2993. Fredric Jameson and Film Theory

By Nassrullah Mambro, Literary Theory and Criticism Notes, August 2, 2018

Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson is among the most prominent theorists of postmodernism and one of the foremost Marxist critics of his generation. In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), film occupies a central place in his account of the formal features of postmodernism and in his analysis of the relationship of postmodern culture to the social and economic forms of “late capitalism”. In other works, such as Signatures of the Visible (1990) and The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), film is the focal point of his reflections on the fate of critical and Utopian thought in postmodern culture, and of his evaluation of the possibilities and limits of various narrative and representational forms for imagining the place of individual experience in the new global system. Much of the power of Jamesons writings on postmodernism depends on his commitment to weaving these distinct levels of analysis into a coherent whole, thereby providing a global interpretation of postmodernism as the “cultural dominant” of “late capitalist” society. Thus the significance of this project – and the legitimacy of its philosophical, aesthetic and political claims – can only be fully understood within the broader framework of Jamesons rethinking of the problem of interpreting cultural history generally, which finds its most systematic elaboration in The Political Unconscious (1981)

“Always historicize!” {ibid.: 9). In the opening pages of The Political Unconscious, Jameson identifies this as the “one absolute” imperative of dialectical thought inherited from the Marxist tradition. But this task, Jameson argues, demands more of the interpreter of cultural artefacts than a reading of the work, as in traditional literary or film history, as a reflection of its political or cultural background. For Jameson, that background is never simply given to us immediately. While historical processes are, as Jameson acknowledges, far from being reducible to the stories we might tell about them, history is nonetheless accessible to us only in so far as it has passed through a “prior (re)textualization” {ibid.: 82). To be represented, in other words, history must first be rendered representable and the stories of its individual and collective characters imagined in terms of the repertoire of narrative schemas and generic formulas, conceptual oppositions, myths and stereotypes that, together, constitute the ideological horizon of a given historical moment.

It is, Jameson argues, only in and through such forms of narrative and thought that a society can attempt to represent its underlying contradictions and antagonisms, respond to the social anxieties and collective wishes to which those contradictions and antagonisms give rise, and imagine the possibility of their resolution. But since those forms, and their traditions of reception, have evolved in response to earlier historical moments of whose ideologies and collective fantasies they still bear the traces, they must themselves inevitably be rewritten or transformed in order to address the contradictions of the present. The text thus does not so much reflect history as work on and rewrite it, negotiating the relationship between the forms of social practice and experience, with their attendant fantasies and anxieties, that constitute its historical raw material, and the repertoire of narrative and representational strategies it has inherited, along with their ideological residues. From this perspective, the task of the critic is that of reconstructing the dynamic process by which the work writes a place for itself within those overlapping histories.

Jameson offers an exemplary reconstruction of this dynamic in a brief but richly layered account of the two first films of Francis Ford Coppola‘s Godfather trilogy (1972-90) in Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture, which offers a condensed articulation of the interpretive method later elaborated in The Political Unconscious.1  Of course, as Jameson acknowledges, The Godfather can, at the most immediate level, be considered a representation of actual historical events: the bloody struggles of the five great mob families, and the extension of their reach into the worlds of legitimate business, the entertainment industry and the political power structure. But the ideological work performed by the film will not turn so much on the truth or falsehood of its account of these events considered in and of themselves as on the transformations it brings about in the forms of narrative through which the historical events in question – as well as those of the broader history for which it serves as the allegorical figure – are imagined.

Thus our first clue as to what is at stake in The Godfathers narration of the Corleone family’s history is the way that its incorporation of this “Mafia material” becomes the occasion for reinventing the genre of the “gangster film”, a genre whose transformations over the course of the century action “changing social and ideological functions” in response to “distinct historical situations” (1990: 30-31). For if, Jameson argues, the gangster film of the 1930s, responding to the moment of American New Deal populism, portrayed gangsters as “sick loners” lashing out at decent society and the “common man” and if “the post-war gangsters of the Bogart era” were loners of a different sort, imbued with a “tragic pathos” that resonated with the psychological wounds of veterans returning to confront a “petty and vindictive social order”, the narrative of the Mafia family marks a shift away from the individualism that had marked the previous history of the genre. According to Jameson,

this very distinctive narrative content – a kind of saga or family material analogous to that of the medieval chansons degeste with its recurrent episodes and legendary figures returning again and again in different perspectives and contexts – can at once be structurally differentiated from the older paradigms by its collective nature. (Ibid.: 31)

And this parallels “an evolution towards organizational themes and team narratives” (ibid.) in other subgenres (such as the western and the caper film) in the 1960s.

This shift in narrative form across generic boundaries would seem in itself to suggest, Jameson argues, a shift in the forms of social life that provide their raw material, one in which, in the age of the multinational corporation, the story of a mere individual can no longer credibly lay claim to the same significance. Coppola‘s reinvention of the myth of the Mafia – as “an organized conspiracy” (ibid.) extending its reach into all of our economic, cultural and political institutions – may be seen in this light as a mythic narrative through which this new form of social life can be represented in a form that is at once dramatic (in a way that the representation of the inner workings of a “legitimate” corporation is unlikely to be) and indirect, in so far as big business is represented here only through the displacement of its characteristics on to a Mafia family.

