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tomtwin10's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
Jameson’s writing is dense and he masters all the disciplines at the height of critical theory. This is a must read for any cultural critic.
breadandmushrooms's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
alexlanz's review against another edition
I like how he gives you permission to skip the first 50 pages because they're boring. But seriously this may be his finest work and it really screwed my head on straight.
george_r_t_c's review against another edition
5.0
I think it would be fair to say that Marxist reading is one of the most frequent objects of criticism and disavowal by practitioners of contemporary affect theory, reparative reading, and post-critique in general. Rita Felski frequently insists that post-critique shouldn't be strawmanned, that it isn't a reactionary cringing away from critique, but reading Jameson at work in The Political Unconscious makes it seem like Marxism, one of the three metonymic proper names in Ricoeur's triad of suspicious hermeneuts, has been very frequently strawmanned by those who would complain of its unceasing negativity and paranoia.
Everyone remembers the slogan which opens the preface – first as history, then as history! – which sounds like a simplistic program, indeed a "transhistorical" one, as Jameson literally immediately concedes in the second sentence. The book is full of similarly quotable and much more nuanced lines – "texts come before us as the always-already read" (ix), "The scandalous idea that the senses have a history is, as Marx once remarked [in the 1844 Manuscripts], one of the touchstones of our own historicity" (217) – none of which, I think, are really incompatible with the sophisticated literary scholarship that travels under the name of affect theory. Without getting too deep into this debate, it's easy enough to contrast the polemical misfire that is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's criticism of Jameson's historicising slogan in her "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading" essay (from Touching Feeling) with her own embrace of the careful work of historicising the body (historicising affect itself) in the 2008 preface to Epistemology of the Closet where she writes, for example, that "the dividing up of all sexual acts – indeed all persons – under the "opposite" categories of "homo" and "hetero" is not a natural given but a historical process" (xvi).
This is not to say that I think The Political Unconscious is a perfect book, or that post-critique is useless. I'd suggest that Jameson's conclusion is the most interesting section, and in it he explicitly outlines a "Marxist positive hermeneutics" which foils the negative hermeneutic of "ideological analysis," the exposure or decipherment which post-critics focus on as the single-minded drive to destroy/rewrite texts according to a unified metalanguage of structural oppression (286). This positive hermeneutics draws on the Marxist literature of the Utopian; not the Utopian castigated by Engels in Socialism: Utopian or Scientific, but rather the Utopia of Ernst Bloch, the "Marxist perspective on the future" outlined in Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1954–59) and his writings on fairy-tales (224).
As someone completely unfamiliar with Bloch's work this is a little opaque, and Jameson doesn't really give an exposition of the Blochian dimension of his project. This weakness is similar to the broader problem of the separation or independence of chapter one and the conclusion from chapters two to five. The weakness is that these chapters do not really develop the theoretical apparatus that Jameson constructs in chapter one (just as the concept of the Utopian is outlined but only drawn on sporadically in specific case studies). This apparatus consists in the idea of concentric hermeneutic circles or "distinct semantic horizons:" text as symbolic act / text as utterance of a class discourse or "ideologeme" / sign system as textual trace of mode of production (61–62). Instead, the central chapters of the work mostly serve to substantiate (without exhausting) Jameson's more overarching and original thesis: that there is such a thing as the political unconscious, or, perhaps more richly stated, that the unconscious is political, or that the political operates unconsciously. To be fair to Jameson, he develops throughout the body of the text his penchant for the Greimas semiotic rectangle, which is a concrete analytical procedure for staging the political unconscious that Jameson explicates in detail in chapter 1. The issue is that the case studies are not particularly systematically related, but are instead different examples of the form this political unconscious can take.
