Maria Elisa Cevasco
How to celebrate Fredric Jameson’s enormous legacy in a blog published by a society dedicated to another great Marxist critic? There are many intersections between their respective works. I do not think Williams ever quoted Jameson, but the latter quoted Williams on many occasions, very much including his characterization of postmodernism as a structure of feeling, in his pathbreaking 1984 essay (and later a book) ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. Yet, rather than looking for similarities and references, it would be more productive – intellectual productivity being a central concern for both critics, and for Marxist thinking in general – to use an approach pioneered by Williams, for whom words were key aspects of thinking. I want to remember Jameson by recapping some of his keywords that point out some of the directions he opened for future work. Here they go.
Allegory: Ever since its discussion in Marxism and Form (1971), allegory has played a central role in Jameson’s proposition of a hermeneutical procedure suitable to our times. It is ‘a particular phenomenon, in which a single coded object or item of the outside world is suddenly overloaded with meaning’.[1] It is the task of the critic to interpret those meanings: ‘Allegory is an interpretive virus, and also a surgical instrument, a diagnostic tool’.[2] He argues that the fourfold system of medieval allegorical meanings provides a ‘ladder to be climbed rung by rung beginning with the simplest elements or forms’.[3] As far as I know, he presents his first version of those four levels, central to his practice as cultural critic, in the chapter in Marxism and Form on Walter Benjamin. Jameson quotes Dante’s description of his poem as having the four dimensions of the medieval system of exegesis: the literal (the hero´s adventures in the afterworld), the moral (the ultimate fate of this soul), the allegorical (in which his encounters resume one aspect or another of the life of Christ), and the anagogical (where his own drama foreshadows the progress of the human race toward the Last Judgement), and suggests we can adapt them to our own more secular times.[4] He makes recourse to this system in a number of his interventions. In the Political Unconscious (1981) and in Allegory and Ideology (2019), he presents the literal as the historical or textual referent, the allegorical key as the interpretive code, the moral as the psychological level of the individual subject, and the anagogical as the political or collective meaning of history.[5] The interpreter shifts between the levels, prompted by what he calls transversality, as one’s attention is caught by a striking feature of any of the levels. ‘Transversality’, he explains, ‘occurs in every living text, as it opens itself to a reading by those multiple subject positions we are all as individuals’.[6] This approach to literary texts and to other cultural products opens up new and productive possibilities for strong interpretation. If I may add a personal note, when teaching the four dimensions and asking my students to practice transversality between the levels in their literary analyses, one of them summed up the impact of this practice: ‘This changes my way of reading forever: now I understand what is meant by learning from literature, and this has enabled me to see through the surface of texts and of other social forms’. I think that is why Jameson characterized allegory as ‘a tool in the quest for meaning which is a paramount activity in all the levels of our existence, and is a powerful remedy for a historical time in which a desperately necessary social regeneration has not yet found its agents’.[7]
Cognitive Mapping: This is one of the most quoted of Jameson’s categorical inventions and adaptations. It synthesizes the cultural model, the aesthetic and the political tasks called for by our historical situation. As he diagnosed in his book on postmodernism, ours is a period in which the very categories we use to analyze experience – time and space – have undergone a mutation. Ours is the period in which the continuum of time has been replaced by the eternal present of the commodity form. We have lost our connection with the past and our capacity to imagine a different future, immersed as we are in the continuous flow of commodities that fill up every single space. Postmodern space is characterized by a new depthlessness, where all is on the surface. This spatiality is constituted by the ‘relentless saturation of any remaining voids and empty places to the point in which the postmodern body … is now exposed to a perceptual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed’.[8] Jameson reads this new configuration of time and space as a social symptom, and an expression of a historically new dilemma: how can we give figuration to our positionality in the ‘multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities, whose frames range from the still surviving spaces of private bourgeois life all the way to the unimaginable decentering of global capital itself’?[9] This new cultural model demands new aesthetic forms that have to underscore the representational dilemma created by this situation in which ‘the organization in time and space is experientially as absent from our daily life as the ultimate laws of Einsteinian relativity are from our normal dealings with Newtonian gravity on this small planet’.[10] In this situation, cultural products have a special role and it is up to cultural critics ‘to interrogate the artistic production of our own time for signs of some new, so far only dimly conceivable, collective forms that may be expected to replace the older individualistic ones’.[11] The political dimension of cognitive mapping is precisely a function of this new complex and nearly ungraspable global space, where it is more and more difficult to coordinate, strategically and tactically, local politics and national and international ones, that may give rise to a new social order. For Jameson, ‘The incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is to urban experience. It follows that an aesthetic of cognitive mapping is an integral part of any socialist politics’.[12]
