On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act
Place on List:
II. Literary Genre: The
Novel
3.
How is political conflict directly represented in novels?
Fredric
Jameson. “On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act”
in The
Political Unconscious.
Key Terms (tags): political
unconscious, novel, secondary text,
Supporting References:
- Text: http://courses.wcupa.edu/fletcher/special/jameson.htm
- Interesting read on Jameson. June 1991. “Fredric Jameson’s laments” Roger Kimball: http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Fredric-Jameson-s-laments-5499
- Buchanan, Ian. "political unconscious." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Date Accessed 27 Aug. 2013
“political unconscious. A concept created by Fredric
*Jameson to articulate the implicit political
dimension of creative works. First proposed in The Political
Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), the
political unconscious draws on and adapts Freud's
notion of wish-fulfilment
and Lévi-Strauss's
notion of the savage mind (‘pensée sauvage’) to construct the
hypothesis that artistic works can be seen as symbolic solutions to
real but unconsciously felt social and cultural problems. The task of
the cultural critic is then to find the means of reconstructing the
original problem for which the text as symbolic act is a solution.
This approach to textual criticism turns not so much on the question
of what does a particular text mean as why it exists in the form that
it does.”
- Buchanan, Ian. "Jameson, Fredric." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Jameson and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Jameson,
Fredric (1934–) Marxist cultural critic. Born in
Cleveland Ohio, Jameson was educated at Haverford College and Yale
University. He is renowned for his landmark essay, ‘Postmodernism,
or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (1984), which for
admirers and detractors alike continues to serve as a focal point
for attempts to define the nature of the contemporary situation.
Few authors display Jameson's intellectual range, which encompasses
a command of several languages and an encyclopedic knowledge of
works in architecture, art, film, history, politics, and literature.
“Reticent about allowing his work to
be turned into something he disparagingly calls a ‘brand’,
Jameson has held back from developing a singular method that could be
easily emulated. His method, which he has variously called
metacommentary,
transcoding,
and dialectical
criticism, is, he insists, in a permanent state
of incompletion. There is no one form of the dialectic, he argues,
and neither can there be a final form, it must constantly adapt to
meet the new challenges of a rapidly changing historical situation.
Jameson has brought together his thoughts on his dialectical method
in The Valences of the Dialectic (2009).
“Jameson completed his doctorate at
Yale in 1959. It was published in 1961 as Sartre: The Origins of
a Style. Focused on Sartre's
novels and plays rather than his philosophical writing, it
established a template for future work by exploring the degree to
which an author's style can be read dialectically as a symptom of
their engagement with their political situation. In essence, as he
articulates more directly in the work that follows, for Jameson all
cultural works can be treated as allegories
for which the master text is history itself.
“In the succeeding decade, Jameson
wrote a series of long essays on key thinkers of the Left, including
Adorno,
Bloch,
Benjamin,
Lukács,
and Marcuse,
which sought both to make these authors (whose works were not
translated into English at the time) more widely known in the
Anglophone academy and to examine their usefulness for contemporary
cultural politics. These essays were brought together in Marxism
and Form (1971), undoubtedly the most important book on Marxist
aesthetics of the latter half of the 20th century. In a companion
volume, The Prison-House of Language (1972), Jameson
provided a critical account of Russian
Formalism and structuralism.
“In The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), Jameson continued
his investigation of the link between style and politics. Highly
influential in literary studies and Cultural
studies, the concept of the political
unconscious adapts the psychoanalytic concept
of wish-fulfilment
to explain the unconscious social and political presuppositions of
cultural works. Jameson's thesis is that cultural texts are symbolic
solutions to real historical problems. They bring into existence in
textual form a vision of society that society itself is incapable of
realizing. Textual analysis, following this logic, tries to
reconstruct (or reverse engineer) the historical sub-text or
problematic driving a particular text by asking how it works. His key
exhibit in this regard is the 19th-century's obsession with the
notion of ressentiment
(particularly in the work of Friedrich
*Nietzsche and Joseph Conrad), which, as he
shows, served the ideological purpose of discrediting all forms of
political action.
“In 1982, Jameson gave a talk at the
Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art entitled ‘Postmodernism and
Consumer Society’. In the words of one commentator, namely Perry
*Anderson, it redrew the map of the whole field
of humanities at a single stroke. A revised version of this talk was
published in 1984 in New Left Review with the new title of
‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. It
quickly became one of the most discussed and cited articles of the
decade because of the way it sought not only to elucidate the
specific features of postmodernism,
but to explain their underlying causes as well. Jameson rejects the
idea that we have entered a post-industrial
age in which the internal contradictions of capitalism have at last
been resolved and argues instead (adapting Ernest Mandel's argument
in Der Spätkapitalismus (1972), translated as Late
Capitalism (1975) in the process) that the present should be
understood as the age in which capitalism has finally permeated every
aspect of life, including consciousness itself. Culture, for Jameson,
is thus both a response to and registration of the underlying
economic and political forces of the mode
of production itself.
“An extended working out of the
implications of his thesis is presented in book form in
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(1991). The postmodern situation, Jameson argues, is conditioned by
two historical drivers:
“(i) the so-called ‘Green
Revolution’, or the industrialization of Third World agriculture,
which had two powerful effects—on the one hand, it massively
increased food production, thus enhancing food security, but it is
also put millions of peasants out of work, forcing them to move to
cities in search of employment; (ii) the refocusing of the First
World economy around tertiary enterprises (i.e. knowledge and
information) rather than primary and secondary enterprises (i.e.
agriculture, mining, and manufacturing).
“These changes took effect in the
1950s, but in Jameson's view it wasn't until the 1970s that they
began to be recorded in what he terms the political unconscious of
global culture. Examining a wide range of texts across all the arts,
Jameson identifies five symptoms of the cultural shift toward
full-blown postmodernism—the waning
of affect; pastiche;
hysterical
sublime; geopolitical
aesthetic; and a mutation in built space
interfering with our ability to produce a cognitive
map of our situation.
“Jameson's subsequent books, The
Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), The Seeds of Time
(1994), and A Singular Modernity (2002) have extended this
discussion further by examining in more detail the problem of what
came before postmodernism and inquiring into its continued
significance. In contrast to many Marxist critics, Jameson does not
engage in either doctrinal battles relating to the correct
interpretation of Marx's thought or factionalist battles relating to
the political uptakes of Marx's thought (e.g. Leninism, Maoism,
Stalinism, Trotskyism, etc.). For Jameson, the crucial measure of any
form of thought and indeed work of art is whether or not it enables
us to imagine a future different from our present, even if it is
brought about by cataclysm. For this reason, Jameson has nurtured a
lifelong interest in modernism
and science fiction, which in his view offer the most important
examples of this type of utopian thinking. Two recent books, both of
which collect essays written over a 30-year period, are devoted to
precisely these topics: The Modernist Papers (2007) and
Archaeologies of the Future (2005).
“Jameson was awarded the prestigious
Holberg Prize in 2008.”
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