For someone whose sentences were long and intricate, putting every thought through a dialectical wringer, Fredric Jameson gets quoted a lot. His most-quoted sentence comes in two versions. The first, “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism,” later restated to, “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” In its latter incarnation, the line is often attributed to Slavoj Žižek or Mark Fisher. But it is pure Jameson, the longer version of the 1994 essay collection The Seeds of Time; the shorter from “Future City”, a 2003 essay for New Left Review. Jameson’s attribution of it to “someone” else, as if to spin off some Borges-like search for the original source, is a typical move. A sly bit of mythmaking, and a refusal to take credit for a phrase that was already, 21 years before his death, becoming a meme.
This mythmaking is also a reference to Jameson’s own constant reference and guide, Karl Marx, who attributed the remark in “The Eighteenth Brumaire” that history repeats “first as tragedy, then as farce” to something “Hegel remarks somewhere”, though it was his own invention. Jameson’s Marx was sometimes disguised, but ever-present. His slogans – “Always historicise!” an exclaimed imperative at the start of The Political Unconscious (1981), and the call for “cognitive mapping” in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991, but built around a long essay of 1984) – are in a sense ways of phrasing foundational Marxist insights in academic terms. Historicising means relating the object of study to the conditions of political economy, class, race, space. And “cognitive mapping” means class consciousness, and a conception of society as an understandable, interpretable, changeable “totality” rather than an onrush of chaos or cock-ups.
Jameson’s work was both utopian and depressive, expansive in the field of its analysis and trained almost entirely on culture rather than politics. And he was rare among Marxist intellectuals in the neoliberal era to have managed to speak firmly to the present day. That is why his work affected so many. An entire strand of mainstream political thought is unimaginable without the influence of Jameson’s fusion of hard cultural criticism, immense knowledge, refusal of low/high cultural boundaries, and his endlessly ruminative, open-minded dialectical curiosity, put in the service of a refusal ever to forgive or downplay the horrors that capitalism has inflicted upon the world. Jameson’s Marxism was particularly tailored for our fallen era, a low ebb of class struggle, an apparent triumph of a new and ever more ruthless capitalism: “late”, as he optimistically put it, borrowing a phrase from the Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel.
That is not a criticism. Though there were examples of activism across his working life, Jameson was a philosopher and literary critic first and foremost, not a revolutionary manqué. He worked in the “Western Marxist” tradition of a Theodor Adorno or a György Lukács, but was much more catholic and enthusiastic in his interests than either. Putting a pile of Jameson’s books on my table after his death, I was boggled by the scope of his thought: science fiction, linguistics, pop art, American militarism, finance capital, Taiwanese cinema, Dutch architecture – and, again and again, the canon of 19th- and 20th-century literature. The only significant art form he never wrote about at length was popular music: oddly, for someone born in the US in the 1930s who loved crime novels, sci-fi and Hollywood, Jameson seems never to have been into modern jazz or rock ’n’ roll.
Literature wasn’t, for Jameson, a substitute for politics or a way of reading politics, it was a real thing to be understood through its own workings. Take two short studies of writers whose politics has usually overshadowed their work: Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979), and Brecht and Method (1998). Both focus on writers Jameson clearly admired immensely, and both take the authors’ politics as being fundamental to their aesthetics, rather than an obstruction or distraction. The brilliant book on Lewis posed the question of how to understand and analyse an unquestionably talented writer who was relentlessly misogynistic and homophobic, often racist, and was for several years a supporter of Nazi Germany.
Jameson zeroed in on Lewis’s use of deliberately bizarre, alienating images expressed through jagged, clogged sentences, filled with mocked clichés, intense physical descriptions and mechanical rhythms. Lewis was not a fascinating and rich writer “in spite” of his fascism, but precisely because of how his sentences conveyed with startling vividness the “primal ugliness” of his views. Jameson admired Brecht more unreservedly, for all his compromises with Stalinism – a fellow literary Marxist who insisted on focusing upon the “bad new things” in capitalist society rather than taking refuge in imagined pasts. Brecht and Method expounded the writer’s philosophical system and its roots in Chinese philosophy, which became a “Marxist Tao”, a guide to being in and fighting against the capitalist world – revealed also through the notorious “alienation effect”. This literary technique aimed to “reveal what has been taken to be eternal or natural… as merely historical”, which is as good a capsule definition of Jameson’s own method as any.
For Jameson “literature” could mean Thomas Mann and it could mean science fiction. Sci-fi was the subject in the essays in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), for me Jameson’s richest and most beautiful book. There could be something quite Big Lebowski about Jameson – the one lecture of his I attended, at the annual Historical Materialism conference in London, was such a sequence of arabesques, his thought constantly looping backwards and forwards, flowing into sometimes bizarre tangents before snapping back into coherence, that I assumed the man had extensive experience of recreational soft drug use. The graphs that he drew and included in his books, similarly, can owe more to a particularly addled Pynchon character than to Marx and Engels. In Archaeologies of the Future, he rocked up to encounter Thomas Pynchon, Philip K Dick, Samuel R Delany and Ursula Le Guin on their own terms, linking them back to the social fantasy of the French utopian Charles Fourier, and throwing them forward into an imagined socialist future in the cosmos, in the closing remarks on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. Again, literary form is crucial, not accidental – it is the realism of Robinson’s prose, the densely detailed passages on socialist Martian science, that allowed him to create a totality, a believable utopia.
