There are lectures that make history. In the fall of 1982, at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Arts in New York, the Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson (1934 – 2024), who died last Sunday, gave a lecture that would become a nuclear part of his acclaimed and influential essay. Postmodernism – the cultural logic of late capitalism, published in the Spring 1984 issue of New Left Reviewand then transformed into a book (recently reissued in Spanish by the publishing house Verso Libros). In this essay, Jameson would lay the foundations of cultural studies on what has been called for some years postmodernity.
Jameson began his lecture/essay by emphasizing the strange sensation, or rather the widespread conviction, of living the end of almost everything, from class struggle, ideology or the dream of revolution to the welfare state, democracy or art. Everything seemed in crisis, about to come to an end. Shortly afterwards, on the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the decomposition of the socialist camp in 1991, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama would assert that with the hegemony of liberal democracy, humanity had reached the end of history and, with it, any vital horizon of emancipation had disappeared because it was useless: we were living in the best of all possible worlds. However, for Jameson, this end was not a reason to rejoice, as it was for neoliberal thinkers.
For Jameson, this postmodern conviction of the end of everything responded to a rupture in the capitalist mode of production. Following the German economist Ernest Mandel, capitalism had entered a new phase – advanced or late capitalism – which was distinguished from the previous one not only by the process of replacing factories with financial centers in the first world, but, and above all, by the fact that it had managed to annihilate its antinomies: the socialist states had disappeared from the map, but also, thanks to neoliberal policies and much repression, the workers’ movements were neutralized and the class-conscious and politically organized proletariat was defeated. As Jameson says in Postmodern theoryWithout resistance or antinomy, postmodernity constitutes “the purest form of capitalism of all those that have existed.” Indeed, postmodernity represents the historical moment when capital becomes totalized, invades everything, saturates each of the pores of society.
Jameson did not understand postmodernism as a simple cultural change, one among many, since postmodernism was institutionalized and canonized by the academy, as a “modernism without scandal,” as a style easily integrated into the production of commodities and as an object of patronage. multinationals; Jameson understands postmodernism as a product of advanced capitalism, which founds a new logic or a new cultural model. In the same way that production has been fragmented and dispersed in advanced capitalism, postmodern subjects think of the world in a dispersed and fragmented way. Advanced capitalism constitutes the matrix that produces forms and discourses radically different in their meaning and social function in relation to modernity. Jameson made these forms and discourses his object of study, which can be constituted either by a novel by Dos Passos, or by a building by John Portman, a film by Coppola or Polanski, a painting by Van Gogh or a record by David Bowie.
Theoretical framework
To carry out his analyses of postmodernism – but not only – Jameson built a very solid theoretical framework that relied on the influence of Marxist thinkers – some of whom were the subject of his studies – such as Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno or Jean-Paul Sartre. The work that best represents this effort to construct a literary theory that allows us to read the literary texts of Marxism is perhaps The political unconscious (1981), translated into Spanish by the republican poet and exile in Mexico Tomás Segovia with the strange and Benjaminian title – I do not know the reasons that led him to translate it like this – Documents of culture, documents of barbarismpublished by Visor in 1989.
In this essay, Jameson sets out the goal of constructing a Marxist hermeneutics that allows – and this is where Walter Benjamin’s thought lies – to trace the traces of history interrupted by struggles, the repressed and buried reality of history. From this Benjaminian starting point, Jameson brings together all the theoretical scaffolding on Althusser’s notion of ideology – crossed by Lacan’s psychoanalysis – to develop the concept of the political unconscious with which he intends to “unmask cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts.”
Jameson understands that behind the symbolic, socially symbolic act that is literature, it is possible to find, he will say with Spinoza, the “absent cause” that produces the literary text. For Jameson, this absent cause is history which, like the Lacanian “real”, can only be read in its effects – or in its symptoms. Thus, as one of Jameson’s maxims says, it is necessary to “historicize, always historicize”. For Jameson, the analysis of the absent cause is what allows us to restore the political content of a literary text, to break its reification into a unified and coherent whole, its static structure. A Marxist analysis, for Jameson, finds the meaning of the text in the gaps and discontinuities that exist within the work, understood as a heterogeneous and schizophrenic text.
The absent cause
The political unconscious –I resist being called anything else– This is a fundamental essay for the analysis of literature as an ideological form. But as is the case in much of so-called Western (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) Marxism, the author barely enters into dialogue with the literary theories that, in parallel, were being produced on the periphery of the empire. When Jameson published his essay on the political unconscious in Spain, it had already been published, in 1974, Theory and history of ideological production by Juan Carlos Rodriguez, an essay that, also inscribed in the Althusserian school of thought, developed the concept of “ideological unconscious” for the study of Spanish literature on the transition between feudalism and capitalism.
The concepts of Rodríguez and Jameson are certainly similar and respond to the same logic of analysis of the textual effects of social relations and exploitation (this “absent cause” that in Rodríguez is called “radical historicity”). However, they also have their radical differences, which are located at the center of the analysis of both: while Jameson reads the symptoms of the unconscious at the symbolic level (and that is why he is political), Rodríguez focuses his analysis on the symptoms at the level of the imaginary (and therefore, it is ideological). Both levels displace the real (the historicity of the text), but they operate in different ways. The lack of dialogue between the Marxisms of the center and the periphery has prevented us from attending a theoretical discussion that would undoubtedly have been very productive.
But Jameson did not completely turn his back on the Marxist critique and theory produced by Hispanism. In one of his most recent books, Antinomies of realismwhere the theorist wants to escape the passionate controversies that include realism always in opposition to something, as in a game of opposites, in the study of its emergence or dissolution, Jameson dedicates a brilliant chapter to Benito Pérez Galdós (“The Protagonist Decline”), in which he dialogues with other Marxist literary theorists who, like Juan Carlos Rodríguez, have recently left us, such as Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga and Iris M. Zavala, authors of the always essential Social History of Spanish Literature.
A theory revived
Fredric Jameson was one of the great literary theorists and Marxist thinkers of postmodernity and postmodernity. In addition to the books mentioned, there are other essential books such as Form and ideology, Archaeology of the future either The Origins of Postmodernismall published in Spain by the Akal publishing house; or Brecht and the Method either Valences of the dialecticpublished in Argentina. The book-conversation with David Sánchez Usanos, Reflections on Postmodernitypublished in Abada in 2010.
Jameson’s importance has been enormous in the debates on aesthetics and Marxism, even beyond Althusserian circles, at a time when – something of postmodernism – Marxism was in crisis and its language seemed no longer to serve to name the world, much less to transform it. His theoretical reflections and critical analyses have allowed to breathe new life into a theory that seemed doomed to insignificance, even to disappearance. With Jameson, it was possible to continue to place politics at the center of theoretical discussions and perhaps also, although surely to a lesser extent, of militant practices. But his influence has also been fundamental, and I would even say founding, among cultural studies.
Yesterday, September 22, 2024, Fredric Jameson passed away, leaving the Marxist theoretical field a little more orphaned. His books and ideas remain to keep the conversation alive.