But if this substitution of organized crime for big business succeeds in endowing this material with the undeniable narrative fascination of the underworld and the evil that it presumably embodies, this same displacement also does the work of ideology, even, as Jameson remarks, if “organized crime has exactly the importance and influence in American life which such representations attribute to it” (ibid.: 32). For while it might be hoped that a direct representation of the dominant role of multinational corporations in our society could lead to a critique of the structures that perpetuate their dominance, the allegorical transposition of that dominance into a “myth’ of the Mafia” (ibid.: 30) encourages us to imagine the baleful effects of its invisible power as the product of a moral flaw in its perpetrators, rather than of undemocratic and exploitative social institutions themselves. The allegorical inscription of the contradictions of corporate America within the framework provided by the gangster genre (an inscription that, as we have seen, demands a reinvention of that genre) thus leads us to frame our objections to that system in the language of moral condemnation, rather than political critique. In this light, Jameson sees such films as carrying out a “strategic displacement” (ibid.: 32) of the anger that might otherwise be directed at the corporate masters of the universe – who, in fact, are pillars of the social order in its present form – on to criminal figures who appear as enemies of that order. Thus, Jameson concludes, in a historical moment where the Nixonian theme of law and order was a touchstone of the political right in America, Mafia films “project a solution to social contradictions – incorruptibility, crime fighting, and finally law-andorder itself – which is evidently a very different proposition from that diagnosis of the American misery whose prescription would be social revolution” (ibid.).

These Godfather films, like other instances of mass culture analysed by Jameson, can thus be said to fulfil the ideological function that the structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss attributed to myth in the culture of tribal societies: that of offering an imaginary resolution of real social contradictions.2 Such mass cultural myths, having tapped the affective reality of antagonism and fear generated by social relations of domination, contain them in a narrative form that, by representing the structural ills of that society as aberrations from the social order, leads us to imagine that the solution to those ills lies in the defence of that order.

But in addition to their performance of this ideological function, Jameson continues, such Mafia narratives also perform a “transcendent or Utopian function” {ibid). For in shifting the genre away from its individualist narrative schemas to the representation of the collective as such, The Godfather‘s rewriting of the gangster film incorporates the ethnic narrative of an immigrant and minority community, with its embedded memories and experiences. In the iconic wedding sequence of The Godfather (dir. Coppola, 1972), for example, Jameson observes that an “ethnic neighborhood solidarity” remains vivid and accessible to present memory in a way that the more distant memories of middle-American small-town life are not. Above all, the film brings before us the enduring image of “the Mafia family (in both senses)” (1990: 33) presided over by the patriarchal Godfather of the title. And this image, in a period in which social fragmentation is often blamed on the “deterioration of the family”, unexpectedly provides the pretext for “a desperate Utopian fantasy”, where the “ethnic group” seems “to project an image of social reintegration” no longer available in the present by resurrecting “the patriarchal and authoritarian family of the past” (ibid.: 33).

The power of such a “mass cultural artifact” (ibid.) as The Godfather, Jameson argues, thus depends first of all on its ability to serve as the means of expression for two opposing impulses at once. It must first respond to the ideological demand that the resolution of social contradictions be imagined without calling into question the underlying structures that give rise to them. But it must also, at the same time, express the ideologically inadmissible longing for another form of life, by entertaining the fantasy of a remembered or imagined collectivity beyond the contradictions of the present. Jameson s interpretation of the first Godfather film thus invites us to discern in it the overdetermined expression at once of “our deepest fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived”, and of the ideological and generic constraints that allow this “ineradicable drive towards collectivity” to be expressed only in “distorted and repressed unconscious form” (ibid.: 34). The genius of the film would seem to lie, from this perspective, in its binding of these two seemingly incompatible impulses within a single generic structure, which allows each to serve as at once the pretext for and the mask of the other.

This argument is confirmed by the unravelling of this compromise in The Godfather, Part II (dir. Coppola, 1974). For as Jameson shows, the sequels elaboration of both the Utopian and ideological narrative strands of the film beyond the generic and historical limits of their framing in the reinvented gangster film unmasks each of these constituent dimensions of the earlier film. On the one hand, it retraces the historical origins of the future Godfather s familial bonds back to the repressive feudal social relations of  pre-capitalist Sicily. On the other hand, it shows how the criminal conspiracy is gradually transformed into just the sort of capitalist enterprise of which it had been the displaced image in the first place. Having been forced to account for its history without the aid of the other, each is compelled, in the sequel, to confront as immediately historical content the contradictions that their displacement into allegorical narrative in the first film had served to transcend or contain. When, in the sequel, the family business grows into a corporate enterprise seeking foreign markets, it encounters in Cuba the same resistance confronted throughout the world by American political and economic power in the 1960s, thus allowing us to glimpse an “authentically Utopian vision of revolutionary liberation” (1990: 34). Similarly, as we move backwards to the Godfathers origins in feudal Sicily, “the degraded Utopian content of the family paradigm ultimately unmasks itself as the survival of more archaic forms of repression” (ibid.). In the sequel, both of these narratives, “freed to pursue their own inner logic to its limits, are thereby driven to the … historical boundaries of capitalism itself” (ibid.), the one resurrecting the memory of feudalism, the other conjuring up the spectre of socialist revolution.

Historical interpretation in Jameson might thus be said to pass through a series of expanding frames, each of which implies a different horizon of interpretation. On a first level, he examines the repressed collective wish or anxiety and its displaced expression through the individual works rewriting of pre-existing narrative and representational forms. When Jameson focuses in this way on the individual work in and of itself, he interprets it as a discrete “symbolic act” (1981: 76), which not only serves to textualize underlying social contradictions, but also figures, often in allegorical form, the containment, resolution or transcendence of those contradictions by the fulfilment of a collective wish. From this perspective, the task of the critic, in Jamesons view, would be to identify the content of the underlying collective wishes expressed in the work and to show through what transformations of pre-existing cultural forms such wishes achieve indirect expression.

