Dowling, William C. - Jameson, Althusser, Marx - An Introduction to the Political Unconscious - 1984

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JA M ESON

AL TH U SSER M ARX

AN I N T R O D U C T I O N T O

The Polit ical Uncons ciou s

W i lliam C owling

o rnell Univ ersi ty Press

I T H A C A NEW YORK



Copyright© 1984 by Cornell University_

All ri •Ills resen e d. Ex e ·pl for brief qu o 1a ous in a review, thishook. or part ther ·of, must not be rnproduc ed in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information,address C r Univ 11iil) Press, 124 Roberts Pla ce. Ithaca, New

York 14850.

First published 1984 by Cornell University Press.First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1984.Second printing, 1987.

lm erna tion.a . wndard ll oo k N u mb er 0 - 80 14 - 17 uJ- 7 ( kith)lm e rna1io11al S1 1nclard Boo k u111b r -8 0 14 - 9,d ::l,J- i,: (paper )Library of Con ,ress au ilog Card un1ber 8,1- 7032l rint ·d in tht t nited States of Amcri aLibml ia11 : Lilm yo Co gre 1s wUi/ugi11g i ,iforma/ibltappears on the last page o the book.

The pa/wi- iu this book is ar.id-[1 • mid meets the guidelinesfor J c1·m e11ce and durn/Jility o tlur Committee on ProductionG11i<Mi11i

fol Book Lon g,:11ilyr f

the Council on Library Resources.

F O R

Lillian, Dorothy, and Frank,

parentibus praeclarissimis



ontents

Preface 91 Dialectical Thinking 19

2 Thinking the Totality 38

3 The Problem of the Superstructure 57

4 Strategies of Containment 76

5 Narrative and Interpretation 94

6 The Political Unconscious 114

Bibliographical Note 43

Index 45

7

F



F

Preface

What follows is, unabashedly, an introduction to FredricJameson s The Political Unconscious I t s not a study, not acritique, not a survey of contemporary Marxist criticism orJameson s place in it, but simply an attempt to make the verydemanding argument of one seminally important book avail-able to readers who have heard about its importance but have

so far been baffled by it. In recent years, as there has been anexplosion in theory and tremendous pressure from the con-

vergence of a number of modern disciplines, such introduc-

tions have become necessary and common, but the custom sofar has been to reserve them for writers who are either de-ceased or European (or both . So perhaps I may say a word

about why Jameson, as a living American theorist, needs anintroduction.

He does not, in one sense, need an introduction at all:among those who follow contemporary theory Jameson has

already established himself as the most important Marxist

critic now writing, and The Political Unconscious carries hisenterprise to a new level. Indeed, the book could claim a sem-

inal importance on either of two separate grounds: as the first

9



PREFACE

sustained attempt to extend into cultural studies in English

the Marxist renewal originating in the work of Louis Althus

ser in France, and as an original and powerful attempt to sub-sume within an expanded Marxism the rival programs ofsuch thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and GillesDeleuze. We are, as I've said, in the midst of an explosion in

theory, and a number of younger theorists especially showsigns of rapid development, but so far Jameson s the only

one working in English who writes as the peer of the French

poststructuralists. Purely in the toastmaster's sense, then, hiswork needs no introduction.

The Political Unconscious needs an in'troduction, in short, not

because of its undoubted importance but because it s diffi-cult. As anyone can testify who has tried to read the book

without help, or who has followed the articles Jameson hasbeen publishing in the interval since his earlier Prison House of

anguage and Marxism and Form, his thought has in recentyears steadily grown knottier and more complex, his mannerof presenting it more oblique and compressed. Putting asidefor the moment the reasons why Jameson s in no sense guiltyof a merely perverse opacity, I may remark at the outset that

the difficulty s less than it seems. With the relevant back-ground in contemporary theory and contemporary Marxism

filled in, and with J ameson's own central concepts somewhat

expanded, his book becomes entirely readable. That s the

main reason for providing an introduction like this one.

Still, the mere fact of J ameson's difficulty, or of a writer

in English needing an introduction in plainer English, s likelyto infuriate the people who remain in high dudgeon about

' the obscurities of such writers as Derrida and Lacan. Why, to

ask the question that always gets asked about such writers,can't he just come out and say what he means? I must confessto a certain sense of weariness when I encounter this question

now, one doubtless dating from the time a few years ago

when I was trying to master Grammatology and never could

manage to explain to various intelligent and genuinely inter-

1 0

PREFACE

ested friends what this Derrida s saying. What Derrida wassaying, I later realized, was that you can come right out andsay what you mean only if you've got a false theory of mean

ing, but even so, he never said that directly, and (These arethe frustrations one felt.)

The problem raised by Grammatology and The Political Un-

conscious alike, that is, s the problem of style as enactment: away of writing that shows as well as tells what it s trying to get

across. Thus Derrida cannot just come out and say what he

means because the whole ethic of coming out and sayingwhat you mean s based on the referential notion of language

whose essential and monumental falsity Derrida s trying toexpose. In the sunlit world of Anglo-American empiricism,

you and I (our minds, at least) are over here, and the worlds over there, and language s the expendable or disposable

means of saying what we want to say about it. t has been the

business of Derrida and those writing in English under thesign of poststructuralism to suggest that both that world and

its attendant style, the plain style enjoined by the Royal Soci-ety in the late seventeenth century, may add up to nothing

more than a comfortable i l lus ion- that , on the contrary, lan

guage may have created the world, and that there s a certaininescapable treachery in the way it did and does so.

For Jameson, on the other hand, the question of style as en

actment s the Marxist question of theory and praxis. In hisview, the plain style s the limpid style of bourgeois ideologywhere there s no need for obscurity because all truths are

known in advance (except the central and terrible truth that

can never be acknowledged, that this pleasant world ofknown truths s rooted in exploitation and oppression anddomination). A genuinely Marxist style, then, will be one that

produces what Jameson calls (in Marxism and Form a sense ofdialectical shock, that as the price of its intelligibility again

and again forces the reader out of customary and comfort

able positions and into painful confrontations with unsus

pected truths. As Jameson also says, a dialectical style s one

1 1



P R E F C E

conscious to Das Kapital but also to signal Althusser's impor

tance as the major mediator between Jameson's experimentsin contemporary Marxism and their epochal origins in Marx's

own thought.Finally, the compression of Jameson's argument raises the

question of his own originality, which paradoxically does not

lie so much in arriving at new ideas as in seeing the possibilities of synthesis in the ideas of others. Even the central idea ofthe political unconscious as Jameson develops it had been

outlined by Terry Eagleton some five years before the ap

pearance of The Political UnconscioU: and the rest of Jame

son's argument turns to productive and, often, pyrotechnical

use the systems of such thinkers as A. J Greimas, NorthropFrye, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Claude Levi-Strauss.This originality-in-synthesis is a sort, perhaps the only sort,

that a committed Marxist must be proud to claim. t has been

said that Capital contains not one idea original with Marx, andyet the work has not been without a certain influence.

As I have said, the present introduction makes no attempt

to substitute for a reading of The Political Unconscious: on the

contrary, it will have failed in its purpose unless readers, having had some necessary obscurities cleared away by its exposition, then go on to read Jameson for themselves. Toward that

end, I have made no attempt to summarize the brilliant seriesof readings that comprise four-fifths of the book: followingJameson through his actual interpretations is the great re

ward of having grasped the theoretical system he presents in

his initial chapter, and it is in aid of such a grasp that I wrote

the following. It is my hope that this volume will make accessible to a new and wider range of readers the work of an original and powerful thinker.

I wrote this volume while a Fellow of the Institute for

Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh Universitydur ing the academic year 1982-83, and I thank David

Daiches, Director of the Institute, and Peter Jones, Convener

P R E F C E

of its Committee, for the many ways being in residence there

was an aid to my work. My reading in Marx, Althusser, andcontemporary Marxism began as a theoretical diversion during a year devoted to another project for which I was awardeda fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foun

dation, which thus wound up supporting work undreamt of

in its philanthropy; needless to say, I am heartily grateful forthe support nonetheless. I owe thanks for advice on particu

lar points to Marshall Brown, Linda Dowling, Kit Fine, Russell Goodman, Alastair Fowler, Khachig Tololyan, and GarryWills.

