Andrew Timms

Department of Music
University of Bristol
A.Timms@bristol.ac.uk

 

Review of: Helmling, Steven. The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique.Albany: SUNY P, 2001.

 

While Fredric Jameson’s status as Marxism’s leading theorist of postmodernity is secure–and his influence on many arts and humanities disciplines undeniable–his work, when considered as a whole, has provoked comparatively little secondary literature.¹ There are several possible explanations for this situation, not the least of which is the fact that Jameson is still a very active writer. Recent years, for instance, have witnessed the production of a theoretical study of modernity and modernism (A Singular Modernity), as well as the publication in the New Left Review of several important articles (“Globalization and Political Strategy,” “The Politics of Utopia”) covering issues that have long awaited an extended Jamesonian treatment. Significantly, this recent work has tended to add something new to the critical mix. One suspects that Jameson’s theoretical position is not yet completely unfurled, which makes it hard for the critic to treat his oeuvre in terms of any finalized trajectory. But it is surely the sheer difficulty of Jameson’s writing that has discouraged critics from engaging with it at length. Steven Helmling’s excellent recent study, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson, is not the first book devoted to Jameson, but it is the first to capture and address the peculiar nature of this difficulty, which Helmling recognizes as arising not merely from the complexity of Jameson’s ideas but, to an even greater extent, from the special qualities of his style. Helmling gives this difficult style of writing a convincing theoretical exegesis and defense, one that grows out of Jameson’s own work in a manner that is intensely enjoyable. The result is a study that should set the tone for future treatments of Jameson, whether or not one agrees with its final evaluation.

 

Helmling’s Success

 

What Helmling latches onto first of all is the extraordinary degree to which, in Jameson’s work, style is written into the very textures of the ideas that it carries. As anyone who has ever tried to summarize Jameson’s seminal text on postmodernism will know, the attempt leads only toward an unsettling and wholly unsatisfactory scholarly asymptote. If you condense or restate a passage from Jameson, you seem to lose all its meaning, its force, its gestural value. As with other figures in the Western Marxist tradition–most notably Theodor Adorno–the very notion of secondary literature thus becomes intensely problematic: the critic must manage to acknowledge the inconsumable nature of the text while at the same time consuming it for his or her own purposes. And, as also with Adorno, no thoughtful reader can deny, even in the midst of these obstacles to paraphrasis or assimilation, the formidable agitation, depth, insight, and provocation of the writing. Indeed, the underlying appeal of Jameson’s work, at a time when synchrony and surface predominate–a time, in other words, that no one has theorized more adequately than Jameson himself–might well be one final glimmer of the essential redemptive promise of Marxist culture-criticism. Somehow, almost despite itself, each one of Jameson’s books tempts the reader even while inevitably proving too testing, too damn high-handed, too beautiful for its own good.

 

No doubt this all sounds faintly ridiculous to analytical Anglo-American ears. Straight-talking–the markets hate uncertainty–can surely get the job done. What place might Jameson’s texts, packed full of qualifiers, pitfalls, reversals, subordinations, find in the world of just-in-time delivery? The answer is: a rather small one. To those who have no time for Jameson, one can only reply, with heavy heart, that Jameson’s writing might at least inform them why they have no time for it; certainly one can agree with Helmling when he says that the “smallest of Jameson’s detractors–the ones, say, who establish a ‘bad writing’ contest for the express purpose of annually awarding him the first prize–need not detain us” (143). It seems more appropriate to acknowledge Perry Anderson’s assessment of Jameson: “we are dealing with a great writer” (72). But this itself must be radically contextualized by Jameson’s own frequent assertions that the time of the daunting modernist styles, the great auteurs, has passed. What might underlie the dizzying interplay of intellectual cross-currents in such a situation?

 

At the very least, we have come a long way from Jameson’s early Marxism and Form, whose conclusion remarked that even “if ours is a critical age, it does not seem to me very becoming in critics to exalt their activity to the level of literary creation, as is loosely done in France today” (415). Later, in his 1982 Diacritics interview, Jameson remarked that while

 

I don’t share the widely spread and self-serving attitude that today criticism and theory are as “creative” as creative writing used to be, still there is the private matter of my own pleasure in writing these texts; it is a pleasure tied up in the peculiarities of my “difficult” style (if that’s what it is). I wouldn’t write them unless there were some minimal gratification in it for myself, and I hope we are not yet too alienated or instrumentalized to reserve some small place for what used to be handicraft satisfaction, even in the composition of abstract theory. (88)

 

The much more recent The Cultural Turn, however, casts matters in an altogether different light: the difference between creation and criticism is merely an “old anti-intellectual distinction,” which casts only a “dreary light” on our present situation (85). One of that volume’s most powerful essays, “‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History’?,” argues that “theory emerged from the aesthetic itself, from the culture of the modern” (85)–a phrase that one can imagine functioning in the future as yet another Jamesonian sound-bite–so the transferral of creative energies from one to the other, particularly in those theorists such as Barthes and Derrida (not to mention Jameson himself) whose writing is calculatedly stylized in ways that suggest modernist experimentation, turns out to be much more significant than the younger Jameson once expected.