But since the pre-existing forms of representation mobilized by the work are rich in meanings accumulated over their previous history, Jameson also maintains that the critic cannot fully grasp the meaning of the works symbolic act without reconstructing, in a broader frame, the implicit messages or presuppositions embedded in those forms themselves, which the individual work will either mobilize or suppress in making use of them in its new historical situation. This is particularly striking, as we have seen, in Coppolas rewriting of the gangster genre, which only becomes comprehensible in light of the critics reconstruction of that genres previous history. But it is also true of the pervasive motif of conspiracy cited by Jameson as providing the form of collective narrative that permits the Mafia to stand in for the corporation. This is just the sort of floating cultural trope – somewhere between an article of faith and a fantasy narrative – that Jameson calls an “ideologeme” (cf. ibid.: 87-8): part of a common stock of narrative situations, received ideas and stereotypes available for representing an invisible collective, of which the Mafia narrative is (along with the “paranoid” narratives discussed below) just one of many variants. In interpreting such pre-existing forms, the critic reconstructs the historical progression of a genre from one historical formation to the next, or maps out the alternative uses of the same ideologeme within a single moment. But here, as in the interpretation of the individual work as a symbolic act, the task of historical interpretation is to uncover the meanings alluded to in the text, in a succession of nested readings that add, with each new historical layer, another dimension of meaning.

It is on the basis of this greater “semantic richness” of his multi-levelled historical approach – and not on the basis of a claim to the superiority of Marxism as a political orientation or “master narrative” of history – that Jameson argues for “the priority of a Marxian interpretive framework” (ibid.: 10). But there is also a sense in which the very success of The Godfather, in carrying out its ideological and Utopian vocations by weaving together elements drawn from multiple layers of history, requires the partial repression of that history. The success of the film as a projection of collective fantasy depends on a historical and geographical structure that allows for allusions to the Mafias past in Sicilian feudalism and its future as big business without explicitly representing the dynamics of either of these moments. The full meaning of that fantasy must remain outside the frame – in the films “political unconscious”. That is why history re-enters the scene in Jamesons account of The Godfather, Part II as an unmasking: as a return of the repressed. In rendering explicit what was only evoked in the first, the second film unties the interwoven strands that gave the first its formal and ideological coherence. For that coherence turned on the exclusion of anything that might lead the viewer to question its illusory superimposition of the collective forms of the feudal family on the entirely different anti-individualism of corporations of the post-war period.

An essential strategy of Marxist critique – which Jameson refers to as an “imperative to totalize” (ibid:. 53) – is to move beyond the generic, historical or spatial limits of a given narrative or interpretive frame to make visible the texts repression of that inadmissible material which must be kept “beyond its boundaries” (ibid.) in order for the world it represents to maintain its narrative and ideological coherence. This ultimate form of reframing emphasizes not the richness of a texts multiple historical meanings, but the limits of what Jameson calls its “strategies of containment” (ibid.: 53): the ways in which a narrative or ideology gives the impression of being selfsufficient in its own terms, while repressing what cannot be thought without calling its underlying assumptions and narrative forms into question.

Fredric Jameson

Nowhere is the tension between the semantic richness of a works intertextual allusions, and the limits imposed on its frame by aesthetic form and ideology, more pronounced than in Jamesons analysis of postmodernism. No moment of cultural history would seem to be richer in its repetitions of multiple styles, languages, genres and cultural forms than is postmodernity. One of the key features of postmodernism is the “universal practice” of “pastiche” (1991:16), in which the work, having abandoned any claim to the authority of a unique style or vision valorized by modernism, carries out a seemingly random cannibalization of the styles of a decontextualized past. Thus, in Jim Jarmusch‘s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), to cite a more recent example, the contemporary language of hip hop coexists with the comically rendered Godfather-style gangster saga, alongside the otherwise now dead languages of the medieval samurai and the Betty Boop cartoon.

In postmodern pastiche, styles and images from every region and period coexist in the same space. But, as Jameson insists, this “omnivorous … historicism” (1991: 18), far from representing a heightened consciousness of history, is the expression of “an age that has forgotten how to think historically …” (ibid.: ix). For the historical past is not evoked in postmodern historicism as a different form of life or experience. It is accessible only at a second degree, through a recycling of its previous representations. Thus nostalgia films such as American Graffiti (dir. George Lucas, 1973) and Chinatown (dir. Roman Polanski, 1974), rather than representing the 1930s or the 1950s as historical contents, recycle through stylistic connotation the stereotypical concept of an eternal “‘1930s-ness’ or I950s-ness'” (ibid.: 9).

For Jameson, the nostalgia film assimilates the styles of the past to its own “culture of the image” (ibid.: 6), foreclosing any relationship to the past in its difference from the present, and signalling a “crisis” of “historicity” (ibid.: 25) in postmodernism generally. This crisis is paralleled, at the level of individual narrative, by a fragmented and random ordering of events that permeates narrative in a culture of the image “dominated by space and spatial logic” (ibid). Thus Pulp Fiction (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 1994), released a few years after the publication of Jamesons Postmodernism, can shuffle its images and their associated narrative events in any order, since that order is governed by no causal or experiential logic beyond the intensity of these images as such and the inter textual relations between them.

