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Marxism And Form (changes)

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Goals/General

• 1971, meant to suggest a new type of lit crit
  • But it’s more a landmark in Marxism than anything else; if you want lit stuff, go to P Unc
• Introduced English speakers to tradition of Marxist thinkers: Lukacs, Benjamin, Bloch, Marcuse, Sartre
  • A “general introduction” to the German and French tradition that is apart from the Soviet tradition of Marxism that Anglophone community is already familiar with and has by now rejected
  • The 1930s were not only about practical Marxism, Popular Front, anti-Nazism, versus anarchism, etc
  • First work: Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, but also rediscovery of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts did much to set Western Marxism on its way
  • Key works: Lukacs’ Theory of the Novel, Bloch’s Hope the Principle, Benjamin’s Origins of German Tragedy, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Raeson, and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and work on music
• Designed to give alternative to New Criticism and to liberal tradition
  • “for the bankruptcy of the liberal tradition is as plain on the philosophical level as it is on the political” x
• Mission: Make Connections
  • Use the dialectic as political weapon
• An introduction to Hegelian Marxism: to the dialectic as method of literary criticism
• Influenced heavily by Lukacs, esp his discussion of historical realism
• Method: link together “two incommensurable realities,” not in the sense of typical causality
  • Genetic: understanding history helps us understand present: genetic accounts of literature and history by Marxist critics like Lukacs allow us “to reorder our perception of the historical present” so that “the notion of historical evolution is thus essentially a form or pretext for a new politicization of our thinking” (xvi)
    • Peaks in the 1930s, when “social conflict was sharpened and more clearly visible,” before the “increasing occultation of class structure” (xvii)
  • On the one hand, Jameson wants to do the same for contemporary world, but he realizes that the present isn’t amenable to it: that makes it even more important to try anyway. He thus follows Lukacs’ own advice to writers to look back at historical realists for a model.
    • For him, the way to make Marx relevant for present is Hegelian dialectics
• Position of Literature
  • “literature plays a central role in the dialectical process” by providing a “closed realm,” a “laboratory situation” b/c of its dialectics of form and content: we use this to learn more about the dialectical thinking at work
• German Marxist Tradish: Dialectical Form
  • dialectical thought is “nothing more or less than the elaboration of dialectical sentences,” so that dialectics is a rhetorical trope (a form)
  • Pay attention to sentence structure
• Yield: “unexpected contact between apparently unrelated and distant categories” (xiii), as seen in Adorno
• French: Applied Marxism
  • Sartre: Marxist Hermeneutics
  • Asks, “how can we move among levels of society (political, economic, cultural)?” to see “cultural objects as social acts, at once disguised and transparent” (xiv-xv)
  • Jameson uses this hermeneutics to create his method, elaborated in last chapter

Method

• Literary Criticism
  • Should Not Be Periodization
    • “if not the effort to locate real beginnings and endings in what can never be seized as anything but a continuity?” 323
    • Literary criticism has been people just wielding free control over helpless data
    • “construction of historical paradigms” has been its job 323
    • Instead, “The Hegelian theoretical model which we have proposed to substitute for them distinguishes itself by that structural transparency of its diachronic sequences, which are thus clearly identified not as empirical realities but as ideal constructs only.”
    • Theories of history pretend that their ideas actually exist and have histories of their own, but as we learn in German Ideology, ideas don’t actually have history. Men have history, and that changes ideas: their material relations change ideas. So, we don’t pretend our “ideas” are empirically true but recognize that they are constructs that are not as generative as the material conditions behind them.
    • That’s why it ends up in “structurally inherent movement towards its own dissolution, in which it projects the Marxist model out of itself as its own concrete realization and fulfillment.”
      • B/c the end is material relations.
  • Homologies
  • A kind of analogy between objects on different levels of reality (economic, political, cultural)
• Form
  • “influence of a given social raw material, not only on the content, but on the very form of the works themselves” (165)