 

Not everyone would accept the supposed narrowing of this gap between criticism and creativity, of course. But regardless of whether this theory is at all convincing, it does at least point back to one of Marxism and Form‘s most persistent themes, namely, the difficulty of dialectical thought. In that early study, the links between criticism and its object were typically construed so as to allow dialectical thought its intransigent, challenging resistance as a corollary of the inherent contradictions of its objects. This resistance was designed to highlight the possible ideological function of much bourgeois criticism, with its “anaemic transparency” (in Terry Eagleton’s words [68]), but it was also quite specifically deployed against the frictionless surfaces of Anglo-American contemporary cultural experience–“a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience,” to quote Jameson’s prescient, almost Baudrillardian phrase (Marxism and Form xviii). Another of Jameson’s most evocative sentences from Marxism and Form‘s memorable preface puts this in rather more physical terms: “real thought demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence” (xiii). It is ironic that Jameson himself thus offers the most persuasive analysis of the effects of his own texts, for there can be no better way than this to conjure up the aching appeal of Jameson’s books in situations far more unreal than was ever the case in 1971; faced with the essential triviality of contemporary Anglo-American life, each of Jameson’s volumes tempts us cruelly with promises of a redemption for which few have time or a care. How many people do not toss Postmodernism aside (no mean feat!), turning instead to the cherry-picking anthologies which really are “intended to speed the reader across a sentence in such a way that he can salute a readymade idea in passing” (Marxism and Form xiii), wondering why this pretentious stylist could not say what he has to say in a fraction of the space, and without constructing such a trenchant, brick wall of knowledge–the brusque authority of style itself, with all its gnarled roots and branches?

 

This, at least, is one possible and probably frequent reaction to Jameson’s writing–that is, according to Helmling, the “not uncommon view that Jameson’s work is important despite the turgid writing” (146-47). Helmling’s survey of Jameson’s work and achievement foregrounds in what seems to be a wholly novel manner the centrality of Jameson’s writing to his critical enterprise, and claims with considerable justification that such readings as I have here caricatured are “failed reading[s] altogether, and of a peculiarly ironic sort.” For

 

Jameson himself insists that “dialectical” writing itself must be the measure and the authentication of any project of critique, and to miss that–not as a talking point but as the very quick and shudder of the experience of reading Jameson–is to miss very nearly all. (147)

 

This “quick and shudder” must surely be some logical descendant of the dialectical shock explicated so warmly in Marxism and Form. Helmling, however, takes this effect further and demands it of critical responses to Jameson just as it is a feature of Jameson’s critical writing.

 

What Helmling proposes here is not a kind of endless dialectical torture, or undue critical agitation or difficulty for the mere sake of itself: instead, his study manages cogently to explain why such responses cut straight to the heart of the Jamesonian matter. Central to this is what Helmling terms the dialectic of the scriptible: this familiar term of Barthes (from S/Z) originally designated those types of text whose very writing invited, encouraged, or forced the reader into a creative role of actually producing the text while reading it, as opposed to the more consumable lisible text, one written to read itself, as it were (Helmling 22-3). Helmling shows how Jameson subtly transfers the meaning of scriptible from that of reading to writing; so in Jameson, the scriptible comes to designate “sentences whose gestus arouses the desire to emulate it, sentences that make you want to write sentences of your own” (“The Ideology of the Text” 21), or as he puts it in Signatures of the Visible, “Barthes thought certain kinds of writing–perhaps we should say, certain kinds of sentences–to be scriptible, because they made you wish to write further yourself; they stimulated imitation, and promised a pleasure in combining language that had little enough to do with the notation of new ideas” (2). The scriptible thus foregrounds the sentence and the style which is manifested in–as well as created by–such sentences. In such a way do we begin to read off from a writer’s semantic units the fundamental historical marker–style–through which the various contradictions of a moment will be agitated, repressed, or dealt with in any number of ways.

