Arguments on Identification

Arguments on Identification

The “Theory” Chapter in Fredric Jameson’s

Postmodernism

Akiko Ichikawa

Introduction

This essay intends to delineate Fredric Jameson’s view on “group

politics” referring to his arguments about motives of identification in

works of literary criticism such as Kenneth Burke, Walter Benn

Michaels, and Paul de Man through corresponds in Critical Inquiry

and “Immanence and Nominalism in Postmodern Theoretical

Discourse,”¹ the seventh chapter of Postmodernism, or, the Cultural

Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).

In the final chapter in the book, “Secondary Elaborations,”

representing postmodernism as “multinational capital,” Jameson

suggests that “this seemingly disembodied force is also an ensemble

of human agents trained in specific ways and inventing original local

tactics and practices according to the creativities of human freedom”

(408). Against the “concept of postmodernism” there emerge

microgroups and minorities, such as “women as well as the internal

Third World,” who repudiate the postmodern “as the universalizing

cover story for what is essentially a much narrower class-cultural

operation serving white and male-dominated elites in the advanced

countries” (318). To Jameson, the microgroups and minorities are

also “a profoundly postmodern phenomenon” (318); as we will see,

Jameson points out that the provisional opposition “alternatives of

agency and system” exemplified above is not in reality a matter of

choice, but both terms “must be rigorously separated at the same time

that they are deployed simultaneously” (326).


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It can be perceived that Jameson’s view on “group politics” can

be considered in line with his works on literary criticism, which are

developed around motives of “identity.” When Jameson mentions

other critics’ attitudes toward identification, he seems to refer

implicitly to Theodore Adorno’s writings, as he states: “[in Adorno’s

philosophical writings] this word [‘identity’] can subsume the

‘concept’ and the ‘system’ fully as much as ‘enlightenment’ or

‘science’” (Late Marxism 15). The term mentioned as a

“contradictory” that consists of “identity and non-identity” (15)

reminds one of the dialogue in Plato’s Sophist: discussing ideas such

as “the same,” “the other,” “motion,” or “rest,” it gives us a

discrimination of identity and non-identity:

[W]hen we say it [motion] is the same and not the same, we

do not use the words alike. When we call it the same, we do

so because it partakes of the same in relation to itself, and

when we call it not the same, we do so on account of its

participation in the other, by which it is separated from the

same and becomes not that but other, so that it is correctly

spoken of in turn as not the same. (256a–b)

As we will see through Jameson, literary critic Kenneth Burke depicts

emergence of a binary set of “scene” and “act,” with which an “agent”

follows its course. Regarding Burke’s argument, Jameson questions

Burke’s sets of ideas.

Exploration of identity is developed further in the seventh

chapter of Postmodernism entitled “Immanence and Nominalism in

Postmodern Theoretical Discourse.” Two works of literary criticism,

which according to Jameson are representative of “immanence and

nominalism” respectively, are examined. One of these works is

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Walter Benn Michaels’ The Gold Standard and the Logic of

Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (1987),

which studies writers from Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Nathaniel

Hawthorn to Frank Norris, interprets naturalism in the American

novel through his form of identification. This motive is redefined by

Michaels himself as fetishism, in which commodities are “something

more than their physical qualities” (21) and “are somehow human”

(26). The other work referenced by Jameson is Allegories of Reading:

Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (1979)

by de Man, whose criticism Jameson calls “nominalism.” De Man’s

reading of the texts from 18th to 20th century shares similarities with

Adorno’s writing as opposed to Michaels. Within de Man’s writing a

struggle exists to resist generalization, in which Jameson exemplifies

Karl Marx’s theory of general value. Finally, the contrast between the

two critics—Michaels and de Man, which parallels that between

Burke and Jameson—is reenacted in Jameson’s discussion of group

politics.

