The Politica Unconscious

I should begin by saying that I found this book pretty unuseful. As Jameson himself admits, a great deal of the content is very technical. Having not read any Lukacs and very little Althusser, I found the complicated discussion of their two positions meaningless. And I felt less confused - as if Jameson was saying something important but I didn't understand it - than apathetic. He did not seem to be working in an area that seemed fertile.

This may be because Jameson, along with most Marxists, partakes in the Marxist myth which I find absolutely laughable: "In the spirit of a more authentic dialectical tradition, Marxism is here conceived as that 'untranscendable horizon' that subsumes such apparently antagonist or incommensurable critical operations, assigning them an undoubted sectoral validity within itself, and thus at once canceling and preserving them" (10). I couldn't agree with Jameson more that the various modes he's discussing - psychoanalytic, ethical, myth critical, structural, etc - deserve to be treated this way. They should all be canceled as all-inclusive systems but preserved for their own provisional value. But the fact that he accepts the Marxist orthodoxy that Marxism itself is outside of ideology and can be the Ur-system that preserves and cancels the others is just silly. Perhaps he explains why this is so the technical portion that I did not understand.

Besides this pre-eminence of Marxism, Jameson's main goal seems to be to historicize everything. - to turn all of interpretation into the retelling "within the unity of a single great collective story" (19). He seems to be rescuing interpretation from uselessness by hooking it up to a Marxist narrative of history, in which each text has something to tell us about it's historical time and place, which in turn will inform us about the march of history, which we hope to maneuver in favor of fairer economic distribution.

He also seems to side with Western Marxism in tossing aside Vulgar Marxism and accepting a more complex relationship between the base and the superstructure, one which requires an immanent critique rather than mere economic manipulation (see p. 36).

Outside of that big picture dismissal, I did find a few interesting things. First, Jameson argues that Anti-Oedipus is doing a similar sort of thing - Deleuze and Guattari are eliminating the mommy-daddy-me triangle in favor of a "reassert[ion of] the specificity of the political content of everyday life" (22). He ties this in with the Deleuzian command to ignore what a text means and look instead at how a text works. This seems to me to be an endorsement of Deleuze's pragmatism, although the rhizomes of Deleuze, as an alternative to the Freudian triangle, strike me as very far from Jameson's "collective story." Jameson is just reigning things in through a different, historical lens; Deleuze wants to let them all loose.

Some things that are interesting for naturalism: Jameson argues that Freud's theory of sexuality is truly just the theory of the flow of desire, but he seems critical of the fact that Freud has isolated sexuality from the rest of life, which seems to me a valid complaint (64). And he quotes Frye as saying desire is "the energy that leads human society to develop its own form" (71), which makes it sound opposed to naturalism and a good deal like Eros.

Finally, one thing that Jameson gets really, really right: "the mirage of of an utterly nontheoretical practice, is a contradiction in terms; that even the most formalizing kinds of literary or textual analysis carry a theoretical charge whose denial unmasks it as ideological" (58). Well said.