and literature at Yale, receiving his Ph.D. for a dissertation on Jean-Paul Sartre in 1959, the year of Elvis Presley’s “A Big Hunk o' Love” and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, of Some Like It Hot with Marilyn Monroe and North by Northwest with Cary Grant. Later, he wondered whether Alfred Hitchcock, as a European expatriate making films in the United States, might have developed a special perspective on what Jameson called, interchangeably, “American daily life” and “the American misery.” Jameson took it for granted that capitalist civilization was degraded—full of suffering and confusion. And yet he loved its motley artifacts and spent his whole life thinking through them.
The seriousness with which he approached competing schools of thought extended not only to “high” art and literature but also to mass culture. He obliged himself to study his objects with a rare intensity, and he wanted to understand and to be moved by whatever he analyzed. He wrote a classic essay about Jaws and the Godfather films as well as a whole book about the half-forgotten modernist Wyndham Lewis. In each case, he tried to grasp what the artwork promised, the kinds of enjoyment and hope that it made possible.
The pleasure Jameson took in the objects he contemplated attuned him not simply to their limits but to something subtler: their own protests against the world that had produced them, their own desire for a different kind of world. He heard the rumble of dissatisfaction and the craving for alternatives that expressed themselves in all kinds of art “under” capitalism. To understand how culture reconciles us to an unjust system, Jameson knew, it was not enough to see how the media promote the false freedoms of the marketplace or how advertising lures us into buying stuff that we don’t need. Art does not usually lend itself to defending the ruling classes, and ideology is not a straightforward apology for the world as it stands. The ruses of culture are more sophisticated, more difficult to decipher and resist, because of how much they offer us along the way.
In Lewis’s novels, for instance, Jameson saw “fables of aggression,” the violent fantasies of a proto-fascist, totally at odds with Jameson’s own political and ethical commitments. At the same time, though, Jameson insisted that Lewis had made great art, and he set himself the task of describing how, in Lewis’s novels, “the sentence” as a unit of composition “is reinvented with all the force of origins, as sculptural gesture and fiat in the void.” This formal creativity was inseparable from Lewis’s burning rage against middle-class ideologies and big business. Even in a corporate product like the movie Jaws, Jameson could see a “Utopian” desire, a longing for a future beyond the anxiety-ridden consumer society of the American 1970s. In both cases, and almost everywhere else he looked, he found the glimmers of an impulse toward more freedom, more intimate kinds of community, more power for everyday people.
But Jameson also saw how culture managed this utopian potential by way of the dialectical counterpart that he called “reification”: the artwork seemed to misdirect the impulses of rebellion and desire, turning them away from revolution. Thanks to reification, a fervent dissatisfaction with life under capitalism could be captured and displaced onto some other target, including communism and socialism themselves, so that capitalism’s versions of freedom and pleasure could appear as the solution, rather than the problem. To see this complex process, the critic needed both a strong grasp of historical reality and a kind of provisional openness to the beauties and transports of aesthetic experience—from which he knew how to find his way back home.
In the opening paragraph of The Political Unconscious, Jameson delivered his most famous methodological imperative, “Always historicize!,” referring to it as a “slogan” and a “moral,” as if he had received it from some other, unnamed source. He also wrote, in the next breath, of following what “the traditional dialectic teaches us” about history and philosophy. In lines like these, we can see Jameson committing himself to a self-effacing intellectual discipline that balances the rigor of historical analysis with an openness to mystery. It was a discipline without the consolations of religion, but it was its own kind of spiritual exercise.
