Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism / Fredric Jameson; Edited by Ian Buchanan

Jameson on Jameson post-contemporary interventions Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson Jameson on Jameson conversations on cultural marxism Edited by ian buchanan Duke University Press Durham & London 2007 © 2007 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Minion by G&S Typesetters. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publica- tion Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Every eff ort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. Th e editors would be pleased to be notifi ed of corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book. Finally, the editors would like to give thanks to Tanya Buchanan who did an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes work to help realize this project. for my students contents Foreword • ix Introduction: On Not Giving Interviews • 1 Interview with Leonard Green, Jonathan Culler, and Richard Klein • 11 Interview with Anders Stephanson • 44 Interview with Paik Nak-chung • 74 Interview with Sabry Hafez, Abbas Al-Tonsi, and Mona Abousenna • 99 Interview with Stuart Hall • 113 Interview with Michael Speaks • 123 Interview with Horacio Machín • 135 Interview with Sara Danius and Stefan Jonsson • 151 Interview with Xudong Zhang • 171 Interview with Srinivas Aravamudan and Ranjana Khanna • 203 Bibliography • 241 Interviewers • 269 Index • 273 Foreword You have to take the work as a whole, to try and follow rather than judge it, see where it branches out in diff erent 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. —gilles deleuze, Negotiations Terry Eagleton’s quip that Fredric Jameson appears to have read every signifi cant work of literature is only a partial acknowledgment of his accom- plishments as a comparativist: one needs to add that he appears to have watched every signifi cant movie, listened to every signifi cant piece of mu- sic, visited all the major cities and viewed all the major buildings as well.1 Probably the only adequate compliment is Colin MacCabe’s admiring re- mark that nothing “cultural is alien to” Jameson.2 But to call Jameson a comparativist only makes sense to the extent that it is understood that he is foremost a historical materialist and that com- parative studies in art, fi lm, and literature are his means of mapping historical change. His means of tracking down change, though, is not, as it might sometimes appear, the relentless cataloguing of all the new things that are constantly being thrown up by this enormously productive global culture we know today. Yet having said that, there is no one more aware of or more sensitive to the breadth of cultural production operative in the world today. Piling example upon example of what has been said and done does not give rise to an understanding of history; it simply gives us an ac- cumulatively produced description that has no way of discerning in any analytically useful way what should or should not be subsumed under its categories. If every new thing is postmodern or a sign of postmodernism, say, then that particular periodizing category is eff ectively voided. Its result is that “heap of fragments” Jameson warns us about that is no more legible to us than a pile of shoes. What Jameson tries to do instead is triangulate what is missing, or, more specifi cally, that which could not be said, written, painted, sculpted, or fi lmed in our time because somehow and for reasons not disclosed it was out of step with history. He does not so much read texts as diagnose them. I would claim that it is the development of dialectical criticism that stands as Jameson’s supreme achievement.3 Th e “dialectic is not a thing of the past,” he insists, “but rather a speculative account of some thinking of the future which has not yet been realised: an unfi nished project, as Haber- mas might put it; a way of grasping situations and events that does not yet exist as a collective habit because the concrete form of social life to which it corresponds has not yet come into being.” 4 Dialectical criticism’s twofold purpose, as Jameson defi nes it, is to uncover the ways in which a now more or less fully global culture disguises its strategic interests while simultane- ously keeping alive thoughts of the future. Th is task can be specifi ed, in practical terms, as the urgent need to track down and diagnose two diff erent kinds of failure of the imagination: the fi rst is the failure to develop a us- able representation of the present, one that enables us to see its limitations as well as it strengths, but more importantly enables us to perceive its deep systemic nature; the second is a failure to imagine a form of the future that is neither a prolongation of the present nor its apocalyptic demise. Th ere is no one—or fi nal—form of dialectical criticism. “Dialectical terminology is therefore never stable in some older analytical or Cartesian sense: it builds on its own uses in the process of development of the dialectical text, using its initial provisory formulations as a ladder that can either be kicked away or drawn up behind you in later ‘moments’ of the text.” 5 Marx- ism “is a critical rather than a systematic philosophy,” Jameson argues; its appearance always comes in the form of “a correction of other positions” or “a rectifi cation in dialectical fashion of some pre-existing phenomenon,” so that we should not expect it to (also) take the form of self-contained or scholastic doctrine. “Th is is to say that we cannot really understand Marx’s materialism until we understand that which it is directed against, that which it is designed to correct; and it is worth pointing out that the materialist dialectic has not one basic philosophical enemy but two”—namely, idealism (history as prediction) and realism (common sense), understood in their classical or philosophical senses.6 Th ese two enemies are as adaptable to circumstances and as resilient to attack as viruses: “Th e question becomes one of deciding which of these two philosophical attitudes is to be understood as the principal ideological instrument of the middle classes, which of them is the source of the mystifi cation which then becomes the object of the x jameson on jameson specifi cally Marxist critique” (366). Jameson concludes that “the dominant ideology of the Western countries is clearly that Anglo-American empiri- cal realism for which all dialectical thinking represents a threat, and whose mission is essentially to serve as a check on social consciousness: allowing legal and ethical answers to be given to economic questions, substituting the language of political equality for that of economic inequality and con- siderations about freedom for doubts about capitalism” (367). One does not even have to squint one’s eyes to see that these remarks from thirty years ago describe with uncanny accuracy the political situation we are faced with today. In such a situation, Jameson’s conviction, expressed in the same place, that it falls to literary and cultural criticism “to continue to compare the inside and the outside, existence and history, to continue to pass judge- ment on the abstract quality of life in the present, and to keep alive the idea of a concrete future” (416), has the same fresh urgency today as it did then. Th is is why Jameson’s work proves so important. Ours still seems to be an age “when people no longer understand what dialectical thinking is or why the dialectic came into being in the fi rst place, when they have abandoned the dialectic for less rewarding Nietzschean positions.” 7 In a late aperçu on the fate of the dialectic in contemporary theory, Jameson writes: “I have found it useful to characterise the dialectic in three diff erent ways, which surely do not exhaust the possibilities, but may at least clarify the discussion and also alert us to possible confusions or category mistakes, to interferences between them.” 8 Th e three ways of characterizing the dialectic are: (1) in terms of refl exivity, as a necessary second-guessing or reconsideration of the very terms and concepts of one’s analytic apparatus; (2) in terms of a problematization of causality and historical narrative; and (3) in terms of the production of contradiction. Th e third form is the most developed in Jameson’s work and fi nds its most refi ned expression in his account of what he calls “metacommentary,” which is as near as he comes to off ering a method (but it is a method that is adapted and altered accord- ing to the demands of the specifi c case at hand). Needless to say, these three ways of conceiving the dialectic should not be seen as in any way mutually exclusive of one another. It would be more accurate to see them as the three sides of a triangle. Th e nearest Jameson comes to off ering a template for dialectical criticism is his essay entitled “Metacommentary,” fi rst presented at the 1971 convention of the Modern Language Association, where, as it happens, it was awarded the association’s William Riley Parker Prize. In typical fashion, he approaches the general theoretical problem that concerns him via foreword xi a confrontation with a contemporary false problem, in this case the alleged end of interpretation, or more specifi cally the end of content, the former being conditional on the latter, which we associate with Susan Sontag’s in- fl uential 1965 essay “Against Interpretation.” As Jameson points out, Son- tag’s piece was only the latest permutation of this critical turn.

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