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The Ideologies of Theory THE IDEOLOGIES OF THEORY THE IDEOLOGIES OF THEORY ◆ FREDRIC JAMESON London · New York This edition first published by Verso 2008 Copyright © Fredric Jameson 2008 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 13579108642 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG USA: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-277-6 (pbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-276-9 (hbk) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Garamond by WestKey Ltd, Falmouth, Cornwall Printed in the USA by Maple Vail An die Nachgeborenen: Seth, Anne, Justin, Jenny, Cassie, Stacy, Cade, Charlotte Contents Introduction ix PART I. SITUATIONS OF THEORY 1 Metacommentary 5 2 The Ideology of the Text 20 3 Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan 77 4 Criticism in History 125 5 Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis 144 6 Figural Relativism; or, The Poetics of Historiography 161 7 Modernism and Its Repressed; or, Robbe-Grillet as Anti- 175 Colonialist 8 Morality Versus Ethical Substance; or, Aristotelian Marxism in 189 Alasdair MacIntyre 9 On Negt and Kluge 194 10 Benjamin’s Readings 222 11 Foreword to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition 243 12 Foreword to Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music 256 13 The Theoretical Hesitation: Benjamin’s Sociological Predecessor 264 14 How Not to Historicize Theory 286 PART II. SYNTAX OF HISTORY 1 The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller 309 2 Architecture and the Critique of Ideology 344 3 Pleasure: A Political Issue 372 4 Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production 386 of Utopian Discourse 5 Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism 415 6 Reflections on the Brecht-Lukács Debate 434 7 Marxism and Historicism 451 8 Periodizing the 60s 483 9 Foreword to A. J. Greimas’ On Meaning: Selected 516 Writings in Semiotic Theory 10 On the Sexual Production of Western Subjectivity 534 11 Space and Congestion: Rem Kool Hass and S, M, L, XL 555 12 Future City 563 13 Marc Angenot and the Literary History of a Year 577 14 On “Cultural Studies” 598 15 The End of Temporality 636 Index 659 Acknowledgements 677 Introduction Ideology is the mediatory concept par excellence, bridging gaps between the individual and the social, between fantasy and cognition, between econom- ics and aesthetics, objectivity and the subject, reason and the unconscious, the private and the public. This is to say that ideology is not an achieved concept at all, but rather a problematic, itself subject to profound historical change and upheaval on both slopes of its mediatory function. It is subject also to slippage in either direction, always on the point of being absorbed by the purely subjective or dissipating out into the ideas in the air and the fashions of the zeitgeist, the values of groups and the facts-of-the-matter of their objective situations. But if ideology is grasped as either psychological or sociological, it has for all intents and purposes disappeared as a produc- tive operation. The word, meanwhile, is inevitably tainted by history, in the form of its relationship with Marxism as a tradition and a political practice, as well as its origins in the philosophical context of a now universally criti- cized philosophy of the centered subject and of totality. Yet no other term or concept has been proposed to assume its multiple functions. The essays in this book all seek, in their varied historical situations, to acknowledge the viral omnipresence of ideology and to identify and reformulate its all-informing and form-producing power. In the first, two- volume edition of this work (published in 1988), the essays’ arrangement corresponded to a rough distinction between the ideologies inherent in various textual interpretations as such and the visions of history projected by those ideologies. With the addition of a mass of new material that division has been blurred, and supplemented by additional thematic oppositions and perspectives, which it might be well to enumerate from the outset. The essays were written over a forty-year period, and it is not unreason- able to expect some shift in perspective from the earlier ones to those following what we may call the postmodern break, or the onset of the free market period, which we correlate with Reagan-Thatcher deregulation and which may be identified with late capitalism (or globalization, or the third x THE IDEOLOGIES OF THEORY stage of capitalism). Indeed, I associate the earlier collection with a specific problematic, for which the label “Marxist literary criticism” seems too con- fining and specialized. It had to do, indeed, with the way in which one was to relate the literary text to its “context,” however that was defined; and in a variety of ways I sought to replace the well-worn formula of reflexion, let alone determination, with that of