The Desire Called Jameson

Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Delaware
helmling@brahms.udel.edu

 

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. xviii + 214 pages. $22.95.

 

Fredric Jameson’s new book revisits problems treated in earlier work, with results suggested in the titles of its three chapters. The first, “The Antinomies of Postmodernism,” queries whether the venerable Hegelian-Marxist problematic of the “contradict ion,” which the historical process (“the dialectic”) will resistlessly “resolve,” must now (or again) be rethought as “antinomy,” a static, self-reinforcing overdetermination, a “stalled or arrested dialectic,” Jameson calls it, whose apparent lock on the future complements its erasure of the past (except as commodified nostalgia), to produce an “end of history” in which all difference and otherness, including that of the once-Utopian future itself, homogenizes into a tepid, entropic, indifferent conditio n of always-already-more-of-the-same. Where “permanent revolution” was, there shall “permanent reification” be–except that we must scratch that future tense: there (here) permanent reification now appears always already to have been, and promises (or th reatens) always forever to remain. Jameson has evoked this anxiety before; in the tortured prose of Postmodernism (1991) it underwrote a thematic as well as a practice of “the sublime”; but here he is much more explicit about the terms of th e predicament, and as various therapeutics (including Jameson’s own “homeopathy”) would have predicted, “explicitation”–the making conscious of this particular (political) unconscious–has helped to lower the temperature.

 

“Utopia”–the authentic desire versus the marketable simulacrum–is a leitmotif throughout chapter 1; it becomes the main theme of chapter 2, “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” in which an extended discussion of an only recently published early-Soviet text, Andrei Platonov’s “great peasant Utopia,” Chevengur (1927-8), reprises the “anxiety of Utopia” considered in the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism. For me, the most interesting feature of this chapter is Jameson’s speculation that it may now at last be time to credit modernism’s Utopianism, rather than dismissing it as “ideological.” (Jameson’s anti-modernism, like most academic anti-modernisms of the last two decades, was an animus more against academic appropriations of modernis m than against modernism itself, as if in despair of even the possibility of a critique that might extricate modernism’s ambitions and accomplishments from their domestication in an institutionalized “aesthetic ideology.” Can we yet entertain the challen ge of Adorno’s observation that, authorial allegiances notwithstanding, modernist art was de facto left wing? Jameson here indicates what a reconsideration of modernism in such a light might mean now.)

 

The last chapter, “The Constraints of Postmodernism,” is to me the least satisfying of the three: a discussion of several contemporary architects (the cited texts include manifestos as well as buildings and drawings) from Venturi, Koolhaas, Eisenman and Rossi to “deconstructionists” and “neo- (or “critical”) regionalists,” as if seeking in their differences some sort of contestation of what “the postmodern” might yet mean or become. Jameson apparently wants to test whether the complacent, I’m-OK,-you’re -OK “diversity” of a postmodern now might not already be reimaginable, as if in some future retrospect, as something more vitally conflicted “in the seeds of time” than has yet appeared.

 

I should say here, however, that my more or less obligatory attempt, as book reviewer, to provide a sketch of the “contents” of Seeds of Time is, as would be the case with any Jameson book, a futile undertaking. What Jameson has to say can’ t be summarized, because of the complication of his way of saying it. The interest of his work cannot be localized to any particular problems it takes up, solutions it offers, or positions it fortifies and defends. On the contrary: Jameson mobilizes his oft-noted “encyclopedic grasp of modern culture” not to find or propose a solution to every problem, but on the contrary, to problematize, as richly–as problematically–as possible, every possible solution; likewise his relation to any possible “positio n” is wary in the extreme, and most acutely so of those that might offer or impose themselves as his own. Like Apeneck Sweeney, who’s gotta use words when he talks to you, Jameson must traffic in positions to critique them–but only under protest: no mor e than Sweeney does Jameson like it. Most critique, partly because of its inevitably polemic motivations, operates on the model of the unmasking and the exposé, announcing its findings with the triumphant “Ah ha!” of discovery. By contrast , Jameson’s tone is a warier, wearier, “Uh oh”: not proclaiming successful conclusion, but facing up to whatever fresh prospect of obstacles and difficulties his analysis so far, in this text, on this page, in this sentence, has just now opened.

