UC Irvine FlashPoints Title Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b96m8bf ISBN 978-0810-129818 Author Wegner, Phillip Publication Date 2014-06-17 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Periodizing Ja meson 8flashpoints The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how lit- erature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Founding Editor; Ju- dith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown Univer- sity); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Lan guages and Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Nouri Gana (Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) A complete list of titles begins on p. 270. Periodizing Jameson Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative Phillip E. Wegner northwestern university press ❘ evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2014 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2014. All rights reserved. Digital Printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wegner, Phillip E., 1964– author. Periodizing Jameson : dialectics, the university, and the desire for narrative / Phillip E. Wegner. pages cm — (Flashpoints) ISBN 978-0-8101-2981-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Jameson, Fredric. 2. Marxist criticism. 3. Postmodernism (Literature) 4. Marxian school of sociology. 5. Dialectical materialism. I. Title. II. Series: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) PN75.J36W44 2014 801.95092—dc23 2014012369 For two teachers Fredric Jameson and John Hartzog Jag ska försöka komma ihåg vad vi talat om. —Riddaren Antonius Block, in Ingmar Bergman’s Det Sjunde Inseglet (The Seventh Seal) The “desire for Marx” can therefore also be called a desire for narrative, if by this we understand, not some vacuous concept of “linearity” or even telos, but rather the impossible attempt to give representation to the multiple and incommensurable temporalities in which each of us exists. —Fredric Jameson, introduction to The Ideologies of Theory, volume 1 (1988) Contents Acknowledgments xi Preface: To Name the System xv Introduction: Betraying Jameson 3 part i. mediations; or, the triumph of theory 1. The Return of Narrative (1960s) 27 2. Theoretical Modernisms (1970s) 43 3. Symptomologies and Intimations of the Global (1980s–1990s) 60 interlude: from the symbolic to the real 81 part ii. untimely modernisms 4. “The Point Is . .”: On the Four Conditions of Marxist Cultural Studies 121 5. Unfinished Business: On the Dialectic of the University in Late Capitalism 153 x ❘ Verso Running Head 6. Other Modernisms: On the Desire Called Utopia 183 Afterword: Representing Jameson 205 Notes 215 Index 257 Acknowledgments From 1987 until 1993, I had the privilege to study in Duke University’s Graduate Program in Literature (referred to by us in those days as the GPL). There I had the opportunity to learn from a rare group of scholars and teachers—Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Michael Moses, Susan Willis, Toril Moi, Frank Lentricchia, Stanley Fish, Alice Kaplan, Linda Orr, Annabel Patterson, Thomas Robisheaux, Rick Rodderick, Marianna Torgovnick, Annabel Wharton, Terry Eagleton, Franco Moretti, and Darko Suvin, among others—and it was there that I first encountered Fredric Jameson, who ultimately became my dissertation director. It was an experience that shaped my subsequent work in a deep and lasting way. I hope what follows gives some sense of the intellectual energy and excitement of a time and place that remains special. My interest in critical theory in general and Jameson’s work in par- ticular has continued to grow thanks to an exceptional community of intellectuals and friends who have shared so freely their wisdom over the course of the last quarter century. As I learned in my last two books, any list of their names will always be incomplete, and so I hope you recog- nize yourself and our conversations in the pages that follow; I have tried to remember what we talked about. A core group of my comrades from Duke have come together for a number of years as the Summer Institute collective—Susan Hegeman, Caren Irr, Carolyn Lesjak, Chris Pavsek, Michael Rothberg, and Rob Seguin—and our regular exchange of ideas has influenced this project from the outset. At the University of Florida, xi xii ❘ Acknowledgments I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to teach and write as part of a vibrant group of interdisciplinary scholars, deeply invested in the labors of theory, and I would like to acknowledge my many colleagues and students past and present, and especially the graduate students in my spring 2000 and spring 2007 seminars on Jameson’s work: our com- mon labors in these two classes are the wellspring of this book. Our colleague, friend, and mentor, John P. Leavey, Jr., deserves special ac- knowledgment for his example of a rigorous, engaged scholar, teacher, and leader; as does our contemporary and comrade, Kim Emery, for her courage and unwavering fidelity to justice. A good deal of the material in this book was first presented at UF’s annual Marxist Reading Group (MRG) Conference—justifiably described by Cary Nelson as “one of the finest graduate student traditions in the country”—and I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to the multiple generations of students whose efforts have sustained this extraordinary event well into its second de- cade. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Marston-Milbauer professorship for providing support for this and other important events at UF in beleaguered times. A UF colleague, Jim Paxson, and one of my former students and a committed MRG member, Nicole LaRose, unex- pectedly passed away shortly before this book came to its completion. I think both would have had interesting things to say about it, and I sorely miss the opportunity to speak with them. I appreciate the close and detailed readings of and thoughtful com- ments on the entire manuscript generously offered by Crystal Bartolo- vich, Clint Burnham, John Hartzog, Calvin Hui, Kim Stanley Robinson, Rob Seguin, Rich Simpson, and especially the two anonymous readers at Northwestern. The FlashPoints series weathered a crisis in the time after our first conversations about the book, but throughout Ed Dimendberg remained committed to the project, and I thank him deeply for his per- severance and vision. Dick Terdiman has been wonderfully supportive in shepherding the manuscript through the editorial process, and Henry Carrigan, Peter Raccuglia, and Nathan MacBrien provided valuable support in bringing it to completion. The warmth and generosity of our hosts in Uppsala, Sweden, especially Dag Blanck and Danuta Fjellest- sad, made the final work on the manuscript even more enjoyable. The Society for Utopian Studies continues to be a source of inspira- tion, and I am thankful for the support and the friendships I have de- veloped there, especially those with two others who have long engaged with the Utopian aspects of Fred’s work, Tom Moylan and Peter Fitting. (My additional gratitude to Peter for prompting me to write the first Acknowledgments ❘ xiii version of what became this book’s chapter on Archaeologies of the Future.) In addition to the annual conferences of these organizations, parts of this project were presented at talks at Duke, Northwestern, and Stanford universities, and at the Marxist Literary Group and Modern Literature conferences, and I thank these fine institutions for the oppor- tunity to further refine these ideas. Someone who has been part of this journey from the beginning—first as a classmate at Duke, then as a friend, a colleague at UF, and always an interlocutor—is Susan Hegeman, and whatever good comes from this is thanks to her. It has been a tremendous pleasure the last few years to watch Nadia and Owen grow to be admirers of Fred’s work (or at least of Fred). My extended families continue to provide inestimable support in these new days bad and good. This is a book about a gifted teacher, and hence I would like to dedi- cate it to two of the most influential teachers I have encountered over the last thirty years. John Hartzog, my undergraduate mentor at Cali- fornia State University, Northridge, first introduced me to the work of Fredric Jameson and then encouraged me to apply to the new program that Fred was just then helping bring together. The debts I owe to both of them for these gifts—another name for the impossible—can never be repaid. A shorter version of the introduction and part I appeared as “Periodiz- ing Jameson, or, Notes Toward a Cultural Logic of Globalization,” in On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006), 241–280. Material in the interlude was first pub- lished as “Greimas avec Lacan; or, From the Symbolic to the Real in Dialectical Criticism,” Criticism 51, no. 2 (2009): 211–45. A version of chapter 6 was first published as “Jameson’s Modernisms; or, the De- sire Called Utopia,” Diacritics 37, no.