The preface begins with a note on the status of the changing historical importance/perspective of history. This note is not the simple kind of “well, not then, but now” approach to writing or thinking about Marxism. In fact, it doesn’t even degrade the European Marxist milieu of the 30s. What it does do is lay out the relationship between history and the context of history, and those two things with this current moment…
But that’s not really all there is to it, either, because if all Jameson really meant to do was “bring it up to speed” with his moment, he would essentially degrade his own moment; he would essentially also degrade (in his words, relegate) history to the barracks of the night-school. (But with the uncertain status of grad-school education, this should be understood as a memory of factoids.) This factoid-like conceptualization is also something that we come in contact with frequently in today’s (anti) liberal arts rhetoric “what does this [english department] mean?” is the essentially vacant (not-wanting-to-be-answered) question in non-Marxist learning traditions…
What Jameson prefaces this book with is an example of the late/post 60s mis-remembrance of history (especially Marxist history) as a linear graph into the “present.” Jameson shows that the present, without some sort of ontological (i.e. form) the whole praxis of Marxism will fall flat in the next moment of the present, like chivalry or faith have through the eyes of 20th century capital. What this starts is something that Jameson argues all along: that Marxism is not one deciphering code among many inter-changeable and comparable with all of the others, but that Marxism can only be viewed as such from within capital’s already-formulated idea that appears to be invisible in factoid-history.
This form is the historical dialectic; the mode of social discernment through the rigorous use of a Marxist approach to history that stops and rests nowhere, not even in the “present.”
And so, Jameson’s book title really denotes that Marxism can only be used as a mode of social and historical understanding without falling into a linear time-trap like the bourgeois mode of analysis, through its form, which is the process of dialectical re-appraisal that never ceases. Jameson proceeds to put this concept into effect with a “relatively modest and straightforward” task of accounting for six of the 20th century’s greatest thinker for their contributions to literary criticism.
Each one of the chapters (so far; I haven’t finished the chapter on Sartre) is more than a Jamesonian re conception of the original thinker’s work, but a historical unfolding and explanation of their work that even their works did not realize fully because they were in some ways blinded by the moment in which they were written. Jameson seems committed to the notion to write historically and not according to ‘his own’ standards for another reason: it seems that so far in the book he has conceded and included the necessity for an eventual re-reading and historical adjustment to his own writing. [At this point, I don't want to do much more than pose this to myself.]
Jameson is also clear to note in the preface that this is not an exercise in philosophy, but a preparation for literary criticism. This is a tricky kind of claim, for if we follow it through his already stated necessity towards the idea of contemplating literature as well as previous Marxist theorists in a properly dialectic way, that demands the intensive task of philosophically rigorous writing.
In order to reach literary criticism, one must first reach through the past, reach through the theorist’s contemporary ideological blockages (not to mention the original author’s, either) and confront the text without snapping one’s hand through the sharded glass window of “present” ideology. That is to say, the project of Jameson’s book may well be understood as a work against the factoid/linear conception of philosophy and writing and time and criticism (i.e. everything) in an attempt to access truth (i.e. to fulfill the otherwise rhetorical void of meaning) which can
a. only occur in the Marxist Historical context that
b. is not a specific application (or a transitory ‘best-of’ application like in bourgeois analysis) but that elevates the otherwise factoid-like content of history into a Marxist [dare I say Utopian?] possibility.