Postmodernism brings such formal features together in a single constellation as a “periodizing” concept (1991: 3), in which, Jameson argues, it replaces modernism as the “cultural dominant” (ibid.: 4) of the new phase of multinational or “late capitalism” which emerged after the Second World War. Jameson foregrounds two transformations that differentiate late capitalism from capitalisms previous forms. First, the distinction between the economic and the cultural considered as separate spheres – an opposition presupposed by the modernist notion of culture as a site of critique of, or compensation for, the dissatisfactions of modernity – is increasingly worn away. With the increasing centrality of images in consumer culture, both in the marketing of commodities and as commodities themselves, the economic becomes increasingly cultural. At the same time, the production of aesthetic objects themselves becomes increasingly integrated into commodity production. As a result, the content of social experience increasingly becomes indistinguishable from the cultural forms in which it is represented, and the forms of cultural representation themselves become the social reality they represent. In this situation, the only realism possible would seem to be that of citation: realism as pastiche.

Secondly, the global expansion of capital finally eradicates the last “precapitalist enclaves” (ibid.: 49) beyond the reach of capitalist modernity and, with them, the last forms of life and experience untouched by the market and instrumental reason. With this disappearance of the pre-modern (together with the “colonizing” of the unconscious by media images; ibid.), one could no longer credibly appeal to the Primitive, the Unconscious or Being as the ontological ground of a Utopian or mythic alternative to the degraded experiences of modern life. All that will remain of the “authentic” experiences evoked by modernism will be the dead languages in which they were expressed. Meanwhile, this assimilation of its former peripheries into an expanded capitalist system exceeds the capacity of existing narrative and representational forms for situating the interactions of individual and collective actors within a now transnational social space. Postmodernism is thus born of the historical impossibility of reviving realism or modernism in late capitalism, even as the forms of postmodernisms predecessors persist, as so many dead languages within it.

Jamesons analysis of postmodernism as the cultural dominant of late capitalism encompasses the widest historical perspective discussed in The Political Unconscious: the ideology of cultural forms, in their dialectical relationship to the history of social formations. But in his most extended engagement with postmodern film, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson offers analyses of how individual films textualize postmodernity s contradictions within the limits imposed by that historical conjuncture, while expressing its collective wishes and anxieties. The first section, “Totality as Conspiracy” examines North American conspiracy film (including such films as Three Days of the Condor [dir. Sydney Pollack, 1975], The Parallax View [dir. Alan J. Pakula, 1974], and Videodrome [dir. David Cronenberg, 1983]) as a form of “cognitive mapping”: as “an unconscious, collective effort at trying to figure out where we are and what landscapes and forces confront us” in postmodernity (1992:3). At one level, these films address a problem of textualization that Jameson explores elsewhere: how to concretely imagine “the essential impersonality and post-individualistic structure” through which political and economic power is exercised in an age of corporate dominance “while still operating among real people, in the tangible necessities of daily life” (1990:48). In conspiracy film, this problem is managed by a continual shifting of gears between inherited narrative forms (such as those of the detective or espionage novel) where characters must be individuals, and the hidden conspiracy as an invisible collective character.

But such conspiracy narratives also elaborate an “unconscious meditation” {ibid,: 28), in the form of a myth or collective fantasy, on the fears and hopes aroused by a post-individual society. In Cronenberg s Videodrome (1983), sexually charged media images, through a hallucination-inducing technology, “colonize” the psychic interior of its anti-hero, Max, inducing him to play the roles, at various points, of investigator, victim and even perpetrator, of two conspiracies: a right-wing conspiracy of corporate elites and a millenarian Utopian conspiracy. As Jameson points out, the dizzying rotation of Max’s roles allows Videodrome to explore all the possibilities of paranoia as an ideologeme representing, through the “narrative category of the individual character” (1992: 34), collective processes incommensurate with individual experience. Meanwhile, the struggle between these two conspiracies, considered as collective characters, also provides a narrative apparatus in which opposing judgements concerning the ultimate nature of those social processes – as the Utopian promise of a transfigured community or as an updated fascism – are juxtaposed. Videodrome, Jameson argues, does not ask us to decide between these visions of a post-individual world, but shows that they are “intimately intertwined” {ibid.: 28) in the same collective fantasy. The alternation between the two thus does not so much offer a mythic resolution of these contradictory aspects of postmodernity as lay bare before our eyes the narrative mechanisms of ideology itself.

But if such conspiracy narratives are to be understood as unconscious attempts to imagine the global totality from its North American “centre”, in “Circumnavigations”, the second half of The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson explores how film-makers from Europe and the global South, who must think their distance from that centre, elaborate  the most inventive strategies of resistance to postmodernity s social and cultural forms. In Mababangong bangungot (The perfumed nightmare; 1977), Kidlat Tahimik explores the relationship between his alter ego s life in a village in the Philippines and his implicit faith in the metropole s promise of technological and economic development. Kidlats persona is a village jeepney driver. (Jeepneys are reconstructed and elaborately decorated surplus jeeps used for public transportation.) But he is also an avid listener to Voice of America, and founder of the Wernher von Braun Fan Club. Drawn to the European metropole by his dreams of the “developed” world, he is, ultimately, disillusioned with the ideology of development.

But Tahimiks critique of capitalist “overdevelopment” in this film – staged in a series of sketches and gags – cannot lay claim to some site of absolute otherness outside the global system. When, at the films climax, Kidlat incongruously conjures up a great wind blowing against the empire, he cites, as Jameson acknowledges, a mythic language, expressing forces of revolt latent in the land. But, as Jameson insists, Tahimik foregrounds the incongruous and “unearned” (1992: 208) character of this mythic ending, which the film has not prepared by grounding it either in a natural or traditional world beyond the reach of Western technology, nor in any plausible alternative to global capitalism. Similarly, when Tahimik allegorizes Kidlats situation on the periphery of the global system (as in Kidlats series of attempts to pull a jeepney – first a tiny toy jeepney, then a larger one, ending, comically, with the massive thing itself- across the bridge leading from his village to the “developed” world beyond), he artfully deploys Brechtian effects of distanciation by adopting an aesthetic of formal “regression”. This aesthetic, deftly staging the apparent unsophistication of a home movie or a child’s game, is nonetheless valorized throughout the film as a “Utopian escape from commercial reification” (ibid.: 204).