WILLIAM C. DOWLING

Albuquerque New Mexico

~ -



J ameson Althusser Marx



1

ialectical Thinking

As anyone who has attempted to grasp its argument knowsThe Political Unconscious s a work that makes few conces-sions to the uninitiated reader. Several reasons for this have

already been mentioned: the density of Jameson s argumentation and the willed opacity of his prose do not arise from in-tellectual perversity but from the demands of a very ambi-tious philosophical program, and they are inseparable fromits ambition. Yet beyond those immediately obvious obstaclesto an easy comprehension of Jameson there s another: un

derstanding the argument of The Political Unconscious involvesunderstanding what can only be called a style of thinking, away of viewing culture and society and history that s uniquely

his own. It s J ameson s style of thinking that I have chosen tocall dialectical.

To describe as dialectical the thinking of a Marxist criticand perhaps after Raymond Williams the best-known Marxist

critic writing in English may seem to be treading on the mar

gins of tautology and yet I think there s a real value in

describing Jameson s style of thinking that way. For thoughit s true that J ameson s thought always participates in the

19



J A M E S O N , A L T H U S S E R , M A R X

ally be embodied in a limited and imperilled way in, for instance, the pygmy society that was the famous subject of Colin

Turnbull 's study The Forest People.Yet the importance of primitive communism for Jameson s

less that it now exists in a few remote forest clearings thanthat it may be posited as a once-universal stage in human exis

tence, and what s in turn significant about this for Jameson asa student of culture s the mode of perception the way of beingin the world, that primitive communism may be imagined torepresent. Here s J ameson's first crucial point of departurefrom traditional Marxism, for which primitive communism s

significant mainly as an economic stage or mode of produc

tion, the state that exists before division of labor emerges

(History proper beginning in the moment men set out to huntwhile women stay home to cure hides) to set mankind off

on the road of precapitalist accumulation that will ultimately

generate capitalism. For Jameson, on the other hand, primi

tive communism s equally important as what Wittgenstein

was the first to call a form of life, and it must be grasped assuch to follow his arguments.

Yet this s impossible to imagine directly. There s a mo

ment of what poststructuralism calls aporia here, an irresolvable bind or logical paradox that teases and frustrates the mind

with its very irresolvability. For the unhappy fact s that ascreatures of History, locked away in the private and separate

and lonely worlds of our own consciousness-the separation

and the loneliness having been produced by the implacable

market forces of a capitalism that constitutes human beings asindividual units or subjects in order to function s a syst e m w e cannot imagine what it would be like, in the purestsense, to think collectively, to perceive the world as a world in

which no such thing as individuals or individuality existed, to

think not as a member of a group but s the group itself.This s the moment of aporia or paradox, then: when I am

in a group I cannot conceive of myself, no matter how closelyI am bound to its members by ties of love or habit or shared

2 2

D I A L E C T I C A L T H I N K I N G

interest, as thinking as the group. The best analogy for

what Jameson has in mind for such collective th ink ingan analogy caught in St. Paul's vision of the Christian Churchas a mystical body, and subsequently taken over by mysticalthinkers through Blake and beyond- i s the way any individ

ual in this fallen social reality inhabits his or her body. For

there s a sense in which I think of my arms, legs, fingers, toes,and so on as having an existence apart from me; I recognize,

for instance, that should my left leg be amputated the beingor subject I call I would continue to exist. At the same time,when I use my arm and its hand and fingers to do something,

to hit a tennis ball o r pour a glass of milk, I do not think ofmyself as giving a command to an Other, but simply as inhab

iting my body as my own physical space in the physical realityof the world.

By the same token, when I say I ran away I do not ordi

narily mean I gave orders to my body to run away but some

thing much more like I-that-am-my-body ran away. f wecould transfer this way of thinking to a social collectivity wewould have something very close to what Jameson means by

primitive communism, a state in which all members of socie t y - m e n , women, children, young, old, strong, w e a k -

look out on the nonhuman world from a collective mind that

recognizes no more difference between individual members

of the group than I recognize between my arms, my legs, my

hands, etc. But we cannot in any real sense do this, and in-

deed (the moment of aporia again) I am using the language

of a fallen social reality even to speak of a group here. Inprimitive communism as Jameson conceives it no concept ofthe group as such could exist, any more than I can consider

my arms, my legs, and other parts of my body a group, asthough I were to say the whole group ofus ran away: my legsdid the pumping, my arms did the flailing, my eyes did thenavigating, etc.

It s only with the emergence of relations of domination,

then, and the underlying economic forces that inexorably

2 3



AMES O N , L T H U S S E R , M A R X

wants precisely to demonstrate how any such concept as experiencing the world s determined by History, and History

by the economy in the last instance. )What, then, does it mean to experience the world as a

sphere from which the merely human s being drained awayand all that s left s things or objects and the relations among

them? At the level of relations among people, this seems to invoke the kind of example favored by moral philosophers who

are attempting to account for the underlying conditions orlimits of ethical behavior. Stanley Cavell's notion of acknowledgment, for instance, seems to turn on just this person/thing or human/nonhuman dis.tinction: if I could plunge

an axe into the body of another person with just the same

cheerful unconcern as I chop logs for tonight's fire, I would

seem to exist outside anything that could be called, even inthe most minimal sense, a human community. f I did this toyou I would be seeing you, as I saw the log I was chopping forthe fire, as a thing.

f here s no urgent need for a regrounding of ethical categories here, it s because we always retain the option of classifying someone who behaves this way with an axe as psychoticand seeing that he gets proper treatment. Yet it was Marx's

point that there s already this element of the psychotic in any

relation of domination, that the relation of the serous to the

master in Roman society, of the Negro slave to the plantation

owner in America, of the child-laborer (or any laborer) to the

factory owner in nineteenth-century Britain, all would have

been impossible had not impersonal historical forces been atwork to determine that relations among men should give wayto relations among things. The note of impassioned moralconcern in Jameson's writing, in the face of Marx's scorn for

anyone weak enough to entertain a merely moral impulse,

arises from a terrible sense that this same process of reification s now working its ultimate deformations on humanity asa whole.

Here we have the origin of painting in that fall out of col-

28

D I A L E C T I C A L T H I N K I N G

lective consciousness that begins in the disintegration of prim

itive communism, and then, subsequently, the entire history

of painting in the process that generates the successive stagesof human society and culminates in the stage of late commod

ity capitalism. In the cave paintings of the old stone age, wehave the first outward expression of that interior reorganiza

tion of the individual described earlier, of a visual sense increasingly separate from the other senses and increasingly au

tonomous in its operations, seeking to complete itself not in aperception of that full and vivid world perceived as a simulta

neity by the collective mind, but in objects, images on the

walls of caves, existing for the gratification of sight alone.Though Jameson sketches in the rest of the story in the

barest possible terms, its fuller outlines may be glimpsed.

What s at issue when art produces objects for the sight alone,

for instance, s a process of reification which will turn Natureitself into an object, and which by the time we get to the eigh

teenth-century landscape paintings of a Constable or a Gainsborough will mirror the operations of an emergent capitalismby transforming the natural setting not only into an object butalso into a commodity, and then not simply in the sense thatlandscape paintings are made to be bought and sold but that anow-autonomous sense of sight consumes the visual artifact

precisely by looking at it (as it s displayed to be looked at) as awork of art, a commodity or thing.

To explain the dissolution of representational conventions

in the modern period, then, that gradual wavering of repre

sentational form in Impressionism, so soon to be succeededby Cubism and then the purely abstract forms of modern art,

Jameson need do little more than point to the tremendous acceleration of history that has established capitalism and reification as the dominant forces in the modern world. For in

a world so wholly reified an autonomous sense of sight seeksas its object an art also grown purely autonomous, painting

that dissolves the fettering constraints of the representational

fiction ( he pre ense that art was about a world of rivers and

29



J A M E S O N , A LT H U S S E R , M A R X

e it h er Adam Smith or Freud as having co mmitt ed errorshe re: the bli nd ness or fa ta l l imi ta t ions of their resp ec t ive sys-tems were , qu i te as mu ch as th e sys tems themse lv es , de-t ermined by His to r y. This s worth in s is t ing on not si m p lybecause Ja m eson insists on it, but also because hi s ins is tencemarks anot her of those points o f depa rture from w hich Jame-

son m o v e s beyond or th odox or traditional M a r x i s m . For tr a -ditional Marxism conceives of the id eologica l b l indne ss of aSmith or a Freud to the li m i ta t ions of their o w n systems as amatter of fa lse consciousnes s m ere ly, whi le for Ja meson, aswe shall se e in de ta i l later on, it s somethi ng altoge ther moreinter esting an d sugges t ive , the in ev i table consequence o f ide-ologie s t hemselv es as s t ra te g ies of containment.