Adorno Chapter

• Adorno: Tries to “Reawaken numb feeling” 3
  • Enemy of division of labor, fragmentation
  • Finds a place for the “objects afloat in the realm of culture” 4
  • Most “thoroughgoing” and “pessimistic” critique of modernism you can get
  • Lit crit shows dialectical relationship: juxtaposing work and social reality as its “source”
    • Beyond causality, reflection, or analogy: “sheer interrelationship” is what you see
  • art reflects social the best when it refuses the social (remember importance of the negative for Adorno), making it the “last refuge of individual subjectivity” 34: the promise of art
• Adorno’s Unification
  • Links two apparently unrelated phenomena: this method Jameson here calls “the sociology of culture’ (“a spark between two poles” 4) (6 “the will to link together in a single figure two incommensurable realities”)
  • Gives a “glimpse of a unified world,” “refocuses into a network” 8, a “reconciliation”
    • Where ideology becomes material, down to earth; while material is “unexpectedly spiritualized”
    • Examples: Viennese love of number games versus the inability of Austria to be industrial power; seeing history of capitalism in transition of music from Beethoven to Schoenburg (atonal music shows both the end of regular order and a hint of a new order)
  • But it’s not like you add to it something it didn’t already have: the grounds were already implied
  • “presupposes a transcendence of the atomistic nature of the cultural term”
• In this chapter, Jameson gives round account of modernity
  • Totalizing systems in politics (fascism) and art (twelve-tone system) really show the totality of capitalism itself
  • Capitalism’s totality: assimilation of formerly free-floating businesses and distribution
    • Total market “planification of the public,” which leads to “planification of the work itself” b/c authors want “absolute conscious control” of the work, reflecting “increasing autonomy” of institutions
      • Artists make up for contingency, but in doing so, they don’t actually do anything structurally different from capitalism itself, but instead mimic the increasing totalization of culture
      • Artists thus “not free not to reflect what it reacts against” (37), so art forms become “straitjacket” that is unavoidable, making you create works that look superficially different but really don’t offer anything new (ie, twelve-tone system? you’re still writing sonatas!)
      • The new forms they try to make are not natural but instead “lacking in any genuine internal logic”
      • Presumably, dialectical thinking about the object will save it b/c it will reflect upon its conditions of production, thus showing how capital works
  • Alienation: getting us to buy products not actually related to biological or social need: capitalism creates artificial needs, destroying the autonomous subject
  • Dead autonomous subject: “wholly delivered over to objective manipulation” for the easier creation of the single market
  • Lifestyle replaces individuality (think of Hemingway’s vacuous partiers who hardly even know why they make the rounds of alcohol and bars
• More on totalization
  • 48: the modern can’t understand Hegel because of Hegel’s unity of spirit with the world: “overall organization is no longer comprehensible to us” so his syntheses are “a dead letter” b/c would only work in society where an individual was already reconciled to organization of the world
    • Hegel shows us that individual subjectivity can have a connection to a “self-contained world” but we can’t possibly imagine that now
      • Noted that Hegel acted with “indifference to publication” which led to indeterminate texts, even down to sentence level: unrevised, leading Adorno so say that Hegel “renounced” attempt to create a definitive form: so Hegel’s texts are “antitexts” by refusing to be definitive: his large system is TOLD in fragments, and that’s what Jameson wants!
      • Jameson: while Hegel’s Absolute Spirit is illusory, a figment that was allowed him to do his living in a transitional moment in history, his system is actually rather “realistic” (49)
      • Hegel’s system is not yet realized b/c people aren’t reconciled to organization of the world, which Jameson says is necessary to be able to understand an intellectual reconciliation of self and world
    • Remember Jameson’s quotation of Plekhanov saying that art pour lart in Art and Society only happens when the individual is felt to be irremediably divorced from society
      • Another Plekhanov: his study of symbolism asserts that when authors resorts to symbolism when the object’s meaning can’t be grasp or you don’t want to b/c it would be difficult (ex: Ibsen’s wild duck)
  • 49: All “vast artistic syntheses” must fail, all “crack” under the pressure, but what’s good is that they took Hegel’s understanding as a goal, replaced with “elemental…perceptions”
    • Remember that earlier we learned that to believe you can have a bird’s-eye-view of the world is Kantian mysticism, a bourgeois refusal to understand the connections in the world and a way to evade responsibility for the way they have organized the world
  • 50: “All systems of reference have been assimilated into the dominant system,” so assimilation can’t be rebellion
  • Solution? Not being systematic, as far as content goes: no real thesis but only “series of references to a state of things” (53); to be “resolutely unsystematic;” focus on shape of sentences which determine the raw material (content), to be self-conscious (53)
    • As Lukacs says that the authors can achieve the harmony and unity their heroes can’t in the epic narrative, Jameson says that even though the “artistic syntheses” crak, “they already take place at a lower level of language,” making language the cradle of Jameson’s utopia, eh?
      • Level of language for James is associated with “elemental and immediate physical and emotional perceptions” even though it can’t on the level of “understanding (49)

