For many humanists and cultural critics, Fredric Jameson’s work in the early 1980s typified a certain kind of Freudo-Marxist inquiry, a materialist approach to the investigation of politics and aesthetics that would remain influential through the turn of the millennium. Yet the status of criticism and theory has changed subtly in recent years, particularly with the advent of new materialism and the larger ontological turn in contemporary theory. This article reassesses Jameson in the context of today’s new materialism, with an eye on the relationship between politics and ontology. Like many Marxists, Jameson tends to avoid discussions of essence, existence, presence, and other ontological topics. Yet being so thoroughly influenced by Hegel’s dialectic and the representational logics of cultural Marxism, Jameson indeed promulgates a very specific ontological structure, if not in word then in deed. This article makes the argument explicitly: Jameson is an ontological thinker; he proposes a specific structure of being, a structure that, while rooted in the Kantian tradition, nevertheless inverts that tradition in favor of a more materialist core.
“In our time exegesis, interpretation, commentary have fallen into disrepute”—the year is 1971, but the observation could easily be applied to the present day.1 For many humanists and cultural critics, Fredric Jameson’s work in the 1970s and early 1980s typified a particular kind of Freudo-Marxist inquiry, a materialist approach to the investigation of politics and aesthetics that would remain influential through the turn of the millennium. Yet the status of criticism and theory has changed subtly in recent years, with many in the field seeing a crisis of legitimacy in the face of competing methodologies such as cognitive science, neuroscience, or the statistical techniques deployed by digital humanities, not to mention the widespread triumph of neoliberalism, which, among other things, professes an end to competing methodologies as such. Many have wondered whether cultural theory has a future at all and, if so, whether “exegesis, interpretation, commentary” have any role to play in it.
Published in the winter of 2004, Critical Inquiry’s special issue on “The Future of Criticism” was one of several publications that tackled these questions directly. Based on papers delivered at the journal’s editorial board symposium in Chicago on 11–12 April 2003, the issue included contributions from such authors as Homi Bhabha, Teresa de Lauretis, Miriam Hansen, Mary Poovey, and Lauren Berlant, along with Jameson’s own contribution, “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?”2 To fan the flames, the editors ran Bruno Latour’s anticritical diatribe “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” as lead article ahead of the special dossier on the future of criticism.
While the so-called crisis of theory is complex and irreducible to a single theme or trend, I will nevertheless focus here on materialism, a theme particularly relevant to Jameson and twentieth-century cultural Marxism as a whole. Having fallen out of fashion, materialism is once again a topic of debate thanks to so-called new materialism and the ontological turn in contemporary theory. A capacious if also overly vague appellation, ontological turn has been used to describe the work of thinkers as diverse as Karen Barad, Manuel DeLanda, Elizabeth Grosz, Bruno Latour, and Quentin Meillassoux, many of whom have achieved prominence in the last ten to fifteen years. New materialism, also broad and often difficult to define, indicates a newfound interest in nature, matter, reality, being, and ontology, as opposed to what it sees as the irredeemably culturalist tendencies of postmodern theory, with its penchant for text, discourse, subjectivity, ideology, and epistemology.
Such pat distinctions are challenging to defend, however, and the “new” materialism is often difficult to separate from its “old” counterpart. For example, in the second half of the twentieth century, “old” cultural Marxists such as Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey helped spark a renaissance of interest in what were called radical materialists, chief among them Spinoza. Even poststructuralism, often unfairly caricatured as unmoored from material reality, placed a special emphasis on the material specificity of, say, the diacritical mark, the gestures of the body, or the way power flows through society. Nevertheless, today’s new materialism often defines itself in opposition to materialism’s previous caretakers, particularly those like György Lukács or Raymond Williams, or Jameson himself, who were working under the banner of the cultural turn in Western Marxism. Indeed, amid recent calls for a return to materialism and ontology, one often hears various strains of post-Marxism, if not anti-Marxism, along with a variety of reasons for doing away with interpretation and criticism altogether, as if the warm presence of being were nourished in equal proportion to the waning of the critical apparatus.