Ja meson does no t undertake so ex te ns ive an analysis o f Freudian th e ory ju st b e c a u s e he s fasc inated by th e way itfunct ions o n the ideol og ical level to shut out or deny His tory, however, but b e c a u s e h e has reco g nized all along be neathits ideo lo gica l or historical ly determined surface th e w o r k i n g sof a tremend ously powerful an d original interpretiv e sys tem.Fo r t h e ge n ius o f Freud in J ameson s view h as lit t le to do withthe hoary case hi s tor ies or the body o f p recepts a nd p ra c t icethat passe d on to become the i n s t i t u t i o n of organ iz e d psycho-an alysis. I t lies, rathe r, in F reud's profo un d insight into th every nature a nd necessity of in terpretation i tsel f, into thatperm anent condition of o ur conscious being t ha t m a k e s an in -q uiry into meanin g not o n l y natural but u n a v o i d a b l e .

As we sh a ll see, Fr e ud's centr al importa nce fo r Ja meson d e -

ri v es from his insig ht that interp retation s i n d i s p e n s a b l e in any situation w here a latent meanin g lies hidden behin d whats open o r ex pressed or m anifes t , and that th is in turn s al-

ways the case when a primal and etern a lly re pressed source ofen e rgy (fo r Freud the i n d i v id u a l u n c o n s c i o u s , f or Jamesonthe collective or po li t ica l unconscious ) e xists in a troubledand antagonist ic relation to tho se overt structures (fo r Freudthe me c ha n ism of the co ns cious , for Jameson c ulture and ide-ology viewed as a whole) t hat exis t to hold th e repressed at

3 6

D I A L E C T I C A L T H I N K IN

b ay or manage its threatening erupti on s . This s what w eg l i m p s e when we have seen that e ven Freudian theor y and itso b je c t of analysis were d etermined by Hi st o ry. We must no w proce ed to consider the q ue stion of H i s t o r y itself.

7



Thinking th Totality

For Jameson, as for anyone writing in the philosophical tradition of Hegel and Marx, the question of the totality s the

central issue not only for cultural analysis but also for any attempt whatever to account for the objects of human thought,

for quantum physics quite as much as television serials, for

Pascal the theorist of mathematical probability quite as much

as the Pascal of Port Royal o r the Pensees For philosophizing that takes seriously the idea of a totality or humancollectivity existing through history must begin and end in

the recognition that literally nothing can be conceived toexist outside the limits of human history, and that the limits of

history are just as literally the limits of thought itself. Theequation at the heart of Jameson's program asserts that the

totality s humanity s History, and it holds in no matter what

order the terms are rearranged.

Thus baldly asserted, however, the equation s not by any

means an easy one to grasp, and by way of examining itswider implications I should like to begin by considering that

transitive sense of thinking used in the title of this chapter:

thinking the totality, that is, rather than thinking about

38

T H I N K I N G T H E T O T L I T Y

or taking up the notion of the totality. As readers who have

made even limited forays into contemporary literary theory

will recognize, this s a locution now common in theoretical

writing, one taken over directly from the French and assumed by writers who use it to signal a special and indispens

able meaning that cannot be gotten at through the more usual

idea of thinking about x. Among readers discomfited by andhostile to the newer theory, on the other hand, suspicion s

widespread that this un-English (perhaps un-American)

phrasing s simply more of the wilful obscurantism of those

who have fallen under the baleful influence of structuralism

and la nouvelle critiqueYet even an unsympathetic reader may see in a moment's

consideration that the notion of thinking about x carries

with it a large burden of intellectual assumptions, not the leastof which (and that precisely the one signalled by the word

about ) s that the most normal mode of rational thinkings one where the mind securely inhabits a framework of ac

cepted ideas and looks out from within its customary limits, asone might sit on a porch and watch the boats drifting down ariver, at anything that might come along in the shape of anything intellectually new or strange. The about in our ordi

nary way of putting the matter, then, signals nothing otherthan a barrier of custom or habitude between the mind andany unaccustomed object.

The value of the phrase to think x, then, will be just that itsignals the annulment of any such barrier, announces that

certain truths are to be grasped only when the mind allowsitself to feel the customary or accepted framework of itsthought dissolve or melt away, and with this dissolution finds

itself surfacing within a framework altogether new and unfa

miliar. Thus when Derrida in Gramrnatology speaks of think

ing the trace, for instance, he s not speaking about a point

he has just made or wishes to make but about the dizzying experience of feeling one world of thought-roughly speak

ing, the entire metaphysical universe based on referential no-

39



J A M E S O N L T H U S S E R M A R X



J A M E S O N , L T H U S S E R , M A R X

anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as weknow, is wizened and has to be kept out of sight. (Walter Benja

min, Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt [London, 1970], p. 255.)

Seventy or eighty years ago, the moral of Benjamin's parable would for orthodox Marxists have been cause for intellec-tual or theoretical uneasiness only, as pointing out to an os-tensible materialism that it had not yet managed to purifyitself from the curse of an idealist teleology. Today, the same

moral is what gives substance to the claim of the nouveauxphilosophes that totalitarian oppression was written right into

the heart of the Marxist program from the outset. The directline that according to the nouvea ux philosophes leads from He

gel to the Gulag does so, that is, as follows: ( 1 Hegel inventsthe notion of Absolute Spirit, and with it a teleology of history

that is so far harmless as being confined within an idealisticsystem; (2) Marx then relocates this teleology within History

conceived in materialist terms, which so to speak gives it flesh-and-blood force; and (3) the annulment of contradiction at

the end of the teleological process becomes, with Stalin or any

dictator coming to power as a Communist, an abolition of dif-ferences through sheer force. Thus Absolute Spirit becomes

the knock at the door, in the name of History, of the secretpolice.

Jameson's response to so sobering a view of orthodoxMarxist teleology is dictated by the nature of his own en

terprise, which is cultural analysis and not, at least in any di-rect sense, political philosophy. So on one level what concerns

Jameson about the notion of a theology concealed within his-torical materialism is, as we shall see in detail in the next chap

ter, that it permits a treatment of all human culture, including

literature and art, as the mere illusory reflection of an underlying economic level. The problem of a theological Marxism

that makes the Economy the ultimate secret of history is from

this perspective that it denies Marxist criticism as Jamesonconceives it. On another level, however, the charges brought

50


by the nouveaux philosophes and others are terribly real toJameson, for the theological Marxism that denies J ameson'senterprise is the same as that they associate with Stalin and to-talitarian terror. So even as he confines himself mainly to cul-tural analysis Jameson will implicitly be answering this newest

critique of Marxist philosophy.The problem of the totality brings us now to one of Jame

son's most important and original philosophical moves, onethat draws on Althusserian Marxism but is within the realm ofcultural analysis all his own. The move consists in reconceiv-ing the idea of totality in such a way as to circumvent the seri-ous problems associated with a theological Marxism. Jameson founds his enterprise, in short, on a conception of the

totality not as some concrete and positive vision of history butas an ideal and abstract standard that allows him to expose allpartial or limited ideological truths as such. (Though the term

negative dialectic is usually associated with Adorno, I shall

be using it to refer to Jameson's normal mode of analysis,to keep in view the sense in which his notion of the totalityis negative or without concrete content of its own.) ThusJameson aims to replace the totality of theological Marxism

with a totality functioning, as he modestly puts it, as a metho

dological standard.

As always, Jameson is choosing his terms carefully, yet itwould be a mistake to take him wholly at his word here, to seeas a mere methodological standard a negative vision of the

social whole every bit as potent in its way as the positive vision

socentral to orthodox

Marxism.For Jameson's

visionof the

totality has the same force as those varieties of negative the-ology which insist on the real infinitude and ineffability ofa Divinity which must be impoverished and ultimately trivi-alized by any positive conception of, God. God conceived in

positive terms must on this account always be some version

of Blake's Nobodaddy, a petty celestial tyrant with a white

beard who gives back the image of those petty minds who

worship him; yet the human mind does eternally create its

51

] A MESON, L T H U S S E R , M A R X T H I N K I N G T H E T O T L I T Y



] A MESON, T H U S S E R , M A R X

Nobodaddies, and only by destroying them as they arise maya truer spirit tear away the veil of illusion and glimpse the

light of an infinity beyond. The negative conception of divinity at issue here s a direct analogue of that negative totality in whose name Jameson will unmask all local ideologi es tothen point to History revealed as an absent cause.

