Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Delaware
helmling@udel.edu

 

“History is what hurts,” writes Fredric Jameson in an oft-quoted phrase that many readers seem to take as a motto for his work as a whole. If Jameson matters, it is to the presumably minority audience for whom the anodyne declaration of the “end of history” only exacerbates the abrasions it so officiously promised to soothe. For Marxists and other Left intellectuals still alive to the hurt of history (as well, of course, for many triumphalist conservative detractors), Jameson is a standard-bearer, “representative” of critical (unhappy) consciousness in a period that has seen the fortunes of the Left decline precipitously. “Representativeness” involves a by-now familiar problematic, but from at least Marxism and Form (1971) on, Jameson has prescribed for cultural critique a “dialectical writing” that should enact, perform, indeed, suffer the contradictions and predicaments of its subject matter–for only thus can critique participate in the dialectic of history itself.

 

Which raises the problem, how should critique be written, or, more pointedly, in what sense can critique be said to succeed, in a period when revolution itself is failing? This anxiety, a kind of “self consciousness,” agitates Jameson’s writing continuously, and his resourcefulness as a writer–the allusiveness and inventiveness of his “dialectical writing”–helps make his work “representative” in the sense of registering not merely the intellectual dilemmas of socialism in our period, but something of the experiential texture, the vécu of these disappointments and failures as well. The adviso that “History is what hurts,” for example, comes in the peroration to the opening chapter of The Political Unconscious–a passage that treats the difficulties of the revolutionary tradition as continuous with those of the critical and theoretical labor that would guide, critique, or even merely narrate it:

 

the most powerful realizations of a Marxist historiography… remain visions of historical Necessity… [and] of the inexorable logic involved in the determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history: the ultimate Marxian presupposition… is the perspective in which the failure or the blockage, the contradictory reversal or functional inversion of this or that local revolutionary process is grasped as “inevitable”…. Necessity is not… a type of content, but rather the inexorable form of events; it is therefore a narrative category… a retextualization of History… as the formal effects of what Althusser, following Spinoza, calls an “absent cause.” (PU 101-2)

 

Recall that the topic is not History, but rather “dialectical” critique of the type Jameson here both theorizes andattempts to write. The “vision” of “inevitable failure” here prescribed for critique is a “textual effect,” to be achieved in the writing, but also a motivation of critique generically–and to inscribe “failure” as the motivation of an enormously ambitious project, and the measure of its success, is to incur a peculiar difficulty: what Jameson calls, in “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (1985), a certain “textual determinism”:

 

the purpose of the theorist is to build as powerful a model of capital as possible, and as all-embracing, systemic, seamless, and self-perpetuating. Thus, if the theorist succeeds, he fails: since the more powerful the model constructed, the less possibility will be foreseen in it for any form of human resistance, any chance of structural transformation. (IT2 48)

 

How to manage this predicament–exploit it? suffer it? dramatize it? but dramatizing also somehow (how?) the persistence of “human resistance”?–these are questions to which Jameson’s 1984 essay, “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” offers a suggestive set of mediations–less an “answer” to these questions than an enactment of them.

 

The “Postmodernism” essay has too often been taken as a series of theses on, and even on behalf of, “the postmodern”–a reading that involves, most simply, an exultation over the grave of bad old modernism and a triumph (however qualified) of the generational revolts of the 1960s. Jameson, needless to say, has much sympathy with these values, but neither his repudiation of modernism, nor his embrace of the postmodern are so simple as many of his more excited readers have wanted to believe. He is at pains in the essay itself to warn against taking the modern/postmodern binary as an occasion for a “moralizing” choice between them; such either/or thinking, he cautions, invoking both Hegel and Marx, would be un-dialectical (P 46-7). So when Jameson speaks of the (postmodern) “euphoria” and “joyous intensities” displacing “the older affects of anxiety and alienation” (P 29) or, even more rapturously, later (in the 1991 book that reprints and draws its title from the 1984 essay), of “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” (P 313), he is ventilating an anxious hope, not announcing an achieved victory. The essay’s title, after all, retained in full for the book, identifies “postmodernism” with “the cultural logic of late capitalism.”

 

Nevertheless, the enthusiasm over “the postmodern” has its “truth,” and attests something real, some genuine “[textual] effect,” in or of Jameson’s “dialectical sentences,” the excitements of the Jamesonian scriptible qualifying (perhaps, overriding?) the announced presupposition(s) or “vision” of “inevitable failure.” We will shortly consider how this happens, but we must begin with the presupposition itself. The “Postmodernism” essay, like the virtually contemporaneous “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (1985), foregrounds the problem of “textual determinism”:

 

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. (P 5-6)

 

To this problem, the essay’s characterizations of “postmodernism” may be taken as agitating variously anxious or hopeful responses.

 

And also, I want to argue, quite self-conscious responses: more than in The Political Unconscious or earlier works, Jameson’s writings of the ’80s make explicit what had earlier been left implicit, namely the import of problems arising from the determining force of “the vast text of the social” upon critique itself, or as Jameson’s ’80s usage increasingly calls it, “theoretical discourse”–a term seemingly value-neutral, in contrast with such terms as “dialectical history” (or “historiography”) with which Jameson more readily identifies his project. “Theoretical discourse” usually encodes Jameson’s reservations about “the ideology of the text,” i.e., theory’s reduction of History to (mere) textuality or representation, its self-congratulatory connoisseurship (another apolitical aestheticism) of highbrow “jouissance” and “the pleasures of the text.” But the same logic that entails upon “Marxist historiography” a particular “vision” or “textual effect” means that Jameson’s reservations about the “ideology of the text” enumerate pitfalls or failures threatening any practice (including his own) of “dialectical history” or “Marxist historiography” themselves. The term “theoretical discourse” signals the dangers inherent in the scriptible, whereby the utopian energies of the writing may devolve into a mere aesthetic or “ideology,” “an imaginary solution to a real problem.”