Besides the particular configurations described by the Greimas rectangle, the other popular form of the political unconscious on display in this work is ressentiment, which links chapters three, four, and five together as different angles on the thesis that the late-nineteenth-century novel's unconscious seems to be structured by a ressentiment that expresses itself in the insistent resentment (novelistically satirised or otherwise) of its characters. Jameson makes interesting and productive use of Nietzsche's methodological innovations throughout this text, including his account of ressentiment as a kind of nascent class dynamic (although for Jameson Nietzsche's criticism of the concept is effectively counterrevolutionary, just as it is for Conrad). However, in chapter five Jameson critically repoliticises him: these novels "betray their own inner dynamic: the concept of ressentiment being ... the product of the feeling in question;" that is to say, to posit resentment is to be motivated by resentment (258). Jameson writes earlier that the project of the transvaluation of value can itself be subjected to a kind of suspicious demystification and revealed as an attempt "to project an intellectual space from which one can study inner-worldly value as such, the whole chaotic variety of reasons and motives the citizens of a secular society have for pursuing the activities they set themselves. These ideals [Nietzsche's and Max Weber's] are implicit or explicit attempts to parry the powerful Marxist position, which sees intellectual activity as being historically situated and class-based" (237). The study, or the critique, of value, for Jameson, is only possible once traditional values have been fragmented, alienated, and either expunged or instrumentalised by capitalism: thus, in a neatly Nietzschean riposte, Jameson suggests that "the study of value is at one with nihilism, or the experience of its absence ... We must ponder the anomaly that it is only in the most completely humanised environment, the one most fully and obviously the end product of human labour, production, and transformation, that life becomes meaningless, and that existential despair first appears as such in direct proportion to the elimination of nature" (240–241). I'm sure this pondering would lead us directly to The Dialectic of Enlightenment.
The point of this detailed engagement with Nietzsche, which is a surprising and cool aspect of the book's approach, is to understand the way these late-nineteenth-century novels are caught up in the ressentiment that characterises their political unconscious and which was theorised (and perhaps exemplified) by Nietzsche's corpus. For Jameson this specific type of political unconscious is an important precursor to the political unconscious of modernism, which is outside the scope of the book, but which (perhaps problematically, because it isn't clear whether Jameson is thereby historicising and delimiting the very concept of the political unconscious) he describes as a "perfected poetic apparatus" that "represses History just as successfully as the perfected narrative apparatus of high realism did the random heterogeneity of the as yet uncentred subject;" because of this total repression, the political in modernism is "driven underground" and becomes "a genuine Unconscious" (270). I find this claim pretty plausible and interesting, but I don't know whether Jameson is suggesting that early-twentieth-century texts have a political unconscious which is now inaccessible to critical methods, or whether some kind of explicitly psychoanalytical midwifery is required. Indeed, this diagnosis of modernism, which would certainly flatten out the richness of the modernist repertoire, seems particularly vulnerable to certain post-critical moves.
In addition to the unexpected centrality of Nietzsche, I want to note in passing that, when this book was written, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972) was still a relatively recent and controversial work, and it is interesting to me that Jameson describes their argument as "very much in the spirit of the present work, for the concern of its authors is to reassert the specificity of the political content of everyday life and of individual fantasy-experience and to reclaim it from that reduction to the merely subjective" which Jameson identified as a feature of both the American psychiatric establishment and the French political scene (6). I like this even-handed and serious consideration of the Deleuzean conception of narrative as a socially symbolic act or system.
So, to summarise these points, some of the positive claims that animate The Political Unconscious are: the Marxist semantic horizons of chapter 1; the move from criticising the ideology of a text to extracting its Utopian vision of the future, pace Bloch, in the conclusion; the politicised ressentiment that unifies the central case studies, and the corresponding political engagement with Nietzsche; the Greimas semiotic rectangle as paradigmatically expressive of the political unconscious; and a generally Deleuzo-Guattarian commitment to "the construction of some new and more adequate, immanent or antitranscendent hermeneutic model" which will not compete with other critical methods so much as position itself as their "horizon," as an analytic perspective on the very intelligibility of different and conflicting interpretive methods in general (7, x).
