Andrew's Wiki
Political Unconscious

Description

• Clearest examination of Jameson’s method: critique ideology while leaving room for utopia
• Marxism is best tool for hermeneutic investigation: comprehensive, nothing outside its grasp: it “subsumes all other interpretive modes or systems” b/c its limits “can always be overcome”
• Texts have a political unconscious: use literary analysis to unearth the hidden social networks
• “Distintegrating” bourgeois subjectivity

Notes

• Unconscious has political content
• Aimed against deconstruction or formalism that says you can understand texts apart from politics
• Shape: A Greimas “semiotic rectangle” that is the method and form of “ideological closure” by working out the various formations that come out of a binary opposition
  • “a binary opposition, which the political imagination seeks desperately to transcend, generating the contradictories of each of these terms, mechanically generating all the syntheses logically available to it, while remaining locked into the terms of the original double bind.” 48 thus you can explore the limits of a particular ideological formation
  • this map is the map of “a particular political fantasy” and “libidinal apparatus” where the author’s political thinking is “invested”
  • assumption: follows D and G and Lyotard in saying that our experience of the real is always through fantasy or protonarrative
  • the ideological system that the text represses can be revealed by looking at the points of the Greimas rectangle as nodes of the system
    • the literay structure is partially submerged, “tils powerfull into the underside or impense or non-dit, into the very political unconscious, of the text”
  • Thus there is a paradox: what looks undialectical, that is the ideological closure you see in the book, helps you reveal that ideology that the novel “fails to realize, or on the contrary seeks desperately to repress.” 49
• Ethics 60: “in our situation” take the form of psychology, psychologizing, the “notions of personal identity” so we need to decenter the subject, and dialectics does that
• Reification
  • Lukacs redefines Weber’s “rationalization” to come up with this
  • “the traditional or ‘natural’ unities, social forms, human relations, cultural events, even religious systems, are systematically broken up in order to be reconstructed more efficiently, in the form of new post-natural processes or mechanisms; but in which, at the same time, these now isolated broken bits and pieces of the older unities acquire a certain autonomy of their own, a semi-autonomous coherence which, not merely a reflex of capitalist reification and rationalization, also in some measure serves to compensate for the dehumanization of experience reification brings with it, and to rectify the otherwise intolerable effects of the new process.”
    • Waste Land, anyone?
    • ex: painting as a reification of visual sense: where ritual and religious function gives way to secularized form of sight that leads to painting genres. it’s compensatory b/c the abstraction that lets you now see color, depth, texture, etc now gives painting autonomy and ready for impressionism, expressionism, etc
  • Lukacs then (says Jameson) correctly identifies modernism and reification, but WRONG in that he “oversimplifies and deproblematizes a complicated and interesting situation by ignoring the Utopian vocation of the newly reified sense” 63
    • what does it give you? libidinal gratification, and the same thing happens with “the heightened experience of language in the modern world”
      • “the ‘discovery’ of Language is at one with its structural abstraction from concrete experience, with its hypostasization as an autonomous object, activity, or power” 63
• What about the fact that the unconscious is of one person and yet you care about collective?
  • desire unfortunately “remains locked in the category of the individual subject…since the need to transcend individualistic categories and modes of interpretation is in many ways the fundamental issue for any doctrine of the political unconscious of interpretation in terms of the collective or associative”
  • How will he do that? By referring to Northrup Frye’s archetypes instead of Freud.
    • Frye: “the religious figures then become the symbolic space in which the collectivity thinks itself and celebrates its own unity;” “distorted or symbolic coming to consciousness of itself, of the human community” ... but for Jameson, literature has replaced ritual so that “all literature must be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community.” 70
    • Frye: 71 desire: civilization has a desire, not just imitating nature: Desire “is the energy that leads human society to develop its own form. Desire in this sense is the social aspect of what we met on the literal level as emotion, an impulse towards expression”
    • literature part of Frye’s anagogic level of meaning when “nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained…the archetypal synbols…are themselves the forms of nature” so the person has the universe itside of him, has in Jameson’s words “collective and Utopian resonance” b/c this is where the society becomes a living whole organism: one person’s body
      • anagogic: the libidinal body, so that “political and collective imagery is transformed into a mere relay in some ultimately privatizing celebration of the category of individual experience” ... so whereas Frye accepts this happening, Jameson won’t, reclaiming the medieval sense of the anagogic (the human race not the individual), so here it is: “the imagery of libidinal revolution and of bodily transfiguration once again becomes a figure for the perfected community” “the unity of the body must once again prefigure the renewed organic identity of associative or collective life”
      • after all the individual organism “cannot…lay claim” to the “Self-sufficient intelligible unity” it may want, but only belongs to the community

