Jameson and Method

Anthony Jarrells Jameson and Method This essay is dedicated to the late Michael Sprinker. (On Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method [London: Verso, 1998]) In a journal entry dated July 12, 1934, Walter Benjamin records the following anecdote of his tirr\e with Bertolt Brecht: Yesterday, afterplaying chess, Brecht said: "you know, when Korsch comes, wereallyoughttowork outa newgamewith him. A game in which the moves do not always stay the same; where the function ofa piece changes after it has stood on the same square for a while: it should either become strongeror weaker. As it is the game doesn't develop, itstays the same for too long." ("Conversations with Brecht" 88) "We should rewrite Coriolanus, too," we can imagine Brecht thinking . Benjamin's anecdote is a nice piece of Brecht memorabilia, attesting to a characteristic Brechtian cleverness. But it points to another , perhaps more timely Brechtian characteristic, that of Umfunktionierung, or rebuilding, re-functioning. In his recent Brecht and Method, Fredric Jameson describes this as a "popular-mechanics " version of science: Science and knowledge are not grim and dreary duties but first and foremost sources of pleasure: even the epistemological and theoretical dimensions of "science" are to be thought in terms of Popular Mechanics and of the manual amusement of combining ingredients and learning to use new and unusual tools. (BM 2) Brecht and Method makes a case for Brecht's usefulness "right now, in a post-Cold-War market-rhetorical situation even more anti-communist than the good old days" (1). This idea of Brecht's new game might also describe what I will call Jameson's method, and help to make a case for its usefulness in today's "market-rhetorical" situation. ForJameson the pieces, or figures , are those of the Western Marxist tradition, a tradition steeped in questions concerning culture and art. Many of these figures squared off, famously, in what has come to be known as the realismmodernism debate. About it, Jameson himself remarks that, 332 the minnesota review Even within Marxism itself, the terms of the problems, if not their solutions, are numbered in advance, and the older controversies—Marx versus Bakunin, Lenin versus Luxemburg , the national question, the agrarian question, the dictatorship of the proletariat—rise up to haunt those who thought we could now go on to something else and leave the past behind us.... Nowhere has this "return of the repressed " been more dramatic than in the aesthetic conflict between "realism" and "modernism." (RC 196) We might infer that Jameson's own perspective on the matter will be less an original one outside of or beyond those enumerated in the realism-modernism debate than a newly articulated understanding of the problem based on the coordinates of the argument as established in this very debate. It will be a reinvention, not an invention . Jameson has suggested that his interest is not in attaching himself to a single Marxist "ideology," nor is it to produce an ideology of his own. Rather, it is in "a range of those [ideologies]" and in moving "back and forth" (Zhang 365). These ideologies, or positions , are tinkered with, rebuilt, repositioned; the values of the individual pieces change according to the demands of the present. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the several "just-whatwe -need-today" statements that follow in Jameson's critical studies of major Marxist thinkers. In "Reflections in Conclusion" (1977), for example, Jameson says that "in an unexpected denouement it may be Lukacs—wrong as he might have been in the 1930s—who has some provisional last word for us today" (211-12). A little over ten years later, in his Late Marxism: Adorno, or The Persistence ofthe Dialectic (1990), he remarks that "it now seems possible, then, that Adorno's Marxism, which was no great help in the previous periods , may turn out to be just what we need today" (5). The implication is there as well in Brecht and Method, but the phrasing is significantly different: the framing of artificial arguments and reasons why Brecht would be good for us today and why we should go back to him in current circumstances seems hypothetical in contrast to the concrete demonstration that we...