 

This, then, is something like Jameson’s use of the notion of scriptible, and one which, as Helmling points out, is far from the more fashionable ideas of intertextuality or the heavily aestheticized écriture. It should be quite obvious that the scriptible is thus, for want of a better mode of description, a way in which dialectical criticism can, literally, get close to its objects–and, remembering Marxism and Form, work through the insights of various “competing” theories before subsuming them in some larger body of thought that can adequately theorize both their advantages and their limitations. And as Helmling notes, in Jameson’s study of Sartre,

 

“style” finally means something like the total meaning or (better) the cumulative authorial “gestus,” the characteristic movement, the (as it were) authorial carriage, the verbal body language, of an oeuvre–a way of conceiving literary labor (and success) rooted in the thematics of the writer as culture-hero, a producer of “works”–indeed, in all its most fully-blown romantic/modernist senses, an “author.” (24)

 

So the scriptible does not imply a sell-out in the face of the various slogans proclaiming the death of both authors and even subjects; in fact, Jameson purposefully refashions it into a much more nuanced tool, one that is fundamental to the dialectical method.

 

But the scriptible is, to be sure, some kind of measure of influence, although (as Helmling cautions) it works in no simple causal manner: compare, for instance, the very different mannerisms of Barthes and Jameson: “no particularity of Jameson’s verbal style or mannerism would ever ‘remind’ anyone of Barthes” (25). And it clearly does not measure ideological influence or sympathy, since Jameson has written with considerable brio on Wyndham Lewis (a study subtitled “The Modernist as Fascist”), and he has retained throughout his career an interest in Heidegger, even going so far as to admit having “some sneaking admiration for Heidegger’s attempt at political commitment, and find[ing] the attempt itself morally and aesthetically preferable to apolitical liberalism (provided its ideals remain unrealized)” (Postmodernism 257)–a statement that truly makes one blink, even if its sentiment–the value of commitment over hands-off liberalism–is familiar enough. Instead of simple homage, the scriptible seems often to be prompted by and to entail difficulty: the figures to whom Jameson is attracted are often, especially in his earlier writings, authors whose work is calculatedly impenetrable, from Heidegger to Lyotard, from Deleuze and Guattari to Lacan (Helmling 26). The sheer effort that these writers’ prose demands becomes a style that Jameson’s work will also deploy.

 

Evidently, however, the scriptible as a mode of criticism, even when “successfully” executed, risks failures of various kinds. The most signal of these is the implication that such a writerly style may be regarded as mere ornament: hence the possible view that Jameson is profound despite his style. Another of the more obvious ways in which such a criticism might fail is by its reversion to a mere promotion or evocation of textuality, the sort of aestheticizing mentioned earlier that might aim to distort the underlying contradictions that motivate the text’s form, or even to bracket them (and reality) altogether (Helmling 27). More damaging still is what Jameson calls “thematization,” by which it seems he means the sort of undialectical analytical habits so beloved of Anglo-American intellectuals, whereby positions are briskly summarized with none of the hard graft of Jameson’s laborious workings, which typically give opponents their due. In other words, the resistance to thematization is closely related to a resistance to commodification in particular and mystification more generally–and with this we begin to see that the entire problematic is ultimately that of reification itself.

 

These are some of the ways in which critical practice might fail in its pursuit or cautious emulation of a scriptible; Helmling, however, adds to these by considering the particular styles of Barthes and Adorno, two of Jameson’s most important influences. From Barthes it is clear that style itself can become a Sartrean piece of historical baggage, merely a marker of the guilt that literature brings with itself. Barthes’s notion of white writing, an ascetic, style-less style, is one attempt to renounce this guilt or at least deal with it in some way that remains utopian; but such a style cannot be hypostasized, and sooner or later it falls beneath the feet of history to be imprinted with the stamp of its own distinctive moment. What had been a utopian gesture is gradually estranged, in the Brechtian sense, to become just another stylistic convention among others. Adorno, however, is a very different matter: he does not express utopian thoughts so openly, even where they scar and bruise the skin of his texts. Here the question of failure is asked with troubling urgency, and the failures themselves are asserted “so potently that even the most ‘numbed’ or conscienceless reader cannot help [feel] their sting” (Helmling 37):

 

some kinds of “success”–the kind likeliest to be acclaimed as such by the dominant culture apparatuses–are of interest only as symptoms, if they aspire to no more than a facile manipulation of audience responses; whereas some kinds of “failure”–what the culture apparatuses ignore or shrug off–achieve something more dialectical and authentic precisely because (or to the extent that) they eschew such easy aims to probe, to force themselves up against, the limits of the possible itself. . . . The truest “success” . . . results from a calculated, deliberate, and self-conscious embrace of failure–though that way of putting it (indeed, any way of putting it that so baldly uses the word “success”) risks seeming to have mistaken the point of the exercise. (Helmling 39)

