Thought to The Second Power

Thank you Fred

Fredric Jameson is dead and it feels like the world has moved on its axis, a center of gravity has shifted. 

It is almost impossible to give a full and fair summation of Jameson’s achievements - as an intellectual, writer and philosopher he can only be thought of in plural, as many Jamesons. This is, if anything, a damning indictment of the slow, seemingly irresistible enclosures of thought exercised by the academy that incentivises ever great degrees of granular specialism. Happily, Jameson moved from philosophy to film studies, to architecture, to art and to anything else that attracted his attention. Rather than ever being siloed within a particular field of study he embodied the noble aim articulated by Marx - it truly seemed that nothing human was alien to him. He reshaped the discourse of architecture through his analysis of postmodernity (and remained one of the single great thinkers of temporality and spatiality, from the logistics of Wal-Mart to his analysis of The Wire). He was a trenchant film critic, an expert in the development of French philosophy in the twentieth century, one of the earliest Marxist exponents of Theodor Adorno and a scholar par excellence of both world literature and the historic world-system of late capitalism.  

I think what’s truly impressive is the degree to which he managed to consistently expand and refine his thought from decade to decade. In the 1970s he wrote one of the first English language guides to a host of European philosophers, introducing dialectical criticism to an initially very hostile Anglophone academy. This was Marxism and Form which remains (in my opinion) one of his very best books. In the eighties came the intervention in postmodernism which caught a zeitgeist and essentially set the direction of travel for contemporary art, literature and film studies for at least twenty years. In the nineties his book on Adorno, in the millennium came the collections on film (Signatures of the Visible) literary realism (The Antinomies of Realism) and modernism (The Modernist Papers). Alongside this came dozens upon dozens upon dozens of essays, published on a breathtaking range of subjects, from Brecht to contemporary science fiction to Jaws to popular culture and far more besides. . 

These were collected into forbidding 700 pages tomes with names like The Ideologies of Theory and for so many people Jameson was the author of dense and inscrutable books but he was absolutely one of the finest essayists in American intellectual history. Just this year came another 700 page doorstep on aesthetic theory, but this time it was a transcript of his (always oversubscribed and phenomenally popular) lectures on aesthetics and mimesis. One of the truly heartbreaking details of his passing is the sheer volume of posts from students, stretching over generations who credited his unfailing interest and courtesy in their ideas and the degree to which Jameson as a teacher was a formative influence. He hired, mentored and taught thinkers like Toril Moi, and Kristen Ross, worked with and helped shape thinkers like Sianne Ngai and Anna Kornbluh and Phillip Wegner and Darko Suvin. There is a tenebrous glittering web of connection and influence that has radiated off his work for half a century and there will be no more of it to come.  

A world without Fred Jameson feels wrong, an aberration, like a glitch in thought, a moment in which a guide light finally winks out. He had gone on for six decades insisting upon three singular principles with a fidelity that allowed them to remains thinkable at all in the stultifying intellectual atmosphere of capitalist modernity (or to use a phrase heavily indebted to his work, capitalist realism) - those three guiding points: totality, marxism and utopia. 

Despite the degree to which his work was received in such a way that it became fragmented across disciplines (and the ways in which he always seemed slightly put out that people described him as “eclectic”) he was one of the finest thinkers and defenders of the idea of totality since the days of Lukacs. There is something so ambitious about his writing on what he termed “totalisation”, especially given how much of it was done in the American academy during the height of the Cold War and the ascendent discourses of neoliberalism. Jameson’s genius rests in his insistence that to engage with a cultural object honestly and critically necessitates grasping the total historical and social situation that both undergirds and surrounds the work. This totality of course, includes you in the process of reading him reading another. The point, as he insisted to his undergraduates when teaching a classic work of literature or philosophy, was to not to read something as if for the first time, but to recognise that you had in so many ways already read it and then to try and recognise the various layers of meaning that you were already bringing to bear on the meaning of the text in question. To read and interpret is not to stand outside of a text, but to see it as a part of ourselves and to bring into question the whole nexus of political, philosophical, social and - ultimately - historical forces, contradictions and potentials within which we are enmeshed. 