Burke on Keats: “A Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats”

In an essay “A Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats” found in A

Grammar of Motives (1969), Burke interprets the events in Keats’s

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) as a vicissitude of a set of dialectical

oppositions of body and soul. This opposition, which originally read

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” becomes the focal point of Burke’s

argument. According to Burke’s interpretation, Keats generates wide-

ranging and various sets of binary oppositions, in which one term

conquers the other. At the beginning of the essay, Burke writes, “To

consider language as a means of information or knowledge is to

consider it epistemologically, semantically, in terms of ‘science.’ To

consider it as a mode of action is to consider it in terms of ‘poetry’”


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(447).

Burke demonstrates his reading as a “viaticum” that mitigates

the poet’s bodily fever as sets of binary in the verse opposition find

relief in their course of action (457). The anticipated opposition

appear in the first stanza: namely, that of body and soul. The poet

addresses the Urn and depicts its “shape” as “of deities or mortals, or

both” (ll. 5–6). The second stanza confirms the set of “two

motivational levels,” which reads, “Heard melodies are sweet, but

those unheard / Are sweeter” (ll. 11–12). This corresponds to the

instruments, “pipes and timbrels,” depicted on the Urn (l. 10) to allow

Burke to describe the reference to “the mystic oxymoron” of

“inaudible sound” as “unheard melodies” and “absolute sound, the

essence of sound, which would be soundless” (449). Burke comments

that in the two stanzas, the “erotic imagery” evoked by the phrases

“maidens loth” and “mad pursuit” foregrounds bodily images against

eternal ones (449–50).

In the third stanza, “all breathing human passion” and “leave”

of “the spiritual activity” operate at the bodily level: “From the bodily

fever, which is a passion, and malign, there has split off a spiritual

activity, a wholly benign aspect of the total agitation” (Burke 453).

After separating from the body, the transcendental spirit of the poet

comes to require new “settings”: “Hence, the act having now

transcended its bodily setting, it will require, as its new setting, a

transcendent scene” (454). This scene emphasizes the dramatic

function of the Urn. The Urn, which first contained upon itself the

scene, becomes the scene for the action written upon it. According to

Burke, “The Urn contains the scene out of which it arose” (458). The

final stanza of the poem declares “the oracle” (447): “Beauty is truth,

truth beauty” (l. 49). Burke argues:

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[W]ithout these introductory mysteries, “truth” and “beauty”

were at odds. For whereas “beauty” had its fulfillment in

romantic poetry, “truth” was coming to have its fulfilment in

science, technological accuracy, accountancy, statistics,

actuarial tables, and the like. Hence, without benefit of the

rites which one enacts in a sympathetic reading of the Ode

(rites that remove the discussion to a different level), the

enjoyment of “beauty” would involve an esthetic kind of

awareness radically in conflict with the kind of awareness

deriving from the practical “truth.” And as regards the tactics

of the poem, this conflict would seem to be solved by

“estheticizing” the true rather than by “verifying” the beautiful.

(459)

In the following paragraph to the above excerpt, Burke depicts the

identification of “Truth” and “Beauty,” which can be translated into

“science” and “poetry” and again into “scene” and “act” (459). In the

last equation, Burke reinterprets “act” as “attitude” of the poet toward

the verse (460). The poet, according to Burke, finally “personif[ies]”

the Urn (460). Burke views the poet’s “mental action” as an “agent,”

which leaves behind the “passive body” that suffered from fever and

transacts with the Urn. Foregrounding the artistic mental action,

namely, the “beauty,” he then makes the poet personify the Urn as a

poet.

Jameson on Burke: “The Symbolic Inference” (1978)

In the correspondence between Jameson and Burke in Critical Inquiry

in 1978, Jameson puts forward a criticism of Burke’s manner of

adopting the concept of “ideology,” from which we can gain further

apposite insight. In the article, titled “The Symbolic Inference; or,


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Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis,” Jameson points out that

Burke’s criticism of Keats is merely an exemplification of ideology,

which is no longer valid in the contemporary mode of criticism. For

Jameson, ideology itself should be the object of explication.