To bring Jameson back to Earth: he is still best known for his fascinated and horrified work on postmodernism during the Eighties and Nineties, registering the turn to pastiche and ostentatious nihilism in cinema, art and architecture as a response to the vanquishing of political alternatives under Reagan and Thatcher. This was criticised at the time for its pessimism and for yoking art so firmly to the economy, but its arguments now seem axiomatic – connecting Eighties culture to the neoliberal turn reads today far more convincingly than contemporary celebrations of a “New Times” defined by consumer power and choice. The “end of history” world of the Nineties, as Jameson wrote in one of the essays of The Cultural Turn – Selected Writings on the Postmodern (1998) was by no means unfamiliar to anyone who knew the history of the new global hegemon. The mass privatisation and mass unemployment inflicted upon East Germany, he wrote, “rather resembl[es] what the American North had to do to the conquered South after the Civil War; while the Israeli settlements often remind one of the brutal displacement of Native American societies in the West of the United States”.
In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson defined postmodernism through a still astonishing description of the Hotel Bonaventure in Los Angeles, a 1977 design by the Atlanta architect-developer John Portman. By deliberately choosing a building that was not stylistically postmodernist – no pink stone, no columns, no pediments – Jameson was able to distil what had changed in architecture and society through space, rather than through then-fashionable, soon-to-be-dated appliqué decoration. Gazing at the building’s atrium, with its capsule lifts, Jameson was dazzled, feeling “something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions”. The building was “a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city”. Portman didn’t want to make the world outside “better”, as did Le Corbusier or the Bauhaus school, but to create an introverted world of consumption and pleasure, sealed off from a hostile city. The excitement of Portman’s walkways and elevators was “the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own”. The Marxist historian and geographer Mike Davis, who became LA’s apocalyptic chronicler in the 1990s, would later note how much Jameson ignored the building’s role in destroying the social fabric of the city. But this was slightly unfair – the point, for Jameson, was to derive his insights first and foremost from form.
“The dialectic,” wrote Jameson, “is not moral.” In the sprawling Valences of the Dialectic (2009), Jameson proposed “a new institutional candidate for the function of Utopian allegory, and that is the phenomenon called Wal-Mart”. While conceding that the actually existing Wal-Mart was “dystopian in the extreme”, Jameson was fascinated by its unsentimental destruction of small businesses, its monopolistic mockery of the concept of a “free market”, and its immense, largely automated and computerised network of distribution of cheap, abundant goods. Perhaps it was a step too far to extrapolate from this – as did Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski in their 2019 The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart – and portray the megacorp as a prefiguring of communist distribution networks. But what Jameson was up to, following Gramsci’s and Lenin’s fascination with Fordism and Taylorism, was an attempt to uncover what the new horrors of capitalism made possible. In the case of Wal-Mart, he argued, the answer was: a computerised planned economy. Jameson was a strict, 20th-century Marxist in remaining a firmly modernist thinker, refusing to find any solace in imagined communal or pre-capitalist pasts. But his unsentimental modernism did not preclude an outrage at the ravages inflicted by colonialism and imperialism in the name of “progress”, an often overlooked thread in his work.
Most of Jameson’s 30-or-so books were essay collections. Recent volumes, such as The Ancients and the Postmoderns (2015), threw together decades-old work with vivid essays on 21st-century artefacts by people who had probably read him – David Simon’s The Wire, say, or Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty. But there were also a few short monographs. These read like a writer enjoying himself, returning to old favourites, starting arguments, making wilfully preposterous claims to see what “effects” they might create. They include peculiar essays on Hegel, on Raymond Chandler, and on the first volume of Marx’s Capital. This book, Representing Capital, brought him back to the master. At its heart, it’s a study of how the fluidity and complexity in Marx mirror that of the system he depicts. But it’s also full of deliberately extreme claims to test the patience of scholastic Marxists: Capital, he tells us, is not a book about industrial labour, but “a book about unemployment”.
By some way the oddest of these books was An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (2016), a long essay so strange that Verso’s publication in 2016 had to be bundled with more sober responses from other left-wing writers to try to make sense of it; with an eye to Jameson’s tastes, they put a Wyndham Lewis woodcut of robotic First World War soldiers on the cover. It was Jameson’s only directly political manifesto, and anyone expecting a Le Guin or Robinson-style placid cosmic utopia was in for a shock. Jameson, noting the rise of militarisation in American society and the fact that the one efficient, socialised, advanced force in the country remained the army, made a modest proposal. What if the left simply joined the army, got itself some discipline, and followed the guns-and-food-banks model of the Black Panthers? Would this not create a situation of “dual power” in which it could once again become a revolutionary force? At the time, the book felt like a pipe-puffing thought experiment gone horribly awry. In the chaos of the 2020s, I’m not so sure.
This late shift into an advocacy of unromantic organisation might reflect a certain shift in the world Jameson was writing about. The world Jameson mourned – of the great anti-colonial movements, of international socialism, of modernist invention – was not coming back, and no alternative to “late” capitalism has emerged in the 40 years since his analysis of its “cultural logic”. But in 2016, Jameson was writing in a country where, in the Democratic primaries, a socialist had a decent shot at becoming president. In that context, he may have felt that his kind of political aesthetics – extraordinarily learned, remarkably insightful interpretations of the cultural forms capitalism has thrown up – needed to give way to calls for action and for new political forms. Jameson’s work remains, to use a word he applied approvingly to Brecht, useful, in understanding what capitalism does to human beings and the artworks they make. But in a new age, he decided in that late, eccentric manifesto to reiterate that the point was to change it.
[See also: The rise of disaster nationalism]
Content from our partners
Related