For instance, in “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” Latour has argued stridently against the critical stance, that type of rationality inherited from Kant’s critical philosophy but also, more pointedly, the critical stance passed down via Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism. For Latour critique is a form of pernicious deception in which an elite specialist (the critical intellectual) demonstrates to naive believers that what they believe is wrong. Critique creates the very conditions of mental trickery precisely so that it can valiantly overcome them. In the end, according to Latour, intellectuals use critique to make themselves look better, while showing how audiences, readers, and subjects of all kinds can be redeemed from false consciousness. “Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind?” Latour asked sarcastically. “Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right! . . . Isn’t this fabulous? Isn’t it really worth going to graduate school to study critique?”3
Contra critique, Latour urges his followers to pursue more material concerns rooted in a realist ontology. “What I am going to argue is that the critical mind, if it is to renew itself and be relevant again, is to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude”—realism (along with empiricism) being Latour’s preferred form of material ontology.4 Latour’s indictment is thus an indictment against cultural theory as a whole: cultural critique or ontological realism.
Latour is just one thinker, of course, albeit a hugely influential one. And, given more time, it would be useful to delve into the details of the recent ontological turn, along with new materialism more generally. Suffice it to say that something is afoot and that here, in the context of this special issue, the time is ripe to reassess an old materialist, Jameson, in the context of today’s new materialism. Much has already been said about Jameson’s writings on utopia, art, dialectics, allegory, history, and totality. Yet this article explores a different side of Jameson’s work, not new materialism so much as old materialism: historical materialism and its often fraught relationship to ontology. By the end I hope to demonstrate that this choice—critique or ontology—is in fact a forced choice and a false one. Jameson resolves this dichotomy, in my view, by showing that it never existed in the first place, instead furnishing his readers with a kind of criticism that can only be called ontological.
Such an end, however, requires a counterintuitive beginning, for on the surface it appears that Jameson has little interest in ontology. Like many Marxists, Jameson tends to avoid discussions of essence, existence, presence, and other ontological topics. In an echo of Althusser’s distinction between theory and philosophy, if not Karl Korsch’s assertion that “Marxian theory constitutes neither a positive materialistic philosophy nor a positive science,” Jameson typically shuns the kinds of grand systemic claims made by metaphysics, ontology, and other branches of philosophy.5 “Marxism is not an ontology, and should be neither an ontology nor a philosophy,” Jameson stated flatly in a 1995 interview with Xudong Zhang; “there is not a philosophical system of Marxism that you can write down. . . .. Marxism is not a recipe.”6 On the one hand, ontology and metaphysics devote themselves to the most fundamental questions of existence and presence, organizing their discourse into a coherent system of being. “Theory,” on the other hand, “makes no such systematic or philosophical claims.”7
So stands the record. And our time will not be spent contesting Jameson’s own claims about the nonrelation between Marxism and philosophy, much less dissolving the distinction between theory and philosophy; on the contrary, the distinction should be reexamined and made all the more relevant for our times. Yet being so thoroughly influenced by Hegel’s dialectic and the representational logics of cultural Marxism, Jameson indeed promulgates a very specific ontological structure, if not in word then in deed. This article makes the argument explicitly: Jameson is an ontological thinker; he proposes a specific structure of being, a structure that, while rooted in the Kantian tradition, nevertheless inverts that tradition in favor of a more materialist core.8
And thus—to reveal the ending before hardly having gotten under way—Jameson’s Marxism is not so much a repudiation of philosophy as a rejection of one particular kind of philosophy, an influential kind to be sure, in favor of an alternative relation between thinking and existing. Such an alternative has something to say about ontology, while at the same time it maintains a fidelity to the core political commitments of Marxism.
The key lies in Jameson’s critique of method. Ostensibly against method, in that he denies the existence of any kind of pregiven Marxist method perfected and honed for all circumstances, Jameson defines Marxism instead in terms of a material condition. In other words, there exists no Marxist method as such, yet there exists a material condition that structures the horizon of interpretability for all society and culture. The outlines for such a position were laid down early on by Jameson, as evidenced by two key methodological pieces, the concluding chapter “Towards Dialectical Criticism” in Marxism and Form published in 1971 (along with the above-cited essay “Metacommentary” also published that year), and the 1981 book The Political Unconscious, the latter, in a famous line, claiming that “the political perspective [is] the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.”9
This “absolute horizon”—or what, in a phrase borrowed from Sartre, he sometimes calls the “untranscendable horizon”—remains somewhat elusive. Nevertheless it resides at the heart of Jameson’s method and will serve as our first principle, there is an absolute horizon.
