REVIEWS

The Origins of Postmodernity

PERRY ANDERSON
London: Verso, 1998

The Jamesonian Unconscious:

The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory
CLINT BURNHAM
Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 1995

The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson:

Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique
STEVEN HELMLING
New York: State University of New York Press, 2001

Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism

SEAN HOMER
Cambridge: Polity, 1998

Fredric Jameson
ADAM ROBERTS
London: Routledge, 2000

The Marxian Hermeneutics of Fredric Jameson

CHRISTOPHER WISE
New York: Peter Lang, 1995

Reviewed by IAN BUCHANAN

Reading Jameson Dogmatically

From the title, it might be thought that this review is going to complain that the
books surveyed here are not sufŽciently critical, that they are somehow too dogmatic
– meaning ‘slavish’ – in their approach. But, in fact, my complaint is going to be
the very opposite: in my view, these six commentaries on Fredric Jameson’s work
are not sufŽciently dogmatic in attitude. The critical and the dogmatic are not the
structural opposites they may seem to be; indeed, properly speaking, these terms

Historical Materialism, volume 10:3 (223–243)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002
Also available online – www.brill.nl
224 • Ian Buchanan

are incommensurable, belonging as they do to unrelated paradigms of reading. For

instance, it makes no sense to speak of a critical reading of the Bible, it can only be
read dogmatically, because the only thing that counts is the truth; likewise, it makes
no sense to speak of a dogmatic reading of a newspaper, it can only be read critically
because it does not pretend to offer truth, rather it claims to furnish facts. Things
are not always so black and white, the proper approach to be taken is not always so
obviously signalled as it is in the two examples given. Theoretical works such as
Jameson’s offer an admixture of facts and truths which perhaps suggests that one’s
style of reading should be similarly heterogeneous, a little dogmatic and a little
critical, or perhaps a little dogmatic and a lot critical, or whatever other permutation
one might come up with. But, of course, such an option is not available: that they
are mutually exclusive means one has to decide between reading dogmatically or
critically.
Today, however, the active need to make this choice has been all but forgotten,
so redundant has it become. The practical effect of the current hegemony of critical
theory is that the decision to read critically has the quality of a ‘forced choice’ (to use
Zizek’s useful term). One is free to choose to read either dogmatically or critically,
but only insofar as it is understood that the dogmatic is the proscribed negative of
the critical and not an afŽrmative option in its own right. Yet, as anyone with even a
passing uency in Hegelese could see, the very constancy implicit in this singular
choice is, in its own way, dogmatic. Hence the necessity of Adorno’s attempt to cre-
ate a kind of negative dialectics capable of the self-examination needed to interrogate
the inner dogma the critical approach more or less helplessly produces insofar as
it intransigently refuses all other options. Ironically, without this self-reection, it is
critical theory that winds up being dogmatic in the ‘bad’ sense it attributes to the
term, because it is blind to its own doctrine. But what is at stake here is not so much
the heroic rescue of some long-lost or repressed alternative way of reading as the
recognition that it never in fact disappeared. This leaves us free to ‘negate the
negation’ that the dogmatic has long endured and explore its newly perceived
positive dimension.
The difference between these two modes of reading, as Zizek has explained with
respect to Marx and Freud (and Lacan), is this: whereas the critical reading permits
one to falsify the master discourse, the dogmatic reading does not. Since

Marx and Freud opened up a new theoretical Želd which sets the very
criteria of veracity, their words cannot be put to the test the same way
one is allowed to question the statements of their followers; if there is
something to be refuted in their texts, this [sic] are simple statements
which precede the ‘epistemological break’, i.e., which do not belong under
 Reviews • 225

the Želd opened up by the founder’s discovery (Freud’s writing prior to

the discovery of the unconscious for example).1

In effect, the work of Marx and Freud is sacred in the sense of being the horizon of
truth itself. Consequently, developing their work further effectively means bringing
to light insights ‘the founders “produced without knowing what they produced”’.2
In order that this not be mistaken as simply an instance of Zizek’s idiosyncratically
perverse approach to all things, let me just mention that Gilles Deleuze takes
precisely the same position as Zizek on this issue: ‘You have to take the work as a
whole, to try and follow rather than judge it, see where it branches out in different
directions, where it gets bogged down, moves forward, makes a breakthrough;
you have to accept it, welcome it, as a whole. Otherwise you just won’t understand it
at all.’3 Both Deleuze and Zizek are of the view that the dogmatic approach is more
productive than the critical approach.
To read Jameson dogmatically would be to read him as a founder of discourse
(to use Foucault’s very useful description of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche), that is,
someone whose thought comes to us in the form of a system which we can inhabit
and deploy for our own perhaps quite different purposes. Contrary to what is pop-
ularly believed about the dogmatic view, it is very far from being blinkered and
accommodating: in fact, insofar as its basic demand is that a system of thought be
capable of accommodating every possible question, it is utterly ruthless – very few
attempts to produce a system of thought can satisfy this particular imperative.
No one has yet approached Jameson’s work in this way and, for that reason, his
work remains, to my mind at least, both incompletely understood and woefully
under-utilised. Jameson is presented time and again as an authoritative reader and
interpreter of others, but never as an originator of a system of thought or concepts
in his own right. Sadly, not one of these six books reviewed here make any attempt
to alter this peculiar pattern. One reason for this, I suspect, is that it has not been
sufŽciently recognised that sorting out theories is, in fact, a theoretical problem and
not a self-evident procedure functionally equivalent to sorting apples and pears. But
this is not the only reason. As I read them, each of these commentaries is awed – in
their very make-up – because of their (never avowed) unwillingness to suppose, let
alone confront, that which is essentially Jamesonian.