Jameson points out that although Burke’s work is an

“ideological analysis,” Burke is reluctant to admit as such. Ideological

analysis, according to Jameson, can be defined as follows:

[T]he rewriting of the literary text in such a way that it may

itself be grasped as the rewriting or restructuration of a prior

ideological or historical subtext, provided it is understood that

the latter—what we used to call the “context”—must always

be (re)-constructed after the fact, for the purposes of the

analysis. (“Symbolic Inference” 511)

Burke adopts this manner of reading. The Burkean symbolic

act “articulates its own situation and textualizes it, encouraging the

illusion that the very situation itself did not exist before it, that there

is nothing but a text, that there never was an extra- or con-textual

reality before the text itself generated it” (“Symbolic Inference” 512).

At the same time,:

[T]his simultaneous production and articulation of “reality” by

the text is reduplicated by an active, well-nigh instrumental

stance of the text towards the new reality, the new situation,

thus produced; and the latter is accompanied immediately by

gestures of praxis. . . . (512)

Furthermore, Jameson claims that, “to stress either of these functions

of symbolic action at the expense of the other is surely to produce

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sheer ideology” (512). The aforementioned movement towards the

personified new Urn for the poet is, for Jameson, itself a negation of

social reality.

Jameson argues that Burke’s “strategy” of interpretation is a

technique of concealing social aspects. Jameson claims, “[his] way of

construing romanticism, by projecting a situation which is its own

response, seals us off from any further need to consult the historical

circumstances of romanticism itself” (518). Moreover, the strategy

seems inappropriate within “modern society”: in another section,

which deals with the Burkean method of criticism (one that Jameson

calls a “strategy of containment” and to which he attributes another

Burkean concept called “the ritual”), Jameson suggests that “the idea

of ritual . . . entails as one of its basic preconditions the essential

stability of a given social formation, its functional capacity to

reproduce itself over time” (519). The perpetual nature of the ritual,

“however, . . . no longer holds for modern society, . . . for capitalism

itself[,] . . . a social formation whose inner logic is the restless and

corrosive dissolution of traditional relations into the atomized and

quantified aggregates of the market system” (519). Hence, Jameson

describes Burke as a critic of liberal democracy who retains the

temperament of “endow[ing] the American capitalism of the thirties

and early forties with its appropriate cultural and political ideology”

(520). As stated by Jameson, “[w]hat tends to strike us today about

the Grammar and Rhetoric of Motives is less their critical force than

Burke’s implicit faith in the harmonizing claims of liberal democracy

and in the capacity of the system to reform itself from within” (520).

In another part of the essay, Jameson also criticizes another

Burkean “concept of the self,” which is attributed to the

aforementioned “strategy of containment,” and thereby reveals

Burke’s “strange reluctance to pronounce the word ideology itself as


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well as his fundamental hesitation to identify his own study of

symbolic forms with any of the available strategies of demystification

[of identity]” (521). Jameson insists that focus should be on “the

status of category of identity and of the self, which is itself ideological,

and which can hardly be properly evaluated if we remain locked into

the very ideological system, the ideological closure or double-bind,

which generates such concepts in the first place,” rather than studying

“the nature of alienation” as Burke claims to be an issue (521). Put

simply, a “demystification” is required in Burke’s criticism where

Burke stages the mystification of identity with the concept of “drama,”

the third concept connected to the “strategy of containment” (521).

As Jameson suggests, “Drama is not so much the archetype of praxis

as it is the very source of the ideology of representation and, with it,

of the optical illusion of the subject” (522).

Jameson’s claim that Burke follows his “strategy of

containment,” therefore, implies that Burke presupposes society in a

humanistic fashion. If one overlooks the social and historical contexts

in which differences between the two critics are observed, then the

criticism made by Jameson toward Burke is a reminder of the

statement given by Plato on rhetoricians that they arbitrarily persuade

an audience. This experience, however, is based not on art, but rather

on the aim of making the audience believe whatever they are told.

