74O

THE ABYSS OF REP

t47

of all human conceptual instruments) and therein cancels out its own impossible originality" (+6). Yet this does not relieve us, however, of the responsibility
of developing some conceptual instrument on the order of mapping, but more

appropriate to this imploded postmodern space; still, the objective conditions

for such an instrument have yet to avail us of such a possibility. We must,

according to one of |ameson's most visual figures, develop new sensory organs
that can enlarge our imaginative capacity for taking in the sublime-unrepre-

suBLlME LOGIC OF THE REAL

r,vhen,

to elaborate further on Lvi-Strauss's example, I cannot reconcile or

my social relationships as both a capitalist (infrastructural relation-

eiae

a Christian (superstructural relationship)-then that resolution must

ship) and
about figurally, through art and narrative. But as suggested earlier, this

s6e

is not internal to me as an individual but is made possible by the

available to me. In this way the text draws "the
objecfve figural apparatuses

process

sentable-space of late capitalism.

its immanent "subtext," not as something external

Real" into its own texture as
but
as Jameson notes' "something borne within and
or extrinsic to the text

SYMBOLIC ACTS AND CHARACTER SYSTEMS

vehiculated by the text itself, interiorized in its very

operation must work"' (8r)'
the stuff and the raw material on which the textual
not exist outside the text
This is not to suggest, however, that "the Real" does
figurative
but rather that it only becomes available to thought through the

fabric in order to provide

Figuration, in addition to its other functions I have been outlining here, is a

mode of collective storytelling. Jameson's version of this figurative process
depends on an elaboration of, among other things, Lvi-Strauss's analysis of

mhical thought. Lvi-Strauss, Iameson writes, views myth

process as follows
process of working it up into the text. Jameson describes this

ilThe PoliticIJnconscious: "The literarywork or cultural object,

as

though for

as "a narrative

at one and
the first time, brings into being that very situation to which it is also,

process whereby tribal society seeks an imaginary solution, a resolution by way

the same time a reaction. It articulates its own situation and textualizes it'
thereby encouraging and perpetuating the illusion that the situation itself did
not exist before it, that there is nothing but a text" (Sz). He then elaborates on

of figural thinking, to a real social contradiction between infrastructure and

superstructure" (rrzZZ).For jameson, however, this narrative process is found
not only in tribal societies but in all societies. Here Jameson explictly connects
his theory of "narrative" as a socially symbolic act, or the political unconscious,
and the process of figuration.. Iameson writes that "in the absence of any

genuine historical and social self-consciousness, what has been conceptually

unformulizable becomes the raw material and the occasion for a very different
type of mental operation, namely what must be called the work of figuration"
(ibid.' 93). we can rarely if ever form a concept of our own social contradiction;
we can only think this contradiction as a conceptual antinomy or binary op-

position. That is, the social appears as simply the illogical, the historically
contingent problem ofsocial relations appearing as an eternally necessary problem ofthought. Lvi-strauss, for example, argues that the social contradiction
between, as Jameson puts it, "the tribal infrastructure of the kinship system, and
the religious or cosmological systems" of that same culture seem irreconcilable

this point:

It

seems useful, therefore, to distinguish,

from this ultimate subtext which is

the place of social contradiction,a secondary one, which is more properly the
place of ideology, and which takes the form of the apori or The antinomy:

What can in the former be resolved only through the intervention of praxis
here comes before the purely contemplative mind as logical scandal or double bind, the unthinkable and the conceptually paradoxical, that which cannot be unknotted by the operation of pure thought, and which must there-

whole more properly narrative apparatus-the text itself-to

square its circles and to dispel, through narrative movement, its intolerable

fore generate

closure. (82-8)

systems. "Myth" for Lvi-strauss is precisely this resolution-through-figuration.