 

Jameson has been committed to a critical prose of this unconventional kind–i.e., he has been telling us that this is how he is trying to write, and how he wants to be read–from the beginning. The program is implicit in his first book (1961), which cel ebrates Sartre’s leavening of the philosophical drive to formulation and conclusion with the existential (a.k.a. phenomenological, sc. aesthetic) particularizing temporality of the narrative artist. It is explicit in Marxism and Form (1971), whose preface celebrates the “dialectical prose” of Adorno, and whose last chapter projects a program for what Jameson calls a “dialectical criticism.” Later, adapting Barthes, Jameson speaks of “the scriptible” and “the sentence”; and in his mos t recent work, especially Late Marxism (1990) and Postmodernism (1991), this ideal of a “theoretical discourse” that refuses the false security (or resists the inevitable familiarization) of “positions” or “conclusions” is projec ted negatively, in opposition to that intellectual reification or commodification–Jameson’s calls it “thematization”–that “dialectical criticism” would overcome.

 

A (critical) prose written on such principles is by now a familiar period feature, a veritable sign, all agree, of “the postmodern.” But the strengths enabled by such an aversion to the usual sorts of argumentative closure entail certain drawbacks; amon g them, in Jameson’s case, the difficulty that while Jameson’s work seems ready at every moment to project itself boldly out into confrontation with whatever problematic it might discover or invent for itself, its programmatic inconclusiveness can seem at times simply (or rather, complicatedly) evasive.

 

In the present instance, for example: what is, so to speak, the time, the “moment,” of The Seeds of Time? The two books Jameson has published since the devolution of the Soviet Union three years ago merely collected material from before the fall. By now (as I write) it is 1994; surely, I thought, in this new book Jameson will have something to say about the Second World’s cataclysm. Not quite: the book offers itself as a reprint of Jameson’s Wellek lectures at Irvine, given in April 1991 (i.e., before the fall), but the text has obviously been enlarged and supplemented since, leaving many traces of what we might call a “self-difference” that is not merely temporal but historical: as if the text itself has suffered asynchronously (which is not to say diachronically) the differential seismic shocks of an “uneven development.” Thus “Second World culture” may figure in the present tense on one page, in the past on the next, while “Eastern Europe” appears throughout as ex-socialist, but in th e context of a rollback that seems to have proceeded only as far as the Soviet border–i.e., as if the “moment” of this text were quite specifiably that of post-autumn 1989 but pre-, and without anticipation of, December 1991. It is a standard move of th eory to “suspend” rather than to answer pressing questions, but this is a perplexing suspension from a critic whose best-circulated slogan is “Always historicize!”

 

It is also, thereby, a telling sign or “symptom”–not simply of a residual nostalgia for the Soviet experiment that can seem almost a form of denial in face of its demise, but of a larger, more general and systemic conflictedness agitating all Jameson’s projects. Recall the affirmation in “Metacommentary” (1971) of the necessity of interpretation: “we are condemned to interpret at the same time that we feel an increasing repugnance to do so”; similarly, the imperative to “historicize” is not a “d esire” to do so: in The Political Unconscious, its burden is of a facing-the-worst sort, a chastening “Necessity” enforced by “the determinate [“inevitable”] failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history.” Since befor e The Political Unconscious, Jameson’s grim asides about “actually receding socialism” have owned that revolution’s “inevitable failure” as an established fact. But that was then, this is now: while one kind of anti-Soviet Marxist mig ht welcome the end of the USSR as good riddance to bad baggage, Jameson is of the more scrupulous sort whose qualms about the USSR were more salient before the fall than after, and whose loyalties to it will likely prove more poignant after than before.

 

So rather than moralize or score points against Jameson’s “evasion,” we can more fruitfully consider it as an instance of the later Jameson’s own constant theme, what the title of the last chapter of The Political Unconscious calls “The Dial ectic of Utopia and Ideology”: the Eros-and-Thanatos agon of Utopian desire in its fated conflict with the reality principle, or (to use a vocabulary Jameson favors) with that Lacanian “Real” which Jameson has glossed as “simply [!] History itself.” What ever else we might want to infer from this agon’s enactment in the motions and the motives of Jameson’s prose, we can’t ascribe any of this problematic’s “political unconscious” to Jameson himself: he is no doubt as “conscious” of it as anyone could be.

 

I put it this way to foreground what Jameson has at stake in this effort to Utopianize against the historical wind: the costs or conditions, the strains and contradictions (I-can’t-go-on-I’ll-go-on) of this Beckettian but also Promethean project. Take f or example the book’s title, drawn from a passage of Macbeth slightly misquoted in the book’s dedication to Wang Feng-zhen: “for who can look into the seeds of time / And say which grain will grow and which will not. . . .” The allusion is a t once elegiac and defiant: both a farewell to the Marxist dream of foretelling the plot of History’s grand narrative, and a protest against the postmodern ideology’s preemption of the future. Such are the ambivalences enacted in Jameson’s prose, so often suspended between, or rather overlapping and thus positioned to draw on the libidinal effects of both, a refutation of postmodernism as the (false) ideology of “late capitalism” and a raising of the alarm against a world-historical adversary that is only too real.