 

Criticism cannot free itself from the problems of ideological failure or the guilt inherent in art, even if Barthes thinks that “literature itself just might” (Helmling 43). In this way the dialectic of the scriptible is really a rewriting of what Jameson (in The Political Unconscious) calls the dialectic of utopia and ideology, the way in which utopian visions are perpetually challenged by their propensity to dissolve into ideology. But as Helmling notes in a marvellous passage that radiates signs of its author’s own attraction to Jameson’s scriptiblesentences,

 

Jameson’s own writing re-enacts the exemplary failures he identifies in Barthes and Adorno, thereby securing (or “emulating”) some measure of the success he praises them for. That is, there is an emancipatory leavening of “linguistic optimism” in the scriptible that can enact necessity and failure, yet still attest at least some (utopian) possibility of their being overcome. Hence the excitement of Jameson’s early prose: it can project a failure imperative so bracingly as to seem to loosen its strictures. Those labyrinthine sentences, zigzagging between qualifiers and hedges, subordinations and sub-subordinations, feeling their way as if to a period not foreseen when the sentence began, whose surprises prompt fresh departures in their turn, enact the obstacles, limits, or contradictions they pursue and confront, but also, paradoxically, suspend or “neutralize,” ad lib., some of the law-like force of those very contradictions and limits that ought to have proscribed such suspensions or neutralizations in the first place. (45)

 

From difficulty, in other words, comes a faint glimmer of redemptive light.

 

All of this changes as postmodernism gradually comes onto the scene. Helmling argues that the earlier stoic and tragic style gives way to something that feels very different: “the prose remains as allusive and inward as ever, but with an affective charge much larger and more accessible, more immediate (in the colloquial sense) than before” (122). Anyone who has read Marxism and Form will immediately notice the very different texture of the famous essay on postmodernism (Postmodernism 1-54), over whose surface it is so much easier to skid (which presumably accounts to some extent for the essay’s wide dissemination). In fact, the Postmodernism book is arguably anomalous in Jameson’s output: there is simply nothing like it, barring perhaps The Cultural Turn. That the Postmodernism book is something of a one-off as well as simultaneously the volume through which many people first encounter Jameson should give us pause: one wonders how many people have an inaccurate or inadequate appreciation of Jameson as a result. But regardless of the different feel of Postmodernism, it is still characteristically difficult, even if it deploys that difficulty in different ways. In fact, Helmling claims convincingly that, once again, we have to read the difficulties as part and parcel of the writing of the criticism itself. So whereas in the early works the dialectic of ideology and utopia loomed large through a scriptible that retained hope, however faint, of redemption, in Postmodernism the possibility of this redemption has gradually faded, even though it is more or less explicitly a theme of the closing sections of both the famous essay and the book’s huge conclusion. This situation is foregrounded by the problem of textual determinism, by which is meant the power of theoretical models to become so compellingly total as to bludgeon the reader into a submission from which no resistance can emanate. In Jameson’s elegant formulation,

 

it is certain that there is a strange quasi-Sartrean irony–a “winner loses” logic–which tends to surround any effort to describe a “system,” a totalizing dynamic, as these are detected in the movement of contemporary society. What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic–the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example–the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself. (Postmodernism 5-6)

 

The very status of totalizing dialectical thought is plagued by anxieties of a slightly different kind from the ones that haunt the dialectic of ideology and utopia. But it is also possible to read this passage as a moment of searing candor in which we see the doubts Jameson has about the sorts of theoretical models he himself constructs. For there is a take-it-or-leave-it terseness about some of Jameson’s early theorizing (not that he would see it that way: for Jameson, one can only “leave” dialectical problems at the cost of rediscovering them later), particularly in that unconvincingly worded moment when he argues that the pleasure of (Adorno’s) dialectical thought is “not . . . a question of taste, any more than the validity of dialectical thinking is a question of opinion; but it is also true that there can be no reply to anyone choosing to discuss the matter in those terms” (Marxism and Form xiii-iv). In light of this, the hesitation in the essay on postmodernism can be read as a revealing moment of equivocation.