What we know from Socrates is that “the rhetorician’s business is not

to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and

wrong, but only to make them believe” (Gorgias 455a). Jameson’s

response to Burke seem to be read in analogy with the question Plato

has Socrates pose: “what course of life is best; whether it should be

that to which you invite me, with all those manly pursuits of speaking

in Assembly and practicing rhetoric and going in for politics after the

fashion of you modern politician, or this life of philosophy?” (500c).

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Jameson, in response to Burke’s correspondence, writes:

This might then be the most appropriate way of sharpening the

differences between us: For Burke, the concept of ideology is

essentially an instrumental one whose usefulness lies in its

effectiveness in dramatizing the key concept of symbolic

action. My own priorities are the reverse of these, since I have

found the concept of symbolic action a most effective way of

demonstrating the ideological function of culture. (“Ideology”

421)

In this statement, the difference between learning (being instructed)

and believing may be grasped analogically in terms of the key

difference in attitudes between Burke and Jameson. Burke considers

the Urn a scene of identification in a manner of romanticism, and

preserving the verse in advance from shifting social and historical

contexts thereby renders the text merely an affirmation of itself.

Jameson on Michaels’ Gold Standard

The contrast between Burke and Jameson, as previously discussed, is

also depicted in Postmodernism, where Jameson develops his

criticisms of Michaels and de Man. Here the model of “the mysteries

of identity (which we take for granted)” is explained in that of Marx

as Jameson writes as follows:

[H]ow is it, when the consumption (or “use”) of any specific

object is unique, and constitutes a unique and incomparable

temporal event in our own lives as well, that we are able to

think of such things as “the same”? Sameness here is not

merely the concept of the category of this particular object


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(several different things being steaks, cars, linen, or books) but

also, and above all, the equivalence of their value, the

possibility we have historically constructed of comparing

them (one car for so many pounds of steak), when in terms of

experience or consumption—in other words, of use value—

they remain incomparable and speculation is incapable of

weighing the experience of eating this particular steak against

that of a drive in the country. (Late Marxism 23)

Michaels’ Gold Standard actually introduces the general form

of value in his introduction as a motive in his literary and cultural

study. In the first volume of The Capital, Marx informs the reader

while the value of a commodity is expressed in relation to another

commodity or to other commodities “as something distinct from its

own use-value or its physical shape as a commodity,” in the theory of

general form of value one form of commodity becomes that to which

all others are compared (158). According to Marx:

The general form of values . . . can only arise as the joint

contribution of the whole world of commodities. A

commodity only acquires a general expression of its value if,

at the same time, all other commodities express their values in

the same equivalent; and every newly emergent commodity

must follow suit. It thus becomes evident that because the

objectivity of commodities as values is the purely “social

existence” of these things, it can only be expressed thorough

the whole range of their social relations; consequently the

form of their value must possess social validity. (159)

In this equivalency, “the general human character of labor forms its

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specific social character” (160). However, labor reemerges differently

in fetishism:

The commodity-form, and the value-relations of the products

of labor within which it appears, have absolutely no

connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the

material . . . relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the

definite social relation between men themselves which

assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation

between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must

take flight into the misty realm of religion, there the products

of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed

with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with

each other and with the human race. So, it is in the world of

commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the

fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon

as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore

inseparable from the production of commodities. (165)

In the “Theory” chapter of Postmodernism, Jameson posits that

the two critics take nearly opposite views on Marx’s theory. Michaels’

Gold Standard pertains to the identification of “self and property.”

The theme of self appears often in his readings of 19th-century

American literary works. Referring to Marx’s theory, Michaels notes

the “double nature of commodity” where “what [he takes] to be the

characteristic concerns of naturalism appear: appropriation,

legitimation, the need to end representation, and the desire to

represent” (26). This is the manner with which Michaels interprets

Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”: for Michaels, the body of the

narrator—the writer of the paper—is identified with the “nursery”


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where she is confined and diagnosed with “hysteria.”

