Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to “The Political Unconsciousness.” by William C. Dowling (review)

L ’E sprit C réateur literature’s fundamental complicity with the uglier sides of medical discourse does not share the liberal pessimism for which he castigates his authors. In this light Borie’s work would stand favorably beside that of the Frankfurt School for whose members (Adorno, Hork­ heimer, Habermas) the extinction of bourgeois critical subjectivity (fascism being the coup de grace) is, ironically, one of the great irreversible narratives of the late capitalist world. R o d d e y R e id Middlebury College William C. Dowling, J a m e s o n , A l t h u s s e r , M a r x : A n I n t r o d u c t i o n t o “ T h e P o l i t i c a l U n c o n s c io u s n e s s .” Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. Pp. 147. $22.50 [cloth]; $6.95 [paper]. In Jameson, Althusser, Marx, William Dowling provides a lucid exposition of the theoretical apparatus of Jameson’s Political Unconscious, with a scope somewhat wider than that lineal genealogy suggested in his title. His project is, in fact, to amplify that which is cryptic in Jameson’s text by virtue of allusion and condensation, and to supply those con­ texts in linguistics, French post-modernism, anthropology and hermeneutics as well as in Marxism which Jameson, according to Dowling, often only implies. The volume is probably timely, given the recent resurgence of interest in marxism, and certainly achieves its modest aim. Yet Dowling, for all his disavowals, is embarrassed by both his aim and his achieve­ ment. But why should the writer feel the need to deprecate from the outset his project of delivering this “knotty and complex text” to the light of day? His own explanation for bashfulness at being caught in the act of reproduction wavers uneasily on the apparent borderline between ethics and politics, and conflates momentarily the styles of Derrida with the “dialectical shocks” of Jameson: “The problem raised by Grammatology [sic] and The Political Unconscious alike, that is, is the problem of style as enactment: a way of writing that shows as well as tells what it is trying to get across. Thus Derrida cannot just ‘come out and say what he means’ because the whole ethic of coming out and saying what you mean is based on the referential notion of language whose essential and monumental falsity Derrida is trying to expose. . . . [For Jameson] the plain style is the limpid style of bourgeois ideol­ ogy where there is no need for obscurity because all truths are known in advance. . .” (p. 11). To be in the sphere of reproduction is unethical, failing to call forth the labour of pro­ duction which the texts that reproduction repeats evoke as their ethical validation. Repeti­ tion seeks to make the text “accessible” insofar as it is always the function of explanation to make the not-yet-known visible within the horizon of the always already known—a process indeed which could be understood here even as the very work of Marxist critique in face of the “political unconscious.” Leaving behind the labour that is its origin, the reproduced text becomes the totally consumable commodity. Thus the opposition between bourgeois lucidity and radical difficulty crumbles on every count. The implicit history of difficulty is already erroneous, since it is from the triumph of the bourgeois era that one would need to trace the gradual fetishization of difficulty as an index of ethical and aesthetic value, such that the value of the already known a priori emerges only through the repetitive labour on text or nature which makes it explicit. The “paternal” concept of originality implies reproduction from the start as its complementary other. Thus the end of labour is only of value insofar as it evokes more labour, not insofar as it actually produces an object of use value. The deprecation of the commodity for its consumability, common enough in leftist writing, grasps the matter from the wrong end. For the commodity is to be distrusted as semblance precisely in its not being consumable...