 

As Helmling realizes, this theoretical impasse becomes extraordinarily tense, even as its working-out provokes ever more supercharged Jamesonian writing. By the time “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” is assembled, an important change has occurred, however, in which fairly suddenly the problems have been found to be figurable in a way that leaves some space for the theorist to enjoy himself. This moment of ease is, I should hasten to add, comparative; the book on Postmodernism is still a challenging read, but some of it is a good deal less difficult than the contemporaneous Late Marxism, Jameson’s book-length study of Adorno. Some passages in Postmodernism even present a level of private reflection that Jameson has, with career-long discipline, normally eschewed–notably his comments on his friend and former Yale colleague Paul de Man, but also his remark that he writes as “a relatively enthusiastic consumer of postmodernism, at least of some parts of it” (298).

 

Helmling reads this momentary relaxation as a corollary of Jameson’s discovery of the notion of the sublime as a suitable representative/unrepresentable figure for postmodernism. At a time when the possibility of critique is seemingly problematized as never before–not just because of the abolition of critical distance, but also because of the hesitancy over totalizing theoretical models–Jameson turns to the very dynamics of representation itself to dramatize the dilemmas posed by the transition into what he calls full postmodernism (Helmling 107-10). As the sublime is re-motivated as the unfigurable networks of global capitalism, the resultant conspiracy-theory-like schizophrenia (in its poststructural sense) marries off our dread and foreboding with a most unlikely Jamesonian idea: relief. As he himself writes, “I think we now have to talk about the relief of the postmodern generally, a thunderous unblocking of logjams and a release of new productivity that was somehow tensed up and frozen, locked like cramped muscles, at the latter end of the modern period” (Postmodernism 313). Quite apart from this description, conspicuous enough in its use of the word relief to characterize a period of ever more systemic capitalism, postmodernism becomes ever more difficult to figure because it completes the movement of modern theory away from meaning (Helmling 115-6).² Indeed, using the sublime as a way of theorizing the postmodern actually reinscribes one of Jameson’s earlier problems, namely, how to interpret the unrepresentable (Helmling 118). Failure again of a familiar sort, then, but one that points back toward The Political Unconscious, with its Althusserian placement of history in some realm beyond knowledge–with all the Lacanian and Kantian resonance of the ultimately unknowable. As Helmling argues, the great metaphysical spin-offs of these concerns seem all the more meaningless in a world that is so outwardly unconcerned with sublimity; to quote one of his purpler patches once again,

 

this globally oppressive atmosphere of muzak and of bar-codes, of transnational designer logos as legible “fashion statement” or willing self-commodification, of smiley-faces and franchiser’s manual courtesies, where shopping is the only leisure activity there is, and for increasingly large numbers of people, the only leisure activity they are “good at”–how to make the narcosis of such a commodity-scape interesting at all, let alone juice it up with the excitements of “the sublime”? . . . Alas, “boredom” and “waning of affect” seem rubrics all too adequate to the postmodern vécu. (116-17)

 

If this historicizes Jameson’s sublime, then the sheer unlikeliness of the sublime’s use only makes Jameson’s deployment of it that much more devastating; and it is in this highly distinctive embrace of the motif of the sublime, however brief, that some of the postmodernism essay’s longevity is surely founded.

 

One other way that the sublime might be invoked in a discussion of Jameson’s style, however, is from the standpoint of the reader (Helmling 122). The totalizing dynamics of dialectical thought continually shift us to ever-widening horizons;

 

the moments are quite frequent in Jameson when the reader can feel engulfed by the threatened onset of an ideational congestion, a cerebral meltdown or synaptic overload, a sense of argumentative threads and suggestions, themes and variations, multiplying beyond any hope of keeping track of them, an intellectual levitation at once exhilarating and daunting, illuminating and befuddling. (Helmling 122)

 

 

Difficulty remains, as do the dialectical shocks, and it might be revealing to juxtapose the persistence of this difficulty with a couple of remarks made by Jameson in his 1982 Diacriticsinterview. When Leonard Green notes that “one feels at times to be pushing against an almost encyclopaedic accumulation of knowledge in your work,” Jameson replies:

 

I’m in a poor position to judge the difficulty of my own work or to defend its stylistic qualities, particularly since with more time and work no doubt even the most complicated thoughts might have been made more accessible. If one defends difficulty a priori (as I have allowed myself to do occasionally), this can be taken as an ominous pretext for all kinds of self-indulgence. But in a general way (and leaving myself out of it), it is always surprising how many people in other disciplines still take a relatively belle-lettristic view of the problems of culture and make the assumption, which they would never make in the area of nuclear physics, linguistics, symbolic logic, or urbanism, that such problems can still be laid out with all the leisurely elegance of a coffee-table magazine (which is not to be taken as a slur on high-class journalism, of which we have little enough as it is). But the problems of cultural theory–which address the relationship between, let’s say, consciousness and representation, the unconscious, narrative, the social matrix, symbolic syntax and symbolic capital–why should there be any reason to feel that these problems are less complex than those of bio-chemistry? (Green, Culler, and Klein 87-8)

 

Jameson himself appears to speak of difficulty here in the accessible rhetoric of the higher journalism. And yet, it is notable that even in this comparatively simple reply we may discern a whole nest of assertions and counterclaims: one begins to wonder on what level difficulty is to be shunned in favor of clarity; or whether the latter must always be regarded as too naïvely utopian, too easily programmed to the logic of the sublime system of late capitalism.