The narrator of the story carefully observes that she has a

“smooch” on her wallpaper; her writing about it, according to

Michaels, represents her identification with the smooch. If a normal

child wants to mark up the walls, he does so because the mark “will

be identifiably his” (7). In doing so he seeks “the guarantee of identity”

provided by the mark (7). However, according to Michaels,

If the threat of hysteria is the threat of losing self-control, of

sometimes becoming someone else, the point of marking is to

produce evidence that you are still the same person. Your

mark is a continual reminder that you are you, and the

production of such reminders enforces the identity it

memorializes. (7)

The theme of reassuring identity is developed further:

From this perspective, the hysterical woman embodies not

only the economic primacy of work but also the connection

between the economic primacy of work and the philosophical

problem of personal identity. The economic question—How

do I produce myself?—and the therapeutic question—How do

I stay myself?—find their parallel in the epistemological

question, How do I know myself? (7)

Thus “the triumphant omnipresence of market relations” is reaffirmed

because Michaels reads the narrator’s body “as the very site of

exchange”: “being oneself, and owning oneself depends on producing

oneself” (13). Through the process of “buying” and “selling,” the self

is made to “enter into exchange”: “[p]roducer and consumer, buyer

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and seller, the narrator of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ need not leave her

nursery to follow the other creeping women out into the market; her

nursery already is the market” (13).

With Michael’s reading, economy in literature is read as

plausible not only with its content but also with its form. The preface

of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The House of Seven Gables defines the

genres of romance and the novel at the beginning:

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be

observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to

its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself

entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel. The

latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute

fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and

ordinary course of man’s experience. The former—while, as a

work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it

sins unpardonably, so far as it may swerve aside from the truth

of the human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth

under circumstances. (351)

Michaels attributes the two literary genres to attitudes toward

economy: “the former as imagining of non-possessed property and the

latter speculative, producing the unreal” (96). Romance is for

Michaels identified with the property to which Colonel Pyncheon

referred when he “asserted plausible claims to the proprietorship of

this . . . land, on the strength of a grant from the legislature” against

Matthew Maule, the occupant of the land (92). “The inalienable title”

to property was not only a problem for descendants of aristocrats, but

also a social issue. A distrust of speculation was noted as in the middle

19th century, popular opinion turned toward “a conviction that the


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land should belong to those who worked it and not to the banks and

speculators” (Michaels 94).

In relation to Hawthorn’s work, which states that “[i]n this

republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life,

somebody is always at the drowning-point” (383), Michaels reassures

that the “openness” of American society and “its hospitality to

fluctuation” are aspects about which Hawthorn concerned (98). The

lawlessness of Holgrave, the daguerreotypist who represents the

“young transients who did acquire property,” at first “appear as a pure

product of the “republican” world” (Michaels 99). However,

Holgrave is not really lawless; it turns out that he “in fact follows ‘law

of his own’” (98).

Jameson interprets Michaels’ “identification of the self and

private property” as “the formal tendency of a system or a method to

complete itself and to endow itself, against its own will and vocation,

with a foundation that grounds it” (199). We find that the

identification to the completed system in Michaels is what Act is to

Scene in Burke. This leads to judgment about Michaels’ historical

sense: Michaels seems less in line with Adorno or Lacan, “where the

ego or personal identity has been the most strongly experienced as an

unstable construction,” as there is “the absence in Michaels of the

inevitable next step, the speculation as to what it would be like to live

without that juridical protection” (199). This seems to be plausible as

Marx writes:

The categories of bourgeois economics . . . are forms of

thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for

the relations of production belonging to this historically

determined mode of social production, i.e. . . . commodity

production. The whole mystery of commodities . . . vanishes

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therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production.