The real error of a theological Marxism from Jameson's

point of view s thus that it promised a vision of the social totality that it could not deliver. To unmask such aspects of hu

man culture as law, art, or religion as forms of false consciousness, for instance, as the passive and illusory reflections of areal system of economic relations hidden beneath the surface,s implicitly to suggest that one possesses a true or genuine ex

planation of the whole, a vision of the totality that can then

function as a yardstick against which the partial visions of ideology can be measured. Thus Marxism may expose Christian

ity as the delusion it s not simply because Marx explained the

world in terms that assign theology and religious myth a determinate place, but also because he told a true story about

human history and the fate of mankind in comparison withwhich the story told by Christianity s patently false.

The problem here lies, as will be obvious, in the way tra

ditional Marxism pictures the totality itself, for conceived inmaterialist terms the totality does not leave room for one toget outside it to attain to a positi ve view of what it s like,and thus to arrive at a teleological account of history throughwhich to triumph over rival teleologies like Christian Providence. Hegel could be allowed a positive vision of the totalityjust because his was an idealistic system: the Spirit immanentin history and rising to consciousness of itself is the totality for

Hegel, and there s no contradiction in terms. When Hegel s

set on his feet in the name of a rigorous materialism, however, this situation abruptly changes. The change may be de

scribed as follows: where as a Hegelian I was in some sense

the Spirit immanent in history, I am as a Marxist inside and

wholly determined by the totality, and as an aspect of the to-

52


tality have no chance. whatever of getting outside to view the

end or meaning of the process of which I am a part.This s the dilemma that Jameson's negative dialectics aim

to resolve. To grasp the nature of the resolution, let us focusin greater detail on the account of Christianity given by ortho

dox Marxism. As a form of false consciousness or opiate ofthe oppressed, Christianity s part of the ideological systemgenerated by successive systems of economic domination toneutralize the rebellious tendencies of the workers whose labor actually produces value. This it does, to adopt Nietzsche'sterms, through a process of emasculation: by devaluing the

real world in which domination takes place (earthly life s pro

bationary merely), by symbolically punishing the oppressors

(now seen as being doomed to damnation), and by envisioning eternal salvation beyond this present life of suffering.

Thus it s that the medieval serf or the nineteenth-century

proletarian s drained of rebellious or revolutionary energies

and transformed into a passive instrument of historical forcesbeyond his control. The hope of revolutionary transforma

tion, then, lies in those impersonal laws of history that existoutside all such delusions of human consciousness.

There is, however, another perspective in which Marxism

may view Christianity or any other ideology, as Jamesonpoints out, one indicated by Marx himself in The EighteenthBrumaire This s to see ideology not as false consciousness butas ideological closure: that is, as the approximation of some

truth about the totality that, given the limitations always imposed by the historical process, stands in (or the deeper truthit exists to deny. As creatures of the economic systems thatenclose them, human beings are forever denied the means ofunderstanding their pl igh t -as we shall see, it s the very essence of systems of domination to hige the truth from those,

oth oppressors and oppressed, who are implicated in

t h e m - a n d yet there remains a drive toward some form ofthe comprehensibility that alone makes existence tolerable. So

it s that in the name of comprehensibility the collective mind

53



AMES ON, L T H U S S E R , M A R X T H E P R O B L E M OF T H E S U P E R S T R UC T U R E



ality as the hidden cause of human action s so familiar to us,it s comfortable enough. t s because Althusser wishes to de-

scribe a form of causality radically dissimilar from either ofthese, and therefore from what we are used to meaning bycausality, that it at first seems altogether foreign.

We may begin, then, by trying to see just why Althusser s

committed to so apparently strange a notion of causality. The

matter may most ·usefully be posed in terms of the problemAlthusser s attempting to solve: on the one hand his object s

to rid his analysis of anything that looks like a hidden essenceworking away behind the surface of appearances, and on the

other he wishes to arrive at an explanation of the structure ofsocial reality which does not appeal to any notion of occultcausality to obtain its results. So the problem, as Althusser

himself must have grasped it at the outset, must have looked

something like this: if we are examining the functional relations among elements of the superstructure (law, religion,

politics, etc.) but are prohibited from seeing them as expres-sions of a hidden essence, how must they then appear to us?

Althusser's philosophical move in this situation, one thats breathtaking when its ultimate implications are grasped, s

simply to point out a fact that may hitherto have escaped ournotice, and yet was there in front of us all along: namely, that

the social structure we are considering s a structure, andstructures have a logic all their own. So it s not in an essence

hidden behind or beneath the surface of things that Althusser

will seek the explanation of social reality, but in the relationsamong elements of the superstructure as conceived in classicalMarxism. Moreover, Althusser's notion of structural causalitywill derive from a curious fact about structure itself: that astructure s always more than the sum of its parts. That is,once we add up the elements of a structure and the relations

among them we find ourselves confronting a totality that can

be seen as such only as it includes something else, and thissomething else s nothing other than structure itself. So Al-

66

thusser's move s to reconceive the social totality as a structural totality' in the strictest sense.

What happens to the notion of causality here? It becomes,

as we have already noted, something a bit foreign to our usual

ideas of cause and effect, but it can be simply enough illustrated for all that. Consider the following:

a. b

The reason we say that (a) s a meaningless scrawl whil e (b) s aface or the schematic representation of a face s that we recognize in the relations among the elements of (b) a totality that s

more than the sum of its parts; what we mean by face s not

just the relation of the enclosing circle to one of the dots inside it, or of either of these dots to the other, etc., but all these

relations simultaneously perceived. To speak of the simultaneity of these relations as the cause of the face we see s toput something of a strain on our usual notion of causality, butit s just this strain that Althusser, in the name of banishing allhidden essences, wishes to induce. t s also the alternative no-

tion of causality that Jameson accepts.In setting forth the idea of structural causality I have so far

retained the terms of our earlier discussion, speaking of rela-

tions among elements of the superstructure and the like. Yet

it may at this point be obvious that the term superstructures no longer meaningful, for we are entitled to talk about a superstructure only when we simultaneously imagine a base orinfrastructure as the hidden principle of causality, and thiss just what Althusser's analysis has taken away. But when

the Economy s no longer admitted as the hidden essence be-



J A M E S O N , A LT H U S S E R , M A R X T H P R O B L E M OF T H E S U P E R S T R U C T U R E



doctrines they believe does much to shape the economic

structure within which they work for wages.Three important concepts are entailed by Althusser's no

tion of a structural totality, two of which may be briefly men

tioned. The first, one that we will later see to be central toJ ameson's theory of interpretation, s the idea of history as an

absent cause. t will be seen that this concept follows directl y

from Althusser's notion of the totality as a structure: since theidea of structure s purely relational, it can make no sense to

talk of any structure as having an existence separate from itselements. When we look at the elements of the face repre

sented earlier, for instance, we do hot see those elements and

something apart from them; what we see, rather, s a set of relations among the elements, and it s this we call structure. Tospeak of history as an absent cause s similarly to speak ofthe structure of the totality as something immanent in its elements or effects, not as something that s additional to and

apart from them.The second concept entailed by Althusser's notion of a

structural totality s the relative autonomy of the levels of the

superstructure: that is, the idea that religion, politics, law, art,

and the rest function in partial independence of the economic

and of each other, and thus exert a reciprocal influence onthe functioning of the system as a whole. The notion ofa relative autonomy s not, as has sometimes been thought,

a mere temporizing on Althusser's par t with Marxist ortho

doxy, but s perfectly rigorous in its own terms. My consciousness at this moment, for instance, s relatively autonomous in

Althusser's sense: I can think or read or write this sentence

without being aware of any physical needs, but the indepen

dence of this consciousness from my body s not absolute: de

prive me of food and water and at some point the deprivation

will affect my consciousness; deprive me of them for longer

and I will at some point cease to be conscious at all. My con

sciousness s only relatively autonomous, then, in the sense

that the physiological always has priority; the same relation

holds, for Althusser and Jameson, between the various levelsof the totality and the brute fact of Necessity as it determinesthe structure of the whole.