 

Helmling has an answer for this and several related questions, but it is one that is more provocative than the rest of his study, and it latches onto the change in the assessment of theory’s creativity with which I began this discussion of Jameson’s style. For there is in Helmling’s view a further change in Jameson’s style after Postmodernism. In essays such as “The Existence of Italy” (Signatures of the Visible 155-229), “The Antinomies of Postmodernity” (The Seeds of Time 1-71), and particularly the powerful “‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History’?” (The Cultural Turn 73-92), the largely Hegelian-Marxist concerns of the earlier work return in all their glory, branded anew, or so the postmodernist might imagine. It will be clear that this return is nothing more than a resurfacing of career-long concerns, and that even “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” never constituted a very sharp departure, much less any sort of repudiation. All the same, there does seem to be a marked change of emphasis in the work of the 1990s, from Late Marxism onward. Specifically, Helmling explains this as a return “to the supposedly retro interests (Hegelian, Marxist, phenomenological) that Postmodernism had seemed to downplay or eschew” (138). But there is something else that has dropped out of Jameson’s writing, in Helmling’s opinion–something that has once again freed Jameson’s criticism from its earlier tragic accents: namely,

 

the inexorable “winner loses” logic of “inevitable failure” that Jameson in The Political Unconscious posited as the necessary condition, the specific “vision” incumbent upon “dialectical historiography” as such. (142)

 

What has gradually become less and less visible has been the Adornian constraints that seemed to charge critical writing with a necessary failure. Instead of this deadlock, Jameson has been able to substitute a

 

discussion able to proceed with evident confidence in the programs it proposes for itself, the ambitions it entertains, the desires it hopes to realize, operating in the process a renewal of the genuine utopian potential of “the sublime” and of sundry other critical projects or “desires”–including not least that generic hybrid, or hubristic genre, where critique aspires to sublimity, in “theory” itself. (142-3)

 

Later on it becomes clear just how important this rapprochement with theory is:

 

It is customary these days to deplore criticism’s vainglorious usurpation of the privileges properly attaching to “literature,” but, our well-advertised “information glut” notwithstanding, just what “literature” is there, these days, for people like us to read? . . . for me it is a simple statement of fact that “the way we live now”–or at least the way some of us read and (try to) write now–becomes actually exciting almost nowhere else than in the writing of a very few highrolling superstar professors. . . . for a few centuries now our culture has produced a minority audience that hungers to see the challenges of its own time written about in relevantly challenging ways. The greats of the past are still great, but they are not our greats. Nor is there any question of Derrida being “as great” as Joyce, or Goethe or whomever; it is rather that the sort of intellectually ambitious reader who sought out Joyce or Goethe in their day is the sort of reader who today will find the challenges of Derrida or Jameson more demanding, the difficulties more difficult in pertinently “contemporary” ways, the rewards proportionally more complicatedly satisfying, than those of Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, or–who you will. (Saul Bellow?) (147-8)

 

I have here indulged Helmling’s own indulgence (as he himself describes it [148]), partly because it is moving and revealing on its own terms, but also because it poses interesting questions about (and of) criticism and theory. It is quite obvious when reading The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson that Helmling must surely have intended to finish at this point: the ending of the “Jameson Post-Postmodernism” chapter is saturated with closural elegance, winding up his lucid study with a slightly more personal assessment of Jameson’s writing than at any other place in the book. But as Helmling admits in his coda–“Beyond Success and Failure”–his closing of the book was continually problematized by Jameson’s continuing productivity. It says much for Helmling’s ideas that they can so easily be tweaked to accommodate Jameson’s recent study Brecht and Method, which exhibits a style somewhat different from that of most of the rest of his oeuvre. But the coda nevertheless sits rather uncomfortably next to the grand claims quoted above, and it is to these–to theory’s hubris–that I shall now turn.

 

Helmling’s Failure?