(169)

Regarding Frank Norris’s The Octopus, which depicts land-

disputes on Mussel-Slough and the economic affair between railroad

trust and wheat farmers, Michaels argues referring to a political study

contemporary to Holgrave, that “it is the corporation . . . that

embodies, if that’s still the right word, the possibility of . . . intangible

person” and hence of a truly “exhaustless greed for lucre”: “[a]s

persons, corporations, like natural persons, could cheat or steal; but

as intangible persons, corporations, unlike natural persons, could not

be sent to jail” (188). The depiction of the steam leads to the

emblemizing of the railroad company:

. . . the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with

its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to

horizon; but [Presley the poet] saw it now as the symbol of a

vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over

all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in

its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the

soil, the soulless Force, the iron hearted Power, the monster,

the Colossus, the Octopus. (51)

Referring to Joshiah Royce’s novel and other contemporaneous

discourse on questions of the relationship between person and

corporation, Michaels concludes that “for a man to be a man he must

also be a corporation” (206) and that “in naturalism, personality is

always corporate and all fictions, like souls metaphorized in bodies,

are corporate fictions” (213).

For Jameson, this expansion of “the market” overlooks “the


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relationship between such a ‘logic’ and the actors—consumers,

writers, and trusts alike—caught up in its ineluctable machinery”

(Postmodernism 217). What is at work is “belief” that “is . . . the

missing totalization . . . [that] you can never get out of, some ultimate

and definitive form of ideology fixed for all time” (217). From this

perspective, the “separation of belief from knowledge” sets Michaels’

criticism in motion (217).

Jameson on de Man’s Allegories of Reading

Allegories of Reading by Paul de Man reverses or resists the process

of mystification. According to Jameson, “Romanticism . . . becomes

a dangerous moment, a moment of seductiveness . . . but what seduces

us here is a thought system or an ideological synthesis . . . whereas

the modern marks the triumph of a more properly verbal and sensory

seductiveness” (221). Although belief surpasses knowledge in

Michaels as we have previously discussed, the two terms are at least

equated in de Man. In a sense, de Man is considered to have made this

equation possible through the absence of the metaphysical and his

nominalism, as Jameson describes in several places.

The chapter entitled “Rhetoric of Persuasion” studies Friedlich

Nietzsche’s philosophical fragment in Will to Power, which asserts,

“We are unable to affirm and to deny one and the same thing: this is

a subjective empirical law, not the expression of any ‘necessity’ but

only of an inability” (279). According to de Man, the text denies

identification through its presupposition. Nietzsche writes,

“supposing there were no self-identical A, such as is presupposed by

every proposition of logic . . . , and the A were already mere

appearance, then logic would have a merely apparent world as its

precondition” (280; qtd. In de Man 125, italics added by de Man).2

As the protasis of the sentence quoted above posits

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presupposition, which indicates Nietzsche’s opposition to the gesture

to know, de Man concludes that “[t]he text does not simultaneously

affirm and deny identity but it denies affirmation” (124). The binary

set, which is translatable into that of “performative” and “constative”

respectively, leads to de Man’s reading of Nietzsche as literary,

performative text, which he ends up being unable to assert. For de

Man, who refers to Nietzsche’s text which states that “logic . . .

applies only to fictitious truths that we have created” (Nietzsche

280),3 concludes that “the text . . . established the universality of the

linguistic model as speech act, albeit by voiding it of epistemological

authority and by demonstrating its inability to perform this very act”

(de Man 129). Therefore, when a philosophical text by Nietzsche is

read as a literary text, there turns out to be a “rhetoric of persuasion”

(de Man 119).

In Rainer Maria Rilke, the audience finds what Jameson calls

“complicity” awakened: “Rilke’s work dares to affirm and to

promise . . . a form of existential salvation that would take place in

and by means of poetry” (de Man 23). This promise is that of

“salvation that could only be deserved by endless labor and sacrifice,

in suffering, renunciation, and death” (25), the theme of which is

identified by Hermann Mörchen as “the actual suffering of the poet”

in “elaboration of a metaphoric language” (qtd. in de Man, 25–26).4

However, according to de Man, the promise is dismissed or

questioned by the text itself. In “At the Borderline of the Night [Am

Rande der Nacht]”,5 the “complicity” between the reader and

metaphoric language becomes a “seductive audacity” (35). When the

poetic “I” in a room is called “the string of the violin,” the metaphoric

function of the instrument conveys the image of things in the room

turning into sound (36). De Man states, “[t]he usual structure has been

reversed: the outside of things has become internalized and it is the


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subject that enables them access to a certain form of exteriority” (36).

