Fredric Jameson (1934–2024)

[The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present] - Frederic Jameson

I have been reading this book over the last month, which has served me as an introduction to post war philosophical and to some extents social and political thought. Frederic Jameson an American died last year at the age of 90, in 2021 he gave a series of lectures which were recorded verbatim and which have been published as this book. The lectures were I think mainly given over the internet because 2021 was the show more plague year (Covid-19). Jameson was a literary critic a philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was himself much involved with the literature and philosophy of this period which he labels French Theory, having met and discussed ideas with some of the leading protagonists as well as writing a number of books himself.

The lectures start with Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism, but also glance back to previous generations of European philosophers, such as Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, with Marx always in the background. Jameson's first book was on Sartre and he admits to still being exited by Sartre's thinking, he briefly discusses Beauvoir before moving on to Levi-Strauss and structuralism and the first of the breaks in philosophical thought of this era. Fanon and Merleau-Ponty are briefly discussed before the next of the big breaks coming with Lacan and Freud. The lectures continue with the superstars of the time; Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and others. There is a lecture on feminist thought: Monique Wittig, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray and later chapter cover more poststructualists like Barthes, Jean Baudrillard. Each lecture is about twenty pages long in book form and so can only serve as an introduction to the ideas generated by these people. Nothing is conclusive and there are numerous loose ends, but the aim of the lectures seems to have been to get the students exited by the content and for them to delve further into what interested them.

The book certainly feels like being present in a lecture theatre, because Jameson will interrupt himself with asides or little stories. He refers in passing to some of the work that the students have produced and advises them on what to read or will tell them not to bother too much with some of the materiel that he is presenting to them. There are some amusing stories and for the most part the language is relatively easy to follow, although I found myself having to look up some definitions of philosophical terms and even some of the thoughts which Jameson's explanations had not brought home to me.

The book does well in placing the philosophers in context with the events that were taking place in France and Europe, which Jameson contrasts with America at this time, where increasingly intellectual pursuits had been derided. He writes nostalgically about the lectures in Paris given by Lacan where hundreds of people jam packed themselves into theatres to hear the words of wisdom and would do well to avoid being doused in cigarette ash from their immediate neighbours. He tells us of Lacan's parody of Descartes famous maxim "I think where I am not, and I am not where I think". Jameson also talks about films and cinema theory, seemingly a passion of his as well as references to some of the horrors of late capitalism and materialism. He always has something of interest to say even if some of the philosophy may seem a little opaque.

The book does well in providing a chronological story of French theory written by somebody on the inside and somebody who has lived with these thoughts all his life. It was certainly a change of pace for me which sometimes took me out of my comfort zone, but I have a new list of recommended books to consider and you cant ask much more from a non fiction tome. 5 stars. show less

Nothing just stands on its own

It is always fascinating to read what experts have concluded from a microscopic examination of a work of art. They put things in historical perspective, in biblical context, and find similarities and anomalies, dialectic conundrums, support and contradiction - where I see or hear beauty. So I appreciate the different perspective. This book is the latest collection from Fredric Jameson, as erudite, expert and analytical as any author ever has been. He analyses show more artists, film directors, novels, films and tv shows. Some of them you’ve even heard of.

He follows a dictum of Thomas Mann: “Only the exhaustive is truly interesting.” (He quotes it twice.) These then are substantially all of Jameson’s thoughts on these works, including the references, tangents, asides and free associations. They are piled high and thick.

Reading The Ancient and the Postmodern was like stepping into an alternate universe, where nothing was as it seemed to the naked eye and the unsharpened mind. Jameson’s intensive scrutiny is otherworldly and so granular as to be mystifying. Sometimes you no longer remember what was under consideration. It is filled with dense references, facts and mysterious sentences like: “Leitmotif is the scar left by destiny on the musical present.”

Jameson’s obvious passion is Wagner and Mahler. Their era redefined music. He has seen their works multiple times, can distinguish different directors’ productions and different performers’ interpretations. He links them to past present and future, moral values, trends, fashions, and the tangents of adaptations. They get about a third of the book.

The central theme is: like a black hole at the center of every galaxy, works of art “must have a contradiction at their center in order to win any value.” This colors his approach to everything. Whether or not it is valid is beyond the scope.

The irony, if there is one, is that Jameson looks at the macro period from the Baroque to the present in the tiniest micro increments, dwelling on fine details in every medium. Drawing historic conclusions from this approach is impossible.

His Marxist credentials are on vivid display, which is the major reason most readers would want this book. But his text is so much more dense than say, the accessible Marxist Slavoj Zizek. It doesn’t inspire further reading. Having read the in-depth appreciations of all these artists and authors, I have no desire to rush out and acquire any of their works, which is normally how my reading branches out. It is nonetheless, a remarkable ride.