Let us end our consideration of the superstructure and itsproblems by looking in some detail at the third concept associated with Althusser's notion of structural totality, namely thatof mediation. As understood in orthodox or classical Marxist

theory, mediation s precisely a demonstration that the various levels of the superstructure, as different as they may ap

pear on a cursory or superficial level, are really identical withone another and with the economic level underneath. So aclassical Marxist analysis, for instance, might invoke the master concept of class interest to demonstrate that the legal system and the political system are identical instruments of ruling-class exploitation-that is, that an exploitative system ofeconomic relations s in this instance mediated by the legaland political levels of the superstructure, which to just that

extent are identical wi th it. This, as we might by now expect,s

an idea and an interpretive procedure Althusser would like toabolish.

Here, however, we come upon one of Jameson's most important points of departure from Althusser, whose account ofmediation he wants to correct in two signifi cant ways by argu

ing, first, that Althusser without realizing it s not objecting tomediation as such but to something quite different-namely,the concept of homology-and second, that some idea of me

diation s indispensable to any mode of social or cultural analysis calling itself Marxist. Althusser's real objection to what hecalls mediation, Jameson maintains, s actually an objection to

homologies of the sort asserted by Lucien Goldmann in TheHidden God, that famous study of Jansenism in which a socialsituation (Port Royal and its noblesse e robe , an ideology (the

Jansenist revival of a pure Augustinianism), and art (Pascal's Pensees, Racine's tragedies) are found to share a structural identity deriving in the last instance from economic andclass relations.

J A M E S O N , L T H U S S E R , M A R X T H E P R O B L E M OF T H E S U P E R S T R UC T U R E



The relationship between homology thus asserted and the

ideas of economic determinism and expressive causality thatAlthusser wishes to combat are evident. Homologies of the

sort Goldmann asserts are something like a symphony orches

tra in which every instrument s simultaneously playing the

same theme: to someone unaccustomed to orchestral musicthe oboe will at first sound different from the flute, and both

from the violin, but only a moment's attention s necessary todemonstrate that all are playing the same notes at the same

time. The totality as Althusser wishes us to conceive it, in contrast, occurs when the same orchestra plays an actual symphony, a myriad themes and motifs developing in relativeautonomy from one another, all adding up to that whole, immanent in but not reducible to its effects, called Beethoven's

Seventh or Schubert's Ninth.Even though it might be shown that there s something

fundamentally wrong with the idea of homology, however,

whether in Goldmann's sophisticated version or Caudwell'sless subtle practice, it does not follow that any genuine Marx

ism can get away from some process of mediation. Nor, p ce

Althusser, does it follow that Marxism should want to, for

only through this process can Marxism come to view history

and society as a totality, to overcome the false separations andcompartmentalizations of life under late capitalism. In particular, it s only through mediation that Marxism can fulfill itsunique claim to overcome the false specialization of the bour

geois disciplines, in which the economist looks at things from

one point of view, the sociologist from another, the historian

from yet a third. Only through mediation, that is, can Marxism demonstrate that these separations do not really exist,that they are symptoms of the estrangement and alienation oflife under capitalism.

Moreover, the very fact that Marxism can employ the con

cept of mediation (or, as Jameson will put it for reasons weshall come to shortly, can practice mediations ) goes in

its way to show that social life does have a prior existence as

a unity or totality. Again there s an analogy with the body,

which can for purposes of medical treatment be separated

into its constituent elements (the doctor tells me my liver s

malfunctioning), just as my psyche can be in the case of psychiatry (my psychia trist allows me to see that my superego s

exerting an intolerable pressure on my consciousness). Yet in

any such case these separations assume my prior existence asa unified being: the me to whom my doctor talks about itsliver or my psychiatrist its superego s the same as-yet undif

ferentiated me that my friend asks about going to a movietonight. J ameson's point s that mediation works in just thisway: it could not be coherent unless the concept of the whole

or the totality were first coherent.

Althusser goes wrong, then, according to Jameson, because

in directing his attack at expressive causality and homology he

fails to recognize a more fundamental truth about mediation,

namely, that one cannot talk about differences between cul

tural or ideological levels without assuming a prior unity, justas one cannot talk about their ultimate identity without

assuming some prior difference. Consider, for instance, even

the crudest form of Marxist social analysis, one that in the

name of an underlying economic reality wishes to demon

strate that under capitalism the legal system and the politicalsystem are the same, as being equally instruments of ruling

class domination and oppression. J ameson's point s that

if they were the same in any self-evident sense no such dem

onstration would be called for, that· only a prior awareness

of the differences between the two systems can make even thisrudimentary a practice of mediation necessary in the firstplace.

On a more sophisticated level, the same s true, thoughfrom a reverse perspective, of Althusser's treatment of the

various levels of the social structure. When Althusser pro

claims the semi-autonomy of the religious o r the political orthe artistic, for instance, he thinks he s insisting on their distance and separation from one another within the totality.

73

J A M E S O N , A LT H U S S E R , M A R X

i i

T H P R O B L E M OF T H E S U P E R S T R U C T U R E



And this is so, but what he does not see is that such insistencemakes sense only against the background of some larger iden

tity: there would be no sense in even talking about religionand politics and ar t this way unless we assumed them already

to be related at some fundamental level. This is J ameson's

great contribution to the Marxist debate over the superstruc

ture: he wants to r~tain mediation as the distinguishing mark

of Marxist analysis by showing that identity and differenceare mutually dependent terms, each able meaningfully tooccupy the analytic foreground only as the other provides abackground.

Whether or notJameson's point here proves to hold up un

der more detailed scrutiny, it draws its strength from a gen

eral epistemological insight that has little to do with mediation

as such. For the fact is that any discussion of differences does

assume the backgroun d identity Jameson insists on: itmakes no sense for you and me to discuss the differences be

tweenapples

and pears unless the category fruitis

silentlythere as the background of our discussion. By the same token,

any formal system of taxonomy exists as such only by making

this relationship between difference and identity explicit: themagic of the category mammal for an intelligent childis that it so unexpectedly serves as a background of identity

against which to compare the very obvious differences between man and whale (or even that it invites such compar

ison where none had been thought of before).

For Jameson, the sole value of this general epistemologicalpoint is the way it allows him to redefine the concept of medi

ation. f the term mediation has been so irretrievably con

taminated by its association with cruder or more mechanical

forms of Marxist social analysis, he declares at one point, hewill cheerfully abandon it: instead of talking about practicing

mediation when he asserts an essential relation between twoor more levels of the social structure, then, let us say that heis transcoding showing that the differences between them are

intelligible only against the background of an assumed iden-

74

tity. To use this terminology, we might transcode the differ

ences between apples, pears, and oranges in the name offruit as the category against which those differences must

always be defined. For Marxism, of course, the category thus

silently assumed will be society and the historical processviewed as a totality.

Jameson's innocent suggestion that we merely assent to

a change in terminology disguises, however, his last important move with regard to mediation. In his argument, we are

asked to see, mediation will no longer refer to something actually present in the base-superstructure re la t ionship-forexample, the legal system and the political system, once again,as they mediate an underlying system of economic relations

- but something used s an instrument o analysis by Marxist

criticism. To the charge that this is an idealist notion, one that

in effect makes mediation or transcoding disposable, Jameson can respond by pointing out that any use of such instru

mentswill always

andinevitably

presuppose the invariant re

lation between difference and identity, foreground andbackground, discussed here. The instrument can be used in

any specific instance, in short, only because of the ultimate existence of the totality itself: we may dispose of the category

fruit when we have got done discussing apples and pears

and oranges, but what the category fruit has stood in for, ageneralized identity that must stand as the background to anydiscussion of differences, will riever go away. This, the assertion of an ultimate totality in relation, to all disparit y, is Jameson's solution to the problem o f the superstructure.