1
Zizek 2001, p. 100.
2
Ibid.
3
Deleuze 1995, p. 85 (my emphasis). In this respect, it is worth adding Deleuze and Guattari’s
infamous slogan ‘don’t ask what it means, ask how it works’ is also precisely dogmatic in its
orientation.
226 • Ian Buchanan

Symptomatically, Jameson’s own solution to the problem of sorting out theories,

the largely underrated notion of the metacommentary, easily one his of most important
contributions to contemporary critical theory, rates scarcely a footnote in Žve out of
these six books – the exception is Sean Homer who devotes a couple of pages to it,
but nevertheless fails to grasp it as a concept that solves a very particular problem
(pp. 31–5). For Homer, metacommentary is a foretaste of (but, strangely, not a theoretical
precursor to) the hermeneutic mechanism outlined in The Political Unconscious. Burnham
states that it is ‘the cornerstone to the architecture of Jameson’s technique (or perhaps,
to postmodernise the metaphor, the gift-shop of his Frank Gehry-designed hotel
of techniques)’ (p. 108), which, if anything, trivialises it. Cornerstone can usually
be taken to mean that which holds a structure together, which is precisely how I
would characterise it, but to equate it with a gift shop is to read it as ornamental,
that is, structurally inessential. For the rest, evidently, it is entirely nugatory, just
another speed-bump on the road to nowhere. I put it like this, because a concept like
metacommentary could only fail to be recognised as central to the Jamesonian
enterprise to the extent that the existence of a Jamesonian enterprise had itself gone
unrecognised.
But, here, the problem is even more rudimentary; searching for the distinctly
Jamesonian does not even seem to be on anyone’s speciŽc agenda. One could blame
this on the contemporary distaste for totalisation, I suppose, since it is impossible to
properly adduce originality in the absence of this prior gesture; but, surely, the last
place one would expect this particular species of intellectual malaise to surface is in
a book on Jameson! My point is that to fail to see that there is some distinctly Jamesonian
way of doing things, a Jameson-system in effect, is to deprive his work of direction
and purpose, and thus transform it into what Foucault derisively called commentary
(the structural opposite of what a founder of discourse produces). This failing, too,
means that Jameson’s originality could not even be detected, much less presented,
except in the sheerly local terms of being an original reader of this or that theorist or
theory.
On the evidence of these six books, there are an abundance of schemes one
can resort to in order to avoid getting too close to what I suggest it is instructive to
call ‘the Jamesonian Thing’. The most persistent – and, as I noted above, the most
surprising – is the failure to totalise, where totalising would mean, as a minimum,
attempting to apprehend Jameson’s work ‘as a whole’; more generally, it would mean
determining the relation between this properly abstracted whole and the historical
milieu in which it was produced. So pervasive is this failing, as it were, it can serve
duty here as our touchstone, as that conspicuously present absence (like the hole in
the ag that serves as Zizek’s touchstone in Tarrying with the Negative) which connects
 Reviews • 227

these six attempts to portray Jameson, an absence that is conspicuous by virtue of the
fact that it is not present in the object of the studies. Jameson decidedly does totalise!
I might also have used the notion of style as my touchstone here, because it is the
subject of almost obsessive interest in each of these commentaries (even the usually
level-headed Anderson is moved to make some rather breathless assertions on this
score – ‘magnesium ares in a night sky’ being among the most colourful) but, as I
will try to show, my impression is that style is deployed as a ‘dishonoured repre-
sentative’ (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s useful notion): that is, it is execrated in order
to paper over a more shocking abyss, namely the failure to totalise. We might go so
far as to say style is the alibi for getting Jameson wrong.
The failure to totalise has two main inections, which we might proŽtably categorise
as ‘weak’ and ‘strong’: the ‘weak’ inection is the one which takes the position that
Jameson’s work is too vast to be effectively mapped (the claim that his work is
‘too difŽcult’ to be mapped is a subset of this category, but of an utterly inferior kind);
the ‘strong’ inection is the one which takes the position that Jameson is wrong-
headed in his insistence on this strategy (the claim that totalisation is strictly speaking
impossible in the postmodern era could be classed as a subset of this category, but of
a superior variety). It is only Perry Anderson who escapes indictment on this charge,
though it must be said that his species of totalising, which is not Jameson’s, is not
without its problems, as I will show presently. In every other case, though, even in
those instances when totalisation is not rejected outright (as in Burnham, where it
is nevertheless severely compromised and curtailed), totalisation proves to be the
central impediment to a clear understanding of Jameson’s work. Evidently, there
is something excessive about this concept that even admiring commentators (it
may even be what these commentators admire in his work!) simply cannot swallow,
consequently, it sticks in their craw like some indigestible stone and far from pro-
ducing a little pearl of wisdom, turns septic and corrupts the whole.
To begin with the exception, I would say the problem with Anderson’s form of
totalising is that it seems to be striving toward some kind of an alchemy which would
see Jameson’s theory turned into a work of art. Here, his claim that Charles Olson’s
poem The KingŽshers ‘could virtually be read as a brevet for Jameson’s achievement’
(p. 75) has to be taken at its word, the implication being that Jameson’s work achieves
with theory what Olson had already accomplished with poetry two decades earlier.
The Žnal page of Anderson’s book, which dissolves Jameson into a poem thus has
the same sinister and retroactive implications as the stunning last page of Doctorow’s
Loon Lake. One realises, perhaps only then, the full implication of the fact that the title
of Anderson’s book, The Origins of Postmodernity, makes no mention of its ostensible
object, namely Fredric Jameson: this is not a book about Jameson, it is a book about
228 • Ian Buchanan

the fate of one word, ‘postmodernity’, which for a complicated set of reasons, expertly
explicated by Anderson, has come to be inextricably connected to Jameson’s name.4
His boldest claim, then, is that Jameson’s notion of postmodernism subsumes all the
previous versions and transforms it into a leftist concept of great power. ‘Henceforward,
one great vision commands the Želd, setting the terms of theoretical opposition in the
most striking way imaginable’ (p. 66).
Here, we Žnally get a glimpse of the true point of this book – in demonstrating
that, thanks to Jameson, postmodernism is really a leftist term, Anderson’s most fun-
damental goal is realised: the redemption of the Left itself.