Method

• Why? B/c “Marxist critical insights…ultimate semantic precondition for the intelligibility of literary and cultural texts”
• It’s a process of “semantic enrichment and enlargement” in “three concentric frameworks” which are “distinct moments in the process of interpretation”
• 1) “political history, in the narrow sense of punctual event and a chroniclelike sequence of happenings in time”
  • you truly are studying the text in front of you
  • it is more than exegesis b/c “here it individual work is grasped essentially as a symbolic act.” (narrative as socially symbolic act)
  • From Levi-Strauss (77), he takes the idea that “the individual narrative, or the individual formal structure, is to be grasped as the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction”
  • to relate form to politics, you’re not going outside of form b/c it’s already in form; formal patterns are “symbolic enactment of the social within the formal and the aesthetic”
    • to do so you need to find the formal contradictions (ie is the inequality of your political grouping obviously unfair? making people unhappy, confused? when you can’t solve the problem on the level of the political, you do so on the level of the imaginary. at least you can get a “formal resolution in the aesthetic realm” 79)
    • in this way, the aesthetic IS ITSELF ideological. ideology doesn’t go into the aesthetics: IT IS AESTHETICS. b/c art is reworking of conditions of life; it ideology b/c you’re creating an imaginary relash to society
    • this need to work out politics on the level of art is esp. important in a society that’s changing and complex
  • ex: political allegory, which is getting close to our next level of intepretation; “master fantasy about the interaction of collective subjects”
  • “resolution to determinate contradictions” (remember how signif contradictions are to Marxism)
  • the text is also “a rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext” which isn’t just inert reality b/c the text must “draw the Real into its own texture…whereby language manages to carry the Real within itself as its own intrinsic or immanent subtext” (that is the “symbolic text therefore begins by generating and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it, taking its measure with a view toward its own projects of transformation.” 81)
    • restating it in a new way 82: “the literary work or cultural object, as though for the first time, brings into being that very situation to which it is also, at one and the same time, a reaction” (which is why you want to think there is nothing but the text) (after all “history…is not a text” and “fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentative”)
    • so that the text, as symbolic action, “is a way of doing something to the world”
• 2) “society, in the now already less diachronic and time-bound sense of a constitutive tension and struggle between social classes”
  • once we start thinking about class, then your “object of analysis” is “transformed…no longer construed as an individual ‘text’...but has been reconstituted in the form of the great collective and class discourses of which a text is little more than an individual parole or utterance.”
  • what do you call the object of study? “ideologeme,” “the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonists collective discourses of social classes”
    • the ideologeme is the unit around which the class langue is created/manifested; they are where concepts of ideology (opinion, values) meet narrative (class fantasy): the ideologeme can manifest itself as either pseudoidea or protonarrative
    • your mission: find out the raw material on which these were based 87
    • ex: ressentiment
    • ex: Gissing, where his narrative paradigm has an ideological message; Balzac whose value system is “essentially” narrative
  • “individual phenomena are revealed as social facts and institutions” when you use class as your organizing axis for analysis 83
    • which he says is “always dichotomous” in that you have dominant v laboring (any other “Fraction” of a class, he says, is just positioned against that fundamental dichotomy; not that Fred says they don’t exist) b/c all class content is “relational” in the end (oppositional)
    • he adopts Bakhtin’s “Dialogic” structure but wants to say that the “normal form” of it is “antagonistic” reflects class struggle, a fight which occurs within “the general unity of a shared code” 84
  • dominant class wants to legitimate its control; oppositional culture wants to “contest and undermine” the ruling value system
    • so the contradiction a good Marxist will always look for…in this level of interp means “the irreconcilable demands and positions of antagonistic classes” 85
  • we must see the value of the text’s symbolic act within a language of class discourse; in this case the text is “polemic” and “confrontational”
    • text not isolated, and you must reconstruct its dialogic context which might have to be an artificial reconstruction of the opposing side b/c the oppositional discourse tends to get written out of history
      • so texts can help you DISCOVER a lost oppositional culture, but you have to keep in mind its oppositional character, ie that it was part of struggle
      • you might have to undo the process of “reappropriation and neutralization… coopatation… universalization” that the dominant ideology did to oppositional voices to contain them (notice he says how Christianity was originally oppositional but in medieval became part of hegemonic system; how folk forms will then be presented to aristocrats, like it’s theirs or something; and how “popular narrative from time immemorial-romance, adventure story, melodrama, and the like-is ceaselessly drawn on to restore vitality to an enfeebled…’high culture.’” 87
• 3) “history now conceived in its vastest sense of the sequence of modes of production and the succession and destiny of the various human social formations, from prehistoric life ot whatever far future history has in store for us.” 75-6
  • social passions are “placed” into new perspective, that of “the ultimate horizon of human history as a whole and by their respective positions in the whole complex sequence of the modes of production”
  • once you’ve done this, you read the work in terms of “ideology of form…the symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves the traces or anticipations of modes of production.”
  • where you get to the “larger unity of the social system” organized by mode of production
  • typical marx stuff looks like: tribal, hierarchical kinship, Asiatic mode (despotism), oligarchical slave-holding, feudalism, capitalism, communism.
    • Jameson: we need to keep in mind something other than the synchronic character of modes of production. don’t see em as static; then you empty out subversion. 91 So you see, 94 these stages are “unsatisfactory” mere “typologizing”
      • “Every social formation or historically existing society has in fact consisted in the overlay and structural coexistence of several modes of production all at once, including vestiges and survivals of older modes of productions, now relegated to structurally dependent positions within the new, as well as anticipatory tendencies which are potentially inconsistent with the existing system but have no yet generated an autonomous space of their own.” 95
      • what’s cool for me is that maybe you don’t know if it’s past or future….maybe if you’re trying to create new possibilities for politics or economics, you take from the past to suggest the future?