7



AMES ON, L T H U S S E R , M A R X

an infant that the pronoun I may be used to mark out a dif-

S T R AT E G I E S OF C O N TA I N M E N T

at its most brilliant, as in Lukacs's great essays on realism, ob-



ference between me and the rest of the world, thus assuming

my individuality by inserting myself into an abstract slot in agrammatical or linguistic system-may be taken as the mostradical motivation for his famous re turn to Freud ; the same

insight doubtless explains Lacan's great influence on Althus

ser's structural Marxism, and indirectly on Jameson's doc-

trine of a political unconscious .As we have seen, Marxism already knew all this, for the

story of history for Marxism, and especially for Jameson's

Marxism, s the story of a fall out of collective life and con

sciousness into a world of estrangement and separation andalienation. Only toward the end of that story, when the enor

mous power of capitalism to break human life up into ever

more estranged and isolated units has begun to be felt in itsfull force, when all the forms of collective unity have been sys-tematically undermined and human life shivers within the

lonely mon~d of each isolated consciousness, does individual

identity as such become a primary category within thought.

To treat the I, the feeling or experience of individual iden

tity, as a primal datum or ontological category s thus to re-press or deny History itself, and what a Marxian symptomatic

analysis will demonstrate s that Freud's entire system s based

on just this repression or denial.We understand the deepest implications of symptomatic

analysis, however, only when we have seen that the category

of personal identity s not granted this timeless and universal

status only within Freudian theory and literary criticism, but

also within virtually every critical approach with which Freudian criticism s usually assumed to compete. For it s individ-ual identity that formalist criticism honors in structural terms

in the name of such concepts as narrator, character,

point of view, and the like, and even archetypal and struc

turalist criticism, with their far greater emphasis on the ab-stract operations of various systems, retain the category for

purposes of analysis. Indeed, even previous Marxist criticism

liquely honors individual identity by regarding social classeslike the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as collective charac

ters within that story or salvational account of history toldby Marx.

As Jameson's deep admiration for Lukacs might suggest,the aim of symptomatic analysis s never merely to bring to

light or unmask such strategies of containment as the cate-gory of individual identity, to point an accusing dialectical fin-ger at their denial or repression of History. For Jameson's ul-timate point s that such strategies of containment are

inevitably inscribed in cultural texts and our ways of thinking

about t hem- in to , even, the texts of Marx himself, who in

this sense denied History even as,he was instructing the world

in the consequences of such denial. The notion of conceptual

categories or aesthetic conventions or social forms as strate

gies of containment s not meant to liberate us from History,

but to liberate us by insisting that we are always and inevitablyinside it.

93




such impoverishment. On the other hand, Jameson will wisht l t h i th di ti ti b t if t

N A R R AT I V E AND I N T E R P R E TAT I O N

world of infinite mercy) and to hide or distort it (the mysteryf G d d hi l b d l d i



to lay a great emphasis on the distinction between manifestmeaning and latent content that Freud's model of interpreta

tion, and his own as it turns Freud to dialectical use, sostrongly insists on. With so many claims and counterclaims in

the air, it is easy to miss the point that narrative,just by being

narrative, always demands interpretation.

Understanding narrative forms like the parables of theNew Testament, for instance, seems to depend on something

like this point. The parable of the prodigal son, we are told, is

not just a story about a young man who leaves home, squan

ders his inheritance in dissipation n a foreign land, and re-turns to encounter not recrimination but a father who slaugh

ters a fatted calf in joy at his return. It is a story about the

alienation of the soul from God, about the miraculous exis-tence of infinite mercy when nothing like mercy had even toexist. The foreign land, we are told, is the very image of the

soul's alienation from the divine, the killing of the calf thathad been fattening for a later feast the very image of God's

joy at the rebirth of a soul previously lost to Him. This is alle-gory, certainly, but it seems to be allegory demanded by thestory itself, a second story without which the first seems curi-ously incomplete.

The claim that narrative always demands interpretation,

then, seems to work out to a claim that narrative form has

something like the distinction between manifest and latent

meaning written into i t t h a t what is manifestly happening,

for instance, is the slaughtering of a fatted calf, but that thisimage contains another meaning as its latent or hidden con

tent. Associated with this are are certain other problems long

since seen to derive from narrative form as such: that, for in-stance, every narrative simultaneously pr s nts and r pr s nts aworld, that is, simultaneously creates or makes up a realityand asserts that it stands independent of that same reality. Or,

similarly, that narrative seems at once to reveal or illuminate aworld (we gaze through the prodigal son story to a divine

98

of God and his mercy can scarcely be adequately conveyed instories about fathers, sons, and calves). Simply in dealing withnarrative, it seems, we are already dealing with a complex andtangled realm of meaning that demands interpretation.

Just as important, the sort of interpretation demanded bynarrative has in Jameson's view a natural priority over other

modes of explanation. The claim is once again epistemological at bottom: since Reality comes to us in narrative f o r m -

not jus t as literary narratives, but as religious mythologies,theories of history, and the l i k e i t demands to be inter

preted as such. Obliquely, Jameson is here contesting anyclaim to ultimate truth that might be made by the empirical

sciences (in which, presumably, explanation takes the nonnarrative form of experiment and hypothesis) and positivist phi

losophy, but even more obliquely he is contesting the claimsof that scientific Marxism that sought, in a nineteenth-cen

tury infatuation with the methods of the physical sciences, toground Marxist theory in a vulgar empiricism. Jameson's

views on interpretation thus amount to a quiet repudiation ofthis strain in Marxist thought, from Engels's dialectics of na

ture to the Lysenko affair.t is the unlikely question of nar~ative itself, therefore, of

problems of meaning and interpretation normally assumed tobe the rarefied and marginal concerns of literary critics, thatcontains the clue to Jameson's posture as a Marxist thinker.

For literary criticism in bourgeois terms is very obviously amarginal activity, literature itself being at most a polite ac-complishment or leisure pastime, but from a Marxist perspec

tive it would appear to be even more so, the very type of apo

litical or unrevolutionary speculatipµ. We have already seen

par t of Jameson's answer to this charg'~: it derives from an er

roneous notion of ideology and the superstructure, and thus

from a failure to perceive the cultural sphere as an arena ofclass struggle and revolutionary conflict. Jameson's view ofnarrative completes his response: since History comes to us

99




ply as error but as functional or necessary error. Thus ideology becomes in Jameson's system the means of transcending

N A R R AT I V E AND I N T E R P R E TAT I O N

as the ways in which men imagine their relationship to thetranspersonal categories of society and history.



the merely ideological.Jameson will discover the precursor of his own system of in

terpretation, in turn, in the unlikeliest of places: in that great

system of patristic and medieval exegesis the aim of which

was, as he says, to rewrite the scriptural inheritance of the

Jews into a form usable by Gentiles. Here again, as with hisearlier historicizing of the Freudian model of interpreta-

tion, Jameson's aim s to dispose of the historically deter-

mined and merely contingent content of an interpretive

system and leave the system its elf int:ict for his own dialecticaluse. As Aristotle glimpsed behind a wilderness of particulararguments that fixed world of universally valid forms out ofwhich he made syllogistic logic, Jameson s able to glimpse behind systems as widely separated as patristic exegesis andFreudian psychoanalysis forms that, invested with the new

content of dialectical interpretation, may be put to powerful

use.Since Jameson's account of the medieval system s charac-

teristically compressed, and since it nonetheless contains the

most important key to his system of interpretation, we will do

well to follow the steps of his analysis closely. The four levelsof medieval exegesis, we recall, are the literal, allegorical,moral, and anagogical. They may be represented as follows:

ANAGOG ICAL (Mankind: the collective level)

MORAL (The individual: the psychological level)

ALLEGORICAL (Christ: the interpretive code )

LITERAL (Israel: actual history)

J ameson's points about this system will be: ( 1) that in the me -

dieval scheme each level generates the next as a new or furtherlevel of meaning, and (2) that it does so through allegory conceived as ideological investment in Althusser's sense of ideology

1 8

At the literal level, then, we have what appears to be merely

a historical record: the story of the Jews in their kingdoms

and their wanderings, the record of a Semitic people movingwithin the narrow limits of time and geography through various vicissitudes as a national or tribal group. The complex re

ality that stands here to be impoverished, as Deleuze andGuattari have it, by any attempt to allegorize it in terms of amaster narrative s of course not the Old Testament itself butthe historical referent, the actual historical experience, towhich the Old Testament corresponds as document or record. The way in which this record generates another level ofmeaning, however, s clear enough: in the Old Testament history s God's book, and actual historical events are alreadysymbolic, already available as types or figures of some truthlying beyond their own literal status as mere occurrences orevents.

f we have the objections of Deleuze and Guattari in mind,

however, it s the next level, the allegorical, that very obviously contains the threat of impoverishment, for this s the

level at which the events of Christ's life as recounted in the

Gospels are taken to supply the meaning of events in the

Old Testament. Thus, to take the standard exegetical exam-

ple cited by Jameson, Christ's redemption of mankind in the

New Testament s taken to fulfill the promise implicit in

God's deliverance of his people out of Egypt in the Old, the

Egyptian bondage of Israel being a type or prefiguration of

the bondage to sin from which the sacrifice of Christ delivered mankind. All the requiremen,ts Deleuze and Guattari

had in mind seem to be met here: the life of Christ s obviously being used as a master narrative in their sense, andthe multitudinous events of Old Testament history are being

reduced to events in the life of one individual. Is the medieval

allegorical level, then, inevitably an impoverishment of the literal or historical level?

