Metadorno

Neil Larsen

Department of Modern Languages
Northeastern University
<nlarsen@lynx.northeastern.edu>

 

Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 1990.

 

My first encounter with the writings of Fredric Jameson occurred when I was a graduate student in Comparative Literature. At that time the older, New Critical, T.S. Eliot-ized curriculum was rapidly crumbling before the onslaught of “theory.” The moment was uniquely exhilarating, but also charged with a peculiar anxiety, not unlike that experienced by an ‘uneducated’ consumer about to buy a new refrigerator or, say, a compact disk player. Doing “theory” meant not only becoming familiar with a range of available critical paradigms–from the many varieties of poststructuralism and feminism, to psychoanalysis, to reception theory, etc., etc.–but also, inevitably, taking one home. Extenuating factors, for the most part extra-academic, predisposed me to Marxism, which happened to be in stock, and I remain, I must confess, a most satisfied customer. The decision, however, was greatly facilitated by reading books such as Marxism and Form and the then recently published Prison-House of Language. The latter work in particular fell upon us like a godsend. Here, at last, was a critique of formalism, structuralism and poststructuralism, setting out from clearly articulated theoretical and political positions of its own, but at the same time satisfying the collateral need for an introduction to a whole range of thinkers–from Shklovksy and Jakobson to Levi-Strauss, Greimas, Lacan and Kristeva–whose many individual works one simply hadn’t the time or the training to assimilate. With the then constant appearance of new works of theory–a process still unabating–it was easy to become dismayed at the prospect of falling further and further behind. But Jameson’s books made life easier–indeed, made the career of many a struggling apprentice to critical theory a possibility where it might otherwise have succumbed to burn-out or inane and unwanted specializations. I think I am not far off in saying that Jameson played a unique role in educating an entire generation of Marxist literary and cultural critics (and perhaps not a few non-Marxists), not only in the tradition of the Western Marxism of a Lukacs or a Benjamin, but also in virtually all of the important schools of critical theory to have emerged since roughly the 1920s. To say this is in no way to disparage Jameson’s contributions as an original critical theorist. One thinks especially here of his central position within current discussions of postmodernity. But perhaps his most original contribution is precisely the method of interpreting ‘rival,’ non-Marxist theories and interpretations in such a way as to expose their falsifying implications at the same time that their specific ‘truth content’ is preserved–a method variously identified as “meta-commentary” and as “transcoding.” There can, in my estimation, arise genuine doubts about the ultimate political effect of metacommentary–as to whether, in fact, it is the Marxist frame and not the array of ‘rival’ discourses that is finally severed from its ‘truth-content’ as a result of this operation. But I don’t think there can be any about the vastly productive heuristic force of Jamesonian interpretation. Metacommentary has, pretty much alone it seems to me, worked towards an intellectual-critical synthesis within the humanities, without which the quality of present day intellectual discourse and analysis would probably be far poorer.

 

It is against this rather special standard of expectation that Jameson’s 1990 work, Late Marxism, seems both disconcerting and somewhat disappointing. Here, somehow, metacommentary, while never more sophisticated and sensitive to every conceivable nuance and possibility lurking within its intellectual object, seems oddly static. An exhausting labor of reading–for Late Marxism is, uncharacteristically, a book whose initial threshold of difficulty, beyond which the effort of comprehension becomes continuously self-rewarding, seems never to be reached–leaves the reader finally bereft of the expected synthesis. Why is this?

 

Perhaps it is simply my own local need or desire for metacommentary that has lapsed here. But I suspect my response to Late Marxism–at least among those who have themselves been schooled by Jamesonian Marxism–is not atypical. What I want to suggest in what follows is that the peculiar density and tendency to hypostasis detected in Late Marxism by its readers stems not from any intrinsic decay of metacommentary, but rather from what may be the essential unfeasability of the task that the method here sets for itself.

