Fredric Jameson on the Taking of Sides

Antinomies are propositions that are valid but also contradictory. Immanuel Kant illustrates this concept with the idea that time had a beginning and the idea that time has always existed. Each idea, Kant says, is rationally provable. Neither can be chosen over the other. The point of the illustration, for Kant, is that when applied to the domain of experience, rationality has its limits. Fredric Jameson’s point in calling his book The Antinomies of Realism seems to be that, rather than contrasting realism to what it is not and thus drawing one’s conclusions about it, whether for or against, it makes more sense to think of realism as constituted by contradictions that are both internal to it and irresolvable. Taking sides has its limits. Setting plot against scene, telling against showing, the irrevocable destiny of chronological succession against the eternal or existential present: Jameson seems in each case to prefer one of these terms over the other—specifically, the more temporal, linear, narrative term. But the book’s official position is that we should learn to live with realism’s contradictions, which are inescapable: “What is crucial is not to load one of these dies and take sides for the one or the other as all our theorists seem to do, but rather to grasp the proposition that realism lies at their intersection” (26).

If this is how we come to think of realism, we will have decided, on the one hand, that realism is not something worth being for or against and, on the other, that it’s nonetheless supremely compelling because its contradictoriness reveals to us the contours of what Jameson calls modernity. But that is not all we will have decided. Logically speaking, it would seem to follow that modernity too is something that it makes no sense to be for or against, that side-taking is not a skill our moment urges us to prioritize. Since modernity, as Jameson has taught us, really means capitalism, this provisional hypothesis seems unpromising. Viewed in the abstract, it feels like an antinomy itself: being against being for or against. I suppose it could also be read as a historical symptom—what might be expected to befall the attempt to practice a socialist criticism in the absence of a socialist movement that would demand the taking of sides in a more than academic sense. If so, the condition is widely shared and, in any case, perhaps not very relevant. What matters more, I think, is that this brave, ambitious, profoundly challenging book is willing to get involved in such risky business at all. Having made five decades’ worth of virtuoso contributions to Marxist criticism and to criticism as such, Jameson had the right to do something more comfortable, more orthodox, safer. Once again he has chosen the path of difficulty and discomfort, for himself and for us.

The Antinomies of Realism begins by stating that the binaries in which debates about realism have been couched involve a “passionate taking of sides” (2). A great deal of the book seems impatient with the taking of sides. There is no true binary, Jameson observes, between the narrative functions of villain and hero. The hero is merely positional. The villain, on the other hand, “necessarily presupposes and depends on a preexisting binary opposition between good and evil.” The binary opposition between good and evil is “peculiar,” Jameson continues, in that “it is the fundamental binary opposition as such, the one that generates all those other innumerable oppositions at work in life and thought, from masculine/feminine to black and white.” The examples strongly suggest that thinking in terms of good and evil is a bad habit. But Jameson’s history suggests that we are managing to break this habit. The taking of sides is the protagonist of Jameson’s major metanarrative, its disappearance defining one of those happy endings...