Representation
What is this horizon? Where does it reside? And why is it absolute? History is one part of the answer, materiality another, “that absent thing called the social” yet another.10 And while Jameson’s fundamental Freudianism is sometimes overlooked in the secondary literature, the unconscious is still another way of thinking through the problem of the absolute horizon. Jameson’s interviews bear this out: “One comes to Marxism at least partially with the conviction that convictions themselves are formed at some deeper place than sheer opinion by realities other than conscious choices—realities of social class and of the unconscious.”11 Or as he put it once during an interview in reference to the work of architect Rem Koolhaas, we must be sensitive to “the presence of some rigid, inhuman, non-differential form that enables the differentiation of what goes on around it.”12 So there is an absolute horizon, a “deeper place” conditioned by history, materiality, social class, and the unconscious. And this absolute horizon has a relationship of necessity, determinism even, vis-à-vis the normal facts of society and culture. “History is necessity,” Jameson wrote in his essay-length reflection on the long decade of the 1960s, and we must be attentive to “objective constraints” and the “determinate historical situation.”13
There is an absolute horizon, then, even if Jameson avoids more extensive reflection on the nature of being, existing, and other ontological questions. But asserting the absolute horizon is quite sufficient; that hoary question of being now surrounds us, with its ground and foundation, its limit and possibility, its totality and prescription. This leads to a second principle, closely related to the first, having to do with the determining nature of the material conditions of existence—indeed, the influence of Sartre’s existentialist Marxism is evident in both of these initial principles. The absolute horizon thus inflects and sculpts all things taking place within it. And inside such a structure is forged a fundamental relationship of correspondence: the “realities of social class and of the unconscious” condition the everyday life of individuals; the “determinate historical situation” conditions social relations and cultural production.
Or, in the punchiest line from The Political Unconscious, “history is what hurts.”14 An evocative expression, it means two things at once: when history is reified or mystified, it sets real limits on individual or collective practice, yet at the same time history is the badge people wear designating the struggle or hurt endured. History hurts because history is full of the violence of capitalism, or what Jameson described as “the scars and marks of social fragmentation and monadization, and of the gradual separation of the public from the private” and “the atomization of all hitherto existing forms of community or collective life.”15 History hurts because of unemployment, proletarianization, and “pauperism.”16 History hurts whenever material necessity wins out over social collectivity.
Yet Jameson’s role is not simply that of doomsayer, predicting the continued degradation of life under capitalism. His significance lies elsewhere, in what can only be described as a full-scale metaphysics, manifest in that most vivid of metaphysical structures, the structure of representation. Is there a Marxist ontology after all, and if so, what does it look like?
“If there is an ontology of Marxism,” Jameson observed once, breaking the implicit taboo against thinking Marxism in terms of ontology, “it lies in that, through praxis and its determinate failures, one confronts the very nature of Being itself (provided you grasp Being as a historical and changing, evolving process).”17 Three points are important to underline in this observation. First is the fundamentally Hegelian conception of being as historical evolution (“historical . . . changing, evolving”). Second is the importance of the dialectic, unnamed but clearly evident, as the primary structure and mediating apparatus of the world (“praxis and its determinate failures”). Third is the notion of a confrontation with being in which, through the dialectic, being is revealed (confronting Being, grasping Being). Taken together, these points describe a structure of representation in which a world, understood as an “historical and social substance itself in constant dialectical transformation,” is revealed to an individual attempting to confront or grasp it.18
Hence a third principle, historicity means thinking the mode of production.19 An Althusserian or Foucauldian might articulate this principle in terms of the “conditions of possibility” for thinking anything whatsoever—a fact that reveals how there can be no ontological claim that is not also implicitly an epistemological one and, vice versa, how there can be no claim about knowledge that does not already assume something about existence. (It also reveals the essentially modern, even Kantian, nature of Jameson’s project, a topic addressed presently.) But how does this actually work on the page? I have already summoned the most essential Jamesonian axiom, that “the political perspective [is] the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.” And Jameson goes to great lengths to amalgamate three crucial ingredients in almost every sentence that he writes, whether on a novel or film, or on a work of philosophy or theory.20 The text itself (as narrative), its sociohistorical context, and the critic’s own interpretive stance are all three triangulated in Jameson, through a kind of dialectical supergrammar in which three structures of representation, (a) manifest narrative/latent narrative, (b) reading/interpretation, and (c) inscription/world, are superimposed one on the other, all before the concluding punctuation is reached.21 Hence, the layers of allegorical meaning embedded in a text structurally resemble the critic’s own interpretive layering, superimposed over the text as criticism, which themselves likewise resemble the text’s own relation to a larger sociohistorical context. Aesthetics and politics are related, therefore, by way of a shared representational structure.