This “perfect adjustment” of a figure of the instrument within the

room enables the establishment of the totality “beforehand and in an

entirely formal manner” (38). In the space, the subject and things are

dissolved into one another: “The assimilation of the subject to

space . . . in fact implies the loss, the disappearance of the subject as

subject” (36). As “the individuality of a particular voice” (or “the

subject’s autonomy”) becomes merely “the voice of things,” “the

solidity” of “outer things” turns “empty and as vulnerable as we are

ourselves” (36). The condition of the things is far from “self-

knowledge”; they remain in that of “confusion and non-awareness”

(36). Free from reference, the sound of language becomes

autonomous, which seduces readers but promises nothing. In the de

Manian avoidance of resolution in terms of form and meaning, one

can see his manner of “deconstruction”:

De Man uniquely . . . [assigns to] Schein [which Jameson

explains as “aesthetic appearance”] and sensory appearance

the negative status of aesthetic ideology and falsehood or bad

faith while retaining art itself . . . as the privileged realm in

which language deconstructs itself. . . . (Postmodernism 255)

Moreover, this behavior influences his stance toward modernism:

“The deconstruction of the seductiveness of poetic language is at one

with the deconstruction of ‘modernism’ itself” (Postmodernism 253).

The Savoyard priest in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Profession de

foi starts his main argument with the question of judgment: “But who

am I? What right do I have to judge things and what determines my

judgment?” (Bair 237; qtd. in de Man 229) The opposition of

judgment and sensation is observed throughout the following

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argument:

Judgment is described as the deconstruction of sensation, a

model that divides the world into a binary system of

oppositions organized along an inside / outside axis and then

proceeds to exchange the properties on both sides of this axis

on the basis of analogies and potential identities. (de Man 230)

This opposition leads Rousseau to dismiss “totalization,” for his priest

claims that the “visible universe consists of matter . . . which as a

whole has none of the cohesion. . . .” (Bair 241; qtd. in de Man 230,

italics added by de Man). These oppositional terms are attributed to

nature and fiction, respectively. While sensation receives “things in

their proper places,” judgment is “a manipulation, a displacement that

upsets the ‘truth’ of things as they are” (232). At the same time, de

Man describes the function of judgment as that of language: “To the

extent that judgment is a structure of relationships capable of error, it

is also language” (234).

The characteristics of judgment, which is inseparable from

error and figurative language as well, cause loss of authority of “the

immanent judgment,” through which the question “Who am I?” may

have been answered (de Man 243). Apart from this point, the priest’s

argument proceeds to a sensual perception of self: “At the same

time . . . the alternative recourse to a transcendental source of

authority, such as nature, or God, has also been definitively foreclosed.

The aporia of truth and falsehood has turned into the confusion of

good and evil and ended up in an entirely arbitrary valorization in

terms of pain and pleasure. . . . ” (de Man 243). Even when the priest

finally reintroduces “the rhetorical structure” to “restat[ing] his belief

in the metaphorical analogy between mind and nature,” de Man points


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out that the analogy will be evoked and repeat “the aberrations of

figural language” (245).

Jameson calls de Man “nominalist,” which term stems from de

Man’s vigilance against genres that can potentially “be inconsistent

with the experience of the individual work of art” (250). In relation to

the term, Jameson asserts that de Man’s aesthetics persist even in his

“deconstructive” reading which is done to the extent that an

interpretational judgment is impossible. In other words, the

intervention by a contemplator is necessary for judgment on

readability of the text but his aesthetics allow de Man himself “denial

of the transcendental” (185). Hence, de Man’s claim that it cannot be

determined if the text of Profession de foi is theistic or not.

