Jameson’s first chapter On Interpretation begins with a lengthy introduction and repudiation of previous modes of interpretation. He begins with Althusserian Marxist variant of structural causality, which is embedded in that thinker’s structural approach. Structuralism is very important to Jameson’s conception of the dialectic of Utopia and ideology as manifested in modern literature, but not without considerable qualification. To begin with, Jameson argues that structural causality as it was fought in various encoded political battles (namely the French Communist Party against Stalin) used the concept of (semi) autonomy was used as a reductive term to quantify the various levels of economy and society. The debate was that Stalin’s use of causality allowed his particular brand of ideology to cross cut and flatten the various levels of culture and society in order to maintain a direct (and alienated) network to subjects. This, Jameson argues, is a syllogistic approach to a structuralism whose causality is rather situated within mediation between these structures, and not the levels, themselves. The difference between autonomous levels in structuralism, versus a structursl relationship of mediation is that, synchronically, the relationship from one level to the next to the next, are inextricably inter-woven and show a kind of origin within the “base;” that is, the relationships lose their autonomy insofar as they express the homology of relations themselves. (Which, as a side note, clearly also counteracts post-structural critiques that quantify the levels as autonomous and interchangeable into a situation that is not only undialectical, but also un-Marxist.) All of these qualifications serve to suggest that Althusserian Marxism must be understood as a (modern) modification of the Marxist mode of interpretation, rather than a break with it. Indeed, earlier in the chapter, Jameson brackets Althusserian Marxism as a type of local law, presumably the local laws of modernism, and therefore cannot be abandoned or washed away in the critique of modern literature.
Jameson goes on to dismantle the “alternate” side of the debate, which is the Lukacian analysis of modern literature, which the author says is reductive of the modernist problematic and completely ignores the Utopian vocation of reification. So, while Lukacs is not wrong in his historical identification of reification as an oppressive ideological force, his essentially un-dialectical mode of interpretation is not useful in conducting a genuine literary analysis of modernism. Althusserian structuralism in the highly qualified and historically corrected sense, is still applicable on a level of modern history, though structuralist Marxism as a master-code approach must be limited or qualified within a properly dialectical hermeneutic that is trans-historically valid. So, the first chapter of The Political Unconscious introduces the dialectical relations as embodied in the form of the novel as the mediatory force between modern structural levels of reality in late capitalism (late modifying the recentness of events, not a suggestion of impending capital failure).
Jameson also engages with other allegorical lexicons of interpretation, namely Freud’s schematic. Here, he works to qualify the structure of Freud’s interpretive apparatus by freeing it from the essentially private sphere of individualized libidinal desire. Freud maps the unconscious impulses of desire, which relates to wish-fulfillment, not as a personal libidinization of private desires, but a filtering of history and Utopian impulse along axes in order to free dialectical bearing to an otherwise ideologically bound system of individual impulse. (Jameson also validates Freud’s lexicon from the Freudians as its own mode of interpretation in exposing that the only group who is invested in making sense of the Freudian lexicon within its own context are themselves, and that symbolism in its direct/contextual sense has long been outmoded approach to the unconscious, specifically because it does not gesture towards the political without extensive qualification.) This moment in the text is a direct pre-cursor to his analysis of Conrad, whose literature contains a dialectical relationship to (desired) value as it was discussed in terms of that author’s contemporaries, Nietzsche and Weber. Jameson completes this lexical liberation by transferring the Freudian interpretative mode from the individual onto the allegorical organization of modeling society as presented by Northrop Frye. Frye’s mythical allegory of social relations, while imbued in religious imagery, is useful with the infused terminology of Freud’s lexicon, a mode of interpretation for social relationships as a unifying ideological process that provides surface cohesion for an otherwise conflicting formation (i.e. ideology as religion). Freud’s interpretive code is explicitly useful in terms of Frye’s allegorical level of the Myth/Archetypal, but when this interpretive function is expressed, it passes into the anagogical mode of “meaning” that always re-invests itself as a contained ideological impulse.
In this sense, the reader can quickly branch out the book’s Conclusion, wherein the dialectical mode of ideology is also clearly Utopian, but forever re-invested in its own ideological code (in late capitalism, the dream of eternal life or bliss is always folded into an insistence of consumption). Returning to Frye’s allegorical mode of social interpretation, Jameson is in fact drawing out a doubled critique of the Lukacian critique—while the Anagogic impulse does contain the Utopian content within ideology, it is always reinvested in ideology because it does not explicitly realize the imminence and necessity of the Utopian; that is to say, Frye’s conception resolves the dialect by functionally leaving it within the unconscious of the Anagogical desire, itself.
