(I have hesitated to post this position paper here for several weeks, but at the end I decided I have a certain obligation to do it. It is, after all, my reading of Fredric Jameson’s last book, and I figure I owe it to him. Fred was a friend for many years, during a still formative period in my life, until our friendship vanished—painfully for me. But he was no shrinking violet and I think he would appreciate my speaking my mind, even if he would not much have liked what I have to say. Maybe nothing happens for no reason (not the same as saying that everything happens for a reason), so the disagreement here may explain more regarding certain inconsistencies in my life than it would be apparent to the casual reader.)
Fredric Jameson died last Fall, which was the time when we were trying to launch the Critical Theory Collective here at Texas A&M. Just a few days or weeks before his death, Verso sent out announcements that they were about to publish Jameson’s book on “the years of theory.” The book was going to be a transcription of a seminar Jameson taught through Zoom, from his country home in Connecticut, to Duke students at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. Jameson was already 90 years old at the time. It was a good idea for Verso to make that gesture, as an homage to Jameson, and it seemed a good idea for us, as we were trying to launch our own initiative, to ask people to read and think about what turned out to be Jameson’s posthumous work. Also as an homage to him. Jameson was, after all, one of the most distinguished figures in the humanities during the heyday of critical theory in the United States, a man of great intelligence and critical talent, and the author of important books and essays—let me just mention his book on postmodernism, extremely influential, very widely read. And so many influential articles, of which I will mention his 1986 essay “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” published in Social Text, which had a number of us busy for years trying to find counterexamples to his main thesis.
So here we are now, having read the book. I have to say, without pleasure, that reading it exhausted me, even though I am old enough that I can honestly say I have read most of the authors he mentions in his book, so I could contextualize his words. I can only imagine how exhausting the book may have been, or will be, for younger people who may not have had the time or the interest to read those authors in their past, and who are now confronted with this curious compendium of opinions based on the presentation of keywords. Jameson’s intelligence obviously shines through, in the choice of themes (keywords), as does his amazing command of the relevant literature. But, perhaps because of the choice of style for the seminar presentations, many times the text looks hurried, capricious, and ideologically overdetermined. Frankly, with all due respect, as I was laboriously reading the book the helicopter attack in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now kept coming to mind—you know, the scene that ends with the Coronel saying that he loves the smell of napalm in the morning. Because the apparent eclecticism in the presentation cannot hide, cannot dissemble, a critical strategy with which I have no alternative but to take issue.
Jameson gives us indeed a helicopter ride through or above French theory. Does he himself provide us with theory, with philosophy, with the sense of a future for rigorous thought in the humanities? (I don’t know why I say “rigorous thought in the humanities,” as I have rarely seen rigorous thought, the way I mean it, outside the humanities field). But—does he? Is there thought in that book? There is certainly learning—he has read and thought about the authors he discusses, which is something that takes a lifetime. But is what he tells us something that leads to thought, or does he lead us straight into a killing field, a sort of psychotic night of the world where thought should probably be renounced for the sake of survival in favor of some unspecified practice having to do with politics? Politics, or the claim of political praxis, becomes then Jameson’s ideological proposal, which is surprising for those of us who have heard him say many times that Marxism is not a politics.
Let me briefly go into the last lecture in the book. The “Envoi,” subtitled “Theory after De-Marxification,” gives us some clues about Jameson’s underlying purpose, which I think needs to be brought out and highlighted because we may want to disagree with it, in a context in which only that disagreement can be productive for the future, and the present, of thought. In the Envoi Jameson tells us that “we can at least see that these movements, these moments, whether in philosophical history or cultural history, don’t last” (436). They certainly don’t last if they are presented as opinions around keywords, which turns those movements, those moments, into the Hegelian night of black cows. I am not sure this was not done on purpose. Jameson contends that the movement he has been studying begins with the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1943 and ends in the 1980s or 1990s, with the death of some of the last major representative figures, say, Althusser, or Foucault, or Deleuze. There is a certain dismissal in place, perhaps nihilistic in nature: “you can see with somebody like Deleuze that it is an encyclopedic endeavor that swallows everything up, after which there is no more room. Are there Deleuzians? It would seem so—everybody is talking about Deleuze—but I don’t really think so, because there is not a single doctrine. There have been Derrideans. Are there any more? Maybe now in France, but not in those days” (436). The last phrase is certainly a non-sequitur, to the extent we are talking about whether Derrideanism is still producing thought after the “there is no room” thing. But Jameson’s answer is implied: no. Nothing will surface.
Never mind. Jameson goes back to his old Althusserian mantra: “class struggle in theory.” Thought is class struggle at a theoretical level. For Althusser class struggle in theory amounted to the dismantling of idealisms from the point of view of materialism. Jameson is generous enough to say that Derrida also engaged in class struggle in theory, in his case having to do with the undoing of metaphysics. Jameson talks about that as a “quasi-political aim” (437). But here is the punch line: “they all have as their end the search for the hidden god term which turns things into idealisms that have to be unmasked, even if they can’t be destroyed” (437). What is the point, then? There is no point. “Theory was a kind of ideologically powered search for these elements in a text which had attempted to do away with its own center” (437). But reification will come back and bite those searches in the ass. So, the conclusion: “Theory was supposed to destroy the disciplines, not only philosophy but also aesthetics as a discipline, history as a discipline, ethics, of course, and even political science as a discipline. And now all of those have come back in one way or another, in the revival of ethical philosophy, aesthetic philosophy, film theory, narratology; all these things mark the institutionalization of what used to be theory and thereby the return to some kind of establishment, which certainly allows the production of all kinds of rich stuff, but the one thing it can’t do is call for anything really new” (438-39). So, Jameson kills theory. Is that surprising? Theory is for the birds, a quaint and hopeless effort. Every time somebody comes up with something, reification sets in and petrifies it. It is not worth it. We have wasted our time.