David Wineberg show less

Suicide as a Sort of Present

I don't run in these circles, so I wonder how Marxists on the street contemplated the (recent) death of the author (Jameson, in this case). This text seems meant as a gift to them. Here the author promises to decommission the Semiotic square, which, we hear, was once quite naughty in the way it functioned as non plus ultra of a closed literary analysis (albeit, one wonders whether these reports of misbehavior haven't been exaggerated. . .) To open up this square show more as if it were a kind of present seems to be the objective here.

The author spells it out in the case study of Conrad's Nostromo (1904): Construed as a bourgeois novel with the central problem of humanist self-development, the vertices of the Greimas square become The Ideal (S1), The Self (S2), Selflessness (-S2), and Cynicism (-S1). We don't like the paucity of this square and its determinate enclosure (resulting from (the author's) reading of this novel as a limited bourgeois project). The author's upbuilding solution here is to add to this figure (above) four additional vertices implied by the acknowledgement of the Political-Unconscious: i.e. Marriage (between Ideal and Selflessness), The Act (between Ideal and Self), History (Between Self and Cynicism (anti-Ideal)), and The Witness (between Selflessness and Cynicism).

The subsequent figure (below) appears to satisfy our Marxist-Freudian needs, though only 'til one looks it aslant (askance). It takes tilting the head tilted forty-five degrees to recognize this new figure is also one of those (notorious) geometrical Squares with the addition, intolerable even to Marxists, that now one's analysis must always move between the vertices of History (Marx) and Marriage (Freud). So we haven't made it out of the old box after all; our author appears to be re-gifting it in new wrapping paper. In our generosity we are prepared to forgive much from family and fellow travelers, though the gift of this text (i.e. the new-found ability to convict various literary works of unconscious Historical-Materialist impieties) is severe (for which we forgive it) and yet (unforgivably) not very funny. (Aside: this appears to be the persistent Differance between this author and Slavoj Žižek . . .)

So, to circle back, one wonders whether Marxists greeted Jameson's passing the same way feminists greeted the death of Beauvoir: The sense was, "well, now we can (finally) get to work." (Though, in this case, among much mourning, one wonders when (and if) the next wave of Marxism is coming . . .) It's notable that Jameson's life came to an end when the modern maxim of Biopower has become, "make live or let die." This is a recognition that, with the technological resources of an intensive care setting, there is no theoretical limit to the prolongation of a vegetative life on-vent. In such circumstances, we might count every death a suicide (in the good sense; a tactful withdrawal). David Foster Wallace would call this act of departing the scene at the right time, "Suicide as a sort of Present." show less

On one level, I like Jameson a lot. I agree with him about a lot of important stuff: yes, most art contains hefty doses of ideology (lies we tell ourselves so we feel better about living in a crappy world) and utopian hope (desire to live in a better world than ours). Yes, to understand this you need to pay attention to history and not just the book/movie/painting/building/symphony. Yes, it's a nice idea to read stories as attempts to solve real world problems.
But there's plenty not to like show more about this book. Primarily, Jameson treats the authors he writes about as naughty schoolboys who *never* tell the truth. Young Conrad, you keep telling me you're writing about the late-Victorian culture of honor, but I know better. Present thy buttocks for a class-war** caning! Whack! 'Lord Jim' is a proto-existentialist philosophy of the act, and you know it! Whack! This philosophy of the act demoralizes the capitalists and reveals to us, your reader, the omnipresence of class war! Whack!
Why not say that Conrad had some frigging clue about what he was doing? Why not see that Lord Jim just is about the late-Victorian culture of honor, that it criticizes that culture, and then ask how that critique might fit in to an historical understanding of the time? Well, doing that wouldn't let Jameson spend endless pages constructing Greimasian structural-quadrilaterals that eliminate any sense that a plot moves. That wouldn't let him make pointless, ignorant arguments about the Bourgeois Subject. That wouldn't enable him to take random pot-shots at Henry James for believing that people think stuff sometimes. In short, he might have to admit that he's no cleverer than the authors he's reading.
Let's do a Jamesonian reading of Jameson. The ideology is his insistence that structuralism and anti-humanism are somehow emancipatory, when experience (not to mention his reading of Adorno) should have taught him that they are deeply oppressive.*** Jameson's utopia, on the other hand, is his belief that literature matters to us, that it isn't just an autonomous formal jewel floating somewhere in the empyrean. Nice.


** His insistence on 'class war' as *the* structure of all history just seems silly in contrast to the ideology stuff, but it's important to note why: the only definition of class that can hold this kind of weight is Marx's. His definition is: the bourgeoisie owns the means of production, everyone else is a proletariat. The problem should be clear. Lawyers, for instance, don't own the means of production; nor do plastic surgeons. By contrast, the owners of small bookstores do. Now class obviously hasn't been eliminated. But in a post-industrial society, the bourgeois/proletariat model no longer makes any sense in political terms. So, the only model of class conflict that can be a prime-mover of history no longer makes sense in political terms. We need to re-think any reliance on 'class' as said prime-mover.

*** By which I mean, capital itself is structuralist and anti-humanist; the unreflective use of structuralism and anti-humanism as 'radical' theories is just bowing down before the thing you're trying to undermine. show less