I have some doubts about whether all these ideas hang together perfectly in this volume, but, to return to a reading that positions The Political Unconscious as a potential riposte to certain strains of the post-critical turn, it is its final pages which are the most important, because Jameson there reminds us that Marxism earns its place as the horizon of interpretive practice generally conceived because of its modest self-abnegating subservience to actual political praxis, which is the only real post-critique.
Everyone remembers the slogan which opens the preface – first as history, then as history! – which sounds like a simplistic program, indeed a "transhistorical" one, as Jameson literally immediately concedes in the second sentence. The book is full of similarly quotable and much more nuanced lines – "texts come before us as the always-already read" (ix), "The scandalous idea that the senses have a history is, as Marx once remarked [in the 1844 Manuscripts], one of the touchstones of our own historicity" (217) – none of which, I think, are really incompatible with the sophisticated literary scholarship that travels under the name of affect theory. Without getting too deep into this debate, it's easy enough to contrast the polemical misfire that is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's criticism of Jameson's historicising slogan in her "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading" essay (from Touching Feeling) with her own embrace of the careful work of historicising the body (historicising affect itself) in the 2008 preface to Epistemology of the Closet where she writes, for example, that "the dividing up of all sexual acts – indeed all persons – under the "opposite" categories of "homo" and "hetero" is not a natural given but a historical process" (xvi).
This is not to say that I think The Political Unconscious is a perfect book, or that post-critique is useless. I'd suggest that Jameson's conclusion is the most interesting section, and in it he explicitly outlines a "Marxist positive hermeneutics" which foils the negative hermeneutic of "ideological analysis," the exposure or decipherment which post-critics focus on as the single-minded drive to destroy/rewrite texts according to a unified metalanguage of structural oppression (286). This positive hermeneutics draws on the Marxist literature of the Utopian; not the Utopian castigated by Engels in Socialism: Utopian or Scientific, but rather the Utopia of Ernst Bloch, the "Marxist perspective on the future" outlined in Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1954–59) and his writings on fairy-tales (224).
As someone completely unfamiliar with Bloch's work this is a little opaque, and Jameson doesn't really give an exposition of the Blochian dimension of his project. This weakness is similar to the broader problem of the separation or independence of chapter one and the conclusion from chapters two to five. The weakness is that these chapters do not really develop the theoretical apparatus that Jameson constructs in chapter one (just as the concept of the Utopian is outlined but only drawn on sporadically in specific case studies). This apparatus consists in the idea of concentric hermeneutic circles or "distinct semantic horizons:" text as symbolic act / text as utterance of a class discourse or "ideologeme" / sign system as textual trace of mode of production (61–62). Instead, the central chapters of the work mostly serve to substantiate (without exhausting) Jameson's more overarching and original thesis: that there is such a thing as the political unconscious, or, perhaps more richly stated, that the unconscious is political, or that the political operates unconsciously. To be fair to Jameson, he develops throughout the body of the text his penchant for the Greimas semiotic rectangle, which is a concrete analytical procedure for staging the political unconscious that Jameson explicates in detail in chapter 1. The issue is that the case studies are not particularly systematically related, but are instead different examples of the form this political unconscious can take.