Figuration, then, is an operation of "squaring circles." What this means is

that the binary opposition of the two antinomic terms produces an intolerable
closure, a vicious circularity of moving from one term to the other, treating
each in its turn as the privileged term in the opposition. This back-and-forth
movement gestures toward a resolution to this aporia by suggesting that one or

If it can't be thought, it must be figured.

when a culture does not offer a social resolution to its contradictions-

the other of the terms can finally achieve some privileged status, but this
resolution only occurs through the mediation of a third term. Figuration pro-

with one another (zz-z\), and only achieve symbolic resolution once posed in
terms of the oedipus myth. oedipus, then, becomes the figure who reconciles
on

purely symbolic level the contradiction here between kinship and religious

742

THE ABYs5 OF REPRESENTATION

t4?

Third term

SUBLIME LOGIC OF THE REAL

(mediation)

.-s

-S

Figure z

vides such a resolution by projecting this third term that, in good Hegelian
fashion, at once preserves, cancels, and sublates the two initial terms. It is

this

third term that squares the circle. For fameson, this process of figuration lies
the base ofthe political unconscious.

so far this conception of the figurative process remains at the simple triadic
level of Lvi-Strauss's mythical thought. But what interests Jameson is the
way
in which A. I. Greimas's semiotic rectangle fleshes out this triad into a fullblown semiotic system exhausting all of the rogically possible permutations

of

the initial binary terms. If the first of the two terms is referred to as s, then
its
opposite would be -s, with the third term figuring as their resolution (figure
z).

The fleshing out of all the logical permutations resurting from, and the ways

out of the "interminable closure" of this initial opposition would then

be

represented as shown in figure 3.

The relationship between s and -s, as we have seen, is that of opposition
between two positive yet irreconcilable terms. The relationship between s and

5, on the other hand, is that of negation;5 is simply not-s. The same is true
as
well of the relationship between -s and -5. And finall the relationship between

'5 and 5 is again simple opposition, this time between the semiotic system,s two
negative points. Greimas refers to what I call position c, the resolution
of the
initial contraries, as the complex position, while what I refer to as position N is
the neutral position, the emptying out or neutrarization of the value of the

initial binary. As we shall see, the complex resolution is the process that Lvistrauss refers to as myth, while the neutral position is the process that Louis
Marin refers to as Utopic discourse.
one place where Jameson illustrates the reraticlnships between these terms is

in his discussion of Honor de Balzac's La vieilte Filte. pointing out that Balzac,s
tale is a sexual farce, Jameson goes on to say that such a narrative centers
on a
sexual secret and, consequentl initiates the search for this secret
information.

By initiating this activity through which the secret slowly unfolds, through
which the unknown manifest content translates into the known, the

sexual

farce also sets itself up to be read as allegor another structure

demanding

Figure

decoding. Once the transcoding structure is set in motion, in other words,

it does not simply end at the level of sheer content but rather projects this
rnystery-structure outward. What is signifrcant here, then, is that the allegorical
anscoding or hermeneutical activity of the reader doesn't end once the sexual
mystery is solved; as |ameson puts it, "The function of the sexual comedy is to
direct our reading attention toward the relationship between sexual potency

and class affiliation'(pu 16). Once this happens, the story then revolves
around the struggle for power over France as figured by Mademoiselle Cormont hand in marriage. Having identified the dominant binary opposition
structuring Balzac's political allegory to belhe Ancien Rgimeversus Napoleonic
Energy,lameson expands on the initial binary terms in frgure 4.
In this way Iameson is able to chart out what he refers to as Balzac's "character system"; each synthesis is embodied in the narrative by a particular character who displays the particular traits of that synthesis. The Count de Troisville,

for example, embodies The contrary (positive yet opposing) relationship between the characteristics of both the Ancien Rgime (standing for organic
society and legitimacy) and Napoleonic Energy. So the Count de Tioisville-the
ideal yet unattainable (because married) husband prospect for Mademoiselle
Cormon, the novel's center-embodies the complex resolution of these two
positive poles. Further, the Ancien Rgime is also in a contrdictory relationship
with the Bourgeoisie (not-organic, not-legitimate); and Energy in turn is in a

contradictory relationship with Culture (not-activit or passivity). The character who embodies the synthesis of Energy and the Bourgeoisie, we can see, is
Du Bosquier, while the Chevalier synthesizes the traits of legitimacy and pas-

sivity. Finall the neutral resolution is embodied by Athanase, the passive and
powerless romantic poet. The figurative contradiction to the Count, then, is

,i
144

t1

THE ABYSS OF REPRESENTATION

tAS

Count de Troisville

SUBLIME LoGIC oF THE REAL

rather

as

the structure ofa particular political fantas as the mapping ofthat

particular "libidinal apparatus" in which Balzac political thinking becomes

ancien rgime

invested-it being understood that we are not here distinguishing between

'_'.''

