Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature by Fredric Jameson

Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature Reviews

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  Eric

  “It is more honest and more dialectical to point out that the scope and relevance of criticism varies with the historical and ideological moment itself. Thus, it has been said that lit­ erary criticism was a privileged instrument in the struggle against nineteenth-century despotism (particularly in Czar­ist Russia) , because it was the only way one could smuggle ideas and covert political commentary past the censor. This is now to be understood, not in an external, but in an inner and allegorical sense. The works of culture come to us as signs in an all-but-forgotten code, as symptoms of diseases no longer even recognized as such, as fragments of a totality we have long since lost the organs to see. In the older cul­ture, the kinds of works which a Lukacs called realistic were essentially those which carried their own interpreta­tion built into them, which were at one and the same time fact and commentary on the fact. Now the two are once again sundered from each other, and the literary fact, like the other objects that make up our social reality, cries out for commentary, for interpretation, for decipherment, for diagnosis. It appeals to the other disciplines in vain: Anglo­ Amerioan philosophy has long since been shorn of its dan­gerous speculative capacities, and as for political science, it suffices only to think of its distance from the great political and Utopian theories of the past to realize to what degree thought asphyxiates in our culture, with its absolute inability to imagine anything other than what is. It there­fore falls to literary criticism to continue to compare the in­side and the outside, existence and history, to continue to pass judgment on the abstract quality of life in the present, and to keep alive the idea of a concrete future. May it prove equal to the task!”
• 
  Adam

  Spellbinding exegesis, a lodestar for (Western) Marxism. More than a mere recapitulation of the life and works of the thinkers, Jameson scrutinizes the subjects, extending their key concepts and applying them to contemporary tasks. Absolutely essential reading, not only for the choir of recalcitrant leftists learning Jamesonese, but artists, philosophers, and critics.
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  Katie

  Let's be honest: dialectics isn't the easiest thing in the world to understand, and Jameson isn't the simplest of writers. The complexity of his writing matches a clear complexity of thought, however - his intelligence, the depth of his cultural references, and dialectical skills are unparalleled by any other alive. A great thinker, a witty and intelligent theorist, and a brilliant critic. Marxism and Form is just enrapturing. The more one reads of Jameson, the more things begin to slot into place!
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  Maja Solar

  iako me ne zanima teorija književnosti (niti teorija umetnosti ), a također su mi bliže marksističke teorije koje udaljavaju Hegela od Marxa a ne ove koje ih približavaju, ipak mi se knjiga dosta svidela. Džejmsonova erudicija je opčinjavajuća. volim knjige za koje se moraš malo pomučiti u čitanju iako su dosta uzbudljive, iz kojih stvarno nešto možeš naučiti, čak i kada se ne slažeš sa koncepcijom. ovde se pored upoznavanja sa različitim dijalektičkim pristupima - Adorna, Benjamina, Markuzea, Šilera, Bloha, Lukača i Sartra - daju konture toga šta bi bila dijalektička književna kritika...
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  Solo Wrightson

  A phenomenal work which reviews the key thinkers who laid foundations for Western Marxism. The work's importance lies most in the fact that Jameson tried recklessly to import the continental tradition relatively alien, if not proactively suppressed and demonized by the ruling class ideology advocated by various sources of mass media and popular cultural productions, to American readers at the time when the norm of thinking was governed by the historical context of Cold War, Vietnam War, McCarthyism, "Loss of China", and so on.
  
  Jameson's thesis consists in his emphasis on the form, instead of content, of Marxian dialectics, no longer as an auxiliary function but the very essence of the works he cites throughout his book. This extends to his critique on the phenomenon of revolution as such; that the significance of revolutionary events as recorded in history, such as the Convention, the Terror, and the establishment of First Republic in France, the 1848 March in Prussia, Cultural Revolution in Mao's China, Cuban Revolution, and so on and so forth should be found in the "revolutionary moment", more than the outcomes, that they produced: "The protagonists of the French Revolution ... meant ... merely the definitive choice of a particular political form of government and the elaboration of a constitution. Whereas the continuation of the revolution in a socialist country had to do with a social and technological transformation which has no foreseeable end." (p. 267)
  