I think it is this interest in totality which explains so much of his methodological and disciplinary interests. Take two of his early books: Marxism and Form and The Prison House of Language. One is an exegesis of “dialectical criticism” which is heavily influenced by Marxist and communist thinkers, and the other is a reading of structuralism and Russian formalism. In an era of granular specialism it would be easy to see there being contradictions between these two interests but I’m not surprised that he was originally planning to publish them as two halves of the same book. He spoke often of the possibilities that occur in the “transcoding” of philosophical commitments - one simply learns to build a larger and more capacious, flexible and unified philosophical language. One of his earliest interests (going all the way back to the 1950s) is Sartre and he remained deeply Sartrean in many ways. That said, this was often transcoded - not overwritten but translated into his ever expanding conception of what philosophical and critical thought could do and become. Almost inevitably then, his style reflects this method in the distinctive pattern of Jamesonian sentences, elegant and clause laden, in which antinomies and contradictions become their own solution and the subsequent grounding for the continued investigation of a now clarified problem. You can see this method in the beats of his argument, like this short point from The Political Unconscious on the problem of interpretation: 

“Leaving aside for the moment the possibility of any genuinely immanent criticism, we will assume that a criticism which asks the question "What does it mean?'' constitutes something like an allegorical operation in which a text is systematically rewritten in terms of some fundamental master code or "ultimately determining instance." On this view, then, all "interpretation" in the narrower sense demands the forcible or imperceptible transformation of a given text into an allegory of its particular master code or "transcendental signified": the discredit into which interpretation has fallen is thus at one with the disrepute visited on allegory itself.” 

In Marxism and Form there’s another moment that sums up his methodology.

There is a breathlessness about this shift from the object oriented activity of the mind to such dialectical consciousness - something of the sickening shudder we feel in an elevator's fall or in the sudden dip in an airliner. That recalls us to our bodies much as this recalls us to our mental positions as thinkers and observers. The shock indeed is basic and constitutive of the dialectic as such: without this transformational moment, without this initial conscious transcendence of an older, more naive position, there can be no question of any genuine dialectical consciousness. 

And this truly is the experience of what reading Jameson is like - a kind of reworking of consciousness on the subjective level without taking for granted the material realities of cultural analysis. As he put in the opening essay of one of his very last books, Inventions of a Present, his totalisation was not about the imposition of something extraneous to the text, but quite the opposite. “Faithfulness to the text is an excellent slogan, but one which commits us, even more than we may be aware, to an enterprise that cannot stop short of history itself.” Focus on a specific object and if you look carefully, critically and honestly your gaze inevitably spirals outward to take in not just the text but all of history, transforming it, and yourself too. In Marxism and Form Jameson talks about the work of Ernst Bloch, comparing it to a satellite - a great extraterrestrial craft that had arrived from the future and, covered in strange hieroglyphics, still awaited its final decoding - and its fulfillment in reality. To reach for a metaphor for Jameson’s work needs something less other worldly and more architectural. He constructed, over the course of decades, his own unique intellectual edifice, part mansion, part skyscraper. We have so much left to explore, and so much to build on and extend thanks to him. 

This commitment to totality goes alongside Jameson’s commitment to Marxism. He was, and I am absolutely convinced this will be downplayed in plenty of the mainstream eulogies and obituaries, a committed communist. So much of his work demonstrates his non-dogmatic and utterly militant commitment. He wrote books and dedicated them to both Ho Chi Minh and Adorno, he praised the Black revolutionaries of the 1960s as the most significant political achievement of the US left, and he gave speeches on the necessity of Palestinian liberation and emancipation (there’s a picture of him with Arafat from back in the day) The entire point of his commitment to the project and process of totalisation was to make the argument that the world as it was is constructed. In other words, the world was made and thus could be remade. This process of remaking is the qualitative and quantitative transformation of the world that is revolution. To accurately encompass the breadth of Jameson’s Marxism is probably something that  would require its own book length study, but there’s a couple of anecdotes worth highlighting. Firstly, his book on Adorno, Late Marxism (1990) was not just a serious contribution to philosophy but argued explicitly for the idea of a Marxist Adorno, a phenomenally bold argument to make in at the end of the Soviet Union, a moment in which the reputation of Marxism and communism in the US couldn’t have been lower. 