This has been a discursive victory gained against all the political odds,
in a period of neo-liberal hegemony when every familiar landmark of the
Left appeared to sink beneath the waves of a tidal reaction. It was won,
undoubtedly, because the cognitive mapping of the contemporary world
it offered caught so unforgettably – at once lyrically and caustically –
the imaginative structures and lived experience of the time, and their
boundary conditions. (p. 66)

As I said, it is not really a book about Jameson, so much as a determinate placing of

Jameson within intellectual history, a case of giving credit where credit is due, you
might say, but not an authentic attempt at exegesis. Anderson’s book is an example
of a false or perverted totalisation: it identiŽes Jameson so closely with (but) one of
his conceptual inventions, it turns that concept into a metonym for Jameson’s work
‘as a whole’.
As Deleuze says, we only ever get the philosophy we deserve because our answers
are only as good as our questions. If we want to specify where Anderson goes wrong
and botches his totalisation, we have to examine his key questions. Straightaway,
it is obvious that Anderson did not ever set himself the task of adducing Jameson’s
project (to use Sartre’s term for what I have referred to above as the Jamesonian
Thing): his only question is what enabled Jameson to produce so complete a theory
of postmodernism and deliver it ‘virtually at a stroke’ (p. 51)? Anderson gives the
presentation of this concept the status of what Badiou calls a ‘Truth-Event’ – in other
words, the fact that Anderson emphasises so strongly the inaugural scene of this
concept, Jameson’s 1982 lecture ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ given at

4
From this perspective, the extremely interesting and detailed history of this incredibly
freighted term – postmodernism – functions like a vortex: it swallows Jameson whole. Anderson’s
claim, his gambit, is that it is only against this background that ‘the peculiar stamp of Jameson’s
contribution emerge[s] in full relief’ (p. vii). Doubtless this is true, but that nevertheless reduces
Jameson’s work to the status of a footnote, albeit a bloated one, in the history of some other
thing.
 Reviews • 229

the Whitney Museum for Contemporary Arts, is in itself noteworthy.5 In its obsessive
repetition, it perhaps betrays that Anderson is himself investing heavily in this moment,
indeed in this notion of postmodernism, which lends weight to my claim that his
ultimate purpose is soteriological (pp. 47–55).
Foucault may have thought the twentieth century might one day be known as
Deleuzian; but if Anderson has anything to do with it, it will be known as Jamesonian.
The retroactive effect of this hypostatisation is clear. As I have complained already,
what it does is subordinate Jameson to this one concept. Through this particular
optic, it looks as if Jameson’s career was initially a kind of fumbling around until this
concept was invented and, then, a long series of justiŽcations and exploitations of it
afterwards. There is, of course, more than a grain of truth in this picture: for it can
readily enough be shown that Jameson has always been working on producing some
concept adequate to the representational demands of our age; but that is not all he
has worked on. The bigger problem with this depiction of Jameson as hero of the
Left is that it effectively transforms Jameson’s work into a metonym for the Left in
general, making it a model and prototype for things to come and thereby, ‘at a stroke’,
neutralising its agonistic force.
Given all this hyperbole, Anderson’s critique of Jameson, placed at the end of the
book, has the slap-in-the-face effect of a bubble burst. One feels that it was all a lie,
that Jameson never really was that great thing Anderson made him out to be because
his work was always riven by a fault line, his failure to deliver a fully worked out
political platform to go along with his aesthetic one. For Anderson, Jameson’s
comparative neglect of Gramsci – practically the only Marxist of consequence Jameson
has not treated at length (though one could add Lefebvre’s name to this list too, since
Jameson acknowledges a debt to him, but has not produced an extended essay on his
work to match those he has produced on the others he lists as among his teachers,
including Lukács, Benjamin, Sartre and Barthes) – is instructive because it points to
an entire domain of work in the Marxist canon which Jameson has, for the most part,
either overlooked or deliberately bypassed. In this latter case, his neglect can perhaps
be read more strongly as a consigning to the dustbin of this body of work. Here, we
get a glimpse of what is at stake for Anderson in writing this book, because his
response is: ‘Who can say that his intuition [is] wrong?’ (p. 131). In other words, the
slap in the face is not merely that Jameson’s work is beset by a deep-seated fault, but
that, inasmuch as Jameson represents the best face of Marxism today, leftist thinking
in general is similarly beset.

5
It is perhaps worth noting, in this respect, that, according to Jameson himself, this was
not the Žrst presentation of this paper. In a private conversation, he told me that, so far as he
could remember, before this Whitney talk Anderson emphasises, he had already presented it at
a conference in Germany. This does not belie Anderson’s presentation of it as an ‘inaugural’.
230 • Ian Buchanan

Like Anderson, though somewhat more soberly, Sean Homer justiŽes his mono-
graph on Jameson by stipulating him as saviour of the Left.

Jameson’s oeuvre presents one of the most sustained and unequivocal

arguments for Marxism’s continuing relevance to the Želd of cultural
politics today. His achievement is once again to remind us that the much
heralded ‘death of Marxism’ is somewhat premature. (p. 6)

What sets Homer’s book apart is the fact that it is the only one in the strong category
of rejecting the very enterprise of totalisation. Unfortunately, his rationale for doing
so actually stems more from the weak category; that is to say, he rejects Jameson’s
notion of totalisation because he himself is unable to perform it with similar or even
comparable adroitness. The book is badly marred by an utterly wrong-headed cru-
sade against totalisation, which, given how consistently it misrecognises totalisation’s
goals as its faults, can only be described as a case of tilting at windmills. It does not
even have the dignity of a mad chase à la Ahab, because Homer’s white whale does
not exist; it is quite simply a Žgment of his own devising.
Nowhere is this Quixotic impulse more glaring than in the following passage: ‘The
proposition that modernism and postmodernism are distinct in their social position
and function facilitates an acute analysis of postmodern culture but at the same time,
I contend, leads to an overly homogeneous theory’ (p. 127). In other words, on this
view, the very moment that totalisation – that is, postmodernism, which many
forget is precisely an attempt at totalisation, irrespective of who uses it – realises its
purpose and renders possible a certain ‘acute analysis’, it somehow cancels out these
very gains by virtue of enabling this ‘acute analysis’. Homer ’s point, I think, is the
quite reasonable one that we have to be prudent in our usage of metanarratives
because they can blind us to essential details, or, just as signiŽcantly, lead us to
misperceive them as something they are not. This reading is correlated by Homer ’s
oddly indignant assertion that, contrary to Jameson’s own view of things, post-
modernism is not a global cultural dominant (p. 111). I am not referring here to
Homer’s quibbling hair-splitting over whether this is the third or fourth machine age,
since he himself admits that it does nothing to discredit Jameson if this is in fact the
fourth age and not, as he claimed, the third. Rather, I am referring to the claim that
postmodernism is strictly a Western phenomenon; because the implication here, which
needs to be set right, is that Jameson has somehow neglected the plight of the Third
World precisely by emphasising a phenomenon from which it would seem excluded.
In a sense, this critique is right, albeit for the wrong reasons. That it is right, or at
least contains a grain or two of truth, is borne out by Jameson’s recent uptake of the
term ‘globalisation’, and his subsequent down-playing (if not outright abandonment)
of ‘postmodernism’. Jameson theorises globalisation precisely as Americanisation (the
 Reviews • 231