  For this clarification, Jameson dedicates 100 pages to Sartre, who is conventionally thought as an existentialist philosopher, dramatist, novelist rather than a Marxist dialectician. Whereas for the traditional or orthodox Marxist historians ideology-formation is determined by the mode of production of the specific time–that is to say, it consists of the manifestations of material conditions of reality–Sartrean historicism recognizes the negative relationship between the subject and the object in which human, whether the worker or the factory-owner, is compelled to react against the background of the machine, the factory, other workers, and so on, so that their consciousness and the ideologies which derive from it are determined to 'reflect' negatively the situation precipitated by the mode of production. Following this, the economic base is seen as the result of transformation of the predecessors of history which then provides the background against which the new generation endeavors to resist, or revolutionize the existing structure. Jameson comments that Sartre tried to do to economics what Marx did to philosophy by introducing historical materialism, perhaps in the fashion in which Hegel indoctrinated the end of history; when a discourse develops further and further away from the reality object of their studies into abstractions, someone needs to put the whole tradition into scrutiny, and demystify the field through the uses of a superior rhetoric. The merit of dialectics, Jameson argues, like revolution, is in the euphoric, or "apocalyptic" moment of recognition or the failure of recognition as in 'the shudder felt in a descending elevator or a falling airplane in turbulence'. Whereas that of Hegelianism is characterized by its "hair-splitting" rigor which demystifies the myth of simplicity, the Marxist method cuts the knots quilted by a hobbyist's play of abstraction of reality to bring him to the "grossest of the truths". (p.308-9)
  
  Couple of more points are in order in the concluding chapter about the key principles, history, and effects regarding the technique of dialectics and why it is relevant to the reality of the American society at the turn from the 60s often seen as the period when the cultural and political turmoil as the aftermaths of WWII made it ever more difficult and confusing for the ordinary public to understand the immediate occurring of their everyday life. Most important to be note are his remarks on how Marx's philosophy, as well as that of Hegel, should be read in context of the historical situations which gave the very space to their thoughts, and what they did in effect in regard to the situations in which the thinkers found themselves. Dialectics is, the author argues, a tool which "projects us out of our own concepts into genuine reality. [...] The task of genuine dialectical thinking is to spring us outside our own hardened ideas into a new and more vivid apprehension of reality." (p.372) 'Hermeneutically speaking, much of modern thought consists in an unconscious movement toward the ultimate dialecticism which works to dispense with the baggage of system or metaphysical content.' (p.373) Thus, regarding the shift that occurred in the modernist production of art from a spiteful, isolated middle-class writer's critique whose interpretation was inherent within it, toward fragmented pieces of popular entertainment which works to disguise the reality of work and production is worthy of remark for him: "The fact of work and production–a key to genuine historical thinking–is a secret carefully concealed as anything else in our culture. This indeed is the meaning of commodity as a form, to obliterate the signs of work on the product in order to make it easier for us to forget the class structure, which is its organizational framework." (p.407-8)
  
  The lengthy essay, often acclaimed as Jameson's first opus magnum, lays out some of the foundational theses which put in context, and each develops further in, his later important works such as Ideologies of Theory, the Political Unconscious, Post-Modernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and Allegory and Ideology (Those are the works I know of). The work is didactic to and a must-read for aspiring cultural critics and serious Marxist intellectuals who mean to read through their immediate experiences of contemporaneous cultural and political productions which otherwise could seem unrelatable to the deeper inner content of their own lives, their own histories conducted not independently from the geographical and technological particularities–according to Jameson.
• 
  Iñigo

  I don't care what anybody says about Jameson being a bad writer, at least from this book I can say for sure that you don't get such excellent and in-depth explanations of these kinds of dense topics by being a bad writer.
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  Michael

  Marxism and Form provides an excellent overview of western Marxist aesthetics in the first half of the twentieth century. Jameson provides a clear and accessible explication of the Hegelian Marxists: Lukacs, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse and Bloch; as well as an extended analysis of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. The chapters on Lukacs and the German critical theorists offer clear descriptions of each author's treatment of their respective aesthetic field as it pertains to Marxist dialectics, whether that is music, movies, theater or the novel. But it is in Jameson's extended treatment of Sartre where the book really shines. Jameson treats the Critique of Dialectical Reason within the context of Sartre's entire existentialist and literary project, showing the continuum of thought and the relevance of Sartre's vision for aesthetic and Marxist theory. His description of Sartre's philosophy provided me with a greater understanding, insight and appreciation of Sartre, a philosopher whom I have not seriously thought about for years. I enjoyed and appreciate this book immensely.
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  Andrew Noselli

  I found the final summation in the concluding chapter deeply disappointing; I felt that Jameson, in not drawing direct and clearly stated political conclusions, cheapens the thought of the Marxian dialectics he surveys so adroitly and goes so far as to limit the scope of literature's ability to produce knowledge-content, thereby reducing it to the status background noise in an already overloaded culture. Three stars.
• 
  Joyce

  the first few chapters are five star stuff but then it grinds to a halt in 100 pages about sartre
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  Alexis

  Difficult, worth it. I think?
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  David

  After postmodernism and political unconscious, his best work.
• 
  Ivan Labayne

  ang librong ayaw i-date ng Super Bowl at Kenshin
• 
  A L

  Beautifully written. The Lukacs chapter ended too soon.