Chevalier..---

fantasy and some objective reality onto which

Du Bosquier

it would be projected, but

rather, with Deleuze or with |. F. []ean-Franois] Lyotard, asserting such

fantasy or protonarrative structure as the vehicle for our experience of the

cultur

real. (eu48)

The libidinal apparatus, as Jameson uses the term, is

Athanase

vehicle for ideological

investment. But this point should be taken in its broadest application, in such a
way that the "ideological" does not figure as false consciousness, as a mode of

Figure 4

romanticism, which here functions

as

the neutralization or emptying out of the

positive values embodied by the Count.

One form figuration takes, then, is the elaboration of a character system

such as the above. The key point is that faced with the contradiction between

tradition and dlnamism that marks ear bourgeois society in post-Napoleonic

France, Balzac writes a farce that serves as an apparatus for playing out the

of his social desire. This apparatus-the sexual

farce-is not somehow unique to Balzac, as though it expresses his personal
fantasmatic manifestations

psychic dynamics. Rather, it is a social form from the start that offers Balzac a

certain figurative response to the social contradiction he faces-the coexistence

oflate feudal and early capitalist social relations.

LIBIDINAL APPARATUS

Confronted with the intolerable aporia of binary logic, the political uncon-

of
as a "libidinal

scious, as illustrated in the above example from Balzac, thus projects a system

symbolic resolutions to this aporia. Jameson refers to this system

apparatus," which can be seen operating in La Vieille FiIIe:

which the political imagination

Lewis in Fables of Aggression: Wyndhm Lewis, the Modernist s Fscist. There

he discusses what he calls the transition from national allegory to libidinal

in Lewis's work, "national allegory" does not

simply operate through the representative national figure-the "German" or
the "Italian," whose traits we know ahead of time precisely because they are
essential to German-ness or ltalian-ness as such. Lewis's allegorical system is
apparatus. Jameson claims that

not essential and predictable but relational and contingent; unpredictable momentary alliances crop up between normally antagonistic national flgures. For
fameson, such a state of affairs produces a dialectically new and more complicated allegorical system. "Under these circumstances, allegory ceases to be that

lLa Vieille Fille is informed by thel binary opposition between aristocratic

elegance and Napoleonic energy,

thinking that can be avoided, any more than the unconscious can be avoided.
We all "experience the real," as Jameson puts it, by means of these libidinal
apparatuses. There is no outside of ideology in this sense; in fact, this very
metaphor of ideology as a space or terrain that could be thought in terms of
inside and outside is misleading to the degree that it keeps us from seeing
ideolog like the Lacanian unconscious, not as something internal to individual consciousness as such but as external, as the effect ofcertain social practices
that are displayed b staged b condensed in libidinal apparatuses.
lameson develops this term most extensively in his discussion of Wlmdham

seeks des-

static decipherment of one-to-one correspondences with which it is still so

often identified and opens up that specific and uniquely allegorical space be-

pechanr_q generating all. the syntheses logically available to it, while

tween signifier and signifred" (re 9o-9r). What we get, then, in Lewis's work is
a new allegory that frgures "the ultimate conflictual 'truth' of the sheer, mobile,

remaining locked into the terms of the original double bind. Such a vision is
not to be taken as the logical articulation ofall the political positions or ideo-

shifting relationality of national types and of the older nation-states which are
their content," as Jameson puts it (9r). To understand the transition from such a

logical possibilities objectively present in the situation ofthe Restoration, but

national allegorical system to the libidinal apparatus, one passage from Fables of

perately to transcend, generating the contradictories of each of these terms,

146

THE ABYSS OF REPRESENTATION

t47

is worth quoting at length, especially so because of 11.

