Metadorno

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...