Fredric Jameson | |
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Born | Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. | April 14, 1934
Died | September 22, 2024 90) | (aged
Alma mater | Haverford College Yale University |
Spouse | Susan Willis |
Children | 3 |
Era | 20th-/21st-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Western Marxism Marxist hermeneutics [1] |
Institutions | Harvard University (1959–67) UC San Diego (1967–76) Yale University (1976–83) UC Santa Cruz (1983–85) Duke University (1985–2024) |
Thesis | The Origins of Sartre's Style (1959) |
Doctoral advisor | Erich Auerbach |
Doctoral students | Kim Stanley Robinson [2] |
Other notable students | John Beverley [3] |
Main interests |
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Notable ideas |
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Fredric Ruff Jameson (April 14, 1934 – September 22, 2024) was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. [4] [5] He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) [6] and The Political Unconscious (1981).
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. [7] In 2012, the Modern Language Association gave Jameson its sixth Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement. [8]
Frederick Ruff Jameson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 14, 1934. [9] [10] 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. [11] [12] [13] Both his parents had non-wage income over $50 in 1939. [11] [14] By April 1935 he moved with his parents to Gloucester City, Camden County, New Jersey, [11] and by 1949 the family occupied a house in the middle-class suburb of Haddon Heights in the same county. [12] He graduated from Moorestown Friends School in New Jersey in 1950. [15]
He completed a BA in French with highest honors at Haverford College, [16] where he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society in his junior year. [17] His professors at Haverford included Wayne Booth. [18] 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. [19] [20]
From 1959 to 1967 he taught French and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. [2]
He was employed by the University of California, San Diego from 1967 to 1976, where he worked alongside Herbert Marcuse [3] and was the initial doctoral advisor for Kim Stanley Robinson's thesis on Philip K. Dick, then by Yale University from 1976 to 1983, and by the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1983 to 1985. [2]
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. [21]
In 1985 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [22]
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. [9]
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. [23]
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. [9]
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. [24]
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". [25] 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. [26]
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". [27]
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). [9] 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. [28]
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. [29] [note 1]
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. [31] According to Vincent B. Leitch, the publication of The Political Unconscious "rendered Jameson the leading Marxist literary critic in America." [32]
It is Jameson’s contribution to a conception and analysis of postmodernism that has had the most impact in its breadth and reach. [33] Jameson’s contention is that postmodernism is the cultural expression of our own current period of Late capitalism. [34] [35] Postmodernism represents the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than the production of goods. It’s an expression of the “cultural logic of late capitalism.”[ citation needed ]
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”. [33] 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 . [36] [37] He later expanded the article into a book, which he published in 1991.
As mentioned in the preceding section, Jameson argued against other theorists of the postmodern by asserting that the various phenomena of the postmodern had been, or could have been, understood successfully within a modernist framework. 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. [note 2]
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 our daily lives. [33]
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". Jameson argues 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 recognizes 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. [39]
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". [40]
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". [41] [33]
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. [33] 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". [42] 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. [note 3]
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. [48]
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. [49]
Jameson was married to Susan Willis, and had three daughters. [9] He died at his home in Killingworth, Connecticut, on September 22, 2024, at the age of 90. [9] [50]
The Modern Language Association (MLA) recognized Jameson throughout his career. In 1971, Jameson earned the MLA’s William Riley Parker Prize. [8] Twenty years later, it awarded him its 1991 James Russell Lowell Prize for Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. [51]
The latter has remained a landmark publication in its field since it was published in 1991, [52] and is still Duke University Press’s all-time bestseller (as of 2024). [53] Jameson was again recognized by the MLA, this time in 2012, with its MLA Lifetime Achievement Award. [53]
In 2008, Jameson was awarded the annual Holberg International Memorial Prize in recognition of his career-long research "on the relation between social formations and cultural forms". [54] The prize, which was worth 4.6 million kr (approximately $648,000), was presented to Jameson by Tora Aasland, Norwegian Minister of Education and Research, in Bergen, Norway, on November 26, 2008. [55]
In 2009, Jameson was awarded the Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award by the North American Society for Utopian Studies. [52] Jameson was given credit for his ”significant role in introducing to an English reading audience the rich theorizations of Utopia found in German critical theory, in works written by Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and most significantly, Ernst Bloch.” It was also noted that “the question of Utopia is central to all of Jameson’s work.” [52]
Jameson has had an influence on the theorization of the postmodern in China. In mid-1985, shortly after the beginning of the cultural fever (early 1985 to the massacre on June Fourth, 1989)—a period in Chinese intellectual history characterized in part by intense interest in Western critical theory, literary theory, and related disciplines [56] —Jameson discussed the idea of postmodernism in China in lectures at Peking University and the newly founded Shenzhen University. [57] [58] [note 4]
In 1987, Jameson published a book entitled Postmodernism and Cultural Theories. [note 5] Although the Chinese intelligentsia's engagement with postmodernism would not begin in earnest until the nineties, Postmodernism and Cultural Theories was to become a keystone text in that engagement; as scholar Wang Ning writes, its influence on Chinese thinkers would be impossible to overestimate. [58] [note 6] [note 7]
This debate over postmodernism, in part fueled by Jameson, was at its most intense from 1994 to 1997, carried on by Chinese intellectuals both inside and outside the mainland; particularly important contributions came from Zhao Yiheng in London, Xu Ben in the United States, and Zhang Xudong, also in the United States, who had gone on to study under Jameson as a doctoral student at Duke. [57]
Thirteen years before his death, Rey Chow, then chair of Duke University's literature program, reflected on Jameson's career on the occasion of presenting him with a lifetime achievement award:
"One would be hard put to find a humanities scholar who is more widely visible and more frequently cited across the disciplines, and who has sustained national and international critical attention for a more extended period of time than Fred Jameson". [8]