Form: Materialist formalism can well summarize Jameson’s way of practicing Marxist cultural criticism. In his latest book, Inventions of a Present (2024), he states that in order to be able to read the records and social symptoms elaborated in the novels that are ‘inventing a present’, he needs ‘a kind of formalism, provided it is a social or better still a materialist formalism capable of detecting the profound historicity of which these works are an archeological transcription’.[13] This materialist conception of form is the cornerstone of his practice, and from there he goes on to make a fundamental contribution to Marxist cultural criticism where the basic dialectic is that between aesthetic form and social processes. This has been traditionally worked out in terms of a determining base and a determined superstructure. This formulation has attracted a lot of criticism inside and mainly outside the tradition. Jameson deals with this central question in terms of his notion of aesthetic form. Again, as early as in Marxism and Form, which seems to contain in nuce all that comes afterwards, he spells out a dialectical conception of form as sociohistorical content. ‘Form is, in itself, but the working out of content in the realm of the superstructure’.[14] ‘It is the final articulation of the deeper logic of the content itself’, and ‘this logic is social and historical in character’.[15] He points out that the raw material of cultural products, what other traditions call its content, is itself never formless, but is ‘rather already meaningful from the outset, being neither more nor less than the very components of concrete social life itself: words, thoughts, objects, desires, people, places, activities. The work of art does not confer meaning on these elements, but rather transforms their initial meaning into some new and heightened construction of meaning’.[16] This notion, as I have argued elsewhere, is among the conditions of possibility of Jameson’s argument in The Political Unconscious.[17] He demonstrates that narrative, which is a central human activity, is a socially symbolic act: it is an act in so far as it does something to the world as it gives an imaginary resolution, by way of representation, to the real social contradictions between the base and the superstructure. It takes up these contradictions that constitute social life and submits them to the ‘transformation of form’: ‘the literary work or cultural object, as though for the first time, brings into being that very situation to which it is also, at one and the same time, a reaction’.[18] The aim of interpretation is to lay bare the socio-historical content, from daily life all the way to the mode of production and its mutations, which, like the Freudian unconscious, have been subjected to distortions and censorship. The work of the interpreter is to make this form “speak”, so to say; it is to make history appear, and raise to consciousness the political, and economic infrastructure that organize our lives. In this new and enhanced sense, cultural analysis is a potent instrument for discovering the contradictions that determine social life. Let me give an example of this constant practice: in his book on postmodernism, he reads the changes in infrastructure in the formal differences between Warhol’s and Van Gogh’s paintings, that give figuration to two different stages of capitalism, the moment of the monopoly or imperialist stage and our own moment, which we can call, following Jameson and Mandel, late capitalism. It is this constant movement from cultural forms to social, political and economic ones that anchors the potency of his analyses and gives us a path to follow in our own practice.
Utopia: Even a very small inventory of Jameson’s keywords, like this one, cannot finish without mentioning Utopia. Utopia is the ‘transparent synonym for socialism’,[19] and radical system change remains the objective of Jameson’s intellectual efforts. One of the strategic needs of the discursive version of social struggle in our times is, of course, to counteract the prevailing scepticism about the possibility of – do I dare to say the word? – revolution. As Jameson puts it in his 2005 book dedicated to Utopia,
what is crippling [in our time] is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency is irreversible but that the historical alternatives to capitalism have been proven inviable and impossible, and that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available. The Utopians not only offer to conceive such alternate systems, Utopian form is itself a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness and on the systemic nature of the social totality, to the point where one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence that has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet.[20]
And one of the ways Jameson does that is by re-activating the Utopian impulses of the tradition. This is particularly evident in his readings of Marcuse and Bloch in Marxism and Form. Those readings function not only as efforts to make historical connections but also as specifications of Jameson´s own project. Marcuse is approached historically, via Schiller and the surrealists. They are all seen as representatives of the different historical shapes taken by ‘the stubborn rebirth of the idea of freedom.’[21] In all three instances, there is a double aspect to this Utopian re-birth: one, that of the nurture of desire, that is, as a means for consciousness to prepare itself for change in the world, and another, more openly interventionist, as a means for learning to ‘make demands on the real word that hasten that change.’[22] For Marcuse, Utopia is to be found in the negation of what exists. We can see the traces of Marcuse’s ‘negative hermeneutics of freedom’ in Jameson’s own highly original codification of the function of the Utopian text, namely, ‘to bring home, in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself’.[23] In this sense, ‘Utopia’s deepest subject, and the source of all that is most vibrantly political about it, is precisely our inability to conceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to project the Other of what is, a failure that, as fireworks dissolving back into the night sky, must once again leave us alone with this history.’[24]