It would be alright if Jameson’s conclusion were a mere matter of the pessimism of old age. Aristotle in his Rhetoric claims that old age has its own kind of passion, and in this case, in this particular book, we find a sad passion—sad for us, who see how an important theorist of past generations gives up on the very task of theory by relativizing its results to a nothingness, a mirage, a delusion. A few years ago I had the misfortune of having to engage in an unsought-for discussion with one of Jameson’s early students, John Beverley, now retired. It is interesting that Beverley, a self-declared Marxist, reaches a conclusion that is totally parallel to Jameson’s. Beverley said, talking about theory: “At best, it can only finally point to itself, with the self-satisfaction of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. The first time we see this leaves us astonished; the fourth or fifth time it has become familiarized” (Beverley 15).[i] Reification. But, as opposed to what? Can historical materialism, in a Gramscian sense, provide an alternative? That is certainly what both Jameson and Beverley think, and claim. Well, it is not the old kind of Stalinist dialectical materialism, they have made concessions, no doubt in the wake of theory itself. But they are concessions that unfortunately presuppose a core dogmatic belief system, without which, they themselves insist, nihilism ensues. And I, for one, do not believe that any kind of core dogma can keep nihilism at bay—I think it is already a monumental symptom of it. “The decision is always political,” Jameson says (139). Politics, even if politics is a rare thing, as Jameson will recognize when briefly discussing Badiou and Ranciére, is everywhere, and class struggle in theory is its true name for us, not a rare thing, but an absolute and overwhelming thing, insofar as it rules all our decisions. We are always ever doing class struggle in theory, even if we do not know it.
I am enough of a Marxian to accept that latter statement fully and without reservations. That is not the problem. The problem for me comes at the level of the presuppositions. Jameson says: “If it’s constructed, you are going to say it’s not natural, and so life is meaningless. And then there’s another step one can take, certainly another kind of existential step, through which you can simply confirm that the fact of construction itself is meaningful. That’s what we do. We construct and give ourselves a metaphysic. That’s no longer nihilistic. That’s giving ourselves a meaning, and, of course, Sartrean existentialism is founded on that process” (147). Well, the totality of Jameson’s book is certainly founded on that decision, he may call it political, but I am sure Nietzsche would be turning around in his grave on the assertion that giving ourselves a meaning springs us out of the field of nihilism. The book is premised on the arbitrary assumption that Sartre is ok, but Heidegger is not—although Jameson does not bother to examine the particulars of the Heidegger-Sartre polemics in the late 1940s, making his choice less than transparent. That has implications that lead Jameson not just to his kind of helicopter reading of what at some point he calls “the bourgeois philosophers” (331), all of them at the end unable to transcend theory into practice, and therefore limited to the production of a “quasi-politics” at best (“You can’t just have a Marxist idea. There has to be a practice attached to it. If there isn’t, then you’re already in revisionism and idealism” 194), but to assertions that I find ultimately not very useful. I will end this presentation referring to only two of them, as I am running out of time.
Jameson says: “The Left is materialist, or at least it wants to be. The Right thus must be, if not idealist, then spiritualist. Why not? But, in this kind of situation, there’s always the illusion of the third way” (268). It is no doubt the third way, which is the way of thought, that, while shared by most of the thinkers of the “years of theory,” leads them irrevocably to the final production of a meaningless, reified nominalism deprived of a praxis. But of course this argument eats itself. Why should we accept that, even within class struggle in theory, there are only two ways, and everything else is an illusion? What if we countered that the true illusion is the dogmatic positing of those two neat, opposed ways, Left and Right, materialism and idealism?
And Jameson says: “The philosopher must try to divest thought of idealism, to bring things back to materialism. So there you have a fairly clear notion of this constant process philosophy is engaged in, which is not so different from what Wittgenstein proposed: getting rid of all the false problems, all the verbiage, and going back to the things that matter, transparent or common language. It is at least analogous” (330). This return, in the name of the first way, to transparent or common language after the years of theory, to “the things that matter,” even though we are not told what they are—can it really become the figure in the carpet for future thought? Or is that pretension not the primary producer of an anxiety that could be disavowed, certainly, as it is by most of us in the age of the doldrums? I certainly hope our Critical Theory Collective focuses on every possible modulation of third-way anxiety instead of falling prey to the sad passion of common-sense transparency, with political pretensions, which has become the only name of university discourse in our present.
Wellborn, Texas, January 2025
[i] See John Beverley, “The Pittsburgh Model and Other Thoughts on the Field (Hispanism/Latinamericanism,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 74.1 (2021): 7-16. See also Alberto Moreiras, “On the Recommendation of Social Death,” https://infraphilosophy.com/2021/12/11/on-the-recommendation-of-social-death/
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