Thus, when Tahimik takes up devices inherited from modernism, it is not in an attempt to invent an authentic alternative to postmodernism, but as part of a strategy of dislocation, where the oppositions of the modern to the natural or traditional, and of development to underdevelopment, are called into question. An analogous movement takes place thematically, as Kidlat leads us to rethink the opposition of periphery to centre in the world system. On his visit to metropolitan Paris, what most disillusions him is the destruction, in the name of development, of traditional neighbourhoods for the benefit of the corporate chains. Thus, through this witness from the periphery, we rediscover, in the metropole itself, the same sort of capitalist onslaught on pre-existing forms of life that might be denounced, in anti-imperialist terms, in the periphery.

Meanwhile, it is in the periphery that we discover a site that undoes, in a different way, the opposition of old to new, of invention to backwardness, of development to underdevelopment. This is the factory in which the jeepneys are reconstructed out of the scavenged parts of military machinery, to be refunctioned to a new purpose, but also individually and idiosyncratically painted, and thus transformed into aesthetic objects in their own right. Here, Jameson suggests, is a Utopian image of “a space of human labor” which, without being traditional, is far from “the disembodied machinic forces of late capitalist high technology” a labour process that “does not know the structural oppression of the assembly line or Taylorization”, but “is permanently provisional, thereby liberating its subjects from the tyrannies of form and of the pre-programmed”: a form of work where, crucially, “aesthetics and production” are one (ibid.: 210). But Tahimiks film, Jameson argues, is itself a jeepney of this sort, a vehicle for the Utopian reimagination of the postmodern practices of cannibalization and pastiche as seen from the periphery, but also for a reordering of the conceptual map of postmodernity, which “blasts apart the sterile opposition between the old and the new, the traditional and the Western, and allows its former components themselves to be cannibalized and conceptually resoldered” (ibid.: 209-10).

It is with this exemplary work of cognitive mapping – which, by widening the frame of postmodernism beyond the geographical limits of the metropole, shows us another way of imagining the interpenetration of the cultural and the economic – that Jameson concludes his most extended reflection on postmodern film. Tahimiks film does not move beyond the postmodern present to invoke another world beyond it. Nor does it, like a conspiracy film, dream of a commanding point of view from above, that would encompass the totality of the world system in a single gaze. But it produces, by the strategic displacement of postmodernity’s geographical and conceptual space, a dialectical image of the limits we confront in this historical conjuncture, alongside its possibilities for resistance and invention. In this, it provides a fitting allegory for the work of Fredric Jameson himself.

NOTES 1. This 1979 essay appears in Jameson’s first book on film, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1990), 9-34.

2. In his discussion of this aspect of myth in Levi-Strauss, in which the mythic text is read as “a symbolic act, whereby real social contradictions, insurmountable in their own terms,” are resolved “in the aesthetic realm” (F. Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [London: Methuen, 1981], 77-80, esp. 79), Jameson foregrounds the anthropologist’s analysis of the facial decorations of Caduveo women in Tristes Tropiques, ]. Russell (trans.) (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 173-80, as well as his classic essay, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology, C. Jacobson & B. Grundfest Schoepf (trans.) (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 206-31.

Source: Colman, F. (2014). Film, theory and philosophy. London: Routledge.

2314. Where Do Postmodernists Come From?

By Terry Eagelton, Monthly Review, Jully-August 1995

Terry Eagelton

Abstract

A comprehensive assessment of postmodernism and its impact on culture is presented. Postmodernism should not be viewed as a reaction to the defeat of Communism--it is a response to the "success" of capitalism.

*     *     *

Imagine a radical movement that had suffered an emphatic defeat. So emphatic, in fact, that it seemed unlikely to resurface for the length of a lifetime, if at all. As time wore on, the beliefs of this movement might begin to seem less false or ineffectual than simply irrelevant. For its opponents, it would be less a matter of hotly contesting these doctrines than of contemplating them with something of the mild antiquarian interest one might have previously reserved for Ptolemaic cosmology or the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas. Radicals might come to find themselves less overwhelmed or out-argued than simply washed up, speaking a language so quaintly out of tune with their era that, as with the language of Platonism or courtly love, nobody even bothered any longer to ask whether it was true. What would be the likely response of the left to such a dire condition?