Utopia ‘accompanies ideological discourse’, not necessarily by presenting the opposite number of what is, but by presenting a critique of actually existing conditions, and of the practices they determine. Utopia reveals the limits of current ways of thinking. That is precisely one of the modes of criticism as practiced by Jameson himself: the obvious examples would be his critique of the ideologies of literary interpretation in The Political Unconscious (1981), of postmodernism in Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), of modernity in A Singular Modernity (2002), and of globalization in The Cultural Turn (1998). This would be the negative side of the hermeneutical process in the time-honoured tradition of Marxist cultural criticism. Our time, as Jameson is well aware, requires a complementation. This is how he put it, speaking on ‘Cultural Intervention’ in 2003:
But in a society that has lost the sense of a future and even the very possibility of historical change, which has become convinced that the current order of global capitalism is the only social form that can exist henceforth, being profoundly anchored in human nature – in such society we once again need visions of radical difference and of radical alternatives to the present system. These visions are what I call Utopia, and far from constituting a flight from politics as in traditional Utopias, they are an integral part of politics today. For a productive and well-developed politics must operate on the macro level as well as on the micro level: its local forms and immediately concrete struggles must always be accompanied by some ultimate vision of an overall systemic alternative, of a new system, better and ultimately radically different from what we have today.[25]
The theoretical precedent for this sort of hermeneutics is again to be found in the Marxist tradition: for Jameson, Ernst Bloch’s great contribution is the working out of a hermeneutical technique which enables the restoration of a genuine political dimension to all the texts and objects preserved in our culture. For Bloch every object, no matter how degraded, retains traces of Utopian identity, in such a manner that ‘wherever we look everything in the world becomes a version of some primal figure, a manifestation of the primordial movement toward the future and toward ultimate identity with a transfigured world which is Utopia, and whose vital presence, behind whatever distortions, beneath whatever layers of repression, may always be detected, no matter how faintly, by the instruments and apparatus of hope itself’.[26] Jameson insists on the impossibility of the figuration of another order of things, and on the inescapability of attempting this very same figuration. The clearest example of this duality is to be found in his treatment of mass culture. The essay that spells out this way of reading is the extraordinarily productive ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’ (1979) which opens up a politically useful way of dealing with contemporary cultural production. There, Jameson argues for the coexistence of both reifying and utopian impulses ‘even in the most degraded type of mass culture.’[27] 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 bribe to the public about to be manipulated.’[28] One of the tasks of the critic would be to do justice both to the socio-historical situatedness of the cultural work as producer of spurious legitimating ideology and also to its transcendent potential, the unavoidable effort to give figuration to the undying aspiration for some ‘ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopia or classless society.’[29] And in case we all hurry to look for what this achieved state may look like in the works that more openly deal with alternatives, Utopian fictions, Jameson reminds us that those works succeed by failure, that is, they are politically potent insofar as they figure our inability to imagine beyond what is. But by doing so, they are also producing in their very elaboration, what the system denies, that is, the desire for change. In this sense, Utopia finds its place as one of the many resources for a journey of hope that Jameson’s oeuvre leaves to those who come afterwards.
Maria Elisa Cevasco is full professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Her research interests encompass cultural studies, the interplay between culture and society, and materialist theory. She has engaged with the works of theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams and Roberto Schwarz. Among her publications are Para Ler Raymond Williams, and Dez Lições de Estudos Culturais, both translated into Spanish. She has published a number of articles in Portuguese, English, French, German, Chinese and Spanish. She has edited A Cultura do Dinheiro and O Espírito de Porto Alegre and translated Fredric Jameson´s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism into Portuguese.
[1] Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso, 2008), 426.
[2] Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019), 1.
[3] Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, 4.
[4] Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 60-61.
[5] Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981), p.31.
[6] Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, 43.
[7] Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, 181.
[8] Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, eds., (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 280.
[9] Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, 280.
[10] Fredric Jameson, Inventions of a Present (London: Verso, 2024), 68.
[11] Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992), 54.
[12] Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, 283.
[13] Jameson, Inventions of a Present,3.
[14] Jameson, Marxism and Form, 329.
[15] Jameson, Marxism and Form,329, 331.
[16] Jameson, Marxism and Form, 402-3.
[17] Maria Elisa Cevasco, ‘A Shudder in the World: Reading The Political Unconscious from the Periphery’, PMLA vol. 137 no. 3 (May 2022): 504-510.
[18] Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981), 81-2.
[19] Jameson, Ideologies of Theory, 388.
[20] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2005), xii.
[21] Jameson, Marxism and Form,116.
[22] Jameson, Marxism and Form, 90.
[23] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 289.
[24] Jameson, Ideologies of Theory, 412-3.
[25] Fredric Jameson, ‘On Cultural Intervention’. Paper delivered at the January 2003 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
[26] Jameson, Marxism and Form, 120.
[27] Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, 29.
[28] Fredric Jameson, ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.’ In Signatures of the Visible, 29.
[29] Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London, Methuen, 1981, 291.
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