Fredric Jameson, one of the great Marxist theorists of literature and critic of postmodernism, dies

2024-09-23 10:54:22

There are conferences that make history. In the autumn of 1982, at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art 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 the Review of New Leftand later turned into a book (recently republished in Spanish by the publishing house Verso Libros). In this essay Jameson would lay the foundation for the cultural study of what has been called post-modernism for some years.

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Jameson began his lecture/essay with a strange feeling, or rather widespread conviction, of living through the end of almost everything, from class struggle, ideology or the dream of revolution to the welfare state, democracy or the art of express. Everything seemed to be in crisis, about to reach its end. Shortly after, at the same time as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent decay of the socialist camp in 1991, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama would declare that humanity had reached the end of history with the hegemony of democracy liberal and, with. , Every vital horizon of redemption was gone because it was unnecessary: ​​we lived the best life we ​​could have. For Jameson, however, that end was not a cause for celebration, as it was for neoliberal thinkers.

For Jameson, this post-modern conviction ultimately responded to the rupture of everything in the capitalist mode of production. After the German economist Ernest Mandel, capitalism 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, all. because it managed to expel its antidotes: the socialist states had disappeared from the map, but also, through neoliberal policies and many repressions, the labor movements were neutralized and the class-conscious and politically organized protocol was defeated. As Jameson says in Postmodern theorywithout resistance or antinomy, postmodernism is “the purest form of all capitalism.” In essence, post-modernity represents the historical moment in which capital will be complete, it invades everything, it saturates every pore of society.

Jameson did not understand postmodernism as just one cultural change, another among many, as postmodernism was being institutionalized and canonized by the academy, as “modernism without scandal.” as a style that was easily integrated into the production of merchandise and the subject of multinational patronage; Jameson understands postmodernism as a product of advanced capitalism, which establishes a new cultural logic or pattern. In the same way that production is fragmented and dispersed in advanced capitalism, postmodern subjects think of the world in a fragmented and fragmented way. Advanced capitalism is the matrix that produces forms and discourses that are very different in meaning and social function in relation to modernity. Jameson made these forms and discourses his subject of study, which could be constituted by a novel by Dos Passos or 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 analyzes of postmodernism – but not only – Jameson built a very strong theoretical framework that drew 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. Perhaps the work that best illustrates this attempt to construct a literary theory is his reading of literary texts from Marxism The Political Unconscious (1981), translated into Spanish by the republican poet and exiled in Mexico Tomás Segovia with the strange and Benjaminian title – I do not know the reasons that led him to translate it this way – Documents of culture, documents of barbarismpublished by Visor in 1989.

In that essay, Jameson sets out the purpose of building a Marxist hermeneutics that allows – and this is where Walter Benjamin’s idea lies – to trace the traces of the story that are interrupted by struggles, the suppressed and underground reality of history. From this Benjaminian starting point, Jameson gathers all the theoretical scaffolding of Althusser’s notion of ideology – crossed by Lacan’s psychoanalysis – to develop the concept of a political unconscious which intends to “hide cultural artifacts as socially symbolic actions.”

Jameson realizes that the “absent cause” that produces the literary text can be found, he will say to Spinoza, behind the symbolic, symbolic social action. For Jameson, this cause of absence is history, which, like the “true” Lacanian, can only be read in its effects – or symptoms. In this way, as one of the Jamesonian maxims says, we must “historical, always historical.” For Jameson, it is the analysis of the cause of absence that allows us to restore the political content of a literary text, to break its reformation into a unified and coherent whole, its static structure. Marxist analysis, for Jameson, finds the meaning of the text in the gaps and discontinuities within the work, understood as a heterogeneous and schizophrenic text.

The absent reason

The political unconscious – I cannot have the title in any other way – It is a basic essay for analyzing literature as an ideological form. But as happens in much of the so-called Western (that is, Anglo-Saxon) Marxism, the author is hardly dealing with the literary theories that were, at the same time, being produced on the edge 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 Rodríguez, an essay also inscribed in the Althusserian school of thought, an elaboration of the concept of “ideological unconscious” to study 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 (that “absent cause” called “radical history” in Rodríguez). However, they also have their radical differences, which lie in the focus of analysis of one and the other: while Jameson reads the signs of the unconscious at the symbolic level (and that is why it is political), Rodríguez focuses his analysis of. 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 work in different ways. The lack of dialogue between the Marxism of the center and the fringes has prevented us from attending a theoretical discussion that would undoubtedly be very productive.

But Jameson did not completely turn his back on the criticism and the Marxist theory that was reflected in Hispanicism. In one of his latest books, Antinomies of realismwhere the theorist wants to escape from the passionate disputes that realism always understands against something, as in a game of contrasts, while studying its emergence or dissolution, Jameson dedicates a great chapter to Benito Pérez Galdós (“The waning protagonism”), in which he dialogues with other Marxist literary theorists who have left us, like Juan Carlos Rodríguez, recently, such as Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga and Iris M. Zavala, authors of the always necessary Social history of Spanish literature free,.

Revival theory

Fredric Jameson was one of the great literary theorists and Marxist thinkers of postmodernism and postmodernism. In addition to the books mentioned, there are other essential books such as Form and ideology, Archeology of the future o The origins of postmodernismall published in Spain by the publishing house Akal; either Brecht and the method o Valences of dialectspublished in Argentina. Also interesting is the book talk with David Sánchez Usanos, Reflections on postmodernismpublished in Abada in 2010.

The importance of Jameson was very great in the debates on aesthetics and Marxism, even outside of Althusserian circles, at a time – things of postmodernism – when Marxism was in crisis and it seemed that the language was not connected to the naming of the world further, not to mention his transformation. . His theoretical reflections and critical analyzes revived a theory that seemed insignificant, or even disappeared. With Jameson it was possible to continue to place politics at the center of the theoretical discussion and perhaps also, although certainly to a lesser extent, military practices. But it also had a fundamental influence, and I would say it has a foundation, among cultural studies.

Yesterday, September 22, 2024, Fredric Jameson died, leaving the Marxist theoretical field a little more orphaned. His books and ideas remain to keep the conversation alive.