Obviously not. As Jameson observes, allegory s an impov-

1 9



J A M E S O N , A L T H U S S E R , M A R X

ple what they are: if I wish to become a physicist I can do soonly by internalizing the system of rules and concepts calledphysics, and then when I speak as a physicist it is really this

T H E P O L I T I C A L U N C O N S C I O U S

the idea of a listener or another voice I cannot hear, and even

if it turns out that the speaker is physically alone I will con-strue his discourse as one-half of an imaginary dialogue. A

i f h hi hi i



same system of rules and concepts speaking through me.Then, second, the discourse of physics has the power to cre-ate social and even physical institutions: physics departments,

conferences, journals, laboratories, etc., all are gener ted y

physics as anabstract conceptual order. Foucault's interest

isin the repressive implications of this power, but the very same

notion of a discourse also fits J ameson's idea of an antagonis

tic class dialogue.

Our usual tendency, that is, is to think of seventeenth-cen

tury Anglicanism primarily as a state institution-the Church

of England as a state religion, with Oxford and Cambridge asits seminaries, its cathedrals and bishoprics embodying a na-tional administrative structure, its parish churches and their

vicars an institutional presence reaching into every villageand hamle t -and only incidentally as that body of abstract

thought or theological discourse represented in sermons,controversial pamphlets, works of systematic theology, uni

versity curricula, and the like. Yet the whole point of thinking

of Anglicanism as a discourse is to see that a reverse perspec

tive is also possible, that Anglicanism as an ideology or heg

emonic theology may equally be said to have generated the

Church of England as an institution, to have created its flesh-and-blood vicars and bishops and its actual cathedrals and vil-lage churches as the outward expression of an inner impera

tive. This is the sense of discourse thatJameson's argument

now demands.Then too, we can conceive of Anglicani sm as a di logic l dis-

course, in the sense Jameson borrows from Bakhtin, by view-ing it as a response to a repressed oppositional voice (in roughterms, a discourse of Puritanism ). The value of Bakhtin's

point is that it insists on the sense in which speech o r dis-course must always imply a dialogue; if I overhear a voice in

conversation in the next room I make sense of it by supplying

1 3

hegemonic discourse, in fact, has just this character: histori-cally speaking we hear only one voice because a hegemonic

ideology suppresses or marginalizes all antagonistic classvoices, and yet the hegemonic discourse remains locked into adialogue with the discourse it has suppressed. This is why wemust picture Anglicanism, even in the comparative serenity

of the period preceding the Civil War, as already dialogical innature.

The Civil War itself, then, figures as the episode in whichthe silence imposed on a suppressed Puritan discourse wasshattered, when that endlessly co111plex and dynamic antagonism we organize under the names Anglican and Puritan

erupted on the abstract level into the intellectual war of whichMilton's great religiopolitical tracts survive as monumental re-minders, on the actual o r physical level into bloody civil con-

flict. Jameson's point is that we can call this suppressed dis-course Puritan with no great historical distortion because

religion was for all parties the shared code within which their

differences were fought out. Thus it was, for instance, that

the communism of the Levellers co· uld not take the form ofan atheistic doctrine (a doctrine, say, calling for the end of re-ligious delusions as such) but, on the contrary, presented it-self as a purified Christianity. The unity of Jameson's second

horizon is thus the unity provided by a single dialogue and ashared code.

What happens to the individual text within this second ho-rizon? Jameson's answer is that it must be reconstituted as ap role in relation to the l ngue of its· c.lass discourse. On thesimplest level, Jameson is merely inv~lbng here the standard

Saussurean distinction between p role and l ngue in linguis-tics: p role as any individual utterance within a language, aswhen I say Good morning to you on the street, l ngue the

total system of linguistic rules that makes individual utterance

1 3 1



JA MESON, A L THUS SER, M A R X

world ultimately to emasculate and bring under its despicabledomination the natural masters of society; in the backgroundthere then is the story of the entire Judea-Christian tradi

i l l h ill i i lf


by Deleuze and Guattar i - that is, that he is merely setting up

a master narrative or master code in terms of which to rewrite literary works, which rewriting or allegorizing will thenbe exhibited as the underlying meaning exposed by a Marx



tion as a slave revolt that, too pusillanimous to assert itself at

the healthy or Spartacist level of physical violence, is achieved

at the level of ethics. Thus ressentiment figures as the

ideologeme of Nietzschean philosophy and Nietzschean fable

alike.In a general sense it is clear from a Marxist perspective thatNietzsche's notion of ressentiment must be ideological: as a philosophy produced within a newly hegemonic capitalism itcould be no other. Yet its ideological nature becomes clearest,for Jameson, when ressentiment is invoked by a nineteenth

century bourgeoisie and its intelligentsia as the mindless anddestructive envy that the have-nots of society always and uni

versally feel toward the haves, thus utterly denying the origins in economic exploitation of all discontent from below, ofPeterloo and Chartism and the Paris commune. Add onemore modification, the ressentiment of failed intellectuals- bad poets, hack journalists, unilluminated philosophers,

all the aesthetic priests of Nietzsche's sys t em-who then

turn against society and we have, Jameson argues persua

sively, not only the theme of the alienated intellectual in Gissing's novels but also the coming to light of ressentiment as the

shared ideologeme of Nietzsche and Gissing.To bring to light an ideologeme in this manner is to pass

over into the third and last horizon of Jameson's system, the

horizon of history conceived in the broadest possible sense, as

it embraces mankind from its emergence to its eventual extinction as a species. Our earlier discussion perhaps makes

clear the danger lurking here: even to speak of history as extending from X to Y is to impose a narrative framework

on the raw data, in effect to promise to tell a story. And

should Jameson as a Marxist critic fulfill this promise in any

unqualified way, he will immediately become susceptible tothe sort of objection we have already heard powerfully urged

134

be exhibited as the underlying meaning exposed by a Marx

ist interpretation.

Jameson is wholly alert to this danger, and he is at his most

resourceful in avoiding it. He begins by confronting the concept that most directly leads to the error castigated by Deleuzeand Guattari, the notion of a mode o production as one of the

successive economic stages through which mankind hasmoved from tribal society to capitalism (and will move, afteran intermediate stage of socialism, toward communism

proper and the withering away of the state). Here the storybeing told is c lear- i t is Marx's own story of a movement

from the tribe to the gens and then to the slaveholding societyof the polis (the ancient mode of production ) and finally tothe modes of production embodied in feudalism and capitalism respectively*-as is the process through which Marxist

interpretation compels texts to yield up their allegoricalmeaning according to this story. Here, as we have seen, weencounter Caudwell's pigeonholing of literary works andGoldmann's homologies and even Lukacs's expressive causali ty-everything, in short, to which Althusser objected in the

name of overdetermination and History as an absent cause.Given such powerful objections to the standard story of

successive modes of production, does the concept retain anyvalue at all? Jameson's answer is yes, and to see why we need

only think back to his example of the English Civil War. We

have focused so far on the shattering or fragmentation whichin the 1640s broke England into a multitude of warring sectsand parties, but what Jameson wants il's now to see is that such

fragmentation simult neously implies ,;an underlying socialunity. When we hear two people arguing violently, for in-

*Jameson includes the so-called Oriental mode of production in his summary account, but its status is a hotly debated issue in contemporary Marxisttheory.

1 35



J A M E S ON, L T H U S S E R , M A R X

perspective that allows for an account at once of society-assystem and of history as a process of development.