As evocative as this might be, thus far we have only scratched the surface of Jameson’s method and its relationship to ontology. The above observations serve merely to broach the question, without yet being able to answer it. We must step back, then, and reexamine a larger picture that includes Jameson’s relation to the theoretical enterprise as a whole.
The Dialectic
A burning question: why is the dialectic so great? Answer: “The only truly original solution, which does not claim to resolve anything but rather to incorporate the dilemma of oppositions and binaries into its very structure and method, remains the dialectic, which posits a permanent gap between subject and object within all our thoughts as well as in reality itself.”22 No other term or concept in all of Jameson is so well revered, neither class nor culture, neither literature nor allegory. Essentially unclassifiable and irreducible to other concepts under discussion (form, figuration, historicity, material conditions), the dialectic is something like a physical law in Jameson, something akin to the normal physics of the world. It plays roughly the same role in Jameson that the machinic plays in Gilles Deleuze or the process of revealing in Martin Heidegger. Yet there is nothing grandiose about the dialectic and, likewise, nothing so humble or insignificant as to be overlooked by it. The dialectic keeps the world humming along, like the vibrations of atoms or the gravitational pull of the earth and planets. Thus the fourth principle: the dialectic governs the world.
Here the young Hegelian from Durham is on full display. So influenced by Althusser in other ways, Jameson has willfully ignored one of his master’s central tenets. Hegel should not be exorcised from the annals of modern thought like some unwelcome spirit. How foolhardy to hope to expel the spirit of the spirit doctor himself. The problem with modernity is not Hegel; Hegel is modernity, or, rather, only Hegel provides the philosophical tools with which to think the fundamental contradictions of modernity. “The dialectic is an injunction to think the negative and the positive together at one and the same time, in the unity of a single thought,” wrote Jameson in his recent long compendium on the dialectic.23 And this form of contradiction—a suspended unity, but still resolved, and the negation repeated—is the very heartbeat of modern life.24
This makes the question of a valuation of the dialectic so difficult, for in its very ubiquity the dialectic resists localization within any particular real phenomena or any particular human endeavor (Marxism as opposed to, say, marketing). The dogged persistence of the dialectic, with its many inversions and negations, is precisely what summons forth a whole host of secondary phenomena (representation, allegory, mapping, interpretation), not so much to instantiate the dialectic into particular logical arrangements—part to whole, self to world, this to that—but to supersede it via a series of interminable externalizations, which doubtless is the dialectical machination par excellence.
Still, let us broach that vexed question of value—morality even—so steadfastly avoided by Jameson, but that nevertheless reappears in other ways. From Nietzsche on down, moral value has been rightly condemned for its retrograde effects, to both the personal and the social body. As distasteful as the term might be, it seems impossible to conceive of a Marxism without some admixture of morality, some component attuned to the level of obligation, to the level of want and ought. Can Marxism ever cease to pose that age-old question: what should be done?
So even as Jameson states flatly that utopia “cannot be imagined at all,”25 there are sprinklings here and there of an actual dream that ought to be realized, whether it be “socialism as a vision of freedom—freedom from unwanted and avoidable economic and material constraints, freedom for collective praxis,”26 or the encomium to Marx’s chapter on cooperation, “the most full-throated affirmation of history and production in all of Marx and the one moment which one might be tempted to read as a metaphysics or a proposition about human nature as such,”27 or Jameson’s modest proposal that a new communist America might be forged from, of all institutions, the army.28
Marxists are a fretful bunch, on the whole, and I imagine the great court of history judging all political authors based on nothing but a compendium of the concluding paragraphs to their written works, wherein the most profoundly hopeful grammar often houses a boundless, if all too invisible, pessimism about the state of world affairs, as if two hundred words of utopian pep could change the course of the preceding two hundred pages of sober assessment. This is precisely the stylistic trap that Jameson avoids, resisting in each written line the sufficiency of the sober assessment—an ideological style, if there ever was one, owing much to the tradition of Anglo-American empiricism and pragmatism—and suspending the rousing peroration in favor of a continuous stream of dialectical contradiction in which both the most demeaning proletarianization and the most utopian liberation appear mixed together like some strange metal alloy.