 

To such inexorable “logic(s)” generally, and the self-reinforcing or -fulfilling impasse of the “winner loses logic” in particular, the whole drift of the “Postmodernism” essay seems to suggest a loosening or relaxation (even a “thunderous unblocking”?)–as if these problems themselves are part and parcel of that very “logjam” of the modern that (the essay dares hope) may now be breaking up and passing away. A pregnant contradiction insinuates itself at the essay’s opening, in that the problem of “textual determinism” is prompted by that of “periodization”: periodization implies narrative, and narrative implies a circumscribed field (an “ideological closure”) of possibilities of character and event. How to project “postmodernism” as something really new, when the advent of “the new” is perhaps the oldest story (even “ideology”) of all? Jameson’s essay elaborates the potentialities of the postmodern novum largely in libidinal terms–“intensities,” “the delirious” and “euphoria,” and their inverse, the “waning of affect” (both “joyous” and “boring”), the Deleuzian-Guattarian and Lacanian rhetoric of “the schizo.” The function of these novelties in “Postmodernism,” to loosen or unblock the coils of what had previously been an ever-tightening “logic,” is one his earlier writing had assigned to the operations of “the dialectic,” or to “dialectical thinking.” Indeed, in the “Postmodernism” essay itself, Jameson insists again that Hegel’s and Marx’s renewal of dialectic has for some time now provided us with the necessary, the sufficient, and the only antidote to the prison-house of antinomic “logic” (ideology, metaphysics, History, language, representation).

 

But if the libidinal novelties celebrated in “Postmodernism” merely repeat a Hegelian/Marxist dialectical gesture, how “new” can they really be? Moreover, to the extent that their claim of newness seems to relegate the dialectic itself to a now superceded past, they approach what Jameson himself reprehends (IT2 133) as naively “ideological” kinds of “post-Marxism.” To the extent that to “renew” the dialectical gesture is merely to “repeat” it, they make the dialectic itself merely another instance of the problematic of repetition, another “old story” rather than the very principle of “the new” itself that, in the Hegel-and-Marx tradition, is the dialectic’s raison d’être.

 

I make these points not to hoist Jameson on the petard of contradiction, but to indicate the scope of contradiction and conflictedness, of critical desire and anxiety, that his writing here (and elsewhere) both manages to summon and appoints itself to negotiate. For even as he deplores the “winner loses logic” that continually enforces, even exaggerates the “closures” against which it protests, Jameson is obeying (or exploiting) it in his own writing, and in this very essay most particularly. Which is to say the “Postmodernism” essay needs a theme, a problematic, a motif or “motivation,” sufficiently supercharged to answer to the extremity–or accomplish the extremification–of these tangles.

 

Hence the role the essay assigns, or the use to which it puts, the rhetoric of “the sublime,” a discursive formation with a long and rich history, a term–Freud would call it an “antithetical word”–that maximizes both extremity (an absolute affective or aesthetic limit [or limitlessness] of physio-psychological experience) and ambivalence (conflating polar extremes of feeling: pleasure and pain, joy and terror, grandiosity and annihilation, transport and entrapment, enlargement and contraction, omnipotence and powerlessness…). Vocabularies of affect tend to connotations either of narrowed, focused force, or of a conflicted and thereby diffused ambivalence; “the sublime,” uniquely (sublimely?), delivers both, seeming to make these usually opposed tendencies collaborate to reinforce and strengthen each other (rather than balance or cancel each other out)–and to that degree, “the sublime” might be said to “perform” something of what it “constates.” (Wittgenstein warned against the fallacy of supposing that the concept of sugar is sweet; but “the sublime” approaches being an exception that proves–i.e., probes–Wittgenstein’s rule.) In any case, Jameson’s scriptible involves a constant pathos of the relationship of thetic to themic: neither their (critical) differentiation nor their (hermeneutic) “fusion” ever turns out to be more than provisionally or limitedly possible–and hence the instabilities and reversals that enable “the sublime” to stand in for “the dialectic” itself.

 

Such are the agitations with which Jameson’s “Postmodernism” essay will manage to inflect “the sublime.” But Jameson’s first substantial invocation of “the sublime,” slightly precedes, and makes a surprising contrast with, its projection in “Postmodernism.” In “Pleasure: A Political Issue” (1983), among Jameson’s primary concerns is to rebut apolitical, even depoliticizing, ’70s readings of the Barthesian binary of “plaisir” and “jouissance” in order to rescue Barthes both from enthusiasts, who valorize this view of him, and from (politically oriented) detractors who revile it. So far from celebrating a privatistic hedonism (writes Jameson), Barthes’s Pleasure of the Text “restore[s] a certain politically symbolic value to the experience of jouissance, making it impossible to read the latter except as a response to a political and historical dilemma” (IT2 69). Jameson concedes “plaisir” to the enemy, the better to recuperate “jouissance” for political (or at least “politically symbolic”) purposes; and to that end he assimilates the Barthesian binary to Edmund Burke’s “beautiful” and “sublime,” a move justified in the first place by the latter term’s connotations of an “intensity” that marks a transport beyond the manageable domain of simple “pleasure” or the merely “beautiful,” but with more explicit reference in Jameson’s text to Barthes’s evocations of “fear.” Thus Jameson works on “jouissance” an astonishing reversal, finding in the experience of ecstasy an affinity with the Burkean sublime of terror, an effect that “threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life” (IT2 72). ¹

 

This chastening continues the motivation of the “vision” of “inevitable failure”; in the “Pleasure” essay, it manifests in the “capital-logic” metanarrative according to which “the subject of History” turns out to be not the proletariat but that “unfigurable and unimaginable thing,” Capitalism itself (IT2 73). Which is to say that in “Pleasure,” “the sublime” enforces that very “textual determinism” or “winner loses logic” that Jameson protests in “Postmodernism”–hence the surprising contrast between the two essays, a contrast less of the ways they diagnose than in the ways they mobilize these problematics. In “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” “the sublime” functions to augment the sense of powerlessness before not merely the “winner loses logic” Jameson identifies as generic to his project, but before that much larger and more grasping “Capital-logic” or “ideological closure” of what the later essay will call “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” But in the later essay, as if in some unforeseen dialectical reversal, this very “logic” generates varieties of “lawless” libidinalisms incompatible with Capitalism’s program to rationalize, routinize, instrumentalize, commodify, reify, or colonize them. In “Pleasure,” “the sublime” functions to bring apparently divergent and conflicting motifs–“fear” and “jouissance,” preeminently–to a concentrated focus; it disciplines a variety of impulses or affects to a single effect. In “Postmodernism,” by contrast, it functions to loosen or even reverse this inexorable “winner loses logic.” If the earlier essay inflects “jouissance” with historical terror, the later enables the transformation of “fear” or “shock” back into “joyous intensities.”

