Critical Failure in the New World Order

Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious turned or marked the turn of criticism towards a consensus that reduced the capacities of poetry to a second order of human activity interpretable by a first order academic Marxist hermeneutic (1981). The issue is not Marxism, whatever understanding we might have of that term. In larger part, the issue is rather the academic because Jameson's work came to dominate or at least rearrange the fields of academic critical thinking about poetry and poetics claiming that no other mode of humanistic reflection or inquiry had legitimacy except as part of its ambition.

We might thank Jameson for his recollection of figures and works otherwise almost forgotten during the theory movement. He brought back not only Dante and his four-levels of interpretation, but Northrop Frye who plays a prominent part in Jameson's effort to reorganize the axioms of academic criticism. He chose to resettle the field in a way particular to the accrual of needed academic authority: his recollections usurp any autonomy predecessors might once have had or any value they could have as and for other ways of doing criticism, of imagining life and adapting language. To reorganize at the axiomatic level requires a regrounding that overmasters the aims, desires, and effects of predecessors. Jameson, thus, assigns earlier figures and their works to spots within his regularizing project. His project is uniquely ambitious, comprehensive, and intolerant. As a result, critical and imaginative potential inherent in his predecessors' efforts disappear in a series of concept locations that place their adequacies and inadequacies within what Jameson admits are the universalizing and totalizing aims of his project—aims that he also asserts are necessary to any adequate account of capital and its possible alternatives (Pawling 2013). Such a combination of univocal aspiration and fluid technical embrace demarcates the areas fit for any work that might have a place in his vision. Those with no place must stand aside. Those works allowed a well demarcated place must leave behind elements judged inessential, inappropriate, or in error from the point of the view of that totality and its expositor. The project contributes to professional amnesia as well since it represents itself as having surpassed its predecessors and by placing them properly makes a return to the earlier work all but unnecessary.

For a large part of his career as an academic leader, Jameson's preferred critical device has been allegoresis (Jameson 2019, 327). Allegorizing makes each literary work an account of a moment interpretable within the organization of the totality without telos that Jameson would construct. In his treatment of Conrad's Nostromo, we have an example of allegoresis at work along with the placing of a predecessor's work within the economy of Jameson's project. In the penultimate chapter of The Political Unconscious, Jameson acknowledges Edward Said's extensive reading of Conrad's Nostromo in Beginnings and characteristically incorporates that reading into his own. He accepts that Said noticed something true to the text that reveals an aspect of its historical significance, but which remains nonetheless inadequate to a full historicization. Jameson's practice is not to enable already existing scholarship but to arrogate its achievement precisely by displacing it within the non-teleological totality of his academics (Said 1975, 100-37). In this case, Said's extensive reading disappears in this clause: "a search for events and their origins, which coming up short against a well-nigh Althusserian/Derridean realization of their status as 'always-already-begun,' suddenly finds itself deflected into autoreferentiality" (1975, 279). Said can bring his reader, theoretically and textually, to this point of perception but, for Jameson, he cannot complete the explication because that depends entirely upon taking Nostromo as an allegory of a particular modern capitalist moment.

Jameson's reading of Conrad and his encounter with Said is the final critical act in this, The Political Unconscious. (He closes the book with a highly theoretical chapter that does not read literary texts, as the previous several chapters had done.) It ends on a crescendo of certainty, the consequence of "always historicize" as allegoresis...