American way of life being the US’s most potent export, in Jameson’s view). 6 The
standard critique of his notion of postmodernism – that it is exclusively an American
experience (which is something Jameson always acknowledged in his formulation,
and use of it, anyway) – is thus turned around in Hegelian fashion and put to good
use. For it is precisely the implications of its American origins that need to be faced
up to. Homer ’s critique is wrong, though, inasmuch as it reasons that the exclusion
of the Third World from postmodernism means that it is not the global dominant
Jameson says it is. As Jameson argues in his work on globalisation, postmodernism
is global just because one can no longer opt out. Simply put, there is no way for the
poor nations to alter their economic conditions on their own: de-linking is not a option;
indeed, it would in fact impoverish them further (which should not be taken to
mean that any linkage which is provided, via the IMF etc., is in itself ‘positive’).
Therefore, postmodernism, fully understood, means precisely coming to grips with
the deplorable existence of the excluded as the price paid by the poorer nations for
the lifestyle enjoyed by the richer ones, which, obviously enough, disavow this cost
at every opportunity.
The point not to be missed here (as Zizek would put it) – the one which Homer,
in fact, misses – is that it is only from this totalised perspective that the full plight
of the Third World can, in fact, be represented and understood. Since one can
only specify the Third World as ‘the excluded’ from a global perspective, the aim of
theory should be to attain precisely this perspective, yet it is this very viewpoint that
Homer would cancel out. Effectively, though, what he would stamp out in Jameson’s
work is that which has earned him the title of most important cultural critic writing
in English today (p. 1); or, to put it another way, the very reason Jameson is, for
Homer, worth writing a book about is what must be the most determinedly contained.
Indeed, because of the exceedingly odd and contradictory way he deals with it, I am
compelled to conclude that the notion of totalisation is somehow a cathected one for
Homer. For instance, one reads a few pages on from the complaint that Jameson’s
notion of postmodernism is overly homogeneous the exact opposite complaint:
now his theory is too heterogeneous because it adopts only a very select part of
Lefebvre’s theorisation of space and not the whole ediŽce tout court (pp. 142–6). There
is something of the order of the ‘missed encounter ’ here: both extreme misreadings
can be interpreted as ways of avoiding the Real Jameson, which would then be located
in the so-called ‘absent centre’ of his book.
If one takes Homer at his word, then Jameson (however impossibly) is either too
homogeneous or too heterogeneous. A properly homogeneous theory would, of

6
Cf. Jameson 1998; Jameson 2000.
232 • Ian Buchanan

course, erase all difference between itself and its other, which Jameson’s plainly does
not do; whereas a completely heterogeneous one would be an exercise in solipsism,
which Jameson’s can hardly be accused of being. Nevertheless, Homer ’s critical
strategy is to oscillate between these two extremes: he taxes Jameson with being
overly homogeneous here, before turning around and, almost in the same breath,
taxing him with being too heterogeneous – not elsewhere, but in the same place.
For instance, he says, ‘Jameson’s reading is at once too selective and too generalised’
(p. 164). The Žrst error here is to think that these are opposite processes; the second,
and more important, error is to see them as needless excesses. In fact, one can only
generalise by being selective, by Žnding the one thing capable of embodying the
whole; and, by the same token, the process of selectivity itself only becomes meaningful
against the background of a comprehensive generalisation. In other words, Jameson’s
normal procedure is depicted as excessive through a misprision of its constitutive
elements (generalisation and selection) as homogenising and heterogenising. That his
own reading of Jameson is similarly wrought by generalisation and selection seems
to have escaped his notice.
On the evidence of Homer ’s book and the next one to be considered here, Adam
Roberts’s, which is similarly designed for undergraduate use, one has to say that
Jameson’s oeuvre frankly does not lend itself it to this kind of reduction. Or, at least,
one would say this if one believed the object can be blamed for the poor quality of
the commentary, as Roberts seems to think is the case. Consequently, I am afraid to
have to say that this book must be placed in a weaker subset of the weak category.
It has to be said, too, that it inspires no conŽdence when an author takes great pains
to stress how difŽcult their topic is. One understands that this is meant as an ironic
gesture which will soon enough be proven unfounded: the topic will in the end show
itself susceptible to analysis, but only after one has located the source of difŽculty,
hypostatised it and thereby cleared it away. The gesture thus creates the academic
writing’s equivalent of suspense. In Roberts’s case, though, there is no such moment
of overcoming.
To begin with, Roberts botches his totalisation of Jameson’s oeuvre by deciding to
exclude any consideration of his book on Sartre. His rationale is that the focus of his
study is Jameson’s key ideas, and, though he does not say as much, one has to assume
that this means the Sartre book contributed no such ideas in his view. However, it is
not this exclusion by itself that makes this a genuine botch – though, to my mind,
it is sufŽcient – but the perverse (by which I mean self-contradictory) way in which
it is prefaced by a discussion of the pivotal inuence of Sartre on Jameson (p. 3).
Not only that: it contradicts his own methodological premise, stated a few pages
later, that the only way to clarify key ideas is to situate them in the context in which
they were produced (a Sartrean procedure Jameson himself makes extensive
 Reviews • 233