Regardless, if he skips a valuation of the dialectic, Jameson still wishes to think the dialectic in terms of value, not as much an absolute value as a valence, a provisional direction or vector of value, as with electrons or subatomic particles that carry a particular valence or spin. Hence, the dialectic is both natural law and political strategy. The very impermanence of valence makes it so useful, for one can simply invert the spin, switch from negative to positive, or “change the valences on phenomena.”29
In an eye-opening chapter from Jameson’s recent Valences of the Dialectic, even that most odious site of hypercapitalism, Walmart, is read in terms of its utopian potential. That such an unlikely institution might provide important insight into the logic of utopia might strike some as counterintuitive if not altogether misguided, casting doubt on the very utility of the dialectic with its many twists and turns. Still, those scandalized by such an approach might be surprised to learn that Jameson has been doing this with the dialectic all along—Peter Sloterdijk’s cynical reason is utopian, Gary Becker and the Chicago School are utopian, Hollywood popcorn movies are utopian, and so on. Indeed, with the dialectic “the most noxious phenomena can serve as the repository and hiding place for all kinds of unsuspected wish-fulfillments and Utopian gratifications.”30
The Political
This brings us to the problem of postmodernism and the vexed question of Jameson’s relation to it: Is he? Is he not? Admittedly Jameson’s method sometimes appears to align with postmodernity, to the extent that postmodernity, that steadfast foe of method, can claim to have one. His occasional commentary on the difference between philosophy and theory bears this out. Philosophy hails from an older time, if perhaps not entirely modern then part of the old regime. And the break precipitated by theory is one in which the old canons of philosophical truth cede territory to a new kind of discourse unfettered by ground, truth, and other forms of permanency. Once refigured as theory, “ ‘philosophy’ thereby becomes radically occasional; one would want to call it disposable theory, the production of a metabook, to be replaced by a different one next season, rather than the ambition to express a proposition, a position or a system with greater ‘truth’ value.”31 Jameson’s vocabulary in this passage—the disposability of culture, a meta-or ironic stance, social construction rather than universal truth—all point to a postmodern sensibility.
Yet I suspect Jameson’s methodological kinship with postmodernity is not as entirely close-knit as it seems to be. And, with this in mind, we can revisit an assertion made earlier in passing, which while perhaps not obvious at the time should now fit more properly, much like plot points that snap into focus but whose narrative arc could never have been foretold: Jameson thinks like a modern (which serves as principle number five). Indeed, he might be aptly labeled a modern critic in the strict sense of the term, no matter how frequently his name has been paired with postmodernism or that more appropriate label, late capitalism, and no matter how much time he devotes to the first great gesture of modernity, realism. In fact, I want to argue—with Jameson against Jameson—that his conception of theory is not at all postmodern and that, of the three basic modern sites (realism, modernism, and postmodernism), Jameson’s method is firmly rooted in the middle position, modernism. Jameson is not a realist who has opted to think modernity, or a postmodern embarking on the same; Jameson thinks the modern epoch in general from the perch of theoretical modernism in particular. And so we may ask of him what he asked of Alexander Sokurov: Is Jameson the last modernist, the last great modernist thinker?32
Consider four different aspects of Jameson’s approach, all central to the modern paradigm: (1) history and temporality; (2) shock, break, or rupture; (3) critique; and (4) the materialist reduction. There is a long-standing tension in Jameson’s work that the dialectic is simply unfit for any other historical period than the modern. (By extension, the postmodern is the time in which it becomes difficult if not impossible to think dialectically any more, hence Jameson’s attempt to invent novel iterations of the dialectic under postmodernity, the “spatial dialectic” for one.) The dialectic is so characteristically modern because it is unthinkable except in terms of temporality and break, those classic avant-garde categories of shock and reinvention so integral to the modern subject. “Shock indeed is basic, and constitutive of the dialectic as such: without this transformational moment, without this initial conscious transcendence of an older, more naïve position, there can be no question of any genuinely dialectical coming to consciousness.”33 Narratives of beforeness and afterness are the very stuff of the dialectic, even if modernity’s “ontology of the present” neuters the narrative of its potency.34