 

Put it that among the “motivations” of the “Postmodernism” essay is a certain dis-motivation or de-motivating, a de-linking of terms that would elsewhere in Jameson’s discourse have entrained an inexorable (antinomic) “logic,” “Necessity,” “History,” “closure.” Probably the best-circulated example is that encoded in Jameson’s contrast of (modern) “parody” with (postmodern) “pastiche”: the former motivated by a critical attitude toward its original; the latter, more anomically, simply aping received cultural styles in a “neutral practice of mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse… blank parody” (P 17). Here the general theme of the “waning of affect” reprises an earlier incertitude about why Warhol’s Coke bottles, etc., “ought to be powerful and critical political statements” but seem not to be, thus raising doubt “about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital” (P 9). And indeed, of political critique, or critical “theory”: in the “Introduction” to Postmodernism, Jameson declares that “I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters are inquiries into the nature of… ‘postmodernism theory’ or mere examples of it” (P x)–a gesture cognate with the “Postmodernism” essay’s brooding, alternately sanguine and anxious, over the disappearance of “critical distance” itself. (It was in the ’80s that Jameson advanced “homeopathy” as a figure for his critical project: “To undo postmodernism homeopathically by the methods of postmodernism: to work at dissolving the pastiche by using all the instruments of pastiche itself…” [Kellner 59]).

 

“Postmodernism” thus dis-motivates, or re-motivates, “the sublime” itself, by a sort of performative fiat, as much in the actual (libidinal) effects of the way it is written as in its deployment–the most consequential in Jameson’s oeuvre to date–of Lacanian, Lyotardian, Deleuze-Guattarian “schizophrenia,” “libidinal skin,” and “delirium,” terms suggesting (especially with the writing practice of either Libidinal Economy or Anti-Oedipus in mind, whose sheer nutsiness makes Lacan’s calculated impenetrability seem sedate) a willful, Luddite vandalizing of the (over-) functioning circuitries of sense and discussion “as usual.” The “schizo” motif is aligned with such phenomena as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in a way to exploit both the liberatory connotations (“the subversion of the subject” [IT1 61]) as well as the more oppressive inflections of a psychologized or libidinalized sublime.

 

I have staged the “Postmodernism” essay’s mobilization of “the sublime” as the sign of a “new” effect in Jameson’s writing, indeed, as the specific vehicle for reversing what had become the increasingly, even terminally comprehensive effect of “closure” motivated by the “winner loses logic” of the “inevitable failure” imperative. But besides the thematic of “delirium” and “intensity,” the “Postmodernism” essay’s projection of “the sublime” renews many other long-standing preoccupations of Jameson’s as well. In “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” as we have seen, “the sublime” figured as an effect that “threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life” (IT2 72)–but the valorization of cultural production (whether art or critique) that realizes a “critical” effectivity by way of such an effect is a long-standing theme in Jameson, whether associated with “the sublime” or not. In Marxism and Form, Jameson lays it down as a self-evident proposition that in an increasingly reified world,

 

the serious writer is obliged to reawaken the reader’s numbed sense of the concrete through the administration of linguistic shocks, by restructuring the overfamiliar or by appealing to those deeper layers of the physiological which alone retain a kind of fitful unnamed intensity. (M&F 20-1)

 

The “serious writer” here is Adorno, whose “dialectical sentences” Jameson praises for precisely their ability to administer such “shocks” (this theme of “shock” recurs thoughout the Adorno and Benjamin chapters of Marxism and Form).

 

And given the emphasis in the passage just quoted on “the physiological,” we might propose that the “shock” potential specific to, or uniquely operable under the sign of, that “antithetical” word “the sublime” in effect libidinalizes “dialectical” effects, enacting their motions and reversals in the somatic domain of affects. Thus, in “Postmodernism,” does a scriptible of “the sublime” newly synthesize “dialectical thinking” with what “Pleasure: A Political Issue” idealizes as Barthes’s “writing with the body,” in a passage aiming to redescribe Barthes’s supposed hedonistic aestheticizing as something akin to the Lacanian ethos of “L’écoute,” of listening (to desire), of the “discourse of the analyst”:

 

[Barthes] taught us to read with our bodies–and often to write with them as well. Whence, if one likes, the unavoidable sense of self-indulgence and corruption that Barthes’ work can project when viewed from certain limited angles. The libidinal body, as a field and instrument of perception all at once, cannot but be self-indulgent in that sense. To discipline it, to give it the proper tasks and ask it to repress its other random impulses, is at once to limit its effectiveness, or, even worse, to damage it irretrievably. Lazy, shot through with fits of boredom or enthusiasm, reading the world and its texts with nausea or jouissance, listening for the fainter vibrations of a sensorium largely numbed by civilization and rationalization, sensitive to the messages of throbs too immediate, too recognizable as pain or pleasure–maybe all this bodily disposition is not to be described as self-indulgence after all. Maybe it requires a discipline and a responsiveness of a rare yet different sort…. Maybe indeed the deeper subject is here: not pleasure (against whose comfort and banalities everyone from Barthes to Edmund Burke is united in warning us), but the libidinal body itself, and its peculiar politics, which may well move in a realm largely beyond the pleasureable in that narrow, culinary, bourgeois sense. (IT2 69)

 

“The sublime” might be said to name that “realm beyond the pleasureable” in which “the libidinal body” and its “peculiar politics” less “move” (to qualify that last sentence) than desire (anxiously, vainly) to move; “the sublime” also answers to the longing for stimuli, even in the form of “shock,” that might reawaken responses that have been “numbed” by overhabituation–“too recognizable as pain or pleasure”: a formula that again agitates the desire for the (sublime) “antithetical,” in which all the domesticating binaries suffer (or enjoy) a reversal or sublation for which perhaps even the term Aufhebung might suddenly seem apposite.

