Fredric Jameson

Jameson was the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of Romance Studies (French), and Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University. In 2012, the Modern Language Association gave Jameson its sixth Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement.

Early life and works

Fredric Ruff Jameson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 14, 1934. He was the only child of Frank S. Jameson (c.1890–?), a New York-born medical doctor with his own private practice, and Bernice née Ruff (c.1904–1966), a Michigan-born Barnard College graduate who did not work outside the family home. Both his parents had non-wage income over $50 in 1939 (about USD$1130 in 2024). By April 1935 he moved with his parents to Gloucester City, New Jersey, and by 1949 the family occupied a house in the nearby middle-class suburb of Haddon Heights, New Jersey. He graduated from Moorestown Friends School in 1950.

He completed a BA summa cum laude in French at Haverford College, where he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society in his junior year. His professors at Haverford included Wayne Booth, to whom A Singular Modernity (2002) is dedicated. After graduation in 1954 he briefly traveled to Europe, studying at Aix-en-Provence, Munich, and Berlin, where he learned of new developments in continental philosophy, including the rise of structuralism. He returned to America the following year to study at Yale University under Erich Auerbach in pursuit of a PhD, which was awarded in 1959 for a dissertation on The Origins of Sartre's Style.

Career summary

From 1959 to 1967 he taught French and Comparative Literature at Harvard University.

He was employed by the University of California, San Diego from 1967 to 1976, where he worked alongside Herbert Marcuse. He taught classes on Marxist literary criticism, the Frankfurt School, the French novel and poetry, and Sartre. He was then hired by Yale University through Paul de Man in 1976, and by the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1983.

In 1985 he joined Duke University as Professor of Literature and Professor of Romance Studies. He established the literary studies program at Duke and held the William A. Lane Professorship of Comparative Literature, renamed in 2013, as Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professorship of Comparative Literature.

In 1985 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Early works

Erich Auerbach would prove to be a lasting influence on Jameson's thought. This was already apparent in Jameson's doctoral dissertation, published in 1961 as Sartre: The Origins of a Style. Auerbach's concerns were rooted in the German philological tradition; his works on the history of style analyzed literary form within social history. Jameson would follow in these steps, examining the articulation of poetry, history, philology, and philosophy in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, who was the subject of his dissertation.

Jameson's work focused on the relation between the style of Sartre's writings and the political and ethical positions of his existentialist philosophy. The occasional Marxian aspects of Sartre's work were glossed over in this book; Jameson would return to them in the following decade.

Jameson's dissertation, though it drew on a long tradition of European cultural analysis, differed markedly from the prevailing trends of Anglo-American academia (which were empiricism and logical positivism in philosophy and linguistics, and New Critical formalism in literary criticism). It nevertheless earned Jameson a position at Harvard University.

Research into Marxism

His interest in Sartre led Jameson to intense study of Marxist literary theory. Even though Karl Marx was becoming an important influence in American social science, partly through the influence of the many European intellectuals who had sought refuge from the Second World War in the United States, such as Theodor Adorno, the literary and critical work of the Western Marxists was still largely unknown in American academia in the late-1950s and early-1960s.

Jameson's shift toward Marxism was also driven by his increasing political connection with the New Left and pacifist movements, as well as by the Cuban Revolution, which Jameson took as a sign that "Marxism was alive and well as a collective movement and a culturally productive force". His research focused on critical theory: thinkers of, and influenced by, the Frankfurt School, such as Kenneth Burke, György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, and Sartre, who viewed cultural criticism as an integral feature of Marxist theory. In 1969, Jameson co-founded the Marxist Literary Group with a number of his graduate students at the University of California, San Diego.

While the Orthodox Marxist view of ideology held that the cultural "superstructure" was completely determined by the economic "base", the Western Marxists critically analyzed culture as a historical and social phenomenon alongside economic production and distribution or political power relationships. They held that culture must be studied using the Hegelian concept of immanent critique: the theory that adequate description and criticism of a philosophical or cultural text must be carried out in the same terms that text itself employs, in order to develop its internal inconsistencies in a manner that allows intellectual advancement. Marx highlighted immanent critique in his early writings, derived from Hegel's development of a new form of dialectical thinking that would attempt, as Jameson comments, "to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps".

Narrative and history

History came to play an increasingly central role in Jameson's interpretation of both the reading (consumption) and writing (production) of literary texts. Jameson marked his full-fledged commitment to Hegelian-Marxist philosophy with the publication of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, the opening slogan of which is "always historicize" (1981). The Political Unconscious takes as its object not the literary text itself, but rather the interpretive frameworks by which it is now constructed. As Jonathan Culler has observed, The Political Unconscious emerged as an alternative method to interpret literary narratives.