different
the
elements involved in this figurational process of
of
presentation
the libidinal apparatus:
Aggression

in particular

We have not done with national allegory . . . when we have specified the
conditions for its emergence as a narrative system. Once in place, such a
system has a kind of objectivity about

it, and wins a semiautonomy

as

cultural structure which can then know an unforeseeable history in its own
right, as an object cut adrift from its originating situation and "freed', for the
alienation of a host of quite different signifying functions and uses, whose
content rushes in to invest it. This is the point, then, at which we mark the
transformation of national allegory into what

J. F.

Lyotard has carled a tibidi-

suBLrME LOGIC OF THE REAL

As we have seen, the first stage is the production of the allegorical narrative
system-in this case, the national allegory. That allegorical system itself becomes objectified, seen no longer as a peculiar historical event but as a transitory structure that in stage three, achieves the semiautonomous status that can

it to be cut adrift, isolated from its historical

context to operate
new,
alien
demands.
Once alienated, emptied out, and crystallized
accordingto
structure,
the
national
allegory has become a libidinal apparaafree-floating
as
then cause

tus, available for investments of foreign content-a content that then retroacdvely reinvests and overdetermines the national characters that had set such a

structure in motion to begin with. In Lewis's Thrr, the empty structure of the
nadonal allegory-composed by the figures of Tarr and Kreisler-is invested

floating and inchoate fantasy-both ideological and psychoanalic-can

with the content ofthe psyche, Trr figuring as the ego and Kreisler as the id.
The transition from national allegory to libidinal apparatus in this case, then,

suddenly crystallize, andnd the articulated figuration essential for its social

occurs in the shift from the equation chracter

nal apparatus,4-n

empt

actuality and psychic

f-o-1q

or structural matrix in which a charge of free_

"feiuit

ntional type B

A:

stock

nationl type BTo stock

psychic mechnism C. The extended equation would then be

allegory is then immediately seized on by hitherto unformulable impulses

which invest its structural positions and, transforming the whole narrative
system into a virtual allegory ofthe fragmented psyche itself, now reach back

id. Germanness no longer points strictly to its initial

content (national characteristic) but has become an objective and alienated
structure now invested with new content (psychic mechanism).
We can also see this process at work in fameson's discussion of Freud's

to overdetermine the resonance ofthis now increasinglylayered text. (95)

development of allegorical models:

In the

case

of Tarr, we will suggest that the empty matrix of national

keisler

German

various elements are separated out from this rather dense passage,
three major stages in this transformation from narrative allegorical structure to

The history of Freud's own work may be invoked as testimony for such

libidinal apparatus can be isolated: objectification, alienation, and investment.

These stages themselves can be elaborated as a series of seven steps in this

the Freudian models allegories, they can also be shown to depend for their

If the

process of figuration and reinvestment or overdetermination: not only are

frgural expression on elaborate and preexisting representations of the topography of the city and the dynamics of the political state. This urban and
civil "apparatus"-often loosely referred to as a Freudian "metaphor"- is

process of flgural transformation:

emergence of allegory as narrative system;

the objective precondition for Freud's representation of the psyche, and is

objectification of system;

thus at one with the very "discovery" of the unconscious itself, which may

semiautonomization as cultural structure;

alienation by cutting adrift;

crystallization;

investment; and

overdetermination.

now be seen to have presupposed the objective development-the industrial-

stratification and class polarization, the complex division

of labor-of the late Victorian city. Nor is the post-War transformation of
izaTion, the social

this properly Freudian "libidinal apparatus" into the "energy model" of the

rivalry of Eros and Thanatos without striking similarities to the "break" in

Lewis'work which is contemporaneous with it. ( SS)
Iameson examines Freud's "sexual apparatus" in terms conforming to the
stages

have just isolated. Freud's

turn to the sexual

as the allegory through