 

The desire for release from (what we might call the “prison-house” of) the “too familiar” is itself, of course, rather too familiar a theme, both in the problematic of the modern generally (from at least Romanticism to now) and in Jameson himself, whose scriptible encodes the desire to escape “thematization”–a problematic bearing a strong family resemblance with Lacan’s characterization of “the Real” as “what resists symbolization absolutely.” The latter formula, indeed, invites us to read Jameson’s “sublime” as yet another figure of “the [Lacanian] Real.” To recall that Jameson characterizes the latter as “History itself” (IT1 104) is to rejoin the impulse that prompts Jameson to cathect Barthesian “jouissance” with political force, and thus to assimilate it, as “the sublime,” to a nightmare-of-history experience of fear and terror. If above we evoked a Hegelian sublime of “dialectical” reversal or fusion of polar alternatives whose contradiction had hitherto seemed to impose absolute discontinuity between them, the present point–the sublime as the unrepresentable–resonates with the Kantian noumenon, the Ding an sich, forever inaccessible to the categories of reason.

 

But the dialectical or “antithetical” oscillation between the libidinal and the historical valences of “the sublime,” between its utopian hope and its ideological terror, underwrites the rescript of this desire to escape representation as, instead, anxiety about an inability to achieve it, in what I take to be the “Postmodernism” essay’s most consequential inflection of “the sublime”: the Burkean experience of terror as

 

refined by Kant to include the question of representation itself, so that the object of the sublime becomes not only a matter of sheer power… but also of the limits of figuration and the incapacity of the human mind to give representation to such enormous forces. (P 34)

 

Burke and Kant could conceive “the sublime” as an incommensurability between Nature and the human; but today, “in full postmodernism” (Jameson writes), Nature has been too effectively tamed to play such a role in our imaginations; on the contrary it is the world system of technology and finance that now exceeds our power to grasp, to represent to ourselves. In “Postmodernism,” what uniquely defeats our understanding is, Vico and Marx notwithstanding, precisely what “we” have made. This “postmodern or technological sublime” breeds “high-tech paranoia” or “conspiracy theory” as the mind’s “degraded attempt[s]” to figure what cannot be figured, to represent what cannot be represented, “to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system” (P 37-8). Here, “the sublime” reprises the chronic Jamesonian theme of “society” as the “absent, invisible” determinant (Marxism and Form) or (adapting Althusser, in The Political Unconscious), the “absent cause,” operative upon all cultural production and lived experience, and which it is the task definitive of “Marxist hermeneutic” to infer or extrapolate from the social text at large.

 

The “vast text of the social,” and our abjection to it, as “sublime”: to pursue this theme through the vast text of Postmodernism is a task I am grateful to have to renounce here. Suffice it to say that simply as a “read,” even just as an object to be hefted in the hand, Postmodernism makes many telling contrasts with The Political Unconscious, contrasts for which “the sublime” must here be the summarizing term. Dense and compact(ed), The Political Unconscious tells a (Hegelian) story–there is nothing “secretly narrative” about its diachronic trajectory from pre-realism, through realism to modernism. By contrast, the vast and sprawling Postmodernism, renouncing temporality, narrative, and hermeneutic itself in favor of themes of “mapping,” “the visual,” and “space,” arrays itself in large chapters both thematically and procedurally disjunct. To belabor the book’s own frequent recourse to figures of the geo-“spatial,” we might say that Postmodernism suggests, estrangingly, a satellite probe of some distant planet, the encyclopedically bulky tome itself a hangar-sized bunker housing data as diverse as high-altitude photographs (in, e.g., the “Postmodernism” essay itself) on the one hand to spectrographic analyses of soil samples (in the minutely argued subchapters on de Man and Walter Benn Michaels) on the other.

 

My point here is that in Postmodernism “the sublime” is not merely announced as program, but enacted in Jameson’s writing practice. We need not argue that Jameson altogether calculated these “textual effects” to assert their impact on the experience of reading Postmodernism, and on that book’s renunciation or evasion of some of the predicaments elaborated in The Political Unconscious, most crucially that of the “vision” of “inevitable failure” itself. The Jamesonian “sublime” of impossible imperatives recurs throughout Postmodernism, in tension with antithetical themes of release, dissolution, “intensities,” to lend its discursive expansions and contractions a systolic/diastolic rhythm, working to heighten the impasse of the “winner loses logic” and/or “textual determinism” here, to loosen and “relieve” it there. Both stylistically and thematically indeed, this may be the most consequential of Jameson’s exploitations of the “antithetical” resources of “the sublime”: beyond terror/joy, boredom/intensity, and the like, “the sublime” also operates and signals the (“untranscendable”?) binary of Necessity/Freedom itself, figured here as the tightening and loosening of Jameson’s own “winner loses” rhetoric.

 

Space forbids more than a word here on Jameson’s 1990 book on Adorno, a book apparently overshadowed by Postmodernism, even though the titles (Late Marxism, “Late Capitalism”) invite us to read them as companion volumes. For Jameson, Adorno has raised the Freedom/Necessity dialectic with special force ever since Marxism and Form, in which Adorno’s “dialectical sentences” needed defense, as it were, against the liability of their own aesthetic brilliance: Adorno’s “historical trope” could look uncomfortably like a merely imagist device, that is, a contingency of Adorno’s own merely individual creative wit rather than a “working through” of some “objective,” i.e., “necessary” reality of the determinate world. In Late Marxism, Jameson means to celebrate Adorno again as a writer of “dialectical prose,” but also to guard against a too-easy assimilation of Adorno’s scriptible to a mere écriture or “textual productivity.” Thus Jameson valorizes the “resistance to thematization” in Adorno’s writing practice (and program, in such essays as “The Essay as Form”) even as he wants to claim that Adorno’s ostensibly “essayistic” or “aphoristic” oeuvre ultimately achieves a coherence and scope that deserves, indeed demands the name of “system.” And Adorno’s own prose as “sublime” is a leitmotif throughout: as scriptible, his long (and headlong) sentences and unbroken paragraphs confront the reader with (note the sublimity of this image) “a towering wall of water of a text” (LM 51); as program, or “system,” Adorno’s resourcefulness as a writer answers to (achieves a “mimesis” of) a sense of history, or the “administered universe” as (“sublime”) nightmare (LM 215-6), as in (again) Jameson’s adaptation of the “Capital-logic” Marxists (whom, indeed, he figures as Adorno’s rightful intellectual heirs [LM 239]). And throughout, the problem of the (un)representability of the “totality” looms.

