The Last Good Dad
On Fredric Jameson’s pedagogy
Nico Baumbach
In his tribute to Fredric Jameson in the New Left Review, Perry Anderson notes what he takes to be “a gap” in Jameson’s work, “an unspoken conflict-avoidance,” indeed a surprising absence of politics from the author of The Political Unconscious—that is, if we define politics, as Carl Schmitt did, in terms of the friend/enemy distinction. Anderson’s criticism, gently offered from the already established position of both friendship and deep admiration, gets to the heart of something about Jameson’s work that I have been thinking about since his death. But what Anderson is touching on is to my mind not a gap at all but something more like a key.
Anderson is identifying an aspect of Jameson’s thought that remains largely unanalyzed by both his critics and acolytes. And it is related to something that has been nagging at me as I have been reading the outpouring of encomiums for Jameson on social media, many on Elon Musk’s X. These expressions of grief and celebration have been enormously gratifying at the same time as they have made me curious what precisely is being celebrated—what this desire called “Fredric Jameson” means at this historical juncture on these particular platforms. Surveying social media responses to Jameson’s death, what seems paradoxical is that the celebration of Jameson takes place on sites designed as if to nullify the possibility of dialectical thought. X is an always punctual ticker tape feed in which bitesize statements are submitted to a gamified binary logic of likes, reposts, and follows. One result of platform activism is that a not insubstantial online Marx-curious left remains largely wedded to a moralistic and individualistic tactics of shaming or denunciation of individuals as the only seemingly effective form of social media politics, and, as Jameson might point out, the most immediately available opening for the affirmation of collective solidarity in the absence of other options.
Another criticism of Jameson, this time, Terry Eagleton: “Jameson [is] mistaken to believe that all ethics displaces politics; he also assumes inaccurately that ethics is always a rigid binary matter of good versus evil.” Eagleton has elsewhere criticized Jameson’s “aversion to the moral” and “allergy to ethics.” Is this another way of stating Anderson’s criticism? Leaving aside how Eagleton may want to defend moral philosophy, the point worth emphasizing is that, for Jameson, what he calls “ethics” is precisely the friend/enemy division with no dialectic and the name for the undermining of politics by returning us to questions of individual agency. Dialectical thought, on the other hand, is not “conflict avoidance” but a way of understanding conflict through the refusal of reified binary oppositions. It is only through this refusal that it can be “the anticipation of the logic of a collectivity not yet come into being.”
If this is so, then Jameson is an untimely figure, out of sync with our current information economy. Who then is the Jameson being celebrated? There is a timely Jameson too. A large part of the attraction of the problematic that Jameson’s work opens up comes from his emphasis on the need to think our current moment in its logic and totality and to give it a name. At the same time, he gives us something to do with all the cultural fetish objects and mindless distractions, both high and low, that subsume our daily lives—to redeem them as indexes of historicity, symptoms ripe for interpretation nonetheless shot through with a utopian potential however simultaneously distorted and undermined.
Jean-Paul Sartre, as Simone de Beauvoir tells it, had his eyes opened when Raymond Aron presented the idea to him that phenomenology could make philosophy out of an apricot cocktail. Jameson promised we could make Marxist radical Theory from a Hollywood blockbuster or popular science fiction novel, but not in the way that was ready-made by a certain received idea of Marxist interpretation—as takedown or denunciation. Theory here meant instead redemptive criticism, though Jameson preferred the word utopian for its less religious connotations. Every symptom of capital is also at the same time the potential for utopia. That said, he ultimately placed less stress on the cultural detritus of mainstream commodified culture than the exceptions, which tended to be in the margins of the global economy. To name the system is the precondition for “exploratory projection on what a vital and emergent political culture should be.”
“Always historicize!”—the now quasi-famous slogan of The Political Unconscious meant always periodize and totalize and to do so by means of the cultural items in our midst. Yet seeking to grasp the totality appealed to a desire that could all too easily slip into ideological fantasy—the popularity of conspiracy theories, he pointed out, being the most obvious manifestation of this. In the fantasy, the totality through displacement and condensation is given a content. Yet he also insisted ideological fantasies should not so easily be dismissed and instead be treated not unlike fictional narratives or dreams in which the content is always secondary to the formal problem as such. Fictional narrative is a thought experiment just as political imagination is a fictional narrative— the attempt, however unconscious, to figure what does not exist, a life unburdened by capitalist imperatives. Call it communism— a placeholder perhaps and ripe for confusion with its homonyms, but is there a better word?
If “Jameson” is its own ideological fantasy, it is no accident that Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1990) was his most successful book, not to mention the best-selling book in the history of Duke University Press. A commodity fetish object in its own right, the thick forest green slab of a book, Andy Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes” on its cover, gave Marxist cultural theory some of the allure and sheen of the object under critique and found its place in the 1990s, likely mostly unread, on the bookshelves of many liberal arts college-educated individuals with no enduring commitment to leftwing politics let alone Marxist analysis. (I think of Jameson being name-dropped in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) when the protagonist sells his unread theory books at The Strand despite “remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society . . .”) The seductions of “Theory,” as a distinct discursive formation associated with name-brand theories and theorists, as Jameson pointed out within the book’s covers, was itself a symptom of postmodernity, and with the book he assured his own name among the ranks of Theory’s proper names, mostly French, who possessed a certain cultural capital.
This gave him a degree of fame for a Marxist academic, but despite his insistence on the need to grasp the contemporary, as Anderson notes, he rarely waded into the waters of public discourse. Interventions into the latest theoretical debates, yes, but not into current political events. In a roundtable of responses to 9/11 in the London Review of Books, his reluctance to say too much, or really to participate at all, is evident from his relatively brief statement. “Historical events,” he wrote, “are not punctual, but extend in a before and after of time which only gradually reveal themselves.” After mentioning the genocide of the Iraqi and Indonesian communist parties as part of the essential repressed history that helped explain the reactionary forms that were being taken by resistance to global capital at the start of the 21st century, he finished his remarks by saying “it is permitted to feel that the future holds nothing good for either side.”
Characteristic of that historical moment was a relentless enforced consensus, embraced not only by the network news but widely by the supposedly more sophisticated venues of liberal intellectual culture, which instrumentalized the events of 9/11 for an opportunity to declare “moral clarity” while embracing jingoistic racism and imperialism. Jameson’s remarks, along with other heretical statements expressed in the same roundtable, were an occasional target for not falling in line. A minor but symptomatic example: in the letters section of the following issue, a certain Stanford professor and avant-garde poetry scholar cited Jameson’s response, among others, as a reason she was canceling her subscription to the LRB and calling for her colleagues and students to boycott it.
The response to Jameson’s LRB statement is perhaps what led him to write “The Dialectics of Disaster,” an essay for South Atlantic Quarterly about September 11th and the media reaction. A rare engagement with contemporary politics by Jameson, it also remains one of his more unjustly neglected essays. Has anyone better captured the logic behind the stultifying atmosphere of manufactured consent in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in which a blind allegiance to the trauma of “our side” made it somehow impermissible to offer any consideration of historical context or, more importantly, the atrocities that were surely to come in retaliation at a scale that was just as likely to dwarf the original atrocity that was meant to justify them? The moralizing ideology of the friend/enemy distinction, aided by a specifically American sentimental self-help culture, was crudely but effectively used as a way to silence all opposition: Are you with us or with the terrorists? (Lessons we might apply to the last year, with some minor modifications):
“Once a nameless and spontaneous reaction has been named and classified, and named over and over again so insistently by all the actors of the public sphere, backed up by thinly veiled threats and intimidation, the name interposes a stereotype between ourselves and our thoughts and feelings; or, if you prefer (Sartre’s idea of seriality), what we feel are no longer our own feelings anymore but someone else’s, and indeed, if we are to believe the media, everybody else’s. This new inauthenticity casts no little doubt on all those theories of mourning and trauma that were recently so influential, and whose slogans one also finds everywhere in the coverage. One may well prefer Proust to these obligatory appeals to mourning and trauma, which have been sucked so deeply into the disaster news as to make one wonder whether, from the psychological descriptions and diagnoses they purport to offer, they have not been turned into a new kind of therapy in their own right. Therapy is, to be sure, an old American tradition; and I can still vividly remember the suggestion of a clinical psychologist on the radio, not only that the survivors needed therapy, but that all Americans should receive it! Perhaps it would not be any more expensive than George Bush’s tax cut; but in any case the therapist will now have been reassured. All Americans are now receiving therapy, and it is called war.”
Anderson rightly links Jameson’s resistance to polemics in terms of how he understood Marxism. “It followed, I thought, from his claim that the ‘the lack of autonomous political reflection’ in Marxism was not a weakness but a strength.” Marxism, in Jameson, was best understood as a problem field that was able to translate or mediate between all other theoretical systems. The wager was not only that Marxism was not some reductive dogmatic theoretical system but, on the contrary, the name for the only theoretical approach best equipped to resist dogmatism. Marxism, for Jameson, never provided some orthodox solution or ready-to-hand explanation for understanding our world but provided interpretive problems that always needed to be reinvented and reimagined. At the level of language, of the movement of thought, it was the stubborn refusal of reification. To do dialectical criticism then was to be a writer in some emphatic sense. Framing binary oppositions as political oppositions was opposed to the way he understood the dialectic as a type of thought that understood it could never on its own accomplish what it desired.
“Let’s add some more slogans or lessons. Wrest the collective from the individual. Wrest the political from moralism.”
What then to do with the slogans or axioms that punctuated his essays and books? Jameson once remarked that he liked a good slogan because it “gives you something to do.” Perhaps the most famous was “Always historicize!” but a slogan often would get formulated at the beginning or end of an essay—not a distillation of a thesis so much as a program or even in some cases a kind of thought experiment. If we adopt this axiom, what follows? It sometimes got him in trouble. See the “National Allegory” essay.[1] But close readers of Jameson understood how these suggestive dialectical propositions are less dogmatic than pedagogical, oriented toward the unmooring of thought from received opinion.
Or rather, the point was to “wrest a realm of freedom from a realm of necessity.” Jameson credits the idea to Marx but it could just as easily be attributed to the Sartrean existentialism that marked Jameson’s youth and that he never repudiated even as it drifted to the background of his writing. Let’s add some more slogans or lessons. Wrest the collective from the individual. Wrest the political from moralism. These are privileged terms in the binary opposition, but not of the either/or variety. Rather we can see these propositions as part of a pedagogical aesthetic—he sometimes called it “cognitive mapping”—that seeks emergent potential from the constraints of the given.
“Pedagogy,” he said in an interview, “is not inflicting discipline but awakening interest.” Also on X, former students (I am one, too) noted Jameson’s generosity commenting on their papers. I can attest that what interested him always was the student’s own interest and the opportunity to think through ideas with the student’s work as the occasion. What didn’t interest him was reproducing hierarchy and authority, putting you in your place. Jameson had an attachment to the notion of “interest” that he traced to the moment in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus where when a character responds to the question of whether there is anything stronger than love, he responds “Yes, interest.” Interest, Jameson elaborated, was “that sense of attention and curiosity and the investments of time and vital energies (rather than dividends).” In his role as professor, I did, however, detect some small measure of resistance to his imitators—the students who most confronted him with the tics and idiosyncrasies of his own style, but without the interpretive rigor, and often applied to some fetishized object of popular culture. To be Jameson’s student required not being too slavishly Jamesonian, to let one’s own style and idiosyncrasies emerge unbidden as a secondary effect of one’s own pursuit of one’s own interests. Wrest interest from discipline (and mimicry).
Jameson’s pedagogy will not lead us to mourn his passing. As Benjamin Kunkel pointed out on NLR’s Sidecar, despite his allegiance to existentialism, his was decidedly not a philosophy of being unto death. As such, the eulogy or elegy was not one of the many genres that occupied Jameson’s interest. Impatient with both sentimentality and piety, he often expressed the impolite thought that the naming of a feeling is not necessarily the feeling itself and that what we may desire to feel, or what we say we feel, is sometimes given to us in advance in the form of expectation, norm, or cliché. The unconscious, both individual and collective, finds ways of disabusing us of what he called “named emotions.” He often returned to the phrase “intermittencies of the heart,” from Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth book of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, “when the narrator, seeking to enhance the grief he feels at his grandmother’s death, suddenly finds he feels nothing at all . . .” Grief, like other emotions, cannot be summoned at will and may very well turn into something else when we experience it as a demand from without. “Whatever the feeling in question (anger as well as grief, love as much as hate), we never feel enough; the emotion is never full enough; it comes and goes.” So let’s leave aside my own feelings, and yours. Better perhaps to end with the final line of The Benjamin Files: “This is not a happy ending, but it is not the end of history either.”
[1] See “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text, No. 15 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 65–88. In the essay, Jameson proposed that we see “all third world literature as necessarily national allegory.” The slogan received much criticism, most notably from Aijaz Ahmad in “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” Social Text, No. 17 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 3–25.