Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative

Interlude: From the Symbolic to the Real

81 interlude From the Symbolic to the Real In this section I explore the implications for a materialist dialectics of A. J. Greimas’s semiotics, and in particular what Jameson has described as its “supreme achievement,” Greimas’s “semiotic square.”1 My approach challenges what has become a commonplace—advanced, for example, in both Paul de Man’s classic essay “The Resistance to Theory” (1982) and Paul Ricoeur’s three-volume opus Time and Narrative (1983–85)—that Greimas’s work and the tools he elaborates represent the quintessence of a structuralist drive to abstraction, marked by totalizing/totalitarian tendencies and a rejection of indeterminacy, historicity , and the diachronic. In de Man’s terms, this drive to abstraction is the result of Greimas’s absolute privileging of the deep grammatical level of a text over its surface rhetorical scheme. Ricoeur similarly concludes , “The whole strategy thus amounts to a vast attempt to do away with diachrony.”2 While such a reading may be accurate in certain orthodox uses of these tools, a different set of possibilities emerges when in an imaginative leap the semiotic square is read in conjunction with the work of Greimas’s contemporary Jacques Lacan, and in particular, “the fundamental classification system around which all his theorizing turns,” the three orders of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real.3 In this chapter, I use the rich semiotic resources of the Greimasian square to tell a number of interrelated stories: about the history of the novel; developments in the last few decades in theory more generally and in the work of Jameson in particular; and the value of dialectical thinking for our present moment of globalization. My gesture of reading Greimas with Lacan takes its lead from Lacan’s work, by way of his essay “Kant avec Sade.” In a footnote to a discussion of the essay, Slavoj Žižek suggests that “far from being restricted to Lacan, this procedure of reading ‘X with Y’ has a long Marxist lineage ”; indeed, Žižek argues,“is not the main point of Marx’s critique of Hegel’s speculative idealism precisely to read ‘Hegel with political economy ,’ that is, to discern in the speculative circular movement of Capital the ‘obscene secret’ of the circular movement of the Hegelian Notion?”4 Furthermore, Žižek maintains that we misread this relationship if we see the latter figure in the couple as “the truth” of the former: “on the contrary, the Sadeian perversion emerges as the result of the Kantian compromise, of Kant’s avoiding the consequences of his breakthrough. Sade is the symptom of Kant: . . . the space for the figure of Sade is opened up by this compromise of Kant, by his unwillingness to go to the end, to retain the full fidelity to his philosophical breakthrough.”5 Something similar occurs, I want to argue, when we read Greimas with Lacan. The latter shows us something new about the nature of the former ’s breakthrough: the always already existent symptom haunting the illusory closure of the structuralist schemas, a materializing horizon of dialectical possibilities implicit within the Greimasian mapping as well as the very structures they represent.6 82 ❘ Interlude Figure 2. The semiotic square of A. J. Greimas. S –S –S S N The value for any dialectical criticism of Greimas’s work—as well as that of Lacan—has been explored in great detail by Jameson, one of Greimas’s most influential proponents in the English-language context, and it will be by way of the changes that occur in Jameson’s original and creative deployment of Greimas’s semiotic square that the device’s full dialectical power becomes clear.7 Eschewing any orthodox or disciplined application of the semiotic square, Jameson effects its Brechtian refunctioning (Umfunktionierung), acting in a way much like the workers in the Jeepney factory figured in Kidlat Tahmik’s Perfumed Nightmare: both display a “kind of Brechtian delight with the bad new things that anybody can hammer together for their pleasure or utility if they have a mind to.”8 Jameson wrote the Foreword to On Meaning (1987), the first English-language collection of Greimas’s writings, and one of the 88 books in the University of Minnesota Press Theory and History of Literature (THL) series (1981–1998), which also published the original two volumes of The Ideologies of Theory as well as a host of other land­ mark theoretical texts and translations, all...