 

A study, then, that begins by remarking that the “American cultural system affords its intellectuals no eminence of prestige and controversy comparable to that of Derrida in France, or Habermas in Germany” ends up by elevating Fredric Jameson to this premier status, albeit–thankfully?–without igniting any real controversy along the way (1). In doing this Steven Helmling has produced a major piece of interpretative literature on one of the foremost intellectuals of our time, and even those who mock and mimic the verbal contortions of contemporary literary criticism would admit that this study employs such a language with no little style of its own. For that we can all be more or less grateful; but in broader terms the study, pleasurable and successful as it is, seems to want to be included within the ambit of its own concerns: in Helmling’s terms, it is as if his own scriptible text is a peculiarly reflexive one, much as he judges Jameson’s achievements by the very terms on which Jameson conducts his work and writes his texts. And with this concern we are propelled onto perhaps an inevitable but also one of the most pressing terrains of all, at least for Marxist intellectuals: the tortuous relations between theory and practice.

 

The problems revolve primarily around Helmling’s conclusion. Here, it will be recalled, Jameson is seen as offering the type of difficult experience that it was formerly the business of the greatest writers to provide. This argument–that the difficult theory that swept over the Anglo-American world in the 1970s and 80s is the place to which “high” artistic creativity ultimately migrated–is certainly not implausible. Indeed, in “‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History’?” it is deployed by Jameson himself. But while I do not wish to dismiss the argument, it seems to me that in the very way he presents it Helmling invites strong challenge. And there are, I believe, some respects in which defending difficult theory on the grounds of its aesthetic creativity may ultimately be incompatible with the aims of a truly radical criticism.

 

There would seem to be at least four lines of challenge, all of them certainly interrelated, but each with slightly different emphases and concerns. First of all, one might challenge the sheer self-serving hubris of such a position. It must be reassuring to learn that one is working on the deepest thinkers of the age; and since, as a salaried academic, one is paid to teach and explicate this great material, one’s own validation of it becomes implicitly a validation of one’s own admittedly subordinate status. Of course, we all need to convince ourselves in various ways that what we are doing is worthwhile and constructive; but when working on someone like Jameson, few people, perhaps nobody at all (Perry Anderson excepted), would reckon themselves able to evaluate the claim that he is one of the great writers of our age, so an element of circularity creeps into the position of the critic who is simultaneously one of the few people to designate him as worthy of study and one of the few people actually qualified to study him. But this is only one cynical view of a much bigger problem, which is a return of all sorts of issues that tend to get designated as modernist rather than postmodernist. The elevation of Jameson’s difficulty, something that feeds the needs of the eminent intellectuals of our age, seems to ensure that he remains a minority pursuit, not least because if we follow Helmling, then to sweep away the difficulty in Jameson would be to miss the point and merely fall victim to the various paradigms of clarity or thematization that Jameson’s prose intransigently sets itself against. To caricature the situation (but certainly not Helmling’s own position), it is my dialectical brilliance versus your reified ignorance; that is why I see this stuff as wonderful dialectical prose, whereas you find it turgid nonsense. And since I have already realized that this writing is the most profound intellectual challenge of the age, what does that say about you?

 

These are not new intellectual issues and I raise them not because one must accept them as the final word on the value of theory, but merely because they seem to cause ripples in all sorts of unexpected places. The sort of status that Helmling wants to accord to Jameson seems to be the very plausible accolade of being a great thinker. But since the Jamesonian text sets itself so resolutely against any form of mass consumption, to recognize that he is a great thinker seems to elevate him to the position of the academic high-priest who alone can see clearly to the contradictions of the age. Seeing as we are ultimately dealing with a seminal theorist of postmodernism, that sticks in the throat somewhat: has so little changed? Or is the position of the theorist one of the remaining vestiges of modernism in the new era of the postmodern? What would a postmodernist theory of postmodernism look like?³ (The question is surely valid, because earlier on it seemed as if Jameson’s “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” was not just a theory but also an exemplar; clearly this now seems more questionable.)

 

To say this, however, is to garnish a modernist position with a healthy dollop of avant-garde problematics: would mass dissemination of Jameson risk its status? But mass dissemination is as good as impossible (unless dialectical thinking suddenly stages an unexpected resurgence in its popularity), since if it happened, one would simply claim that the theory had been commodified, thematized, separated from the way in which it is expressed, and so on. Theory quite clearly does not risk that sort of popularity, but it does risk the relative popularity of a wide dissemination within the academy. So do we simply see here a recapitulation of the problems of certain anti-institutional movements, whose success rests on their very failure and obscurity, rather than canonization and elevation to the status of institutional doctrine? Perhaps the one thing that could really dent the radical edge of Jameson’s theory would be the type of academic hysteria that has attached itself to figures such as Derrida–and this is presumably why there has been so much righteous anger from the left that the revolutionary aspects and indeed foundations of much of Derrida’s own work were quietly removed in the course of its American reception and translation (Eagleton 52-3). Seen in this way, the notion of scriptible serves its masters well, since it ensures a transferral of difficulty and close dialectical reading to one’s own criticism (for which few have time or patience), while at the same time designating it as the master key to Jameson’s work.

