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-- concluding with the later Sartre of Search for a Method and Critique of
Dialectical Reason. Not only were these writers largely unfamiliar to most
English-language readers when Marxism and Form first appeared, but their mode
of dialectical thinking was also the very antithesis of Anglo-American empiricism.
Acutely self-reflective, deliberately anti-systematic, rigorously anti-metaphysical,
and relentlessly totalizing, dialectical criticism emerges from Jameson's book as
a radical alternative to the kind of humanistic thinking habitual to the Englishspeaking academy.
While Marxism and Form emphasizes Marxism as a manner of critical thought,
Jameson's next major work, The Political Unconscious (1981), focuses on it as
the "single great collective story" of humanity's "struggle to wrest a realm of
Freedom from a realm of Necessity." This narrative and its themes Jameson
traces in the works of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad, though they operate, he
argues, in concealed ways in every cultural artifact. To detect their presence he
proposes three distinct and successively broader strategies of interpretation,
each of which first dismantles the work's aesthetic unity and then rewrites its
contents in different ways. The narrowest of these frames is the political. Here the
individual work is reconstructed as a symbolic act that invents imaginary or
formal solutions to tensions unresolvable in its own particular historical moment.
The next level is the social, where the artifact's language and themes are
connected to the dialogue between classes, these elements now appearing as
"ideologemes" or "collective characters" in class conflict. The third and most
inclusive horizon is the mode of production, which resituates the work within its
general social formation, rereading it for the contradictory messages that arise in
it from competing economic systems.
Almost a decade before in The Prison-House of Language (1972), Jameson had
prepared the way for this scheme and its bold claim that the "political
perspective" constitutes "the absolute horizon of all reading and all
interpretation." This earlier book critiques Marxism's principal rivals -- the various
anti-historical formalisms that have dominated the humanities since the 1950s,
including Claude Lvi-Strauss's structuralism, Roland Barthes' semiotics, Michel
Foucault's post-structuralism, and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction. The
common source of all these approaches, Jameson argues, is the synchronic
paradigm of language proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1916. This
linguistic model, because it abstracts language and knowledge from temporal
By William McPheron
(c)1999, Stanford University
Fredric Jameson pages edited by William McPheron, William Saroyan Curator for
American and British Literature, Stanford University,
mcpheron@leland.stanford.edu