Besides the particular configurations described by the Greimas rectangle, the other popular form of the political unconscious on display in this work is ressentiment, which links chapters three, four, and five together as different angles on the thesis that the late-nineteenth-century novel's unconscious seems to be structured by a ressentiment that expresses itself in the insistent resentment (novelistically satirised or otherwise) of its characters. Jameson makes interesting and productive use of Nietzsche's methodological innovations throughout this text, including his account of ressentiment as a kind of nascent class dynamic (although for Jameson Nietzsche's criticism of the concept is effectively counterrevolutionary, just as it is for Conrad). However, in chapter five Jameson critically repoliticises him: these novels "betray their own inner dynamic: the concept of ressentiment being ... the product of the feeling in question;" that is to say, to posit resentment is to be motivated by resentment (258). Jameson writes earlier that the project of the transvaluation of value can itself be subjected to a kind of suspicious demystification and revealed as an attempt "to project an intellectual space from which one can study inner-worldly value as such, the whole chaotic variety of reasons and motives the citizens of a secular society have for pursuing the activities they set themselves. These ideals [Nietzsche's and Max Weber's] are implicit or explicit attempts to parry the powerful Marxist position, which sees intellectual activity as being historically situated and class-based" (237). The study, or the critique, of value, for Jameson, is only possible once traditional values have been fragmented, alienated, and either expunged or instrumentalised by capitalism: thus, in a neatly Nietzschean riposte, Jameson suggests that "the study of value is at one with nihilism, or the experience of its absence ... We must ponder the anomaly that it is only in the most completely humanised environment, the one most fully and obviously the end product of human labour, production, and transformation, that life becomes meaningless, and that existential despair first appears as such in direct proportion to the elimination of nature" (240–241). I'm sure this pondering would lead us directly to The Dialectic of Enlightenment.
The point of this detailed engagement with Nietzsche, which is a surprising and cool aspect of the book's approach, is to understand the way these late-nineteenth-century novels are caught up in the ressentiment that characterises their political unconscious and which was theorised (and perhaps exemplified) by Nietzsche's corpus. For Jameson this specific type of political unconscious is an important precursor to the political unconscious of modernism, which is outside the scope of the book, but which (perhaps problematically, because it isn't clear whether Jameson is thereby historicising and delimiting the very concept of the political unconscious) he describes as a "perfected poetic apparatus" that "represses History just as successfully as the perfected narrative apparatus of high realism did the random heterogeneity of the as yet uncentred subject;" because of this total repression, the political in modernism is "driven underground" and becomes "a genuine Unconscious" (270). I find this claim pretty plausible and interesting, but I don't know whether Jameson is suggesting that early-twentieth-century texts have a political unconscious which is now inaccessible to critical methods, or whether some kind of explicitly psychoanalytical midwifery is required. Indeed, this diagnosis of modernism, which would certainly flatten out the richness of the modernist repertoire, seems particularly vulnerable to certain post-critical moves.
In addition to the unexpected centrality of Nietzsche, I want to note in passing that, when this book was written, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972) was still a relatively recent and controversial work, and it is interesting to me that Jameson describes their argument as "very much in the spirit of the present work, for the concern of its authors is to reassert the specificity of the political content of everyday life and of individual fantasy-experience and to reclaim it from that reduction to the merely subjective" which Jameson identified as a feature of both the American psychiatric establishment and the French political scene (6). I like this even-handed and serious consideration of the Deleuzean conception of narrative as a socially symbolic act or system.
So, to summarise these points, some of the positive claims that animate The Political Unconscious are: the Marxist semantic horizons of chapter 1; the move from criticising the ideology of a text to extracting its Utopian vision of the future, pace Bloch, in the conclusion; the politicised ressentiment that unifies the central case studies, and the corresponding political engagement with Nietzsche; the Greimas semiotic rectangle as paradigmatically expressive of the political unconscious; and a generally Deleuzo-Guattarian commitment to "the construction of some new and more adequate, immanent or antitranscendent hermeneutic model" which will not compete with other critical methods so much as position itself as their "horizon," as an analytic perspective on the very intelligibility of different and conflicting interpretive methods in general (7, x).
I have some doubts about whether all these ideas hang together perfectly in this volume, but, to return to a reading that positions The Political Unconscious as a potential riposte to certain strains of the post-critical turn, it is its final pages which are the most important, because Jameson there reminds us that Marxism earns its place as the horizon of interpretive practice generally conceived because of its modest self-abnegating subservience to actual political praxis, which is the only real post-critique.
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