 

Hence the ambivalence we might name, with this volume’s title in mind, the desire called “time.” In Jameson, the desire called Utopia, as we’ve already remembered, is indissociable from a certain “anxiety of Utopia”; and a cognate conflictedness bel ongs to “time,” the temporal, the diachronic, narrative, “History itself.” These last, it will be remembered, were stuff and substance of the “historicizing” program of The Political Unconscious, whose subtitle, “Narrative as a Socially Symb olic Act,” made narrativity and/or historicity at once the determining limit point of the “ideological closure” by which Utopian energies find themselves “contained,” and the condition of possibility of any critique that would try (in Utopia’s behalf, eve n if not in its name) to open, breach, or at least contest that closure. The Political Unconscious, acclaimed in the United States, found a chilly reception elsewhere among Althusserians hostile to its Hegelian, “historicizing” program; and ever since, Jameson has deployed “space” as a virtual watchword for “the postmodern,” and (to make the “motivation” a bit more pointed) as the “other” of a putatively modernist “time”; the gesture has sometimes been so insistent as almost to seem a kind o f penance for the earlier work’s historicism. However that may be, some of the headiest moments (or topoi) in Jameson’s consideration of postmodernism have conjured with the atmospherics of “space”: “Architecture” (“Spatial Equivalents in the World Syste m”), “Demographics of the Postmodern,” “Spatial Historiographies,” “cognitive mapping,” a “geopolitical aesthetic,” “signatures of the visual,” heightened attention to the media of the eye, video, film, etc.

 

Even at its headiest, Jameson’s account of postmodernism was more equivocal than many of his readers seem to have grasped; but my point in thus projecting “space” as a vehicle for Jameson’s enthusiasm for the postmodern generally is that the new book’s t itle signals a renewed willingness to give “time” its innings, and in the context of a gesture most uncharacteristic for Jameson, a self-retrospect occasioned by (and confessing) a change of mind about “the postmodern,” springing, he says, from “a certain exasperation both with myself and with others, who have so frequently expressed their enthusiasm with the boundless and ungovernable richness of modern [sic: in context, read postmodern] . . . styles, which freed from the telos of modern, a re now “lawless” in any number of invigorating or enabling ways. . . . In my own case it was the conception of ‘style’. . . that prevented me for so long from shaking off this impression of illimitable pluralism.”

 

He goes on to make the connection of “personal style” with “the individual centered subject” (both of which the postmodern promised to leave behind), and of “period style” with “aesthetic or stylistic totalization” (both of which postmodernism’s p roliferation of borrowed styles, disjoined from their former motivations by an alientated practice of “pastiche,” likewise affected to exorcise). But the disdain of “aesthetic or stylistic totalization,” Jameson cautions, should not extend to “political or philosophical totalization”: it’s a chronic theme of his that analysis must not disown the aspiration to totalization as a Hegelian hubris, but rather must accept it as a Necessity imposed by the abjection of our historical moment. Once again, what th e overhastily zealous would dismiss as an incorrect “desire called totalization,” Jameson stages as an inescapable “anxiety of totalization.”

 

This desire/anxiety nexus has its own history; to an extent it is simply a generic feature of critique as such, the irresistible force of its meliorist motive in agon with the immovable object it aspires (with mere words) to change. But the anxiety and the desire tussle to different outcomes in different periods, different critics, and, within a given critic’s ouevre, different works–and indeed, on different pages, even in different sentences. Jameson’s own career begins with desire in the asce ndant. Sartre (1961) was a declaration of allegiance; and in Marxism and Form (1971), a sheer excitement about a variety of Western Marxist classics seemed to attest a limitless field of critical possibility. The Prison-H ouse of Language (1972) cautioned (in its titular metaphor) against a focus on “representation” at the expense (or even exclusive) of the “referent”; yet it too reveled in the multiple critical prospects opened by structuralism. Fables of Ag gression (1979) introduced, and The Political Unconscious (1981) consolidated, the darker themes of “inevitable failure” and “ideological closure,” but in counterpoint (still) with an enlarged sense of hermeneutic possibilities–as if (to recall the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach) the loss in our power to change the world could be compensated by our chance of an amplified understanding of it. But in Postmodernism (1991) and other writings of the ’80s, that opt imism receded before the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” Enter anxiety, by way of “the sublime,” which Jameson projected as “unrepresentable,” and therefore inevitably baffling any hermeneutic effort brought to bear on it–as if critique’s impotence to change the world now had to entail an inability to understand it as well. It was Postmodernism, not only projecting and dramatizing this dilemma, but impaling itself on its horns, that set, for me, the high-voltage mark fr om which the books that followed (The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Signatures of the Visible, and now The Seeds of Time) have fallen back.
But fallback needn’t mean loss, if anxiety’s loss is desire’s gain. Much as I enjoyed the excitements of Jameson’s “sublime,” I grew impatient with its premise, that “the logic of late capitalism” is unintelligible, while every day the lies seem mor e brazenly transparent than the day before. If, indeed, you can still think of them as lies, rather than as the monstrous and cynical boasting of “enlightened false consciousness.” (“We call six percent unemployment full employment, because below that w ages begin to rise!”) In any case, since Postmodernism, Jameson has mostly reverted to making more sardonic- (rather than sublime-) sounding kinds of sense–as if understanding the world is after all possible, and even, if not exactly desira ble, still, incumbent upon us, faute de mieux, however much we may, on our gloomier days, find ourselves prey to “an increasing repugnance to do so.” Thus put, though, the case is not desire’s gain at anxiety’s expense, but rather anxiety’s migrat ion to a more settled and resigned abode.