Postmodernity is thus not a word to describe a series of years or decades, beginning in the 1970s or what have you, but rather the name of a condition of stylistic overdevelopment in which the modernist break no longer obtains, the assumption being that such a condition, a medical condition almost, can appear and reappear at various points in history, a kind of motile mannerism or rococo (or what the Greeks in their own very different context called cleverness or sophistry), in the same way that the modern break itself has reappeared in any number of historical guises: the Socratic break, the Galilean break, the Duchampian break, and on and on. Postmodernity, then, is better understood as a kind of depressive state, a psychological Thermidor in which militancy becomes well-nigh impossible on the existential plane. It is no surprise, then, that the greatest thinker of militancy in our times, Alain Badiou, emerged in the Anglophone world precisely at the point when postmodernity outgrew its utility, his project formulated on the basis of a reinvigorated modernism in which all subjects are militants of some form or another. The break is everything, and everything, to the extent that it deviates from the state of the situation, is a break. Jameson’s modernism is thus no anachronism, even in the twenty-first century, given that modernism describes more a subjective stance than a historical period.
The break in Jameson is categorizable. Not an aesthetic break (from one style to another, such as Adolf Loos proclaiming there will be no more ornament, or Lars von Trier that the camera must be hand-held), and not so much a political break (from one form of government to another, bourgeois to communist), the break in Jameson is an epistemological break. Dialectical critique is “thought to the second power”; it involves thinking at “a higher level,” at a level that is “one floor higher.”35 Is this not the most fundamental definition of modern critique, evident in Marx and others, that in the absence of any transcendental anchor, earth-bound and secular humanity must be able to think its own metaconditions?
In this sense, critique is defined simply as the self-grounding of the conditions of possibility of thinking. The fundamental Jamesonian move is to shift from a discussion of the things themselves to a discussion of the conditions of the things themselves. Thus, it is not the particularities of one interpretation over another that is ultimately at stake, or an attention to the various levels of allegory—as in Northrop Frye, the literal, formal, mythical, and anagogic levels—but the condition of interpretability as such and the condition of allegorical levels as such. “One does not necessarily solve this fragmented reality in existential terms,” Jameson observed during a conversation about the complexities of late capitalism; “one does not map that out or represent it by turning it from fragments into something unified. One theorizes the fragmentary.”36 In other words, cognitive mapping is not fundamentally a question of orientating, grounding, fixing, or resolving a subject’s position. The fundamental issue for Jameson is the fact of needing a map as such, not the supposedly grounded subjectivity that results or, as in this quotation, the fact of fragmentation as such. Indeed, the “as such” is the key indicator for these Jamesonian conditions.
To be sure, this is not a form of modern thought akin to that of Kant or Descartes in which the transcendental takes over. Jameson has spoken of a “Gödel’s law of social class” in which there is “no foundational position outside the system.”37 Under such a law, it is difficult if not impossible for an intellectual to “legitimate his own practice” by providing a foundation or ground from which to speak authoritatively and “look down with glacial indifference at these interminable mortal struggles.”38 Yet Jameson’s grievance has to do with the abstract or external nature of such a hypothetical position, not the fact that it is grounded. Even as there is “no foundational position outside the system,” there is still a system, and Jameson’s Marxist reduction is to found the position not so much inside the system but superimpose it on the system itself. Or as he put it in an early text: “We have always shown that for Marx political economy is not just one type of research among others, it is rather that on which the others are founded.”39
We find ourselves again at the heart of the matter, already mentioned at the outset. Jameson is ultimately a thinker of the foundation, of the ground, of the condition of grounding, so much so that we may say of him what Luce Irigaray said of Heidegger, that his metaphysics “always supposes, in some manner, a solid crust from which to raise a construction.”40 Thus, in a discussion on periodization, a perennial theme for him, Jameson characterized periodization in terms of absolute beginnings and first instances: it is “an absolute historiographic beginning, that cannot be justified by the nature of the historical material or evidence, since it organizes all such material and evidence in the first place.”41 How frequently Jameson uses the expression “as such.” How frequently he ends an idea with “in the first place.” These are some of the linguistic indicators of grounding.