Many, no doubt, would drift either cynically or sincerely to the right, regretting their earlier views as infantile idealism. Others might keep the faith purely out of habit, anxiety, or nostalgia, clinging to an imaginary identity and risking the neurosis that that may bring. A small clutch of left triumphalists, incurably hopeful, would no doubt carry on detecting the stirrings of the revolution in the faintest flicker of militancy. In others, the radical impulse would persist, but would be forced to migrate elsewhere. One can imagine that the ruling assumption of this period would be that the system was, at least for the moment, unbreachable; and a great many of the left's conclusions could be seen to flow from this glum supposition. One might expect, for example, that there would be an upsurge of interest in the margins and crevices of the system--in those ambiguous, indeterminate places where its power seemed less secure. If the system could not be breached, one might at least look to those forces which might momentarily transgress, subvert, or give it the slip. There would be, one might predict, much celebration of the marginal--but this would be partly making a virtue out of necessity, since the left would itself have been rudely displaced from the mainstream, and might thus come, conveniently enough, to suspect all talk of centrality as suspect. At its crudest, this cult of marginality would come down to a simpleminded assumption that minorities were positive and majorities oppressive. Just how minorities like fascist groups, Ulster Unionists, or the international bourgeoisie fitted into this picture would not be entirely clear. Nor is it obvious how such a position could cope with a previously marginal movement--the ANC, for example--becoming politically dominant, given its formalist prejudice that dominance was undesirable as such. The historical basis for this way of thinking would be the fact that political movements that were at once mass, central, and creative were by and large no longer in business. Indeed, the idea of a movement that was at once central and subversive would now appear something of a contradiction in terms. It would therefore seem natural to demonize the mass, dominant, and consensual, and romanticize whatever happened to deviate from them. It would be, above all, the attitude of those younger dissidents who had nothing much, politically speaking, to remember, who had no actual memory or experience of mass radical politics, but a good deal of experience of drearily oppressive majorities.

If the system really did seem to have canceled all opposition to itself, then it would not be hard to generalize from this to the vaguely anarchistic belief that system is oppressive as such. Since there were almost no examples of attractive political systems around, the claim would seem distinctly plausible. The only genuine criticism could be one launched from outside the system altogether; and one would expect, therefore, a certain fetishizing of "otherness" in such a period. There would be enormous interest in anything that seemed alien, deviant, exotic, unincorporable, all the way from aardvarks to Alpha Centauri, a passion for whatever gave us a tantalizing glimpse of something beyond the logic of the system altogether. But this romantic ultra-leftism would coexist, curiously enough, with a brittle pessimism--for the fact is that if the system is all-powerful, then there can be by definition nothing beyond it, any more than there can be anything beyond the infinite curvature of cosmic space. If there were something outside the system, then it would be entirely unknowable and thus incapable of saving us; but if we could draw it into the orbit of the system, so that it could gain some effective foothold there, its otherness would be instantly contaminated and its subversive power would thus dwindle to nothing. Whatever negates the system in theory would thus be logically incapable of doing so in practice. Anything we can understand can by definition not be radical, since it must be within the system itself; but anything which escapes the system could be heard by us as no more than a mysterious murmur.

Such thinking has abandoned the whole notion of a system which is internally contradictory--which has that installed at its heart which can potentially undo it. Instead, it thinks in the rigid oppositions of "inside" and "outside," where to be on the inside is to be complicit and to be on the outside is to be impotent. The typical style of thought of such a period, then, might be described as libertarian pessimism--libertarian, because one would not have given up on the dream of something quite other than what we have; pessimism, because one would be much too bleakly conscious of the omnipotence of law and power to believe that such a dream could ever be realized. If one still believed in subversion, but not in the existence of any flesh-and-blood agents of it, then it might be possible to imagine that the system in some way subverted itself, deconstructed its own logic, which would then allow you to combine a certain radicalism with a certain skepticism.

If the system is everywhere, then it would seem, like the Almighty himself, to be visible at no particular point; and it would therefore become possible to believe, paradoxically enough, that whatever was out there was not in fact a system at all. It is only a short step from claiming that the system is too complex to be represented to declaring that it does not exist. In the period we are imagining, then, some would no doubt be found clamoring against what they saw as the tyranny of a real social totality, whereas others would be busy deconstructing the whole idea of totality and claiming that it existed only in our minds. It would not be hard to see this as, at least in part, a compensation in theory for the fact that the social totality was proving difficult to crack in practice. If no very ambitious form of political action seems for the moment possible, if so-called micropolitics seem the order of the day, it is always tempting to convert this necessity into a virtue--to console oneself with the thought that one's political limitations have a kind of objective ground in reality, in the fact that social "totality" is in any case just an illusion. ("Metaphysical" illusion makes your position sound rather more imposing.) It does not matter if there is no political agent at hand to transform the whole, because there is in fact no whole to be transformed. It is as though, having mislaid the breadknife, one declares the loaf to be already sliced. But totality might also seem something of an illusion because there would be no very obvious political agent for whom society might present itself as a totality. There are those who need to grasp how it stands with them in order to be free, and who find that they can do this only by grasping something of the overall structure with which their own immediate situation intersects. Local and universal are not, here, simple opposites or theoretical options, as they might be for those intellectuals who prefer to think big and those more modest academics who like to keep it concrete. But if some of those traditional political agents are in trouble, then so will be the concept of social totality, since it is those agents' need of it that gives it its force.

