Fredric Jameson (1934–2024)

An American Utopia consists of the Fredric Jameson essay by that name and a number of responses to his ideas, followed by an epilogue by Jameson. This is a dense but accessible book which should stir everyone to some level of discomfort whether one agrees or disagrees with Jameson's proposal.

I won't try to elaborate on what various terms mean in the book, the attempts I saw in other reviews should have been labeled as their opinions about what the concepts are rather than a hit and miss show more pseudo-lecture. I found every "explanation" or bit of historical background lacking, as mine would likely be, for the simple reason that there is no brief overview except from a selective viewpoint and I refuse to limit a new reader in this area to a not-wrong-but-not-right overview. One can read this without the background and still understand the arguments as they apply to the current political/economic situation. This does not have to be an academic exercise but rather one open to any interested party.

Jameson generally points out the many problems with so-called democracy, namely that it is all in service to capitalism and the illusion of a free market. He argues for a dual-state approach and uses conscription into the military as a way to create a viable second state. There is not a great deal of logistic detail on how this might be accomplished but the end product, from Jameson's description, sounds significantly better than the miserable state of affairs we are currently in.

Whether you find yourself drawn to western Marxism or not this would be a valuable book to read. The responses to Jameson are not all supportive and point out many of the proposal's weaknesses or unanswered questions. In other words, this book is not just for those of us who for decades have been interested in Marxist thought but for those who are not interested in Marx specifically but are interested in looking at all the options to try to turn this neoliberal mess around, or at least slow the destruction of life on Earth.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. 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

Well, this is seminal stuff. The postmodern defined and instantiated; while there's possibly a split in use-value between the first couple of essays, which are structure-setting, and some of the ones that apply Marxian analyses to the postmodern characteristics of some literature, film and architecture, it's still cool for the versed reader to have all this stuff in one place. Jameson's cornerstones you know if you've read anything about this stuff before (or even if you haven't, you'll show more probably find this stuff familiar if you've ever, like, watched The Simpsons): the move from parody into pastiche, the crisis of historicity, the "perpetual present," the multiplication away from the modern, even--we go back this far--the arguments against the vulgar Marxism of economic base and cultural superstructure (Gramsci is not mentioned(!). A lot of it must have seemed like collation even then, but oh, what exquisite collation! "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations." E.g. And other times he meanders, and you wish for a little more of the vulgar Marxist's clear-eyed flensing.


Ironically in light of Colin MacCabe's genuinely moronic back-cover blurb to the effect that "it can be truly said that nothing cultural is alien to him", Jameson's unexpected shining moment here is in connecting the tripartite "M-C-M" movement of money (liquid acquisition, capitalization, "solid" acquisition--land, factories, etc.) in Capital with the rise of the postmodern financial sector--the sign of a neoimperial capitalism that has extended itself as far as possible, as with the old imperial financial centres of the early 20th century, and then the intensive turn, "the feverish search not so much for new markets--as these are also saturated--as for the new kind of profits available in financial transactions themselves and as such". But then, he connects it too with land, which from our perspective seems so apparent as to be almost quaint, but from a Marxist perspective that theorizes capital value as labour and exchange value, is evidently a relief to him, twenty years back--land is not a capital refuge, it's the last deterritorialization, in the Anti-Oedipus sense--the deterritorialization of territory itself, its transformation into the biggest bonanza of liquidity ever. Welcome to the subprime crisis! It's the Spanish Empire and Inca silver all over again!


Man, that's depressing. And all Jameson can think to do with this insight is a little minianalysis of Rockefeller Center's development history and the referentiality of postmodern architecture, no longer the modern phallus, no longer the storehouse of treasure. Super interesting, but you wonder if he's now wishing he could appear to his younger self in a dream and cause him to make those few missing connections. And then what? To the IMF? Nobody ever listens to prophetic Marxist savants, even when they should (49% of the time at most). show less