use of!), by which he means tracing the intellectual lineage of Jameson’s ideas
(p. 5). This being the case, how could Jameson’s very Žrst book, his PhD no less,
plausibly be ignored? This standpoint is so ill-conceived that I am sure I do not
even need to enumerate key ideas of Jameson’s that owe their beginning s in
Sartre to point out its wrong-headedness. Just for the record, though, I will offer up
one such key idea – I would have thought an unignorable one – taken from that book:
style. The irony here is not merely that the very difŽculty Roberts has with Jameson’s
work is attributed to his reputedly difŽcult style; nor that this very difŽculty, if that
is what it is, is justiŽed in advance by this theorisation of style; but the fact that in
this very discussion of style, Roberts may well have found the vocabulary he
obviously needed to dissolve precisely this obstacle to his understanding.
Speaking of the concept of the political unconscious, Roberts boldly declares that
‘the reader will look in vain for any deŽnition of this presumably central concept
in Jameson’s book, which may or may not be seen as a good thing’ (p. 74). The
glib, but not altogether inaccurate reply, would be that The Political Unconscious taken
as a whole, is the deŽnition of this concept – a very precise deŽnition, to be sure,
encompassing a panoply of nuances and permutations, but containing nothing
inessential or extraneous. A more exact reply would point out that Jameson describes
the political unconscious as a doctrine (hence the unfashionable appropriateness
of reading it in a dogmatic fashion); it is not a thing, as such, which can be deŽned,
but, rather, a model of and for a speciŽc type of action, of a determinate hermeneutic
variety. And that doctrine is very precisely one of metacommentary – thus, if one
wanted to cite a deŽnition of the political unconscious, one could scarcely do better
than to quote the following:

Interpretation is here construed as an essential allegorical act, which

consists in rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive
master code. The identiŽcation of the latter will then lead to an evaluation
of such codes or, in other words, of the ‘methods’ or approaches current in
American literary and cultural study. Their juxtaposition with a dialectical
or totalizing, properly Marxist ideal of understa nding will be used
to demonstrate the structural limitations of the other interpretive codes,
and in particular to show the ‘local’ ways in which they construct their
objects of study and the ‘strategies of containment’ whereby they are able
to project the illusion that their readings are somehow complete and
self-sufŽcient.7

7
Jameson 1981, p. 10.
234 • Ian Buchanan

However, the truly damning matter, I feel, is the fact that, in Roberts’s own book, the
reader looks in vain for any deŽnition of this undoubtedly central concept. That is to
say, even if it were true that Jameson nowhere deŽnes his notion of ‘the political
unconscious’, then would it not be precisely the job of the exegetical commentary to
compensate this lack via interpretation?
I suspect that it is true that Jameson’s work lends itself very poorly to the kinds of
reductive demands that textbooks like those in the Routledge Critical Thinkers series
requires; thus Roberts may be forgiven for his blunt-edged treatment of the key ideas
he set himself the task of extracting. But I do not believe that all that is objectionable
in this book is attributable to the inhospitable nature of the textbook form. Haste has
also played a not inconsiderable hand – a fact that impresses itself nowhere more
forcefully than in the slipshod way in which facts are dealt with. For instance, the
director of The Perfumed Nightmare (the subject of a chapter in The Geopolitical Aesthetic),
Kidlat Tahimik, is interchangeably described as Filipino (p. 143) and Indonesian
(p. 150); Walter Benjamin’s date of birth oscillates between 1892 (p. 15) and 1882
(p. 27); the date of publication of The Political Unconscious shifts between 1980
(p. 15) and 1981 (p. 2); the date of publication of The Geopolitical Aesthetic is similarly
unstable, since it alternates between 1992 (p. 5) and 1994 (p. 139); and Dispatches is
inaccurately described as Michael Herr ’s ‘memoir of his time Žghting’ (p. 132) in
Vietnam.
Essent ially motivated by the same problem as Roberts’s book, namely the
obdurate difŽculty of Jameson’s style, Helmling’s take is much more sophisticated
and, initially at least, a lot more promising. Still, though, one encounters the same
tiresome resistance to one of the core tenets of Jameson’s thought, namely totalisation.
Helmling, who takes the narrowest view of them all, conŽnes himself to what he
terms the successes and failures of Jameson’s style, refusing even to be so bold as to
focus on Jameson’s style as a whole. His not terribly convincing rationale is that ‘the
success/failure problem agitates virtually every sentence Jameson writes’ (p. 2) and
can therefore be used to generalise the way he grapples with the dialectic itself. His
basic claim, then, is that the success/failure problem is Jameson’s ‘constant subtext,
preoccupation, even “self-consciousness”, for it is the question of critical ambition
itself: what can critique (that is, effort like Jameson’s own) do or be in our period?’
(p. 2). Now, if this means simply that – as one would expect – Jameson worries
a great deal about how he can best go about making his point, then it is scarcely
interesting, save in the most banal biographical way; if, rather, it is supposed to point
up a crucial feature of Jameson’s epistemology, then one wants to be shown how and
where in fact it is operative in Jameson’s oeuvre, and this is singularly lacking.
We are soon given notice that – as we feared! – it is precisely style as a problem of
self-expression, as it were, rather than epistemology, that is going to be Helmling’s
 Reviews • 235

preoccupation; for, a few sentences further on, we Žnd this stunning summation
of his book’s forlorn goal: ‘It is my premise here that Jameson’s importance as a
culture-critic is less in his (supposed) conclusions or arguments than in the subtle
and complicated mediations of writing itself’ (p. 3). Therefore, no attempt is made
to determine the nature of Jameson’s conceptual system because, in Helmling’s
estimation, this is somehow less important than the sentences he writes (as though
the sentences did not owe their importance or interest to their very conceptual system
they expound). More to the point, no attempt is made to determine the nature of
Jameson’s conceptual system via an interrogation of the sentences he writes. That is
to say, one could be persuaded to accept as justiŽed so minimal an ambition as
Helmling’s focus on the issue of the comparative success and failure of Jameson’s
sentences if it were properly motivated, by which I mean making a Jamesonian point.
As bleak as I Žnd his position to be, it would not have been all bad if it were at
least legible as a reiteration of one of the core tenets of metacommentary, that
content ‘does not need to be treated or interpreted because it is itself already essentially and
immediately meaningful, meaningful as gestures in situation are meaningful, as sentences
in a conversation.’8 Taking this on board, one might experiment with the idea that
Jameson’s concepts can be treated as the always-already interpreted content of his
forms, but one would still need to delineate the precise matrices of these forms and
that (again) is something Helmling does not do.
Jameson offers a precedent for this manoeuvre in his book on Adorno. There, he
suggests that the stirring anthropological content in Negative Dialectics is what Adorno
had to talk himself into in order to write vivid sentences. 9 The point, however, is
not that the content is unimportant for its own sake, but, on the contrary, that it
is precisely what was required to develop that particular form. Putting it more
directly, Jameson suggests that it can be viewed as the price a concept has to pay
to get itself said in the Žrst place.10 Once we have grasped the concept for itself,
though, following a dialectical logic of reading, we can ask why did it have to be
presented in that way? For Jameson, because content is essentially social and
historical experience put into words, it is always already concrete, or, to put it
another way, always already interpreted by the form itself. This does not mean
that experience is self-evident or immediately available to the untrained eye;
indeed, it is precisely its lack of self-evidence that calls for what is (on this construc-
tion) mistakenly known as interpretation in the Žrst place; but it does mean that it is
some kind of an originary experience which we must endeavour to unveil. Criticism,