 

That task involves the substantiation of two claims: first, that Adorno’s own claim to Marxism (whether or not Adorno himself in fact bothers to make it) is a valid one; second, that “Adorno’s Marxism may be just what we need today” (5). To substantiate the former, Jameson observes that “the law of value is always presupposed by Adorno’s interpretations” (230) as well as pointing to the “omnipresence” in Adorno of the “conceptual instrument called ‘totality'” (ibid.). The latter is purportedly established by the very “success” of contemporary, “late” capitalism at “eliminating the loopholes of nature and the Unconscious, of subversion and the aesthetic, of individual and collective praxis alike . . .” (5). That is, Adorno’s continual “emphasis on the presence of late capitalism as a totality within the very forms of our concepts . . .” (not to mention its presence within all our less cerebral modes of being), while perhaps still tending to untruth for his time, has now been verified for ours. The problem with contemporary, non-dialectical theories of culture and society is–or so Jameson implies here–that in banishing the concept of totality in the ethical belief that this somehow frees them from the danger of complicity with “totalitarian” ideology and politics, such theories in fact fall all the more hopelessly under the spell of the real totality, which has long since found ways of insinuating itself into even the most anti- “totalitarian” acts of consciousness.

 

Adorno, that is, is the Marxist trump card in the postmodern deck. It’s an interesting, not to say attractive notion. The problem, as I see it here, is that to be convinced of this would require more than a general reference to “late capitalism” coupled with the passing observation of the “melting away” of “really existing” socialism and the “drying up” of “Liberation struggles” (249-50)–accurate as these observations may be in themselves. If the claim that “late capitalism” has eliminated the “loopholes . . . of individual and collective praxis alike” (a succinct but quite precise restatement of Adornian political philosophy) is to be defended as one consistent with Marxism, then there would have to be some attempt here–on the level of both political economy and of politics as ideology and hegemony–to account for this change. I don’t wish to rule out the possibility that such an historically and materially grounded account is possible, but if it is, I see no evidence of it in Late Marxism, or, for that matter, in any of Adorno’s works. The Adornian retort here, as Jameson formulates it, is to question whether or not “history” itself, on this plane, is “thinkable” at all except as a “present absence” that can be pointed out but not subjected to any further conscious mediation (see 89). But if it isn’t, then how did we come up with the theory of “late capitalism” in the first place? What explains our ability to register its “success”? All of this, moreover, leaves aside the critical question of agency in Adornian social dialectics–unless we are meant simply to accept it on faith that it is only monadic “works of art”–and the exceptional Critical Theorist–that are empowered to resist totality.

 

These, at any rate, are the sorts of questions that a defense of Adorno as Marxist would have to confront. (It does no good here to fall back on the recognition of Marxism itself as a “cultural phenomenon” that “varies according to its socioeconomic context” (11)l. That is certainly true on one level. But this makes Adorno’s Marxism a “cultural phenomenon” as well, in which case it is hard to see how its particular “truth” is truer than that of the others.)

 

But Late Marxism proceeds instead to an exhaustive re-reading of Adorno more or less in keeping with the method of metacommentary. So, for example, Jameson will object to Habermas’s charge that,in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer revert to a non-Marxist irrationalism by arguing that this work can in fact be read as a sort of “natural historical” supplement to Marx’s social historical genealogy of capitalist modernity (108). Depending on one’s particular take on Adorno, one will or will not be persuaded by Jameson’s local interpretations. No one, I think, will want to dispute their truly awesome virtuosity and brilliance as readings of the Adornian texts themselves–above all Jameson’s mapping out of Adornian concepts in their all important Darstellung. As noted above, the only complaint that might be registered here is against the unrelieved difficulty of following Jameson’s own Darstellung throughout much of Late Marxism. It’s a rare experience to come upon an extended citation from the Negative Dialectics and feel a sense of relief at being able to relax for a moment one’s effort of concentration!

 

Supple and erudite as these reflections are, however, they somehow don’t add up to a conclusive defense of Adorno as today’s Marxist. And, indeed, how could this be the result of a Jamesonian metacommentary, which presupposes that a Marxism endowed with a consciousness of the totality is already in place at the outermost and “ultimate horizon” of interpretation? How can Adorno, who has already been explicitly identified as the bearer of Marxian truth in the era of postmodernity, be both subject and object of metacommentary all at once? In such a situation, metacommentary would seem to lose its very source of motivation. And this, I suggest, is what finally explains the readerly difficulty here, not in following the motion of the ‘transcoding’, but in decoding the ‘transcoding’ itself.