Some of the main ideas of Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious (1981), as we are reminded several times by Jameson himself, were already presented in Marxism and Form. Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971). To that extend, without Marxism and Form, we hardly would have read in The Political that the task of critique was to unmask “cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts” (The Political 20). Marxism and Form introduces some of the main critical works of dialectical Marxism on the arts and culture of the XX century. Jameson presents his readings of T.W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg (György) Lukács and Jean-Paul Sartre. While Adorno, Lukács and Sartre have chapters on their own, Benjamin, Marcuse (read along Schiller) and Bloch are grouped in a chapter called “Versions of a Marxist Hermeneutic” (Marxism 60). The book finishes with a chapter that could bridge Marxism and Form and The Political Unconscious, “Towards Dialectical Criticism”. In this chapter we read that our “estrangement” or fascination towards literature is an affect related directly to the way art form is worked, since what our senses experience are “but manifestations in aesthetic form and the aesthetic level of the movement of dialectical consciousness as an assault on our conventionalized life patterns […] an implicit critique and restructuration of our habitual consciousness” (374). The Adornean sense of this affirmation is the same frame that will circle the canvas where the political unconscious will seek its task for unveiling myths and to give back, at least, a glimmer to consciousness and the real substratum (the formless of existence) that moves the engines of history.
Marxism and Form not only presents but also challenges some of the main postulates of the authors reunited in the book. Yet, the challenge is more a comparison. As it is written in the “Preface”, the book intension is to present to the American reader the fact that when analyzing German and French dialectical literature one cannot but “take yet a third national tradition into account, I mean our own: that mixture of political liberalism, empiricism and logical positivism which we know as Anglo-American philosophy” (x). Thus, more than three perspectives we face two, that of the Anglo-American philosophy and that of the Franco-German dialectics. It is not surprising that at the end of the book, Jameson illustrates the importance of a dialectical method for analyzing literature with an analogy of the missile development and atomic research competition between the Soviet Union and the United States. With this example Jameson makes transparent how useful and accurate may a dialectical hermeneutics be. If dialectics is the method that glimpses the dominant categories that trigger the movement of history, in the 70’s what a better way of making a living than to learn how to read the board and the clock of the twilight struggle.
It is not that Jameson is capturing dialectics and then surrendering it to the “American Imperialism”, but his argument is that dialectics as a tool for understanding reality is already caught up in American Imperialism. If Academia as Jameson pictures it, following C.Wright, is a system who endorses pleasure under capitalism, as something that “is simply the sign of the consumption of an object: it is thus relatively extraneous to the object’s structure or use, since it can attach to any kind of object, and is at the same time gratuitous to the degree that it serves no collective function beyond that of encouraging further consumption and making the system operate at top capacity” (395). Jameson, then, agrees with Adorno that in order to stop/sabotage capitalism’s jouissance dialectics must be “unpleasurable in the commodity sense” (395). Criticism becomes a task that, as Jameson puts it in the eloquent closing of Marxism and Form, must “compare the inside and the outside, existence and history, to continue to pass judgement on the abstract quality of life in the present, and to keep alive the idea of a concrete future” (416). While in 1971 the idea of a concrete future was still foreseeable, in the following years of that decade that idea melted and both concreteness and future dispersed in the air. Did dialectics did too? That is yet one of the questions to ask.
thewheelswithinwheels 