8
Jameson 1988, p. 14 (italics in original). See also Jameson 1971, p. 403.
9
Jameson 1990, p. 68. See also Zizek 2001, p. 85.
10
Jameson 1990, p. 7.
236 • Ian Buchanan

therefore, is not so much a matter of interpretation (where that would mean the deci-
phering of an alien code), as the laying bare, or the revealing in place, of the original
experience demanding that form.
The Žrst methodological consequence of this viewpoint is, of course, the suspension
or bracketing of the distinction between form and content – now, ‘depending on the
progress of the interpretive work and the stage at which it has arrived, either term
can be translated into the other: thus every layer of content proves, as Schiller implies,
to be but a form in disguise’. By the same token, however, it is also ‘just as true to
say that form is really only the projection of content and of the inner logic of the
latter’.11 This is why content no longer needs to be interpreted as such. Rather, it stands
in need of a kind of restoration; its original message, which is to say, the original
experience itself before being put into words, distorted in response to the multiple
demands of history as censor, has to be recovered by unlocking the logic of the
censorship itself. This amounts to treating the content of the form as a necessary
distortion of its true, ‘inner form’, and the question we must therefore ask is not
‘what does it mean?’, which would imply that the content somehow stands for
what it really means in a symbolic manner, and that all we have to do to recover that
meaning is decipher its coded logic of substitution, but rather, ‘why did it have to be
distorted in this way?’ In contradistinction, this entails inquiring after the singular
logic of censorship which demanded this particular codiŽcation of the content.
At Žrst glance, the difference between these two operations might seem superŽcial;
after all, both presuppose that the content does not immediately disclose its true
meaning. In fact, the difference is neither subtle nor slight: the Žrst mode of reading,
presumes that the coding of the text’s true meaning is arbitrary and playful, whereas
the second mode of reading presumes that coding is vital and necessary.
The second methodological consequence of this viewpoint is that Jameson needs
some notion of a writerly unconscious to account for the peculiar production of the
sentences an author is seemingly compelled to produce. He Žnds an answer to his
needs in Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the savage mind (pensée sauvage). The principle virtue
of this somewhat ambiguous concept, insofar as Jameson is concerned, is its ability
to treat ‘preconscious material’ in a systemic manner, without having thereby to reduce
its complexity or range of associations to some ultimate determining instance (such
as a neurosis). What it theorises, in effect, is a kind of artistic compulsion to repeat
that leads a poet – indeed any artist – consistently to choose one kind of word or
image over another from the enormous reservoir of possible items. This compulsion
is both the artist’s friend and enemy: it is what gives the work its peculiarity; but it

11
Jameson 1971, p. 403.
 Reviews • 237

is also what must be transcended, in a sense, if the work is not to turn out to be a
mere Žguration of a neurosis (as Deleuze says, we do not make art with our neuroses).
This compulsion or pensée sauvage is identical to the artist’s unique syntax, or what
Zizek calls their matrix. Content, on this view, is selected according to the demands,
both formal and, as it were, libidinal, of form. In Wallace Stevens’s work, this is
evidenced by his use of place names.

In Stevens, the place-name will be at one and the same time the very locus
and occasion for a production of images: quasi-Flaubertian bovarysme, the
daydream about the exotic place, the free association on Java, Tehentepec,
Key West, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Yucatan, Carolina, and so forth – and
the emergence of another level of systematicity in language itself (the
generation of place-names out of each other, their association now as a
proper vocabulary Želd, behind which a deeper system is concealed and
active).12

That deeper system is the exoticism of the Third World. The point, though, is not to
accuse him of Orientalism (though it should not thereby be seen to excuse him of it
either), but to show the degree to which the exoticism of the Third World is, in some
way, structurally required by the work itself. As Jameson reads him, the so-called
Third-World material in Stevens’s work (his casual references to Java and so forth)
is not merely the private fantasy of someone who did not travel all that much but
nevertheless longed for alterity – although it is certainly that too.13 It is, rather, the
means by which the work attains closure. Put simply, the everyday imagery in
Stevens, which constantly risks falling into a dreary realism, is saved from banality
by its juxtaposition with otherness, ‘Java tea’ being more intriguing to the stied
minds of consumer society than ‘tea’ on its own (a fact a poet so well acquainted with
advertising as Stevens could hardly escape noticing). In the end, though, not even
this infusion of exoticism was sufŽcient to the needs of Stevens’s poetry. Thus, as
Jameson concludes, Stevens is one of those artists who, at the end of the great period
of creativity we call modernism, found himself no longer able to resolve the formal
problems his work presented by sheerly formal means. His devices came to require
that extra motivation which only a theory of poetry can supply.
It would be very interesting indeed to approach Jameson’s sentences in this
way and ask what distortions and compromises have been forced upon him? (Such
a question is of course preŽgured by the even earlier book on Sartre, the one
which Roberts saw Žt to dismiss.) Jameson himself names what is undoubtedly the

