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

Introduction: Betraying Jameson

3 Introduction: Betraying Jameson Caveat lector: this book will offer neither a survey of the work of Fredric Jameson “nor even an introduction to it (always supposing such a thing was possible in the first place).”1 Rather, in the pages that follow, the book’s argument unfolds in terms of what Alain Badiou calls a fidelity to the truth of Jameson’s project, thinking through and along with his diverse and wide-ranging interventions in order to see what kinds of productive, and even unexpected, insights might emerge. Any such fidelity is thus paradoxically, Slavoj Žižek argues, a form of betrayal. Žižek notes, The true betrayal is an ethico-theoretical act of the highest fidelity: one has to betray the letter of Kant in order to remain faithful to (and repeat) the “spirit” of his thought. It is precisely when one remains faithful to the letter of Kant that one really betrays the core of his thought, the creative impulse underlying it. One should bring this paradox to its conclusion: it is not only that one can remain really faithful to an author by way of betraying him (the actual letter of his thought); at a more radical level, the inverse statement holds even more—one can only truly betray an author by way of repeating him, by remaining faithful to the core of his thought. If one does not repeat an author (in the authentic Kierkegaardian sense of the term), but merely “criticizes” him, moves elsewhere, turns him around, and so forth, this effectively means that one unknowingly remains within his horizon, his conceptual field.2 Žižek’s concept of repeating, very different from the notion of “return,” is crucial as well for his own radical dialectical thought experiment, and I enact in the pages that follow a similar dialectic of fidelity and betrayal in my engagement with Jameson’s work.3 Žižek’s last observation concerning the stance of “criticism” is borne out in a number of assessments of Jameson’s contributions, the particular form of ethical engagement they represent being, Clint Burnham suggests, “the dominant mode of literary interpretation in the AngloAmerican world, both within theory (which is mostly engaged in a liberalhumanist mode) and outside of it.”4 Such a conventional ethical stance is amply evident in some strands of the recent “New Formalist” reactions against historicism, interdisciplinarity, and theory.5 The assertion that Jameson’s political and historical commitments mean that he is not attentive enough to form leads the critic to “unknowingly remain within his horizon,” reinventing Jameson’s project in a much-diminished fashion . Such an ethical approach begins by reducing the issue at stake to a zero-sum binary opposition—formalism or historicism, space or time, totality or the particular, Marxism or postmodernism, Hegel or Spinoza, Adorno or Brecht, First World or Third World, the global or the local, art or culture—and then accusing the opponent of falling into error by selecting the wrong (or irresponsible or even evil) option before finally celebrating one’s own right (or responsible or good) choice. The “ethical ideology” that underlies this binary imagination has long been a target of Jameson’s critique. In The Political Unconscious, he argues, the concept of good and evil is a positional one that coincides with categories of Otherness. Evil thus, as Nietzsche taught us, continues to characterize whatever is radically different from me, whatever by virtue of precisely that difference seems to constitute a real and urgent threat to my own existence. . . . these are some of the archetypal figures of the Other, about whom the essential point to be made is no so much that he is feared because he is evil; rather he is evil because he is Other, alien, different, strange, unclean, and unfamiliar.6 More recently, Jameson emphasizes that“the challenge remains to avoid that ethical binary, which is the root form of all ideology.”7 4 ❘ Introduction It is this ethical binary that Jameson’s dialectical approach to cultural phenomena consistently refuses. For example, in the opening of the final chapter of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson points out that some people find his combination of Marxism and postmodernism “peculiar or paradoxical,” and, as a result ,“conclude that, in my own case, having ‘become’ a postmodernist I must have ceased to be a Marxist in any meaningful (or in other words, stereotypical...