The first half of On Interpretation-

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.

the fervent communist: dialectical revelations in jameson’s tpu

I’ve got to organize a properly precis-like piece of work on Jameson’s the Political Unconscious but I thought that it was a noteworthy experience enough to warrant a note up here. Over a year ago, I engaged in the process of learning about Marxism and beyond that, in the fall of 2009, I began a particular type of project called “the missing place of ethics in Marxism.” The materials that I was vastly exposed to were (in all of my theoretical readings, for the large part) part of what Jameson reservedly calls the negative hermeneutic. This may very well be due to a misreading, or more primitive kind of rereading that my overdetermined cultural status/confrontations would not allow me to escape. And obviously enough, when I read works like ‘The Coming Insurrection,’ there were the real “positive” if only they were quantifiable verbalizations of an otherwise negative, vacant, not-yet-demystified discourse, sliding painfully between an internal dialog and an irreconcilable beyond-ness of the individual subject in August 2009. But these kinds of readings ultimately fell short in terms of a legitimate mode of contemplating Marxism on all of its valences: that is, hermeneutically in both a negative or positive sense (as qualified terms in Jameson’s Conclusion)–it is yet to be seen if perhaps these valences are useful along the other axes of politics and philosophy, which I won’t even begin to contemplate here.

The conclusion writes at length about the necessity of a de-centered subject from one’s own individuality, which was very useful, mostly for its simple but absolutey necesary engagement with the simplest terms of self and collectivity; this modest self-revelation ultimately re-affirms my initial suspicions that were followed more concretely in the fall of 2009. I was concerned then, as I am now, with the status of a certain type of “ethics” in Marxism, which in more sophisticated terms, I can say is really this:

What are the standards of Utopian survival in times of ideological repression? And, in times of defunct/changing (once) structural oppositions to capitalism, how does the “individual” subject reconcile an otherwise already-defeated and alienated intellect emerge from increasingly bordered ideological narratives in order to reconsider the Marxist project of Utopia?

One barely has to qualify the immense and intense variations of ideological repression that have flowered vigorously into a death-touch of the Left and also into a systematized standard of ‘connected experience’ that seem to crush the Utopian spirit over the course of the preceding decade. At once, mass culture propagates that we are at one with each other through the network of online connectivity but we are also hopelessly made more disparate, each living in multifariously fractured realities as the basis/objective “need” for such  a network of moderated interaction. A similar kind of dialectical situation is the standard of unified experience as a de-centered self as it exists in the block-buster film: while engaging in the form of ideological repression in the movie theater, watching something like the generic romance of “New in Town,” the content of the film (while not “redeemable” in any sense) is based on the Utopian impulse of collective organization of marginalized labor forces against the late capital enterprise of piecemeal production.

The heart of the matter emerges as the need to identify already re-appropriated Utopian urges in the ideological realm and pull them from their managed shells in order to reinvision the collectivity.

Now, doesn’t that sound so nice? And simple? And… all together political?

What would otherwise be a poltical or collective mobilization (something like the public strike or protest rally) has truly changed its locus into something more ideologically “managed” i.e. reified forms of social interaction.

… time to go. more later.

PS: Best friend and Communist cell-mate has informed me, the writer, that a practice analogy for the GRE is– “Jingoism is to Nationalism as Communism is to Fervor.”

It’s what I can’t talk about

Seven people in a mini-van, driving in and around the bowels of the Greater New York Area. “That looks nice, in a weird way,” he said, pointing to the petrochemical refineries awash in glowing orange light bulbs.

Before, at the house, the drummer goes into the attic while I’m still getting ready. It’s always too loud. These guys are some of my best friends. He comes down, ten books in hand– “Lennin and Philosophy, The German Ideology, The Lenin Reader, The Communist Manifesto, Spectres of Marx,” he says. He had been sent on a task.

They all take a book “one, two, three, go,” says the guitarist. They read in stereo, each his own chapter of a book that none of them cared to understand. They hate to seem contrived.

I laugh. You’ve got to laugh. But you also just get a little sad. My best friends.

We get the bassist. The fucking gps isn’t working. I’m trying to read in the back, the bassist wants a “straight answer” about political theory, about radical politics, about what I’m studying, and what it is.

I don’t say much. I can’t talk about it, not because I don’t care… I mean, I can’t say anything because I don’t know. I say “it’s just difficult to have a conversation about this stuff on a general scale because there’s no common framework for it. There are a million little separations and distinctions as it is, and I’m only a novice.”

“You don’t seem to make a good case for yourself,” he says.

