Fredric Jameson 1934-2024

Socialist Worker, a particularly screamy, Jew-hating website on the UK sectarian left, has published an obituary of Fredric Jameson, 1934-2024.

I stopped reading SW around 2013, when I also started skipping all-but-the-headlines for US Stalinist “antizionism” periodicals like Workers World. 

But since I spent this spring reading ten Jameson books, I gave the obituary a read. Author and SW editorial board grandee Alex Callinicos wrote it. 

A few excerpts that I agree with will suffice:

[....] At the end of the book [Marxism and Form (1971)] Jameson writes, “The works of culture come to us as signs in all-but-forgotten-code, as symptoms of diseases no longer even recognised, as fragments of a totality we have long since lost the organs to see.”

It was the task of dialectical criticism to restore these fragments to their place in this invisible totality—capitalism....

[....] it allows us to understand history as the “absent cause” of all our strivings. In it the “ground bass of material production continues, … yet conveniently muffled and intermittent, easy to ignore”. But “history is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets limits to individual as well as collective praxis.”

[....] In his most important theoretical work, The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson boldly claims that “the political perspective”—he means Marxism—is “the absolute horizon of all readings and interpretations”.

[....] In 1991 he responded defiantly to the apparent triumph of Western imperialism at the end of the Cold War. “Capital and labour (and their opposition) will not go away under the new dispensation,” he said. “Whether the word Marxism disappears or not, therefore, in the erasure of the tapes in some new Dark Ages, the thing itself will inevitably reappear.”

[....] Jameson argues that Marxism does not simply reject what appear to be rival theories. Instead, it recognises that they offer partial, limited perspectives on reality. It takes over their insights and integrates them into its understanding of the social whole....

Jay

3 October 2024

Source: Socialist Worker, Thursday 26 September 2024 Issue 2925