Such an ontological ground requires the elaboration of a sixth and final principle: materialism is an exceptionalism, but a properly justified exceptionalism. At issue is what Jameson simply calls dialectical criticism or what we might label the critical reduction, conceived as a kind of impossible antonym to Edmund Husserl’s idealist epokhē. Recall again the oft-cited passage from The Political Unconscious, used to define the first principle above, only now quoted in context to show how the critical suspension operates: “This book [The Political Unconscious] will argue the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts. It conceives of the political perspective not as some supplementary method, not as an optional auxiliary to other interpretive methods current today—the psychoanalytic or the myth-critical, the stylistic, the ethical, the structural—but rather as the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.”42 The properly materialist or critical epokhē is thus a suspension not of the world but of the “supplementary” and “auxiliary” varieties of thinking. And through such suspension, the many possible interpretive methods are reduced to a single “absolute horizon,” which is nothing more than the fact of interpretation itself. In other words, despite the lofty aspirations of scientific Marxism, materialism is an exceptionalism. It is folly to argue otherwise in a quixotic attempt to overturn exceptionalism at all costs, the reason being, materialism’s exceptionalism is properly justified.
In sum, Jameson’s position on the determinate conditions of modern thought indicates not a dismissal of traditionally metaphysical or ontological questions, toward which, to be sure, Marxism has had an entirely valid historical and theoretical aversion, but rather a reinvention of those questions along different lines. Still, Jameson is not as much a metaphysical thinker as a reverse metaphysical thinker. Instead of the “absolute horizon” being the essence or form or noumenon that withdraws to the perimeter, leading to all manner of philosophical orientalisms from Kant to Hegel and beyond, Jameson’s absolute horizon remains, as it were, at the center, for it is nothing more than the real matter of history whose presence is deliverable only by way of representation, figuration, or forms of appearance.
If materialism means anything, it means this: Instead of the noumena withdrawing from the phenomena, instead of the transcendental residing through or beyond matter and appearance thus constituting the very stuff of existence, materialism shows how the phenomena withdraw from the noumena, how the “in itself” is the most real, the phenomena the least real. The noumena-phenomena relation is then explained through the structure of allegory, a structure in which one narrative layer may convey the manifest phenomena, while another parallel layer conveys the real truth of history.
Viewed in this way, old materialism might not be so incompatible with new materialism. Both approaches have a way of accounting for ontology, even if historical materialism has traditionally tried to mute, even discard, some of the more speculative, metaphysical approaches inherited from the philosophical legacy. And indeed, there might not be as large a gap on the political question as some might fear, with many thinkers of the new materialism devoting their political energies to climate change, the nonhuman, and other branches of materialist inquiry. Where the gap remains, however, is on the question of criticism or interpretation of the world, that intractable debate in which both culture and nature play a part. Much of the new materialism tends to elevate empirical, descriptive, even pragmatic approaches in its quest to unlock material reality, while denigrating hermeneutic pursuits to a kind of useless culturalism, or what Quentin Meillassoux in a different context labeled “correlationism.”43
Such a dramatic step is wholly incompatible with Jamesonian Marxism. As we have seen, Jameson’s “ontology”—disclaimers surrounding the use of this term notwithstanding—requires a reduction to material conditions, a determinism (no matter how weak or strong) of these material conditions, and indeed ultimately an accounting of the absolute horizon that conditions the world as a whole. Hence, the dialectic of reduction-and-expression is absolutely necessary, as are the structures of figuration like allegory and metaphor engendered by them, along with the interpretive techniques required to parse them.
This also furnishes a partial explanation for the close alliance forged historically between Marxism and other political movements such as feminism and antiracist struggles; Marxism is not so much the “reduction to class,” a move that might seem to exclude other forms of subjugation, but the reduction as such, the “reduction to reduction,” or the desire to ground ideology and antagonism in the generic continuum of collective life.
Against the idea that reduction is essentialist or otherwise limiting—against both Latour’s “irreduction” and the tradition of antifoundationalism common on the theoretical left—Jameson demonstrates that such reduction is not to be feared. His lesson is that ontology, properly conceived, is critical and, likewise, that critique itself follows an ontological structure. The reduction of one to the other is simply more evidence of the dialectical machine, that aforementioned “dilemma of oppositions and binaries” that governs the world.