I’m not trying to make a case. I try to be polite. I get self conscious, I’ve been told they make fun of me when I’m not there. I’m not embarrassed. I just wish they could understand something I’m talking about. But the worst part is that I realize I don’t even know…

To look at this another way, perhaps it is good that I find myself unable to engage or (pretend to) mediate between to incommensurable discourses.

“Isn’t the theory kind of bullshit?” he says.
“What theory?” I say.
“Political theory,” he says
“Which one, or you mean in general?” I say.

I think he’s talking about what he believes to be Leninism, or maybe just a capitalist view of the USSR. I have no idea. I side step the question and distinguish between politics and philosophy.

“But isn’t that kind of bullshit,” the pianist says under his breath.

I shrug and say it’s very difficult to talk about with someone who isn’t familiar with the same references points, perhaps if we had a piece to talk about, that would be better. Then I feel like I’m being a snob, and cross my arms in a “T” and briefly engage in a bite-size morsel of diachronic v. synchronic time. “A book, a movie… anything really, is more than a relic in periodization; it is also manifest of other times,” I’m a fucking fool, a smarter person, a better communicator could have engaged this in a better way. I’m just trying to learn these things myself. I can’t convince people with the shallow straight-line arguments that we’re all used to.

I stop talking, I shrug.

“It’s different when someone asks,” he says. He feels insulted.
“I didn’t mean you,” I say.

We go into a tunnel. I don’t fucking know, I want to say. I don’t fucking know.

On Jameson’s preface to The Political Unconscious

This post marks the beginning of my free reading of Jameson. And already, the preface says so much more than I thought it might. For my first attempt at understanding it, I will try to close read some passages.

The Political Unconscious accordingly turns on the dynamics of the act of interpreation and presupposes, as its organizational fiction, that we never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, texts come before us as the alway-already-read; we apprehend them though sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or–if the text is brand new–through the sedimented reading habits and vategories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions. (FJ 9)

What this points to, in unaffected language, is a way of reading, a way of interpreting literature. Much like the world we live in, literature is not directly experienced because of two forces (that FJ later expands): history and literary criticism (or modes of criticisms). These might be considered two opposing things, but I have more than a feeling that they are a part of the same dialectical (Marxian) truth. In the case of the old text: it is easy enough to imagine how we do not really read a text, directly. The tradition of the text, the cultural assignments, the quick and dirty indexes on a work’s author, its secondary and reified use in popular (contemporary) culture, etc, are exhausting. Not to mention the historicist lens that we don every time we attempt to read a work outside our own epoch (as an aside, I wonder if “our epoch” or season of epochs, each pass away more and more frantically, as we are outmoded not at century’s intervals, nor even decades, but now by the week, the day, the minute…). Until we, as historical readers, or readers blinded and harnessed by our inaccessibility to history, or even time itself, cannot read any text without a mode; this brings us to the second type of reading: literary criticism.

The inaccessibility of the reader to his own epoch, while also isolating him from any other, might be temporarily overcome with a manner of reading. FJ lists the many en vogue in the following pages, and points out that in the end, these kinds of literary understandings, like any given feuding mysticism, competes soulessly with all the others with all the same words and stifled promises. Of course, FJ makes no bones about his premise: to show that the Marxist mode of reading is not just another type of reading on the “intellectual marketplace,” but that it eradicates the need for such a dogmatist view and allows the reader to come into the closest type of contact with any given text because it accounts for the historically real material context of the work as well as our own. Thus, it unites us with the text. There is much more to be said about this text. And I will post on more quotes in the preface during all my spare moments this week, though they appear to be few.

Back to reading Oscar Wilde; as I was reading the two in concurrence (not to mention Whitman for a third) I have overcome my hatred of the former and the latter. FJ reminds that Marx’s favorite author was Balzac–

it’s really just too bad that Wilde falls so hideously into his own traps. Brilliant imagery helps this. Onward!

signing off.

The semester is running out in two directions: towards the banal and the extremely challenging. What’s banal is practically everything I do “for school”. What’s challenging is figuring out how to complete my various projects and continue to read and grow even when classes are in session. Should be better after this week. Give me a minute… I will select a book to read! … …

A classic: The Political Unconscious.

I will post a note on the preface this weekend, and will have completed On Interpretation by Friday. I apologize to myself for not working harder.

In other news, my *project* is under way, but I’ve caught myself in a slight hiccup: computer incompatibility i.e. printing issues. But I should have this resolved by the end of the weekend as well. I promise that I’m not just sitting around idly!