 

But there persists the Jamesonian vigilance lest “making sense” lapse into “thematization,” and Jameson’s prose, even when its aims are most unequivocally (or most sardonically) hermeneutic, meets this danger with a wariness in which “making sense” typic ally means un-making some oppressively familiar, “common [ideological kind of] sense.” Even at its most staid, Jameson’s impulse in practice is less toward “making sense” than toward “making difficulties.” The pursuit will qualify itself, or chan ge the subject, or multiply its aspects, in a way to preempt any achieved “sense” of anything in particular, except the ardor and the difficulty/impossibility of the quest. I offer this as value-neutral description of Jameson’s peculiar power, not as cri ticism of a weakness: on the evidence, indeed, I’d say that Jameson is least satisfying when he settles down to an extended discussion of something–in this new book, e.g., the pages on Chevengur had, for me, their longueurs; an d likewise, the consideration of architecture in the closing chapter, another connect-the-dots exercise based on one of those Greimassian rectangles Jameson so favors. The flashes come in (or through) the cracks, as asides, as details allowed their momen tary expansions that can become, for the space of a paragraph or a page, a departure from the drill. Escaping the dictates of “the drill” is the very condition of Jameson’s power.

 

Hence the persistence, and the fascination, of a calculated “unrepresentability” in Jameson’s later work–if not as a telos, yet as an ever present potentia (desire) or ananke (anxiety) exerting pressure away from “sense” toward its unrepresentable other, whether that other be “Utopian” or “sublime.” Which raises familiar quandaries: limits, boundaries, inside/outside, hither/”beyond,” Zeno’s paradox of the infinitesimal that separates quantitative from qualitative change, etc. Wal lace Stevens’s adviso, that a poem should resist the intelligence almost successfully, licenses us to put it (again) that cutting the “almost” finer and finer is almost a period convention of that postmodern genre (or almost-genre? not-quite-genre? ) called “theory”–a gesture enacting, I take it, a sense of the toils, the struggles, “the labor and the suffering” (Hegel) as well as the self-inflicted scruples, the vigilance against hubris and mauvaise foi, of the hermeneutic will-to-understan d–a desire tragically thwarted in an absurd world, and/or (“antithetically,” in Freud’s sense), a hubris, an “omnipotence of thought,” a suppose savoir, a crypto-totalitarian lust for “totalization” and “mastery” that is properly to be thwa rted, distrusted, chastened, subverted.

 

In this unstable and shifting scene, Eros and Thanatos change places (or “perspectives”) with dizzying facility; how to keep the dizziness from numbness, and the facility from facile-ness, are problems too many theorists negotiate altogether too successfully. Jameson’s “difficult” prose negotiates or (better) dramatizes them with more passion, as well as with more aplomb, than anyone else’s, and with a flair in the performance that makes, despite Jameson’s own “resisitance to thematization,” any dissociation of theme from practice “ultimately” unsatisfactory, even as it guards itself against, on the one hand, their premature or too-simple “synthesis,” and, on the other, an aestheticization that reifies the dissociation itself. Some such impo ssibly recursive and self-interfering “desire to desire” seems the very condition of the way we read (and write) now, drawing ambivalent satisfactions from a prose in which the satisfactions can’t be said to count for more than the frustrations, and in wh ich this (somehow) is the satisfaction, this continual deferral-yet-renewal of the promise (or mirage) of satisaction that keeps Jameson writing his texts, and us reading them. Enjoying our symptom? Repugnance to do so? I-can’t-go-on-I’ll-go-on? To the contrary, there’s no stopping him, or us.