 

It is worth attempting to “historicize,” however sketchily, Jameson’s “sublime” in the context of Jameson’s period. Its career could be said to begin in the era of “classic” modernism, with (for example) Ortega’s “dehumanization of art,” Worringer’s “abstraction and empathy” (another modernizing homeomorph of the sublime/beautiful), not to mention the Freudian “uncanny.” By the 1950’s, when Jameson (b. 1934) was coming of age intellectually, existentialism in general and Sartre in particular held for literary-intellectual culture something of the interest that “theory” and Derrida have held for the academic-intellectual subculture more recently. Salient among existentialist motifs was “the absurd,” which meant, first of all, the meaningless: the search for (or the making of) meaning defined the existential task or problem–and often its impossibility, or “inevitable failure.”

 

More recently, “meaning” has appeared not as idealized goal, the hoped-for end or reward of heroic quest or Promethean acte, but rather (along with its constituents, language and representation) as “prison-house,” a “closure” from which escape is vainly sought, an all-inclusive text coextensive with and complicit in (variously) an ever more mystifying “aesthetic ideology,” an unwitting “logocentric” metaphysics, or (Jameson’s focus) an increasingly oppressive world political and economic system. The transit of the un-meaning–what cannot be represented, signified, symbolized, or otherwise expressed, registered, assimilated or co-opted by or in any semiotic system or language–between these two positions could hardly be better graphed than by conceiving it as the passage from “the absurd” to “the sublime.” Nor, in my view, does any competing version of it–from “absurd” to (variously) post-Lacanian/Barthesian “jouissance,” Derrida’s “athetic,” Baudrillard’s “sleep” and/or “death,” Lyotard’s “inhuman,” the “impermeability” of Charles Bernstein, Paul Mann’s mock-apotheosis of “the stupid”–stretch the transit itself as far, nor generate within it so many “antithetical” or dialectical possibilities, as Jameson’s.

 

It also seems to me worth saying that of all Jameson’s successes, among the most startling, because it is, on its face, the most implausible, is to have credibly and sustainably predicated “sublimity” of the postmodern in the first place. 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”? I intend no derogation of “excitement” here; it appears to be a fundamental need of the human creature, and I am sure its scarcity in contemporary American life has much to do with our juvenile crime problem. Nor do I think it sugarcoats the ravages of “late capitalism” to say that its brutalities look, at least in our own first-world environment, more like the banality than the sublimity of evil; and I regret that these remarks might seem to reduce Jameson’s achievement to a mere species of horror fiction for “cultural intellectuals.” Granted, “anxiety” is by now a soothingly conventional motif; still, as anxieties go, multinational capitalism need not solicit the willing suspension of my disbelief as is the case with metaphysics or logocentrism (whether onto-, theo-, or phallo-), let alone commies (or FBI agents) under the bed, illegal aliens (or skinheads) at the 7-11, homosexual (or fundamentalist) “agendas” at the school board, or whatever bogeyman/scapegoat du jour (Marxist professors?) the corporate-foundation think-tanks and Capitol Hill press releases work so hard to scare me with. Alas, “boredom” and “waning of affect” seem rubrics all too adequate to the postmodern vécu–and as I have written in these pages before (Helmling, “Jameson’s Postmodernism: Version 2.0”), Jameson post-Postmodernism will increasingly revert to this more jaundiced view, drastically revising his early-’80s account of the interrelations of postmodernism and “the sublime.”

 

But “the sublime” as (at this moment) a culminating theme is an index of something else characteristic of Jameson’s career, his general penchant for expansion rather than contraction, for problems (even problematizations) rather than solutions, for seeing how far a notion or a vocabulary can be pushed rather than setting out to curtail its range in the name of clarity or certainty. Hence, for example, the contrast between Jameson’s stratospheric Hegel-, Heidegger-, Adorno- (etc.) effects and, say, the pugilistically deflationary wit of Terry Eagleton, whose bare-knuckle style is in the mainstream of English polemical and satirical traditions, in which the game is to bludgeon the other fellow with barrages of caricatural mock-syllogisms delivered in an exasperated baby-talk, as if explaining the ABC’s to an unusually dimwitted child (“we are not politically conflicting if you hold that patriarchy is an objectionable social system and I hold that it is a small town in upper New York state” [Ideology 13]). Jameson is good at polemic and satire when, for local effect, he wants to be–e.g., in the “Introduction” to Postmodernism, in which “the cultural logic of late capitalism” is jeered as effectively as anywhere in Eagleton (on “the ‘aestheticization’ of reality”: Benjamin “thought it meant fascism, but we know it’s only fun” [P x]). But Jameson’s larger ambitions are for degrees of subtlety and nuance to which the hurly-burly of polemic and satire are inimical. “The sublime” is especially incompatible with polemic and satire, for these depend on belittling, on banalizing, on stripping away anything complex, let alone uncanny from the target. Think here of the contrast between Jameson and Eagleton on “postmodernism”: in Eagleton’s hands, it is a sheerly satiric object, an ideological wetdream;² whereas Jameson, more gravely, makes of it an access to the central problems of the age.

 

The “antithetical” power of “the sublime” draws, again, from both a desire for the unrepresentable–for escape from “thematization”–and an anxiety about an inability to represent, to “give representation to such enormous forces” (P 34). This ominous sense of emptiness in the postmodern vécu itself, an inability to make sense of things, besets individuals in their lived experience of the increasingly unintelligible life-world of late capitalism–a theme that revives, as I have suggested, the existentialist “absurd” of a generation ago (when “alienation” was a buzzword only bores and spoilsports linked with Marx); more pertinent for Jameson’s own project is its consequences for critique: for how can we critique what we cannot represent?–or (if our program is hermeneutic) interpret what is not represented or representable? If “the sublime” is the unfigurable, it must necessarily defeat any project of “Marxist [or indeed any other kind of] hermeneutic.” Yet in central chapters of Marxism and Form, in The Prison-House of Language, in the 1971 essay “Metacommentary,” through the opening chapter, “On Interpretation,” of The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson characterizes his project as nothing if not hermeneutic, programmatically opposed to “anti-hermeneuts” from Susan Sontag to Foucault, Barthes and Derrida. Not that the imperative of interpretation is a “desire” to interpret: “we are condemned to interpret at the same time that we feel an increasing repugnance to do so,” Jameson advises in “Metacommentary”–though even in this early (1971) essay, Jameson anticipates the desire of the sublime when he acknowledges, in figures like Mallarmé, a “will to be uninterpretable” (IT1 6, 5; cf. P 91-2, 391-3). But if “History” is unrepresentable and uninterpretable, any project of Marxist hermeneutic would seem to be at a non plus.