Such dialectical inversions are the very stuff of the Jamesonian method. “We’re all idealists, all materialists,” he once said, a hyper-Hegelian stance that only a dialectician can appreciate, “and the final judgment or label is simply a matter of ideology, or, if you prefer, of political commitment.”44 Still, such commitment remains key, and it helps to differentiate Jameson’s Marxism from those other modes of thought (empiricism, realism, pragmatism) in which the world is described for what it is. Marxism is not that. And, following Jameson, I suspect that the future of dialectical criticism will rest not on the changing winds of commitment, this ideology or that ideology, but an unvarnished appraisal of the conditions of all ideologies and an encounter with the absolute horizon that, so far, has been eclipsed from view.
Notes
Jameson, “Metacommentary,” 9. That essay was reprinted, most recently, in Jameson, Ideologies of Theory, 5–19.
The special section in the journal, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, was entitled “The Future of Criticism—A Critical Inquiry Symposium,” 324–479.
Ibid., 238–39. Latour is fighting a straw man here; the “false consciousness” position was refuted and amended decades ago within critical theory by any number of thinkers from Stuart Hall to Jameson as well.
Ibid., 231. See also Latour’s recent treatise on ontology, Inquiry into Modes of Existence.
Korsch, Three Essays on Marxism, 65, emphasis removed. Marx’s early writings, particularly the “Letter to Ruge” (1843) and the theses “Concerning Feuerbach” (1845), serve as the locus classicus for the distinction between philosophy and critique. See Marx, Early Writings.
Jameson, “Marxism and the Historicity of Theory,” 363–64, 371. This, the definitive Jameson interview, is reprinted along with a number of other revealing interviews in Jameson, Jameson on Jameson.
Robert Kaufman has written on Jameson as a “Red Kant,” a label evoked by Xudong Zhang in Jameson, “Marxism and the Historicity of Theory,” 379. See Kaufman, “Red Kant.”
Jameson, “On Contemporary Marxist Theory,” 126. This interview was reprinted in Jameson, Jameson on Jameson.
Jameson, “Envelopes and Enclaves,” 33. This interview was reprinted in Jameson, Jameson on Jameson.
Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” 178. This essay was reprinted, most recently, in Jameson, Ideologies of Theory, 483–515.
Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, 101, 102.
Jameson, Representing Capital, 88. Jameson’s short book on capital contains a meditation on unemployment and the “general law” of overwork and unemployment; see 2, 71, 125, and 147–51.
Jameson, “On Contemporary Marxist Theory,” 128, punctuation modified.
For more on this principle, including the concept of totality as historical knowledge, see the chapter “Marxism and Postmodernism” in Jameson, Cultural Turn, esp. 35–43. Some of the material from that chapter, which forms part of Jameson’s response to critics on the left, also reappears in the conclusion to Jameson, Postmodernism.
Jameson’s notorious dialectical sentences, a stylistic convention borrowed from Theodor Adorno, are a source of wonderment to some and consternation to others. For more, see Wegner, Periodizing Jameson, 18, 222n68.
For an example of this at work, see Jameson, Political Unconscious, 31.
Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 421. The singular importance of the dialectic within Jameson’s corpus may be seen in the very fact that this formidable book is excluded from his six-volume collection The Poetics of Social Forms, as in a painting where the reversal of figure and ground reveals, via absence, the ultimate importance of the negative space.
The dialectic is not modern tout court, as any classicist will quickly attest, and Jameson has shown how the dialectic plays a similar role to peripeteia (reversal) in Aristotle, as evidenced in the long final chapter of Valences of the Dialectic. In taking up Aristotle’s terminology from the Poetics—peripeteia, anagnorisis, and pathos—Jameson has attempted to adapt these classical terms “to a modern and materialist historiography” (565).
Ibid., 416.
See Jameson, Singular Modernity, where he is not at all bullish on the political potential of modernism. On beforeness and afterness see also the final chapter in Valences of the Dialectic, esp. 475–82.
Jameson, Marxism and Form, 307, 308.
Jameson, “Marxism and the Historicity of Theory,” 369, emphasis added.
Ibid.
