After the reading group on chapter one of Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious, hosted by the Institute, I wanted to post a few reflections. The first is that for a book with its famous motto Jameson's own references to literary theorisations seem very 1950s / 1960s: the new critics, Northrop Frye, Norman O. Brown, Greimas / Levi-Strauss. This is obviously not to condemn the book for being 'out of date' as such, but rather to note that this lag (for a book published in 1981) is not thematised as such. There is a sense, as the Institute pointed out, that the book seems to be trying to integrate an academic department with all its factions under the banner of Marxism, qua ecumenical / unifying principle.
Also striking is the theological and quasi-organicist reference to the 'whole body' as utopian trope, taken up in a quasi-Durkheimian moment and in a truly bizzare instance (in the conclusion) tracked through Marx's invocation of the Asiatic despot. This moment in Marx is made to stand-in for his lost thinking of community, which is odd considering that it can be tracked through more 'positive' moments in Marx, such as his remarks on the mir / commune, or his references to human community (Gemeinswesen) (cf. Camatte), or his references to species-being (Gattungswesen). Barring some weird residual Maoism this deliberate provocation seems to be linked to Jameson's argument for a left politics of collective alliances versus a pluralism that mimics capitalist alienation.
This also links to Jameson's constant reference to the unity of history as singular narrative, which is then used to license (in a tricksy move) the necessity for a hermeneutic that can reconstruct and mimic this unified historical narrative. Again what is strange in terms of historicisation is that this conception of history as 'what hurts', as the Real, and as the 'absent cause', only present through and in the effect of its textual traces, is not regarded as an effect of capital. Marx famously noted that 'world literature' become available as a category on the basis of capital; Jameson, instead, argues that history was whole before capital, fractured and broken-up by capital, and will be whole again - seemingly through a joint political and cultural revolution, prefigured by the political hermeneutic that can gather the limbs of Osiris.
This para-modernist reconstruction of the traces / fragments seems to depend on a model of formal subsumption in which history stands outside of capital - both before, during, and after, we could say. Gesturing already to the problematic of the disappearance of 'nature and the unconscious' that he would take up in the Postmodernism book, we could say that later work takes more seriously the problem of real abstraction and real subsumption that immanatises 'History', reduced, we could say, from Jameson's capitalisation. 'History' would no longer stand for some external standpoint, nor completely subsumed in the paranoic sense, but rather as presupposed by capital, as 'internal' resistance to it.
