1. The earlier question of foundational ontology shows up once again here, but with a more pragmatic character. At the end of the first chapter, Jameson characterizes History as that foundation out of which all interpretation must arise but also, then, the primary root to which all interpretation must return, thus the primacy of Marxism as an interpretation. I was hoping we could discuss the role of History in this initial section and its polemical pro-Marxist use (which also might lead us into some thoughts on the second chapter and its discussion of meaning and use).
2. This will be a shorter suggestion: I’m interested, perhaps not surprisingly, in the Marxist creation of the subject, or what Jameson sees as Marxism’s determining how a subject might be formulated in late capitalism, and whether this is complimentary to psychoanalytic moves in this direction. Perhaps we can talk about the role of psychoanalysis in Jameson’s work in general.
3. Finally, and I think Gabriel will like this question, this text, even more perhaps than Marxism and Form has a particular unified strategy in its organization. I’m hoping we can spend some time discussing how the different chapters of the text hang together, and the way, specifically, that the first two chapters prefigure the three that follow.
To keep the chain going, I'll take up Gabriel's third question in the context of Jameson's discussion of ideology v. Utopia. As much as he seems to be, and I agree with Gabriel here, wedded to the idea of praxis in political life, Jameson nevertheless seems to be suspicious of the overtly ideological/polemical in literary discourse. The title of the book is, after all, The Political Unconscious. For example, he is careful to distance himself from an interpretive position that would claim that literary or cultural production is in any way a deliberate program of class indoctrination/dominance. What I would like to think about is the extent to which Jamesonian methodology applies in the context of discourse (political, legal, religious, etc.) that does have a self-consciously ideological agenda. Or to put it another way, it seems clear that this book is an extension of the project proposed in Marxism and Form. I am still not entirely clear, however, on how the hermeneutic apparatus that Jameson deploys in Unconscious to "rewrite" literature relates or compares to the interpretive practice that he brings to bear on the Marxist, polemical texts that he works on in M&F (except, of course, to the extent that both are "dialectic" and self-critical). He turns away from "liberalist" discourse that views the literary, the political and the private as separate spheres of activity, but at certain moments, he seems almost to disparage literary production with a "message". So is it that these two sorts of discourse, e.g. critical v. literary/artistic, are somehow comparmentalized? If not, how might we use Jameson's methodology to reconstruct History as the absent cause of texts that are in some way more conscious of their historical moments/purposes than a fictional novel? I suppose this goes back to one of my questions last week about how we might bring Jameson to bear on Jameson.
2 Comments:
I’ll start this off, I guess.
1. The earlier question of foundational ontology shows up once again here, but with a more pragmatic character. At the end of the first chapter, Jameson characterizes History as that foundation out of which all interpretation must arise but also, then, the primary root to which all interpretation must return, thus the primacy of Marxism as an interpretation. I was hoping we could discuss the role of History in this initial section and its polemical pro-Marxist use (which also might lead us into some thoughts on the second chapter and its discussion of meaning and use).
2. This will be a shorter suggestion: I’m interested, perhaps not surprisingly, in the Marxist creation of the subject, or what Jameson sees as Marxism’s determining how a subject might be formulated in late capitalism, and whether this is complimentary to psychoanalytic moves in this direction. Perhaps we can talk about the role of psychoanalysis in Jameson’s work in general.
3. Finally, and I think Gabriel will like this question, this text, even more perhaps than Marxism and Form has a particular unified strategy in its organization. I’m hoping we can spend some time discussing how the different chapters of the text hang together, and the way, specifically, that the first two chapters prefigure the three that follow.
To keep the chain going, I'll take up Gabriel's third question in the context of Jameson's discussion of ideology v. Utopia. As much as he seems to be, and I agree with Gabriel here, wedded to the idea of praxis in political life, Jameson nevertheless seems to be suspicious of the overtly ideological/polemical in literary discourse. The title of the book is, after all, The Political Unconscious. For example, he is careful to distance himself from an interpretive position that would claim that literary or cultural production is in any way a deliberate program of class indoctrination/dominance. What I would like to think about is the extent to which Jamesonian methodology applies in the context of discourse (political, legal, religious, etc.) that does have a self-consciously ideological agenda. Or to put it another way, it seems clear that this book is an extension of the project proposed in Marxism and Form. I am still not entirely clear, however, on how the hermeneutic apparatus that Jameson deploys in Unconscious to "rewrite" literature relates or compares to the interpretive practice that he brings to bear on the Marxist, polemical texts that he works on in M&F (except, of course, to the extent that both are "dialectic" and self-critical). He turns away from "liberalist" discourse that views the literary, the political and the private as separate spheres of activity, but at certain moments, he seems almost to disparage literary production with a "message". So is it that these two sorts of discourse, e.g. critical v. literary/artistic, are somehow comparmentalized? If not, how might we use Jameson's methodology to reconstruct History as the absent cause of texts that are in some way more conscious of their historical moments/purposes than a fictional novel? I suppose this goes back to one of my questions last week about how we might bring Jameson to bear on Jameson.
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