Grasping a complex totality involves some rigorous analysis; so it is not surprising that such strenuously systematic thought should be out of fashion, dismissed as phallic, scientistic, or what have you, in the sort of period we are imagining. When there is nothing in particular in it for you to find out how you stand--if you are a professor in Ithaca or Irvine, for example--you can afford to be ambiguous, elusive, deliciously indeterminate. You are also quite likely, in such circumstances, to wax idealist-though in some suitably new-fangled rather than tediously old-fashioned sense. For one primary way in which we know the world is, of course, through practice; and if any very ambitious practice is denied us, it will not be long before we catch ourselves wondering whether there is anything out there at all. One would expect, then, that in such an era a belief in reality as something that resists us ("History is what hurts,"as Fredric Jameson has put it) will give way to a belief in the "constructed" nature of the world. This, in turn, would no doubt go hand in hand with a full-blooded "culturalism" which underestimated what men and women had in common as material human creatures, and suspected all talk of nature as an insidious mystification. It would tend not to realize that such culturalism is just as reductive as, say, economism or biologism. Cognitive and realist accounts of human consciousness would yield ground to various kinds of pragmatism and relativism, party because there didn't any longer seem much politically at stake in knowing how it stood with you. Everything would become an interpretation, including that statement itself. And what would also gradually implode, along with reasonably certain knowledge, would be the idea of a human subject "centered" and unified enough to take significant action. For such significant action would now seem in short supply; and the result, once more, would be to make a virtue out of necessity by singing the praises of the diffuse, decentered, schizoid human subject--a subject who might well not be "together" enough to topple a bottle off a wall, et alone bring down the sate, but who could nevertheless be presented as hair-raisingly avant garde in contrast to the smugly centered subjects of an older, more classical phase of capitalism. To put it another way: the subject as producer (coherent, disciplined, self-determining) would have yielded ground to the subject as consumer (mobile, ephemeral, constituted by insatiable desire).

If the "left" orthodoxies of such a period were pragmatist, relativist, pluralistic, deconstructive, then one might well see such thought-forms as dangerously radical. For does not capitalism need sure foundations, stableidentities, absolute authority, metaphysical certainties, in order to survive And wouldn't the kind of thought we are imagining put the skids under all this The answer, feebly enough, is both yes and no. It is true that capitalism, so far anyway, has felt the need to underpin its authority with unimpeachable moral foundations. Look, for example, at the remarkable tenacity of religious belief in North America. On the other hand, look at the British, who are a notably godless bunch. No British politician could cause anything other than acute embarrassment by invoking the Supreme Being in public, and the British talk much less about metaphysical abstractions like Britain than those in the United States do about something called the United States. It is not clear, in other words, exactly how much metaphysical talk the advanced capitalist system really requires; and it is certainly true that its relentlessly secularizing, rationalizing operations threaten to undercut its own metaphysical claims. It is clear, however, that without pragmatism and plurality the system could not survive at all. Difference, "hybridity," heterogeneity, restless mobility are native to the capitalist mode of production, and thus by no means inherently radical phenomena. So if these ways of thinking put the skids under the system at one level, they reproduce its logic at another.

If an oppressive system seems to regulate everything, then one will naturally look around for some enclave of which this is less true—some place where a degree of freedom or randomness or pleasure still precariously survives. Perhaps you might call this desire, or discourse, or the body, or the unconscious. One might predict in this period a quickening of interest in psychoanalsis--for psychoanalysis is not only the thinking person's sensationalism, blending intellectual rigor with the most lurid materials, but it exudes a general exciting air of radicalism without being particularly so politically. If the more abstract questions of state, mode of production, and civil society seems for the moment too hard to resolve, then one might shift one's political attention to something more intimate and immediate, more living and fleshly, like them body. Conference papers entitled "Putting the Anus Back into Coriolanus"would attract eager crowds who had never heard of the bourgeoisie but who knew all about buggery.

This state of affairs would no doubt be particularly marked in those societies which in any case lacked strong socialist traditions; indeed, one could imagine much of the style of thought in question, for all its suspiciousness of the universal, as no more than a spurious universalizing of such specific political conditions. Such a concern with bodiliness and sexuality would represent, one imagines, an enormous political deepening and enrichment, at the same time as it would signify a thoroughgoing displacement. And no doubt just the same could be said if one were to witness an increasing obsession with language and culture--topics where the intellectual is in any case more likely to feel at home than in the realm of material production.

One might expect that some, true to the pessimism of the period, would stress how discourses are policed, regulated, heavy with power, while others would proclaim in more libertarian spirit how the thrills and spills of the signifier can give the slip to the system. Either way, one would no doubt witness an immense linguistic inflation, as what appeared no longer conceivable in political reality was still just about possible in the areas of discourse or signs or textuality. The freedom of text or language would come to compensate for the unfreedom of the system as a whole. There would still be a kind of utopian vision, but its name now would be increasingly poetry. And it would even be possible to imagine, in an "extremist" variant of this style of thought, that the future was here and now--that utopia had already arrived in the shape of the pleasurable intensities, multiple selfhoods, and exhilarating exchanges of the marketplace and the shopping mall. History would then most certainly have come to an end--an end already implicit in the blocking of radical political action. For if no such collective action seemed generally possible, then history would indeed appear as random and directionless, and to claim that there was no longer any "grand narrative' would be among other things a way of saying that we no longer knew how to construct one effectively in these conditions. For this kind of thought, history would have ended because freedom would finally have been achieved; for Marxism, the achievement of freedom would be the beginning of history and the end of all we have known to date: those boring prehistorical grand narratives which are really just the same old recycled story of scarcity, suffering, and struggle.

Even the densest reader, may by now have guessed that the condition I am describing is not entirely hypothetical. Why should we be invited to imagine such a situation when it is staring us in the face? Is anything to be gained by this tiresome rhetorical ploy? Only, I think, a kind of thought experiment by which, putting actual history in brackets for the moment, we can come to recognize that almost every central feature of postmodern theory can be deduced, read off as it were, from the assumption of a major political defeat. It is as though, confronted with the fact of postmodern culture, we could work our way backward from it until we arrived at the defeat in question. (Whether it has been, in reality, as absolute and definitive a defeat as the existence of postmodernism seems to imply is not at issue here.) This whole speculative enterprise has, of course, the advantage of hindsight, and should not be taken entirely seriously; nobody could actually read off deconstruction or political correctness or Pulp Fiction from the winding down of working-class militancy or of national liberation movements. But if postmodernism is not an inevitable outcome of such a political history, it is, for all that, a logical one--just as Act V of King Lear is not dictated by the four preceding acts, but is not just an accident either.

