Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (review)

One of the most influential theorists of literature, culture, and theory itself, Fredric Jameson has only recently been the subject of the book-length authorial studies we expect to surround such major figures of the intellectual scene. It may well be that the sheer complexity of Jameson's work, unfolding over the decades, has confounded previous attempts at such projects. The various discourses into which Jameson has intervened requires an exhaustive knowledge of these different debates, whose significance only becomes clear in retrospect. It is difficult to look past the triad of theoretical blockbusters Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious (1981), and Postmodernism (1991) in any account of Jameson's work, and they serve here as navigation markers in the ocean of Jameson's production. The problem for any appraisal of Jameson lies in their evident difference, in the ways in which they employ very different strategies to address very different subjects.

The quality of Ian Buchanan's book is to identify these changing methodologies, to discover in an aside on causality here or a book on Brecht there the most persistent of Jameson's interpretive tools and working models. The enduring tropes of reflexivity, historical determinism, allegory, interpretation, periodisation, and the cultural dominant are some of the keys to Jameson's heady blend of Marxism and theory. Unlike so many other authorial studies, Buchanan is not concerned with reconciling these with each other, and thus with the singularity of Jameson, but instead to account for the initial possibility of thinking them together. The ways in which this or that distinctive constellation of meaning is revealed as a part of some greater ideological operation is the Jamesonian effect. Buchanan describes that way that it comes to us as an experience of shock on the level of the sentence. Such epiphanies will be familiar to readers of Jameson, as the juxtaposition of unlike elements mediates the fragments of lived cultural reality with history. Bridging the sentences with the strategy, Buchanan helps us come closer to thinking the continuities that we have come to expect from a major thinker.

This mediation of the molar and molecular marks Buchanan's book from previous apprehensions of Jameson's oeuvre, that have so often become lost in stylistics or been seduced by the debates that have followed in his wake. Buchanan's is instead a sympathetic account, in the mode of Geoffrey Bennington's Lyotard: Writing the Event (1988), or Rex Butler's seminal Jean Baudrillard: The Defense of the Real (1999). The intimacy these writers have with the theorists they discuss verges on identification, such that Butler did not know whether he had in the process of writing become Baudrillard, and Buchanan's lengthy sentences come to resemble Jameson's. Buchanan's distillation of causality, the dialectic, figuration, metacommentary, and cognitive mapping are the most exacting we possess, because they reveal through identification the force of their logic. They are attuned to the sense such strategies make in situation, of how they can be assembled into a dialectical conception of history. If there is a larger continuity to Jameson's oeuvre, it lies in this dialectical sentence, a shift from the specific to the general that takes place from phrase to phrase. Buchanan works to demystify the perplexing obscurities of the dialectic, to make its operation comprehensible and useful.

Much of the originality of Buchanan's account here lies in a chapter that maps Jameson's influences, in Sartre, Adorno, Barthes, and Brecht. Here lies cause for complaint, as one might include or exclude any number of antecedents for Jameson's work. Lukács and Bloch are also significant figures for understanding this oeuvre, especially in understanding the strategies of totalisation and utopia. Barthes is an unusual addition to these Marxist theorists, but Buchanan makes a case for this author's ideas on refunctioning and pleasure that could alone lead to a reassessment of his place in a political history of theory. The fascinating transcodings between this generation of theorists and Jameson's own is also the subject of a...