 

Hence the full-throated plangency of Jameson’s writing in the ’80s, with respect to critique’s “impossible imperatives” and “inevitable failures,” a note that lifts the career-long gesture into a different–indeed, a “sublime”–register quite unlike the austerer, more “stoic,” sound of the earlier work. (“Stoic” is a term of praise in Jameson’s account of Lacan [IT1 112].) “The postmodern” here seems to mark a period of revolutionary failures and capitalist successes so demoralizing as to bring “interpretation” itself under the full force of the devaluation expressed in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach–as if our impotence to “change” the world can now be adequately expressed only as an impotence, also, even to “understand” it.

 

This attenuation of the hermeneutic can also be read as a swerve away from a certain set of dangers or possible failures that Jameson wants to avoid. Call these dangers “hermeneutic determinism”–for there is a “logic” to interpretive explanation that can inexorably entrain characteristic “textual effects” (or “generic closures”) as surely as any other too-exclusive “motivation.” The hermeneut can seem a village explainer, a caricatural sujet “supposed [by himself] to know,” laying out with knowing aplomb the hidden designs and purposes that render what looks to uninitiates like a chaotic situation on the contrary a lucid scenario, minutely scripted down to the last detail by an invisible, all-powerful cabal. At its worst, I am describing the sort of paranoid explanatory grandiosity one used to find as laughable in the Daily Worker as in the John Birch Society Newsletter. (Cf. Freud’s assimilation of art to hysteria, religion to obsessional neurosis, and systematic philosophy to paranoia [Totem and Taboo 73].) Such excesses of hermeneutic “success” risk failures of a too familiar, even “vulgar Marxist” sort.

 

This could be one reason why Jameson attends mostly to cultural texts, rather than to “politics” per se: there is less risk of your commentary lapsing into prefab paranoia with E. L. Doctorow or Claude Simon than with, say, Jesse Helms (one of Jameson’s home-state Senators). Jameson’s essay “Periodizing the ’60s” could stand as a cautionary example of what I mean, the narrativization of that turbulent decade as a scenario sufficiently obvious to those with the correct interpretive tools. This pose has its satisfactions, for reader and writer alike, but they are quite the reverse of “the sublime,” and indeed represent a choice that Jameson’s “sublime,” however deliberately, refuses–a point the more acute for the contemporaneity of “Periodizing the ’60s” with the “Postmodernism” essay: both appeared in 1984. (Jameson elsewhere accesses this problem of the “paranoiac-critical” in the contrast of Foucault with Baudrillard [P 202-3].)

 

Hence, too, perhaps, the special use of popular culture, especially film studies, to Jameson’s project: a body of cultural production whose “ideological closure” might be more accessible, no less “absent” than in high culture, but more naively so, and thus perhaps more readily re-“present”-ed–and offering analysis, to that extent, a domain of cultural production somewhere between high culture and Jesse Helms. The 1977 essay on “Dog Day Afternoon,” for example (SV 35-54), anticipates many of the themes of the “Postmodernism” essay’s “sublime”–the problem of representability, in this case of the class system under multinational capitalism (projected here, too–nightmarishly–as “the subject of present-day world history” [SV 50]), but the essay betrays no reservation about Jameson’s own hermeneutic power to represent or interpret these phenomena, however (ideologically) unfigurable they are in or by the (popular) culture at large. And the essay’s indignation at the social changes of the ’70s at least approaches the slippery slope that begins in moralizing and ends in the paranoia of the over-certain (“not merely part of the on-going logic of the system… but also, and above all, the consequences of the decisions of powerful and strategically placed individuals and groups” [SV 45]). Of course, just because it’s over-certain doesn’t mean it isn’t true; to cite the Delmore Schwartz truism one more time, even paranoids have enemies.

 

I have spoken of “the [unrepresentable] sublime” as both a desire (escape from representation) and an anxiety (impotence to represent); and of over-certain hermeneutic representation as entailing a danger Jameson wishes to avoid. There remains one further permutation I want to work through, in which desire and the anxiety of its possible failure generate a psychology of apotropaism and taboo, the mood of the Bilderverbot, the ban on graven images, that is so pervasive a theme in Benjamin and Adorno (see Jameson’s treatment in LM 118-20; cf. 192 and P 392 on “taboo”). An impulse under ban: we have to do here with something Jameson does not say, an inference or possibility he does not draw or acknowledge, namely the representation of utopia. If utopia is to be imagined as something utterly other than, different from, the ideological present, a novum and not a mere “repetition,” it follows that any imaginative projection or representation of it we attempt with the expressive means available to us will necessarily profane that unimaginable end of “History” as we know it, “History” whose Necessity, ideological closure, and inevitable failure have so ineradicably tainted the very veins and capillaries of our subjectivities. Jameson’s “sublime,” for all its avowal of “euphoria” and “joyous intensities,” remains, in Jameson’s writing practice, overwhelmingly anxious, and scrupulously wary of the ruses of (“ideological”) hope, and thus programmatically backward-looking, oriented to the nightmare past rather than any utopian future, an experience of “shock,” of “fear,” of a “therapeutic humiliation of the pretensions of the human mind to understanding” (IT1 40). Like Orpheus leading Eurydice up from Hades, or Benjamin’s Angel of the New surveying the ruin of History avalanching at its feet with its back turned firmly on the future, Jameson’s imagination must avert its eyes from what it desires, gazing instead upon a “sublime” identified with the unrepresentable guilt and violence of the past rather than with that equally, indeed more unrepresentable future possibility (impossibility?) called Utopia. (“Pleasure: A Political Issue” enacts precisely this transit.) I make this point for the sake of accounting for an effect, illuminating a motivation, of Jameson’s prose–an illumination which may be assisted by a contrast with another passage from Eagleton, for whom it is the revolution, not the prevailing “capital-logic,” that is sublime:

 

socialist revolution… is excessive of all form, out in advance of its own rhetoric. It is unrepresentable by anything but itself, signified only in its ‘absolute movement of becoming,’ and thus a kind of sublimity. (Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic 214-5)

 

Eagleton might never have written this passage (dating from 1990), or thus linked the “unrepresentable” and “the sublime,” without Jameson’s “Postmodernism” essay; but just as surely, Eagleton’s repredication of sublimity from capitalism to “socialist revolution” implies a difference from, even a kind of critique of, the “vision” adumbrated in Jameson’s failure-haunted prose. ³

 

Desire and anxiety, humiliation, shock, proscription–Jameson articulates these terms with sufficient “dialectical” ingenuity and passion as to more than motivate the extraordinary “difficulty” of his prose. But my own experience is that in Jameson the “difficulties” make a basis for fellowship between reader and writer–they are shared difficulties, however differently difficult they are for the reader than for Jameson–in contrast to some other “theory” prose styles whose “sublime humiliation” of the reader can feel quite differently motivated (for the writer, more enjoyable; for the reader–ça dépend). When Jameson sounds the “unrepresentability” theme in terms of “a complexity often beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind” (P 38), he means “reading” figuratively; but the word inevitably also brings the reader right back to the experience of the book (Jameson’s Postmodernism) presently in hand, the prose uncoiling, ramifying, exfoliating in so many “dialectically” conflicting directions, through such stupefyingly superimposed problematics, keeping aloft so daunting and yet relevant a weight of allusion to the most challenging thought of our period. Quite frequently the reader can feel engulfed by the 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, dazzling and befuddling, an experience of thought and speculative possibility that might fairly be called (in the words of Thomas Weiskel), “the hermeneutic or ‘reader’s’ sublime.” ⁴

 

But this augment of “difficulty” or “shock” in Jameson’s writing of the ’80s also engenders its own “dialectical reversal,” insofar as 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–as I hope to show by way of an example. Although “close reading” is out of fashion, I will risk a lengthy quotation in order to put on view how “the sublime” and “unfigurability,” the condition of postmodern reification, and the consequent predicaments of a project or a writing like Jameson’s own, can, in Jameson’s diffuse verbal medium, in the heat of affective investments nominally under ban, fuse into an amalgam, ideationally complex but libidinally quite direct, in which “theme” becomes inseparable from “effect.” The following passage is from one of the previously unpublished, presumably recent, meditations gathered in the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism: Jameson is discussing the inferiority ordinary people feel before the intellectual, and complains that an analogous demoralization, what Jameson calls (citing Gunther Anders) a “Promethean shame, a Promethean inferiority complex… is what we [ordinary people? intellectuals?] now feel for culture more generally”–an abjection that “happens to people when their relations to production are blocked, when they no longer have power over productive activity”:

 

Impotence is first and foremost that, the pall on the psyche, the gradual loss of interest in the self and the outside world, very much in formal analogy to Freud’s description of mourning; the difference being that one recovers from mourning (Freud shows how), but that the condition of non-productivity, since it is an index of an objective situation that does not change, must be dealt with in another way, a way that, acknowledging its persistence and inevitability, disguises, represses, displaces, and sublimates a persistent and fundamental powerlessness. That other way is, of course, consumerism itself, as a compensation for an economic impotence which is also an utter lack of any political power…. I want to add that the way in which (objectively, if you like) this analysis takes on the appearance of anthropology or social psychology… is itself to be reckoned back into the phenomenon we are describing: not merely is this anthropological or psychological appearance a function of a basic representational dilemma about late capitalism…; it is also the result of the failure of our societies to achieve any kind of transparency; indeed, it is virtually the same as that failure. In a transparent society in which our various positions in social production were clear to us and to everybody else–so that, like Malinowski’s savages, we could take a stick and draw a diagram of the socioeconomic cosmology on the sand of the beach–it would not sound either psychological or anthropological to refer to what happens to people who have no say in their work: no Utopian or Nowhereon [sic] would think you were mobilizing hypotheses about the Unconscious or the libido, or foundationally presupposing a human essence or a human nature; perhaps it would sound more medical, as though you were talking about a broken leg or paralysis of the whole right side. At any rate, it is thus, as a fact, that I would like to talk about reification: in this sense of the way in which a product somehow shuts us out even from a sympathetic participation, by imagination, in its production. It comes before us, no questions asked, as something we could not begin to imagine doing for ourselves.

 

But this in no way means that we cannot consume the product in question, “derive enjoyment” from it, become addicted to it, etc. Indeed, consumption in the social sense is very specifically the word for what we in fact do to reified products of this kind, that occupy our minds and float above that deeper nihilistic void left in our being by the inability to control our own destiny. (P 316-7)

 

I quote at such length to make accessible the energy beyond or exceeding the mere “points” the passage makes. Indeed, the motives discernible here might rather be thought of as the unmaking of points, the evacuation or discard of all thought-instruments, as though Jameson’s critical ambition, the undoing of alienation and reification, could after all be an affair of nullifying conceptual obstacles by fiat, not merely solving but abolishing “representational dilemmas about late capitalism” and breaking through into “transparency,” realizing the “socioeconomic cosmology” as a radiant Ding an-sich, available not merely as phenomenon but as noumenon to a mentalité in whose operations language once again functions as windowpane. Note that “transparency” here is a more than merely hermeneutic aim, as if “understanding the world” and “changing it” could, or must, or can only (the intellectual’s most grandiosely Promethean desire, or hubris) happen in one fell apocalyptic swoop, delivering (or restoring) us to a pristine naturalness like that of Malinowski’s savages on the beach. (Is this the same beach on which, Foucault prophesied, “Man” would disappear like a [cosmological?] sand-drawing under the wave? Even Lévi-Strauss did not idealize pensée sauvage as “transparent” to its subjects.)