But isn't this just the kind of historically reductionist explanation that postmodernism itself finds most distasteful No, because there is no suggestion here that postmodernism is only the consequence of a political failure. It is hard to see how Madonna or mock-Gothic buildings or the fiction of Umberto Eco are the offspring of such a repulse, though some ingenious cultural commentator will probably try it on. Postmodernism has many sources--modernism proper, so-called postindustrialism, the emergence of vital new political forces, the recrudescence of the cultural avant garde, the penetration of cultural life by the commodity form, the dwindling of an "autonomous" space for art, the exhaustion of certain classical bourgeois ideologies, and so on. But whatever else it is, it is the child of a political rebuff. Its raising of issues of gender and ethnicity have no doubt permanently breached the ideological enclosure of the white male Western left, about whom the most that can be said is that at least we're not dead, and at the same time taken for granted a rampantly culturalist discourse which belongs precisely to that corner of the globe. These valuable preoccupations have also often enough shown a signal indifference to that power which is the invisible color of daily life, which determines our existence--sometimes literally so--in almost every quarter, which decides in large measure the destiny of nations and the internecine conflicts between them. It is as though every other form of oppressive power can be readily debated, but not the one which so often sets the long-term agenda for them or is at the very least implicated with them at their core. The power of capital is now so wearily familiar that even large sectors of the left have succeeded in naturalizing it, taking it for granted as an immutable structure. One would need, for an apt analogy, to imagine a defeated right wing eagerly discussing the monarchy, the family, and the death of courtesy, while maintaining a stiff silence on what after all most viscerally engages them, the rights of property, since these had been so thoroughly expropriated that it seemed merely academicist to wish them back.

Postmodernist culture has produced a rich, bold, exhilarating body of work across the whole span of the arts, and has generated more than its fair share of execrable kitsch. It has pulled the rug out from beneath a number of complacent certainties, prised open some paranoid totalities, tainted some jealously guarded purities, bent some oppressive norms, and shaken some rather solid-looking foundations. It has also tended to surrender to a politically paralyzing skepticism, a flashy populism, a full-blooded moral relativism, and a brand of sophism for which, since all conventions are arbitrary anyway, might as well conform to those of the Free World. In pulling the rug out from under the certainties of its political opponents, this postmodern culture has often enough pulled it out from under itself too, leaving itself with no more reason why we should resist fascism than the feebly pragmatic plea that fascism is not the way we do things in Sussex or Sacramento. It has brought low the intimidating austerity of high culture with its playful, parodic spirit, and in thus imitating the commodity form has succeeded in reinforcing the crippling austerities of the marketplace. It has released the power of the local, the vernacular, the regional, at the same time as it has contributed to making the globe a more drearily uniform place. Its nervousness in the face of concepts like truth has alarmed the bishops and charmed the business executives. It consistently denies the possibility of describing how the world is, and just as consistently finds itself doing so. It is full of universal moral

prescriptions--plurality is preferable to singularity, difference to identity, otherness to sameness--and denounces all such universalism as oppressive. It dreams of a human being set free from law and constraint, gliding ambiguously from one "subject-position" to another, and sees the human subject as no more than the determined effect of cultural forces. It believes in style and pleasure, and commonly churns out texts that might have been composed by, as well as on, a computer.

All of this, however, belongs to a dialectical assessment of postmodernism--and postmodernism itself insists that dialectical thought can be consigned to the metaphysical junkheap. It is here, perhaps, that it differs most deeply from Marxism. Marxists are supposed to be "doctrinaire" thinkers, yet recognize that there can be no authentic socialism without the rich heritage of enlightened bourgeois liberalism. Postmodernists are self-declared devotees of pluralism, mutability, open-endedness, yet are constantly to be caught demonizing humanism, liberalism, the Enlightenment, the centered subject, and the rest. But bourgeois Enlightenment is like social class: in order to get rid of it, you must first work your way through it. It is on this point more than any other that Marxism and postmodernism are perhaps most profoundly at odds.

Postmodernism has a quick eye for irony; but there is one irony above all that seems to have escaped it. Just at the time when it was denouncing the idea of revolution as "metaphysical," scorning the notion of a “collective subject," and insisting on the dangers of totality, revolution broke out where everyone had least expected it, as a collective subject of some kind struck against the "total system" of the postcapitalist bureaucracies. The current results of that transformation are not, of course, ones that a socialist can contemplate with any equanimity; but the dramatic upheavals in Eastern Europe give the lie to many of the fashionable assumptions ofnthe postmodern West. In a powerfully estranging gesture, they expose postmodernism as the ideology of a peculiarly jaded, defeatist wing of the liberal-capitalist intelligentsia, which has mistaken its own very local difficulties for a universal human condition in exactly the manner of the universalist ideologies it denounces. But, though postmodernism may be thus usefully "estranged" by what has happened to the east of it, it was certainly not caused by that collapse. Postmodernism is less a reaction to the defeat of Communism (which it anyway long predated), than--at least in its more reactionary versions--a response to the "success" of capitalism.

So here is another irony. In the crisis-ridden 1990s, it seems more than a little odd to treat capitalist success as if it were a general and immutable law of nature. If that is not just the kind of unhistorical absolutizing that postmodernists so fiercely reject in others, it is hard to see what is.

Terry Eagleton is Wharton Professor of English Literature at Oxford. His most recent book is Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture.