Fredric Jameson

Frederic Jameson is an influential American Marxist literary critic based at Duke's University. He works as the Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies and is the Director of the Centre for Critical Theory at Duke University. Frederic Jameson is associated with postmodernism, as well as his views on globalisation.

He is perhaps best known for his books The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Aside from these texts, which we examine in more detail below, Jameson wrote numerous other books and academic papers over a career spanning more than 50 years.

Fredric Jameson biography

Jameson studied philosophy at Haverford College in the USA and then in Munich and Berlin, Germany, before doing a PhD at Yale University. His studies started with some work on philosophy and the work of Jean-Paul Sartre in particular. He developed ideas around the question of style as it related to historical periods. He looked at the way Sartre's writing style differed across the various aspects of his work, from poetry and novels to his work on philology and philosophy.

The title of his dissertation was Sartre: the Origins of a Style, and it was published in 1961. The influence of Eric Auerbach, his teacher at Yale, can be felt in Jameson's early work.

Eric Auerbach (1892-1957) was a German linguist/philologist who wrote about realism in Western literature. His most famous book, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), dealt with the way the world is depicted in the great works of literature, from the ancient world to the contemporary present; for example, he details the way the world was depicted in classical and ancient texts like The Odyssey (by Homer) and the Bible. Auerbach was an early historicist, meaning that he believed that the way reality is depicted reflects the times in which it is depicted. Jameson followed this approach. His work on Sartre was a detailed analysis of one writer in the mode of Auerbach.

Cultural Marxism Frederic Jameson

After his work on Sartre, Jameson developed a keen interest in Marxist theory and its application to literature. This was in the late 1950s and during the Cold War (1947-1991), so it is understandable that the philosophical basis of Russian communism was held in some contempt in the USA at this time. The origins of Marxism as an economic and class-based critique of society changed over time to embrace culture. Despite the shift of focus among Western Marxists, the end game was the same: namely, to analyse and understand who had power in society.

This attitude towards culture became known as cultural Marxism and was an approach to the study of literary texts, film, music and theatre, which examined the role of the producers and consumers of cultural capital.

Jameson developed his Marxist critique of Western society in his famous book The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981). It was a new approach to the study of literary texts, based on the view that the essential requirement for literary interpretation is historicism. This means, simply put, that a literary text should be understood and interpreted in terms of how it came into existence and according to its immediate historical context. Jameson called history the 'ultimate horizon', meaning the most important viewpoint for textual and cultural criticism.

Fredric Jameson postmodernism

Jameson grieves the loss of history. Because of the loss of history as a vital connection, his view of the present (at the time of writing, 1991) is bleak. He calls the loss of historicity in postmodernity a 'historical deafness' (p.xi of The Political Unconscious). This, he believes, is the result of anti-foundationalism. Anti-foundationalism is the belief that the social order (society) has no foundational set of beliefs or norms upon which to base itself. This led directly to cultural and moral relativism, the idea that all truth, all cultural categories, and all moral claims, are relative rather than universal or absolute.

In postmodernity, there is no sense of history, no reality outside the illusion of textuality. So, for Jameson, this represents one further problem of the age rather than any kind of solution. Jameson argued that in postmodernity, there is a 'new depthlessness, which manifests itself through literal flatness (two-dimensional screens, flat skyscrapers full of reflecting windows) and qualitative superficiality.

In theory, it manifests itself through the postmodern rejection of the belief that one can ever fully move beyond the surface appearances of ideology or "false consciousness" to some deeper truth; we are left instead with "multiple surfaces"'. (Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991.). Postmodernity is therefore detached from history. It is flat and without real dimension or depth, hence 'depthlessness'.

For Jameson, there are two related problems with postmodernity. The first is that it is, as we have noted already, characterised by a loss or 'crisis' of history. The experience of reality is decontextualised, divorced from historical knowledge. The other problem identified by Jameson is what he calls pastiche.

Fig. 1 - Pastiche is exemplified quite well in postmodern architecture, where different elements are placed together (juxtaposed) with no sense of coherence, history, or complementarity.

Pastiche is similar to a collage. Elements in buildings, paintings, or texts are (apparently) arbitrarily added without consideration for 'fit'. This gives an impression of randomness and is intended to disrupt and cause tension or, to borrow a musical term, dissonance. Jameson was not anti-postmodernism but was cautious of it for the reasons given above.

Fredric Jameson globalisation

In a paper book called Valences of the Dialectic, Jameson writes in the chapter called 'Globalisation as a Philosophical Issue' that

What Jameson means is that globalisation is that the world is more joined-up, that we share information through extensive and powerful communication networks like the internet. This allows cultural values to be disseminated and shared around the world.

He goes on to say that, ultimately, much of the communication which happens is in the form of advertising. What was at first thought to be about the transfer and exchange of information in multiple directions has, in fact, become more like a message from the West to other parts of the world: '…the positing of an enlargement of communicational nets [networks] has secretly been transformed into some kind of message about a new world culture'. (p.437).

Fredric Jameson Allegory and Ideology

Jameson is still an active intellectual, and Allegory and Ideology is a book he published in 2019. It is volume two of a proposed 6-volume series called The Poetics of Social Forms. In the book, Jameson argues for a particular way of reading, one which is associated with an earlier period of textual interpretation, the allegorical reading.

In the book, he looks back at some foundational Western texts, like The Faerie Queene (1590) by Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) and The Divine Comedy (1320) by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), among others.

This is further evidence of the thread which runs through so much of Jameson's writing, namely the importance of historicism. In this book, as in others, Jameson argues that what matters in textual analysis is the role played by the historical context in the shaping of texts.

Jameson is regarded today as an elder statesman of Marxist literary theory and is frequently cited in academic literature as well as in popular texts on literary theory.