The book's argument emphasized history as the "ultimate horizon" of literary and cultural analysis. It borrowed notions from the structuralist tradition and from Raymond Williams's work in cultural studies, and joined them to a largely Marxist view of labor (whether blue-collar or intellectual) as the focal point of analysis. Jameson's readings exploited both the explicit formal and thematic choices of the writer and the unconscious framework guiding these. Artistic choices that were ordinarily viewed in purely aesthetic terms were recast in terms of historical literary practices and norms, in an attempt to develop a systematic inventory of the constraints they imposed on the artist as an individual creative subject. To further this meta-commentary, Jameson described the ideologeme, or "the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes", the smallest legible residue of the real-life, ongoing struggles occurring between social classes.

Jameson's establishment of history as the only pertinent factor in this analysis, which derived the categories governing artistic production from their historical framework, was paired with a bold theoretical claim. His book claimed to establish Marxian literary criticism, centered in the notion of an artistic mode of production, as the most all-inclusive and comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding literature. According to Vincent B. Leitch, the publication of The Political Unconscious "rendered Jameson the leading Marxist literary critic in America."

Analysis of postmodernism

Background

It is Jameson's contribution to a conception and analysis of postmodernism that has had the most impact in its breadth and reach. At the time of his death in 2024, it was generally recognized that he was the preeminent critic of postmodernism. Jameson's contention was that postmodernism is the cultural expression of late capitalism. Postmodernism represents the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than the production of goods.

Jameson developed this form of analysis during a time when "an art-historical debate had wondered for several years whether our age had moved beyond modern art and on to 'postmodern' art". Jameson joined in on the debate in 1984 with his article titled "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" that was first published in the journal New Left Review. He later expanded the article into a book, which he published in 1991.

Jameson's argument

Jameson's argument centered around his assertion that the various phenomena of the postmodern had been, or could have been, understood successfully within a modernist framework. This differed from the most prominent views of the postmodern condition that existed at that time. In Jameson's view, postmodernity's merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole was the result of the colonization of the cultural sphere—which had retained at least partial autonomy during the prior modernist era—by a newly organized corporate capitalism.

Following Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry, Jameson discussed this phenomenon in his critical discussion of architecture, film, narrative, and visual arts, as well as in his strictly philosophical work. For Jameson, postmodernism, as a form of mass-culture driven by capitalism, pervades every aspect of daily life.

Key concepts

Two of Jameson's best-known claims from Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism are that post-modernity is characterized by "pastiche" and a "crisis in historicity". And since postmodernism — as was mentioned above — represents the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than the production of goods, Jameson argued that parody (which implies a moral judgment or a comparison with societal norms) was replaced by pastiche (collage and other forms of juxtaposition without a normative grounding). Jameson recognized that modernism frequently "quotes" from different cultures and historical periods, but he argues that postmodern cultural texts indiscriminately cannibalize these elements, erasing any sense of critical or historical distance, resulting in pure pastiche.

Relatedly, Jameson argues that the postmodern era suffers from a crisis in historicity: "there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the [...] history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current, multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life".

Jameson's analysis of postmodernism attempts to view it as historically grounded; he therefore explicitly rejects any moralistic opposition to postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon. Instead, Jameson insists upon a Hegelian immanent critique that would "think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together".

Other concepts

Some of Jameson's other well-known concepts and philosophical contributions —not mentioned in the preceding section or tangential to his critique of postmodernism— include the concepts of "cognitive mapping" (adapted from Kevin A. Lynch; a form of class consciousness mediated by popular culture that corresponds to the era of capitalist globalization), the "vanishing mediator", totality as conspiracy, "alternate modernity" (the postcolonial notion of distinct regional pathways of capitalism, linked to the political project of BRICS), "wrapping" and antagonism as the principle of totalisation.

Later work

Several of Jameson's later works, along with Postmodernism, are part of what he called both a "sequence" and "project" entitled The Poetics of Social Forms. This project attempts, in Sara Danius's words, to "provide a general history of aesthetic forms, at the same time seeking to show how this history can be read in tandem with a history of social and economic formations". While the individual works are formally named on the flyleaf of Inventions of a Present, its more nuanced structure—six volumes comprising seven publications grouped into three subdivisions—can be gleaned from mentions in the books themselves.

Archaeologies of the Future is a study of utopia and science fiction that was launched at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. The Antinomies of Realism won the 2014 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.

Alongside this project, Jameson published three related studies of dialectical theory: Valences of the Dialectic (2009), which includes Jameson's critical responses to Slavoj Žižek, Gilles Deleuze, and other contemporary theorists; The Hegel Variations (2010), a commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit; and Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (2011), an analysis of Marx's Das Kapital.

An overview of Jameson's work, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory, by Ian Buchanan, was published in 2007.