 

So at length we arrive at the inevitable question: what has this theory achieved? What might it achieve? The pragmatic argument, addressed by Helmling, might “blow the whistle” on the whole affair and simply see it as melodrama, because Jameson has enjoyed institutional privilege in a distinguished academic career (125). This, as Helmling notes, can be easily answered as a far too simple acquiescence in “the reifications of a system that, in other precincts of its operation, daily inflicts, on a mass scale, violences for which Prometheus’s torment is if anything too soothing a figure” (125). But this answer is as unsatisfactory as it is compelling: we simply arrive at notions of reification and false consciousness that are always, for a rather vulgar Marxism, going to win the argument, since not to realize this is to fall victim to the problems they solve. In other words, we have clambered, I hope dialectically, onto the untranscendable horizon of Marxist theory itself, which will not go away no matter how familiar or tediously inevitable it seems. Difficulty runs through this field as surely as blood pumps through our veins: “difficult texts, difficult issues, difficult problems, a (very) difficult history, difficult political conditions, difficult rhetorical burdens–a dauntingly overdetermined multiplicity of ways, in short, in which Marxist critique might succeed or fail” (Helmling 3). Most pressing of these is surely the brutal question of what theory can do to change the world: some would argue, simplistically but not ineffectively, that if Jameson’s work has peered into and theorized the darkest corners of our contemporary cultural experiences, it might yet be time–for the acolytes, at least–to put down the pen and make the move from thinking about the world to actually altering it.

 

Who could doubt that this is difficult and depressing? Like any revolutionary, Jameson utilizes the system he is opposing in order to defeat it (or at least to critique it); but when that system has triumphed so conclusively, when it can afford eminence even to those who are, basically, plotting its downfall, one is entitled to ask whether any of their efforts could be called successes. The bleakest alternative is the horrible thought that perhaps Jameson’s work has already been defused of its radical dynamite, softened and subsumed by the very system it has theorized so cogently. Yes, of course Jameson succeeds in the tortuous dialectical ways that Helmling says he does; but these successes seem to be undercut by the greater failure of Western Marxism. In the end, one cannot help but wonder whether this failure might not derive from the profound lack of accordance between academic theory and lived experience in the contemporary West, and whether the speculative daydreams of theory, institutionally viable though they undoubtedly still are, might be rather more proximate to our problems than to their solutions. To entertain such dismal questions is to confront a failure that is Jameson’s but, of course, not only his. As for “success”–whether institutional, theoretical, aesthetic, or otherwise–to speak undialectically of that would be sheer delusion, the mark of a failure altogether more serious than that of the scriptible.

 

Notes

 

1. The principal texts are those by Homer, Anderson, Burnham, and Roberts.

 

2. The “contradiction” here is obviously the ideological effect of the postmodern: the theory both encapsulates and describes the predicament, a choice raised by Jameson himself in the book’s preface (Postmodernism x).

 

3. Clint Burnham’s study, The Jamesonian Unconscious, might well be taken as an answer to this question.

 

Works Cited

 

• Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso, 1998.
• Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. Farrar: New York, 1974.
• Burnham, Clint. The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.
• Eagleton, Terry. “Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style.” Against the Grain. London: Verso, 1986. 65-78.
• Green, Leonard, Jonathan Culler, and Richard Klein. Untitled interview with Fredric Jameson. Diacritics 12:3 (1982): 72-91.
• Homer, Sean. Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism. Cambridge: Polity, 1998.
• Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn. London: Verso, 1998.
• —. “Globalization and Political Strategy.” New Left Review 4 (2000): 49-68.
• —. “The Ideology of the Text.” The Ideologies of Theory. London: Routledge, 1988. 17-71.
• —. Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
• —. “The Politics of Utopia.” New Left Review 25 (2004): 35-54.
• —. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.
• —. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
• —. Signatures of the Visible. London: Routledge, 1992.
• —. A Singular Modernity. London: Verso, 2002.
• Roberts, Adam. Fredric Jameson. London: Routledge, 2000.