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

Preface: To Name the System

xv Preface: To Name the System The peculiar difficulty of dialectical writing lies indeed in its holistic, “totalizing” character: as though you could not say any one thing until you had first said everything; as though with each new idea you were bound to recapitulate the entire system. This observation concerning the difficulty of dialectical writing, reading , and thinking—the three understood here as inseparable—was first offered by Fredric Jameson in his early book Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971).1 It is an equally apt description of the challenges many readers face when encountering Jameson’s now voluminous writings: in order to grasp any particular point he makes, it is as if we need to have the whole of his work before us. Indeed, one of the more common errors in critical engagements with Jameson’s work lies in taking observations and claims he advances in isolation from their nested contexts—within the specific essay to be sure, but also within his larger project and the situation of their writing. My aim here is to provide readers with the tools necessary to begin to meet this challenge by offering the most comprehensive examination to date of a half-century of work by Jameson, one of the most significant contemporary dialectical writers and thinkers and indeed, one of the most significant American literary and cultural scholars. Few living intellectuals are less in need of an introduction than Jameson. On the back covers of Jameson’s recent books, Terry Eagleton praises him as “America’s leading Marxist critic.” Adam Roberts echoes this sentiment in writing that “Jameson remains the world’s most famous American Marxist thinker.”2 Colin MacCabe is even more sweeping in his summation, describing Jameson as “probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today. The range of his analysis , from architecture to science fiction, from the tortuous thought of late Adorno to the testimonio novel of the third world, is extraordinary; it can truly be said that nothing cultural is alien to him.”3 And finally, in his fine assessment of “the usefulness of Jameson,” Ian Buchanan maintains, “Jameson’s work has done more to shape our consciousness of ourselves as an emergent global society than any other thinker.”4 Indeed, Jameson has produced a tremendous amount of deeply influential scholarship, comprising more than twenty books and hundreds of essays, with a number of other major projects forthcoming in the near future. He has been a member of some of the most innovative literary and culture studies programs in the United States, at Harvard University (1959–67), University of California, San Diego (1967–76), Yale University (1976–83), University of California, Santa Cruz (1983–85), and, since 1985, Duke University, where he served for nearly two decades as the Chair of the Program in Literature. At all of these institutions, he contributed in inestimable ways to the education of multiple generations of younger scholars—myself included—many of whom have gone on to become influential and original thinkers in their own right.5 The importance of Jameson’s overall contribution was further confirmed in the fall of 2008 with the Norwegian parliament’s naming him the fifth recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize, awarded to a scholar working in the fields of the arts and humanities, social sciences , law, or theology (the previous recipients are Julia Kristeva, Jürgen Habermas, Shmuel Eisenstadt, and Ronald Dworkin; and subsequent winners include Ian Hacking, Natalie Zemon Davis, Jürgen Kocka, Manuel Castells, and Bruno Latour); and again in 2011, with the Modern Language Association presenting him with only its sixth Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement.6 Although increasing attention to Jameson’s intellectual project has produced a number of invaluable studies, this book is unique in a number of ways.7 Jameson is, to paraphrase Louis O. Mink on the earlier dialectical historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood—a figure who also has had a significant if uncommented upon influence on Jameson— xvi ❘ Preface a systematic thinker in a time that has little use for systems, and thus, “each of his books must be seen as the discussion of a specific set of questions in the context of a possible system.”8 In Valences of the Dialectic (2009), Jameson notes that the “implied projection of a philosophical system,” not only in his own work but in all dialectical thinking,“can be...