Robert T. Tally Jr, in a Jacobin review of his 2024 work, Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, published three weeks before his death, described Jameson as:
"at the height of his powers, carving out his novel alternative… [and that]… for over five decades, Fredric Jameson has been the leading Marxist literary and cultural critic in the United States, if not the world". [60]
A memorial piece published by the editorial team of the Marxist journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory described Jameson as an "intellectual giant" responsible for an "enduring legacy that has inspired generations of thinkers, activists and scholars". [5] They praised Jameson for his "militant commitment to a materialist reading of moments of struggle and revolt, utopia and liberation in cultural texts." [5]
“Following Ernest Mandel's periodization in his book Late Capitalism (1975), Jameson claims that "there have been three fundamental moments in capitalism, each one marking a dialectical expansion over the previous stage. These are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital" . To these forms of society correspond the cultural forms realism, modernism, and postmodernism.” [38]
The caustic edge of Jameson's theory, which had described postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism", was abandoned for a contented or even enthusiastic endorsement of mass culture, which [a certain group of Chinese critics] saw as a new space of popular freedom. According to these critics, intellectuals, who conceived of themselves as the bearers of modernity, were reacting with shock and anxiety at their loss of control with the arrival of postmodern consumer society, uttering cries of "quixotic hysteria", panic-stricken by the realization of what they had once called for during the eighties. [57]
Late capitalism is a concept first used in print by German economist Werner Sombart at the start of the 20th century. In the late 2010s, the term began to be used in the United States and Canada to refer to corporate capitalism.
Postmodernity is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century – in the 1980s or early 1990s – and that it was replaced by postmodernity, and still others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity. The idea of the postmodern condition is sometimes characterized as a culture stripped of its capacity to function in any linear or autonomous state like regressive isolationism, as opposed to the progressive mind state of modernism.
Critique of Dialectical Reason is a 1960 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in which the author further develops the existentialist Marxism he first expounded in his essay Search for a Method (1957). Critique of Dialectical Reason and Search for a Method were written as a common manuscript, with Sartre intending the former to logically precede the latter. Critique of Dialectical Reason was Sartre's second large-scale philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943) having been the first. The book has been seen by some as an abandonment of Sartre's original existentialism, while others have seen it as a continuation and elaboration of his earlier work. It was translated into English by Alan Sheridan-Smith.
The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical philosophy. It is associated with the Institute for Social Research founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. Formed during the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the first generation of the Frankfurt School was composed of intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the socio-economic systems of the 1930s: namely, capitalism, fascism, and communism. Significant figures associated with the school include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas.
Henri Lefebvre was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, best known for pioneering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social space, and for his work on dialectical materialism, alienation, and criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism. In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles. He founded or took part in the founding of several intellectual and academic journals such as Philosophies, La Revue Marxiste, Arguments, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and Espaces et Sociétés.
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, and social transformation. Marxism originates with the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive Marxist theory. Marxism has had a profound effect in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts.
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is a 1991 book by Fredric Jameson, in which the author offers a critique of modernism and postmodernism from a Marxist perspective. The book began as a 1984 article in the New Left Review. It has been presented as his "most wide-ranging and accessible book".
Marxist aesthetics is a theory of aesthetics based on, or derived from, the theories of Karl Marx. It involves a dialectical and materialist, or dialectical materialist, approach to the application of Marxism to the cultural sphere, specifically areas related to taste such as art, beauty, and so forth. Marxists believe that economic and social conditions, and especially the class relations that derive from them, affect every aspect of an individual's life, from religious beliefs to legal systems to cultural frameworks. From one classic Marxist point of view, the role of art is not only to represent such conditions truthfully, but also to seek to improve them ; however, this is a contentious interpretation of the limited but significant writing by Marx and Engels on art and especially on aesthetics. For instance, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who greatly influenced the art of the early Soviet Union, followed the secular humanism of Ludwig Feuerbach more than he followed Marx.
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Criticism of postmodernism is intellectually diverse, reflecting various critical attitudes toward postmodernity, postmodern philosophy, postmodern art, and postmodern architecture. Postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection towards what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism, especially those associated with Enlightenment rationality. Thus, while common targets of postmodern criticism include universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language, and social progress, critics of postmodernism often defend such concepts. It is frequently alleged that postmodern scholars promote obscurantism, are hostile to objective truth, and encourage relativism to an extent that is epistemically and ethically crippling. Criticism of more artistic postmodern movements such as postmodern art or literature may include objections to a departure from beauty, lack of coherence or comprehensibility, deviating from clear structure and the consistent use of dark and negative themes.
Subversive affirmation is an artistic performance that overemphasizes prevailing ideologies and thereby calls them into question. Simultaneously with affirmation, the affirmed concepts are revealed, and artists distance themselves from those concepts. Strategies of subversive affirmation include "over-identification", "over-affirmation" and "yes revolution".
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Robert T. Tally Jr. is a professor of English at Texas State University. His research and teaching focuses on the relations among space, narrative, and representation, particularly in U.S. and comparative literature, and he is active in the emerging scholarly fields of geocriticism, literary geography, and the spatial humanities. Tally is the editor of "Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies," a Palgrave Macmillan book series established in 2013. The translator of Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces and the editor of Geocritical Explorations, In addition to his numerous essays on literature, criticism, and theory, Tally has written books on Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt Vonnegut, and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, as well as a critical introduction to the work of literary critic and theorist Fredric Jameson.
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