Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends. He described postmodernism as the influence of organized capitalism on culture and spatialization. Jameson shifted toward Marxism due to his involvement with leftist political movements and was influenced by thinkers of the Frankfurt School. He views cultural criticism as integral to Marxist theory and emphasizes historical materialism and history as the horizon of literary analysis. Jameson argues that postmodernity results from the colonization of culture by corporate capitalism and is characterized by pastiche and a crisis in historicity.
2. Jameson
• He is an American literary critic and Marxist
political theorist.
• Jameson is best known for his analysis of
contemporary cultural trends—he once
described postmodernism as
the spatialization of culture under the
pressure of organized capitalism.
3. Marxism
• 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.
• This position represented a break with more orthodox Marxism-Leninism,
which held a narrow view of historical materialism. In some ways Jameson
has been concerned, along with other Marxist cultural critics such as Terry
Eagleton, to articulate Marxism's relevance in respect to current
philosophical and literary trends.
• In 1969, Jameson co-founded the Marxist Literary Group with a number of
his graduate students at the University of California, San Diego.
4. Production & Consumption
• 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 they are now
constructed. It emerges as a manifesto for new activity concerning literary narrative.
• The book's argument emphasizes 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
metacommentary, he described the ideologeme, or "the smallest intelligible unit of the
essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes.
5. His Views
• In his 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.
• Two of Jameson's best-known claims from Postmodernism are that postmodernity
is characterized by pastiche and a crisis in historicity. Jameson argued that parody
(which requires a moral judgment or comparison with societal norms) was
replaced by pastiche (collage and other forms of juxtaposition without a normative
grounding).
• Relatedly, Jameson argued that the postmodern era suffers from a crisis in
historicity: "there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the
American 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"