The priest’s aforementioned metaphorical equation between

mind and nature demonstrates its judgment of theism and, at the same

time, its unknowability. We learn from Adorno and Max Horkheimer

that if the two terms are indistinguishable, then it works not in the way

of “genuine mimesis” but that of “paranoiac” or of anti-Semitist

(154):

If mimesis makes itself resemble its surroundings, false

projection makes its surroundings resemble itself. If . . . the

outward becomes the model to which the inward clings, so that

the alien becomes the intimately known, [then the other case]

displaces the volatile inward into the outer world, branding the

intimate friend as foe. (154)

Contrary to the case of the paranoiac, the “mimesis” allows creation

of ego: “In learning how to impart a synthetic unity not only to the

outward impressions but to the inward ones which gradually separate

themselves from them, it retroactively constitutes the self. The

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identical ego is the most recent constant product of projection”

(Adorno and Horkheimer 155). Conversely, the “pathic element”

denotes “the exclusion of reflection from [projective] behavior . . . to

lose ability to differentiate. Instead of the voice of conscience, it hears

voices” (156).

Arguing on whether “new social movements” are “the result . . .

of capitalism itself” or “local victories and the painful achievements

and conquests of small groups of people in struggle,” Jameson, while

dismissing both as “false opposition,” remarks that “[i]n reality,

however, there is no such choice, and both explanations or models—

absolutely inconsistent with each other—are also incommensurable

with each other and must be rigorously separated at the same time that

they are deployed simultaneously” (Postmodernism 326). This model

is what is required in politics Jameson describes to work “only when

these two [local and global] levels can be coordinated” (330).

Even transferring them into two worlds in Kant, namely, “the

noumenon” and “the phenomenon” results in a conclusion that “[for

Kant] we were condemned to an alteration between them.” (326–27).

This reminds one of Jameson’s comments on de Man’s Kantian

reading of Rousseau, where Jameson does not expect any acquiring

of ego:

Kant’s things-in-themselves, along with the material universe

of Rousseau’s Vicar and also, perhaps, of de Man himself . . .

they correspond to what lies beyond anthropomorphism,

beyond human categories and human senses—what is here

before us without us, unseen and untouched, independent of

the phenomenological centering of the human body and above

all beyond the categories of the human mind. . . . As for

‘freedom’ as a noumenon, it marks the same ‘lack of


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perspective’ taken on the self, on human consciousness and

identity, as some monstrous thing we cannot imagine seen

from the outside. . . . (249)

Conclusion

We have seen Jameson’s arguments on identification in liberalism

and postmodernism; either separating or juxtaposing explanations

leads to a conclusion in reality that freedom of choice can only be

observed through one’s choice or action (327–29). Michaels’ or de

Man’s reading is apposite to a time when “genuine (or totalizing)

politics is no longer possible”: to Jameson, “it will be politically

productive . . . to attend vigilantly to just such symptoms as the

waning of the visibility of that global dimension” (330) when

identification is argued.

Notes

1. This chapter will hereafter be referred as “the ‘Theory’ chapter.”

2. English translation is modified by de Man.

3. English translation is modified by de Man.

4. English translation is by de Man.

5. English translation is by de Man.

Works Cited

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and Sciences, The Creed of a Savoyard Priest. Translated by

Lowell Bair, Penguin, 1975.

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. California UP, 1969.

Hawthorn, Nathaniel. Novels. Literary Classics of the United States,

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1983.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodore Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund

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Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991.

---, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic. Verso,

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---, “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological

Analysis.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 4, no. 3, Spring 1978, pp. 507–

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Keats, John. Complete Poems. Edited by Jack Stillinger, Belknap P of

Harvard UP, 1982.

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Marx, Karl, The Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1,

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Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of

Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century.

California UP, 1987.

Mörchen, Hermann. Rilkes Sonette an Orpheus. Stuttgart, 1958.

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translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. Vintage

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---. Theaetetus; Sophist. Translated by Harold North Fowler, Harvard

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