situation and response. After the break, the specifically literary dilemma seemed to have been enlarged to include the problem of culture as a whole, including daily life. The enlargement did not only correspond to a crisis in high literature, or to some new centrality of the media and of commercial or mass culture, some- thing which may not be popular culture exactly in the technical sense, however popular it might be. The latter was itself a sign of the systemic expansion of cultural literacy, but also of a dedifferentiation of culture in such a way that even the economic could be observed to have become cultural (just as culture could be observed to have become economic and commodified). The essay on Lyotard’s pioneering “report” (Part I, Chapter 11) is then followed by essays on music (I, 12) and on architecture (II, 2, 11, and 12) and on cultural studies as such (II, 14). The concluding essay offers some impertinent suggestions about a different reading of postmodern daily life. The question of method clearly runs through these essays, as does that of theory itself and its fate. The first five essays of Part I, along with those on semiotics (II, 9) and literary history (II, 13), raise methodological issues more openly; while others interrogate historiography as such and its rela- tionship to narrative (I, 6 and 9; II, 7 and 8). Sexuality and the bodily sensorium are touched on (II, 3 and 10), while Marxism is not merely an underlying ground of reference but is also interrogated at specific points (II, 6 and 7). Other thematic paths can certainly be hacked through a thicket like this, whose positions are systematized in other works of mine. In any case, I remain committed to the perspective of the earliest of these essays, “Metacommentary” (I, 1), as well as to the ongoing significance and vitality of that discourse called theory (I, 14), which I have identified elsewhere as the construction of a language beyond that of traditional philosophy, and offering at least one possible contemporary equivalent of what used to be called the dialectic. Yet no theoretical deployment of the term ideology can hope to escape the inevitable question about the distinction seemingly eclipsed by post- modernity or late capitalism, with its unique combination of affluence and historical closure. Our dominant or hegemonic ideology today is what has been called “cynical reason,” and its weaker opposite number, Utopia, itself seems by definition to confirm the former’s luxurious impotence. Yet to identify such an ideology is also to reach the confines and limits of what the current situation allows us to think: it thereby at once reopens the INTRODUCTION xi perspective of futures unimaginable within our present time, changing the valences on the regressive and the acquiescent in such a way that the massive technologies of our post-electronic and galactic confinement again become the instruments of future liberation. I should add that, inasmuch as ideological analysis is so frequently associated with querulous and irritable negativism, it may be appropriate to stress the interest and delight all these topics, dilemmas and contradictions as well as jests and positions— still have for me. Durham September 2008 Wenn die Verknüpfung der Einzelphänomene zum Kategorienproblem geworden ist, so wird durch ebendenselben dialektischen Prozess jedes Kategorienproblem wieder in ein geschichtliches Problem verwandelt … When the problem of connecting isolated phenomena has become a problem of categories, by the same dialectical process every problem of categories becomes transformed into a historical problem … —Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness I. SITUATIONS OF THEORY 1 Metacommentary In our time exegesis, interpretation, commentary have fallen into disrepute. Books like Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation1 emphasize a development no less central to modern literature than to modern philosophy, where all great twentieth-century schools—whether those of pragmatism or phe- nomenology, existentialism, logical positivism, or structuralism—share a renunciation of content, find their fulfillment in formalism, in the refusal of all presuppositions about substance and human nature, and in the substitu- tion of method for metaphysical system. What is felt to be content varies, of course, with the historical situation: thus the concept of a “symbol” once served a negative, critical function, as a wedge against an older Victorian moralizing criticism; now, however, along with the other basic components of the New Critical ideology such as irony and point of view, it all too often encourages the most irresponsible inter- pretation of an ethical or mythical and religious character. To name a symbol is to turn it into an allegory, to pronounce the word “irony” is to find that the thing itself, with all its impossible lived tension, has vanished into thin air.
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