12
Jameson 1984, p. 14.
13
Jameson 1984, p. 15.
238 • Ian Buchanan

most potent form of compromise facing all critics, the impossibility of presenting
a concept in full – if, by concept, we mean the experience of thinking that, then
concepts have to be provoked in others, rather than simply presented, in order to be
realised fully for-themselves. Disappointingly, Helming does not take either of these
courses, nor indeed do any of the commentators under consideration here. Instead,
Helmling’s work dissolves into a weak tirade against ‘difŽculty’. I must say that I
Žnd this trope of Jameson criticism something of a mystery – even if it were true that
Jameson’s style is inordinately difŽcult, why, as a commentator of his work, would
you admit this?
But this is not the only strange admission the author shares with us. He also
admits, almost as a badge of honour (though perhaps it is just a defence), that he has
not seen most of the Žlms Jameson refers to in The Geopolitical Aesthetic. He thus admits
that it is possible that the Žlms Jameson writes about are as interesting and exciting
as he says they are, although, obviously, Jameson’s account is not so persuasive as to
actually move him to seek out these (in some instances) admittedly difŽcult to obtain
Žlms for himself (p. 129). This inertia, by implication, is his judgement on Jameson’s
success as a Žlm critic; more to the point, however, it is the only kind of judgement
he can make. Insofar as Helmling is concerned, one does not have to actually see the
Žlms Jameson writes about in order to make judgements about the way he writes
about them. And, as absurd as it sounds, this is, in fact, precisely consistent with his
operating premise, because, if one decides that it is the sheer sentences themselves
that are of interest, then neither their actual content, nor the way that content is formed
(structurally, conceptually, theoretically) can be taken into consideration. In other
words, it is not mere caprice, or quirky affectation: the very structure of his argument
precludes him from engaging with the actual content of Jameson’s sentences.
This strategy is so obviously self-limiting it is hard to see how Helmling persuaded
himself he could structure an entire monograph around it. If we take just this one
example of his remarks about the shortcomings of The Geopolitical Aesthetic, the
precise nature of this limitation should become clear. After christening the principal
interpretive thrust of The Geopolitical Aesthetic ‘the rhetoric of paranoia’ (that this is
another example of Jameson being misidentiŽed with the object of his critique we
shall pass over in silence, except to note that it is of a piece with the misidentiŽcation
of him as a postmodernist), Helmling then suggests that it incurs a particular danger
of its own:

Jameson’s account of the exciting ‘new’ realisms emerging in Third World

Žlm risk sounding uncomfortably like the dreary old ‘socialist realism’ of
yesteryear, not to mention its First World Hollywood variants, in which
‘realism’ doubly calls for quotation marks. (p. 129)
 Reviews • 239

Here, we see that the object of Helmling’s critical interest is only what Jameson
manages to make Third-World Žlm sound like; its failing is thus that of poor
advertising copy – it does not make us (Helmling) want to see the Žlms; worse, it
makes them sound like something we (Helmling) would Žnd dreary. What is absent
here, which, as I have already said, is precisely what he cannot engage with, is the
relation between Jameson’s commentary and the object of his commentary; thus, the
success and failure at issue can only ever be rhetorical, in the emptiest of senses.
The problem is not merely that Helmling does not trouble himself to do what is,
after all, a pretty elementary kind of research, namely watching a couple of movies
– albeit obscure, hard to get, or just plain old passé, movies. Rather, the problem
is that his fundamental question prevents him from coming to grips with what
it is that Jameson does as a critic, which is to try to conceive as systematically as
possible where and how particular cultural objects Žt into the world-historical. By
bracketing as rigorously as he does the actual content of Jameson’s sentences, a
content that is necessarily born of a certain conceptual relation to an object, Helmling
prevents himself from determining the reason why Jameson’s sentences are constructed
the way they are; in the end, the very quarry he thought he was after, namely Jameson’s
sentences, is what eludes him the most assuredly. He thus fails to heed the basic
lesson of totalisation, the lesson that Jameson teaches over and over again in
everything he writes: that the particular only comes into view against the background
of the general. The speciŽcity of Jameson’s style can only be ‘rendered visible’ (to use
that phrase of Klee’s Deleuze was so fond of borrowing) insofar as the necessity
that governs it is determined – the comparative success and failure of Jameson’s
sentences is measurable only with respect to the aim of his project. So, for Helmling
to exclude from the outset any consideration of Jameson’s conceptual system, is to
make impossible his own project.
Now, as I have shown, Jameson himself offers at least two ways one could go about
determining the inner necessity of a theorist’s sentences – either by detecting a logic
of censorship, or by imagining a savage mind at work. In either case, what one
eventually ends up having to come to grips with, which is to say, suppose and then
try to esh out, is the political unconscious itself, or better yet, the Jamesonian
unconscious. And, so, we come to the suggestively titled book by Clint Burnham, The
Jamesonian Unconscious. Yet, as it turns out, Burnham would better have titled his
work ‘Jameson and Cinema’, because the Jamesonian unconscious is the one
thing he decides he does not want to talk about (p. 27). This exclusion creates a
spectre which haunts the text, like the proverbial ‘weight of the dead’. As such, the
incongruous title can only be read as an uncanny return of the repressed. So, while
it is true that Burnham’s book does, by restricting itself to Jameson’s work on
cinema, seem to offer, somewhat anomalously, an example of how totalisation can
240 • Ian Buchanan

effectively be limited – or, to put it another way, an instance of turning a failure to

totalise into an adequate totalisation – it is nevertheless still another instance of a
missed encounter.
What I feel I must take issue with, since it cuts to the heart of my own Jamesonian
Thing, is Burnham’s claim that it is ‘useless’ to try to abstract Jameson’s concepts
(Jameson-isms, he calls them) because ‘it is as impossible to “represent” Jameson’s
technique as it is for his own work to represent Marxism’ (p. 71). Here, we Žnd
something he initially owned was his representational problem, that is, the problem
he had Žnding the means of adequately representing the core tenets of Jameson’s
work, turned into a ‘negation of the negation’ and, in the process, elevated to the
status of an axiom. There is a world of difference between saying ‘I found it difŽcult,
from the very start, to construct in good faith some representational-analytical account,
or even “inventory”’ (p. xiv), and stating that any such endeavour is a priori im-
possible. It is precisely this shift from ‘I had difŽculty’ to ‘it is impossible’ that must
be challenged. Burnham might as well have said Jameson’s work is an instance of
Hegel’s notorious ‘night when all cows are black’, since the effect would be the
same: it renders indistinguishable the concept and its mode of presentation, those
infamous dialectical sentences, thus divesting them not merely of their proper
content, but their intention as well. Paradoxically enough, in so doing, he renders
moot his own exhortation to attend to the reexes and coils of these sentences, for
what are we supposed to be looking out for if not concepts buried amidst elegant
sentences?
Thus, we must attend to the reexes in Burnham’s own sentences, because, on the
one hand, he claims that the more he thought and read about Jameson the less
certain he was that he knew what ‘the political unconscious’ (or any other of Jameson’s
concepts) was – that is to say, the more he came to know them, the less cleanly could
he grasp their ontology; on the other hand, he freely draws on the work of Zizek and
Bourdieu and others as conceptual reservoirs – as though, the less he focuses on their
work, the more cleanly he is able to grasp their concepts. Here, the problem is the
age-old philosophical problem of immersion in the empirical, what Zizek calls (after
Hegel) ‘the night of the world’. The error is to conclude that what has slipped from
view never existed in the Žrst place, an error we can readily enough agree is an error
on the basis of the way Zizek and Bourdieu are deployed. If concepts do not exist in
Jameson, then why should they exist in Zizek or Bourdieu, whose own sentences are
at least as dialectical, dense and perhaps, in their own way, elegant too, as Jameson’s?
The solution to ‘knowing too much’ (to borrow Zizek’s appropriation of Hitchcock)
is not to try to know less by disavowing one’s knowledge, but to try to know more
by abstracting concepts (this would be my Deleuzian translation of Zizek’s ‘the wound
 Reviews • 241