 

Notably, the animus against all “thought-instruments” extends not just to the mystifications of capitalism but also to the theoretical constructs of critique that would challenge them–the “anthropology or social psychology,” the would-be solutions that must themselves be counted as part of the problem, the “hypotheses about the Unconscious or the libido, or… [“foundational” assumptions of] a human essence or a human nature.” (Here Jameson names a central preoccupation of his own work in the same breath with one of the principal bourgeois mystifications he opposes.) Also audible is impatience under the burden of the taboos, the moralistically cathected left shibboleths under which a critic like Jameson must operate, what he elsewhere calls the “rigorous, quasi-religious examen de conscience… [or] Ideological New Year’s Resolution” (Diacritics 78) taken against naive, “ideological” fantasies like the one risked in this passage, of “achieving transparency” (a fantasy Jameson elsewhere is as quick as anyone to expose as ideological)–all the stratospheric intellectual speculation that to the plain-thinking of ordinary folks (Malinowskian savages, ethnic blue-collars, suburban Republicans), sounds like something for which “mystification” would be a typically evasive (and “classy”) euphemism. (“Plain thinking”: Brecht’s plumpes Denken is invoked often in Jameson’s work as leitmotif for the gap between high theory and proletarian consciousness–but figured nostalgically, as a sentimentalism the intellectual must, however regretfully, renounce.)

 

Hence what we might call the dialectic of the grandiosity of intellectual hopes or desire(s), and their abjection in anxiety and failure: “Promethean shame” indeed. “Shame” because of the intellectual’s “impotence” before the reified world, “Promethean” because the intellectual is chained to the ideological rock, with the ideological eagles pecking his or her liver, in a predicament from which there is no escape: “it is thus, as a fact, that I would like to talk about reification,” Jameson writes, but in what follows he does not, can not, do so. He comes closest to talking about it “as a fact,” indeed, here, stating the wish that attests the failure to accomplish the deed. But what prevents Prometheus from talking of reification as a fact? Why must Jameson wave away any suggestion that he has, in this very passage, talked, eloquently, powerfully, of reification “as a fact”? The chains holding him (this is his own complaint in the passage) are those mind-forged manacles, the very thought-instruments whose uses no intellectual commands so masterfully, indeed, as Jameson. A pragmatist might blow the whistle on this as melodrama, since Jameson has been able to talk in any style and about any topic he chooses not from a pinnacle of exposure on a rockface but from a series of comfortable positions at distinguished universities–that his position, his career, has been a privilege, not a doom. Jameson might reply that to find satisfaction in such facile ironies is to acquiesce altogether too complacently 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.

 

My purpose here is not to force a choice, or cast a vote, for one position over the other, but rather to illuminate the motives of contrasting rhetorics. The pragmatist’s hope, however modest, that critique can make change, is liable to the charge of being not merely complacent, but “ideological”–an “imaginary solution to a real contradiction.” Jameson’s Promethean rhetoric attempts to forestall that accusation by inscribing failure as its very premise: since Prometheus never gets off the rock, he cannot be charged with offering our desperation a false hope, an “imaginary solution,” a merely “aesthetic” consolation. “The sublime” expresses with new force this long-standing Jamesonian predicament, including the predicament’s more-than-aesthetic character; and it aspires as well to offer that predicament some more-than-aesthetic “relief.” And in Jameson’s dialectical alembification of thetic “logic of content” with “textual effect,” it can seem, however provisionally, to do so. How provisionally is not merely a question, but also a qualification–and one not to be postponed in the follow-through inevitably to arrive after the moment of sublimity has passed. As I have suggested already, Jameson post-Postmodernism will revert, in his confrontation with the predicaments of “ideological closure,” to more “stoic” accents. But in his writing of the ’80s, “the sublime” inflects the “vision” of “inevitable failure” with maximum force, both to evoke and to contest it–as if to make of its own failure the most trenchant possible critique of culture.

 

(This essay is excerpted from Steven Helmling’s book, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique, forthcoming in November 2000 from State University of New York Press.)

 

Notes

 

1. For a fuller discussion of “the sublime” in “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” see Helmling, “Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and Eagleton.”

 

2. For Eagleton on postmodernism, see the last chapter (“From the Polis to Postmodernism”) of The Ideology of the Aesthetic and The Illusions of Postmodernism. Ponder, as symptom, that Jameson is not mentioned in either of these texts–though he does appear in Eagleton’s doggerel “Ballad of Marxist Criticism (to the tune of ‘Say Something Stupid Like I Love You’).”

 

3. See, for example, Eagleton’s reservations about Jameson in “The Idealism of American Criticism” (Against the Grain 49-64, especially 57-64); see also Eagleton’s “Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style” (ibid., 65-78).

 

4. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime 28-31. In view of Jameson’s (sublime) image of postmodernism’s “thunderous unblocking” of long frozen energies (P 313), as well as the registration of the “inevitable failure” as “failure or blockage” in the “History is what hurts” passage (PU 102), I recommend here as well Neil Hertz’s reading of Longinus, “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime.” On another of the “Postmodernism” essay’s inflections of “blockage,” as a defense mechanism against intolerable realities, see David S. Gross, “Marxism and Resistance: Fredric Jameson and the Moment of Postmodernism,” in Kellner 97-116.

Works Cited

 

A. Works by Fredric Jameson

• Diacritics: “Interview” with Jameson. Diacritics 12.3 (1982): 72-91.
• IT1: The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, Volume 1: Situations of Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• IT2: The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, Volume 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• LM: Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. New York: Verso, 1990.
• M&F: Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
• P: Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
• PU: The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.
• ST: The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia UP, 1994
• SV: Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1992.

 

B. Works by Others

• Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain. New York: Verso, 1986.
• —. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso, 1991.
• —. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
• Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. 1913. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1950.
• Helmling, Steven. “The Desire Called Jameson.” Review of Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time. Postmodern Culture 5.2 (January 1995) <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.195/review-4.195>.
• —. “Jameson’s Postmodernism: Version 2.0.” Review of Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn and Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity. Postmodern Culture 9.2 (January 1999) <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.199/9.2.r_helmling.txt>.
• —. “Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and Eagleton,” Postmodern Culture 3.3 (May 1993) <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.593/helmling.593>. An expanded version, contrasting Jameson and Eagleton on postmodernism, appears in Essays in Postmodern Culture. Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth, eds. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. 239-63.
• Hertz, Neil. “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime.” The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. 40-60.
• Kellner, Douglas, ed. Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989.
• Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
• Yeghiayan, Eddie. A Fredric Jameson Bibliography. Online <http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~eyeghiay>.