The consequences o f this view for a theory of the text are,

as we shall see shortly, enormous, but as always for Jameson


tural revolution, in short, s to preserve the value of Marx'sconcept of modes of production without being led by it into

the error of vulgar typologizing. We must thus retain the notion of history as change or process (the world after all s dif



y, , ythey are only as important as their political implications.Thus, for instance, the notion of nonsynchronous social de -

velopment allows him to reconcile the claims of Marxism andradical feminism, which has in recent years urged against any

analysis of history in terms of class struggle the cogent claimthat in the past women of all social classes have been op-

pressed by men. To view societies as social formations, however, s precisely to expect that earlier levels will coexist withlater; in this case, male domination s to be viewed as the virulent cultural survival of a relation developed within tribal society as the earliest human social stage and today coexistingwith other, more recent, levels such as commodity reification.The point of the revolution envisioned by Marxism s thenthat it will abolish all such relations of domination si

multaneously.The third horizon of Jameson's system s thus not history

merely but history viewed in this new metasynchronic per-

spective, to which Jameson gives the name cultural revolution

Here a caveat s in order: though cultural revolution wassuggested to Jameson by events in China in the late 1960s,and though he obviously considers these associations impor-

tant to his argument, most readers of his book will be con-

fused if they try to make sense of the term by placing itagainst its background in recent Chinese experience. t s bet

ter, for purposes of understanding Jameson, simply to treatthe term as one he has made up to describe his third horizon

in this new aspect, with cultural signalling the sense inwhich a social formation must be grasped as a total structure

or system, revolution the sense in which a dynamic of op -

posing tensions organizes the structure and produces itstransformations.

The aim of viewing human history under the aspect of cul-

138

tion of history as change or process (the world after all different now from what it was in the stone age) but also recognize that this s no orderly march from one mode o f

production to the next but a more complex process of changefrom one social formation to another in which a new dominant

emerges but earlier and future strata also coexist (there stillare stone age societies in our world). Jameson's examples are

the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, neither

of which was a punctual event but both of which mark themore gradual and problematic process of transition inwhich the social relations of a feudal order gave way to thebourgeois ascendancy under capitalism. Jameson means the

term cultural revolution to apply to this whole process.At the same time, the fact that we cannot assign a punctual

moment to such transitions means that they represent, to use

Jameson's own metaphor, the passage to the surface of astructural antagonism or permanent struggle between the

various modes of production coexisting within a given socialformation. To use the vocabulary now current, the diachronic

thus becomes the manifestation in time of the synchronic:

transition simply makes visible a structural antagonism that

has been there all along, just as dynamic events like the

French Revolution, the stuff of ordinary history, demand explanation in the static terms of structural tension or opposi-

tion. In the same way, a geologist might explain an earth-

quake as the visible effect of a system or structure of stressesamong faults, folds, and the like. So cultural revolution s

meant to subsume the diachronic and the synchronic, and to

posit history as the vast and unnameabl:e horizon about whichwe use these limited and reductive means of talking.

In a certain sense, the horizon of cultural revolution implies in J ameson's system the end of literary interpretation assuch, for this third and last horizon s not just another context

1 39



AMES ON, L T H U S S E R , M A R X

the whole point of the minuet as aristocrats playing peasantwould be lost. The same folk dance as a theme in a Romantic

symphony then carries with it the history of these earlier

transformations in signalling, now, a new ideology, an emer-



g g, , gy,gent nationalism that carries within itself, as the symphony

carries folk dance and minuet, the cultural traces of earlier

feudal and agrarian orders. The literary equivalent of thisheterogeneity of symphonic form s what Jameson will discussunder the name of generic discontinuity.

This brings us to the outer limits of Jameson's interpretive

system. Beyond them lie the issues of actual interpretation aspursued by the most original and resourceful Marxist criticnow writing, moment after moment of the dialectical shock

generated by his brilliant readings of individual texts and au -

thors. Yet to end by considering Jameson a literary criticwould be to mistake him and the ultimate purpose of his system, which s to employ the normal categories of literary or

cultural study only as a means of transcending them, to move

through readings and discussions and analyses only toemerge, on the other side, into a space where one may tracethe lineaments of History and Necessity within the social firmament of men and women. To do this s to achieve a revolution within consciousness, the undeniable premonition of that

outward revolution toward which the broad stream of an oth-

erwise inscrutable history s carrying the world.

142

Bibliographical Nate

The most useful bibliography of Marxism for the nonspe-

cialist s Terrell Carver's Guide to Further Reading, ap -

pended to the fourth edition of Isaiah Berlin's classic Karlarx (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); this lists

English translations of Althusser's major works. Readers witha specific interest in Marxism and literature will want to con-

sult Chris Bullock and David Peck, ·Guide t Marxist LiteraryCriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).Aside from its general thoughtfulness, Terry Eagleton's Criti-cism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976) s valuableas registering the impact of Althusser' on Marxist criticism in

Britain. The single best attempt to situate Marxism in relation

to contemporary European intellectual movements is, to mymind, Alex Callinicos s Is There a Future for Marxism? (London: Macmillan, 1982); Callinicos covers some of the same

ground in Marxism and Philosophy (Oxfd~d: Oxford UniversityPress, 1983).

Since my own introduction to Jameson s quite literallymeant to be read alongside The Political Unconscious I have

not footnoted the various sources (including Jameson's previ-

1 43

j A M E S O N , AL T H U S S E R , M A R X

ous writings) on which its argument draws. To these, thereadiest guide is J ameson s index and notes in The Political

Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981 .Diacritics vol. 2 Fall, 1982 , is a special issue devoted to



, , pThe Political Unconscious. The issue contains useful commen

tary on J ameson s theory by, among others, Hayden White

and Terry Eagleton, as well as an informative interview with

Jameson.

144

Index

acknowledgment, 28Adorno, T W., 40, 5

Afghanistan, 1 2

Althusser, Louis, 10, 13, 40, 46, 51,56,61-74,80,82-84,92,97, 107,117,129, 135-137, 143

aporia, 22-23, 40, 126archetypal criticism, 92, 1 11-112Aristotle, 108, 115Arnold, Matthew, 105autonomy of cultural levels, 70, 73,

136

Bacon, Sir Francis, 26Bakhtin, Mikhail, 130Balzac, Honore de, 85, 88-89, 94,

118, 128, 132, 140

Barthes, Roland, 103Benjamin, Walter, 4 9 - 50Berlin, Isaiah, 143Blake, William, 23, 51, 1 12

Bloch, Ernst, 132, 136Braudel, Fernand, 96Brooks, Cleanth, 103Brueghel, Pieter (Der A), 1 7

Bullock, Chris, 143Burke, Kenneth, 122, 124-125

Callinicos, Alex, 143Carver, Terrell, 143castration complex, 32-35Caudwell, Christopher, 57, 60, 72,

1 35causality, 61-66Cavell, Stanley, 28Christianity as ideology), 52-53, 76class discourse, 128-130, 132commodity fetishism, 80, 83Conrad, Joseph, 20, 30, 94, 1 8

Constable, John, 29contra~iction in Hegel and Marx),

116Cubism, 29cultural revolution, 138-40

Deleyze, Gilles, 10, 40, 100-104,106-107, 109-110, 113, 135

Derridai,Jacques, 10-1 I 13, 39-40,103

Descartes, Rene, 26, 4

diachronic explanation, 97, 139dialectical shock, 11-12, 40, 42, 142Dickens, Charles, goDurkheim, Emile, 42-43, 45,

1 45



Li brary o ongress a ta l oging in Publ icati on Da ta

D owling, Will iam C .

J a meson , Al t husse r, Marx: an int roduc tion to The Po l itical U nconscious.

Bib l io graphy: p.Includes index .1 Jameso n, Fredr ic . Politi cal unconscious. 2 Cr iticism. 3. Herm e

neutics . 4. Narratio n Rheto ric) . 5 . Communism an d l i terature. 6.Fictio n-History and criticis m. 7 Althusse r, Lou i s . I T itle.PN81.J 293D6 1984 8 01 .95 , , 84-7032IS B N cl oth) 0-8014-1714 -7 al k. paper):I S B N p aper) 0 -8014- 9284- x alk. paper)

Dowling, William C. - Jameson, Althusser, Marx - An Introduction to the Political Unconscious - 1984

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