is healed only by the spear that smote you’). So, instead of saying that ‘the political
unconscious’ lacks a clear ontology, making it useless to try and represent its eidetic
core, it would be better, in my Deleuze-tinted view, to Žnd the means of cutting
through the layers of rhetoric and discover the concept lodged within.
One way of doing this is to examine, from the opposite side of the fence, as it were,
what are usually taken to be Jameson’s misreadings, or worse still, misrepresenta-
tions, of other critics’ positions. Instead of complaining about his misprisions (or
delighting in them, as some critics of exceptionally bad faith have done), it is more
interesting to try to determine why he should twist things around in the way he does.
In other words, one should follow the Jamesonian edict and try to Žgure out the logic
of distortion at work, a manoeuvre that has the advantage of clarifying at least one
of the means Jameson utilises to produce concepts, namely appropriation. Such a
manoeuvre would have saved Christopher Wise much hand-wringing and kept in
check the moralising tone which blemishes what is otherwise such an interesting book.
The thrust of The Marxian Hermeneutics of Fredric Jameson can be summed-up by
saying that it does not think Jameson’s totalisations are total enough. In Wise’s view,
they are incomplete because they lack a divine dimension – God. Thus, Wise brings
us full circle by showing that one can also botch a totalisation by wishing for what
is not there.
Wise’s polemic against Jameson is built on a felt need to defend Northrop Frye
from what he sees as Jameson’s too brutal glossing of his brand of myth criticism;
the subtext of this particular defence, we come to underst and, is a defence
against Jameson’s secularising tendency. The crucial claim here is that Jameson is
hypocritical (Wise does not use this word, but his implication is clear) to critique ‘the
notion of continuity in myth-critical and religious discourse’ because his totalisation
of social life relies on the same or similar notion of continuity. This leads Wise to claim
that ‘the rejection of mythic continuity in Frye can only seem idiosyncratic on Jameson’s
part, even according to the theoretical logic of his own hermeneutic system’. Then,
we get the real kicker in the form of a type of protest which Zizek has analysed under
the rubric of ‘theft of enjoyment’, because from here Wise goes on to say that it is

as if Jameson is suggesting that, because he himself does not appreciate or

embrace any religious or ‘mythic’ forms of community ritual, they cannot
have any real validity for the billions of people globally who are unable to
rouse themselves from their hallucinatory slumber. (pp. 42–3)

In other words, there is no real repudiation of Jameson’s critique of myth criticism

here, just a half-hearted assertion that totalisation and mythic continuity are the
same, coupled with a pathetic lament that Jameson is not more religious than he
242 • Ian Buchanan

is. Here, to my mind, what would have been more useful is an inquiry into the
rationale, explicitly given or not, underpinning Jameson’s apparent deformation
of Frye.
If, in the foregoing, I have chosen not to emphasise, indeed to not even delineate,
the positive aspects of the six books considered here, that should not be taken to mean
that in my opinion none were to be had. On the contrary, each one offers much food
for thought, and, indeed, were they not as stimulating as they are, I would hardly
have been moved to complain so long and loud. But, that said, it does strike me
as curious, and this is the point I have been trying to make throughout, that the one
feature of Jameson’s work that might conceivably stand for the whole is the very
thing that is attacked, misapprehended, eschewed, distorted and lamented by the
very ones who were surely inspired by that very same very thing – namely Jameson’s
awesome ability to totalise, to bring together disparate material and show how it is
motivated by one and the same force. What I have tried to show, by concentrating
on the negatives, is the ways in which an avoidance of this issue corrupts whatever
picture of Jameson one might hope to contrive in its absence. It cannot simply be
disposed of, nor should it be. Totalisation, as Jameson does it, is not simply the tour-
de-force display of erudition and interpretation of one of the great synthesising minds
of our time, but the stubborn attempt to bring into view that which is in urgent need
of critical attention, namely our wilful blindness to the interconnected nature of global
capitalism, to the fact that our enjoyment of postmodern culture’s various – frequently
exhilarating – offerings, always comes at a price that someone, if not always us, has
to pay. I cannot but feel that the incessant complaining about the difŽculty of Jameson’s
style and the shrill asseverations against totalisation are both symptoms of what
may come to deŽne the postmodern condition: the inability to read in any way except
critically. We have lost the dogmatic dimension.

References
Deleuze, Gilles 1995, Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia
University Press.

Jameson, Fredric 2000a, ‘Globalization and Strategy’, New Left Review, II, 4: 49–68.

Jameson, Fredric 1998, ‘Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue’, in The Cultures

of Globalization, edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, Durham, NC.: Duke
University Press.

Jameson, Fredric 1988, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986. Volume 1: Situations
of Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
 Reviews • 243

Jameson, Fredric 1990, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic, London:
Verso.

Jameson, Fredric 1984, ‘Wallace Stevens’, New Orleans Review, 11, 1: 10–19.

Jameson, Fredric 1981, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,
London: Routledge.

Jameson, Fredric 1971, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of

Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Zizek, Slavoj 2001, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, Revised
Edition, London: Routledge.
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