In an era of post-political readings or of a-political deconstructions and difference Jameson almost single handedly managed to not just keep alive Marxism in American academia, but rather allowed Marxism in that context to be thinkable in the first place. Just think about Signatures of the Visible, originally a series of public lectures that was published the same year as Fukyama’s book on the end of history. Over on Twitter I saw someone point out that Jameson throughout his career managed to keep Marxism in America alive by hiding it in the English department, but now the English department in America is dying away and Marxism seems far stronger than ever. So much of his Marxism is bound up within his method -- most clearly laid out in the opening sections of The Political Unconscious. His famous slogan, “Always historicize!” - and why? Because it’s only in the understanding of history, only in the wrestling with the totality of a conjunction can we truly grasp both the immanent logic of capitalist development and the moments of possibility in which revolution was foreclosed, or the flickering glimmers of revolutionary chance. Or, as Jameson puts it, in what remains maybe one of my very favorite passages: 

My position here is that only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism... Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it. This mystery can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one; only thus- and not through the hobbies of antiquarianism or the projections of the modernists--can we glimpse the vital claims upon us of such long-dead issue as the seasonal alternation of the economy of a primitive tribe, the passionate disputes about the nature of the Trinity, the conflicting models of the polis or the universal Empire, or, apparently closer to us in time, the dusty parliamentary and journalistic polemics of the nineteenth century nation states. These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme-for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity. 

The passage sums up everything that makes reading Jameson so distinctive and underscores his Marxism as simultaneously looking back to the broad sweep of history, rescuing it from the dusty condescension of historicism and firmly insisting on the political (and thus unnatural or constructed) nature of our shared life-world. At the same time Jameson’s always looking towards the future, always poised to see the moments at which the possibility of difference can come tantalizingly into focus. For now our desire is nameless but for Jameson the desire was Utopia and its realization was in communism. His Utopianism (and he shares quite a lot with Bloch here I think) was never programmatic or dogmatic but rested upon his sophisticated philosophical aesthetics and sense of history. For Jameson in his excellent essay “The Politics of Utopia” (published, like much of his work in the New Left Review), the term was a symptom - a way of diagnosing a set of politics. For the left Utopia is communism, for the right it is Stalinism. But, as Jameson pointed out the decline in the term, the denigration of utopia was also a symptom. As he puts it (and I think the last sentence is still deeply true) 

Yet the waning of the utopian idea is a fundamental historical and political symptom, which deserves diagnosis in its own right—if not some new and more effective therapy. For one thing, that weakening of the sense of history and of the imagination of historical difference which characterizes postmodernity is, paradoxically, intertwined with the loss of that place beyond all history (or after its end) which we call utopia. For another, it is difficult enough to imagine any radical political programme today without the conception of systemic otherness, of an alternate society, which only the idea of utopia seems to keep alive, however feebly. This clearly does not mean that, even if we succeed in reviving utopia itself, the outlines of a new and effective practical politics for the era of globalization will at once become visible; but only that we will never come to one without it.

I’ve written a great deal about utopia (buy the book!) and Jameson’s point is still deeply true - that we cannot imagine the break, the new mode and articulation of social life is not a testament to the impossibility of such a break, but an indication that we remain so deeply enmeshed within the structures and mystifications of capitalist ideology. The challenge is not to develop some new utopian politics but far more fundamental and in some ways even more difficult - the challenge is the impossibility of thinking of utopia in the first place. Yet at the same time (and it’s only in the process of writing I’ve noticed how many times I’ve used that phrase) the resources of culture provided huge potential for thinking about utopian possibilities. Take his famous essay, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” which manages in the space of just twenty pages to not just extend the Marxist theory of reification from the sphere of economics to culture but also to argue that films like The Godfather or Jaws present a kind of “optical illusion of social harmony.”  The world is ever more connected and - at the same time - ever more alienated, and these optical illusions which are so deeply ideologically cannot be so without also being somehow Utopian. As he puts it, “the hypothesis is that the works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well: they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy.” The end of the essay is much quoted, as it should be - because this “genuine shred” is a vital tendency within mass culture - try as we might to think otherwise, underneath the ideological mystifications of capitalist culture there remains the stubborn whispers and sparks of a life-world transformed. 

To reawaken, in the midst of a privatized and psychologizing society, obsessed with commodities and bombarded by the ideological slogans of big business, some sense of the ineradicable drive towards collectivity that can be detected, no matter how faintly and feebly, in the most degraded works of mass culture just as surely as in the classics of modernism-is surely an indispensable precondition for any meaningful Marxist intervention in contemporary culture. 

So much of Jameson’s work sought after this drive towards collectivity in every corner of the global world system of capitalism, from films, music and literature to architecture and photography, every resource is needed, every scrap of inspiration to carry out the colossal task outlined by Marx in the famous letter to Ruge. “The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.” 

He left us so much to work with, and there is still so much to be done that he will never see. Thank you, Fred.