Literature

• Reading
  • Overexposure of readers to text leads to need for novelty, which makes books more and more complex, merely to keep up 20
• Freud
  • 27: as an allegory for the disintegration of the autonomous subject”
  • Freud less about permanent mental states than about historical event, that is, the the “gradual alienation of social relations” which is allegorized in the id, ego, superego when your behavior is determined by the outside, not by yourself
  • Reason only makes you an automaton: just like the superego seems to come from the outside
  • It’s no coincidence that this happens at the time of separation of individual from social whole
• Modernism
  • Death of autonomous subject under late capitalism means that modernism is crying out for what’s lost
  • Modern art wants “abolition of chance,” that is, it wants “absolute overdetermination” 30 by having everything “painfully assimilated into the structure of the work itself”
    • Zola: His stuff revels in the contingent
    • Joyce: Can’t bear contingency, so chains it to myth that runs parallel to chance-ridden empirical daily life
      • Despite appearance of naturalism, the book is far from it: it is the best example of tendency in all modern novels to find some other dimension on which meaning can be found for the empirical contingency of daily life
      • Ulysses as post-individual because replaces Joyce’s earlier Paterian work with a pastiche that transcends pastiche b/c it suggests possible new linguistic pattern for the post-individual (34)
      • Joyce again: 42: labored, artificial connections between city and subjective shows that he tries to reconcile it, but “the seams show;” it is willful and arbitrary. Failure however is judgment on historical world, not on the artist.
      • Also connects this problem with James’ late style: “mannered,” pregnant half-sentences and close-ups on objective world also show the “seams” of his art, when he tries to infuse objective world with subjective meaning
• Preindustrial society: no mediation from raw material to work of art b/c the objects are still obviously human products, and the social institutions still feel organically theirs, not alien
• Industrial era: “the elements of the work begin to flee their human center” (166)
  • “paths lead out at every point into the contingent, into brute fact and matter, into the not-human” (166)
  • Characters: must be explained now, must have “personalities” that the author seems to choose “by fiat” which will “sink to the level of accident…a kind of case history” or will explain by causal circumstance (if you are shy, it’s because your dad was an alcoholic, etc)
  • All elements of writing become tainted with the problem of the contingent, ie “loss of immediate comprehensibility:” time setting, place setting, institutions, etc
    • Yet contingency is illusory, of course: they are human in origin: “never has so much of the individual’s environment been the result…of human history itself” 168. Theoretically, they should be able to find and represent this order.
    • But it’s on such a huge scale that won’t be expressed because “the framework of the work of art is individual lived experience” 169 so of course it will stay alienated
      • Art can’t reach the “collective dimension…in which human institutions become transparent for us once again” (169): that is too abstract for art. So, modern art reacts by becoming abstract.
  • Contingent seems to be related to the non-human: wherever institutions seem non-human, alien, imposed upon people, contingency will be a theme
  • You must justify these myriad details somehow, or make it “family accident” which puts problem back into the past (his example: The Ambassadors: the chamber pot that the family manufactures) 167
  • Separations now occur: “between public and private, between work and leisure, and the story must find its elbowroom” around rhythms of work (you must somehow MAKE TIME to give excuse for the plot, such as on weekend, vacation, or in leisure class)
  • The institutions around the character act as a given, something that happens to be a regular part of the time or place (an “accident” of time and place”) something that’s “unrealized, and ultimately unrealizable, foreign bodies within the work of art” (167) such as industrial city, modern university
  • Commodities in modern novel same way: accidents, insoluble, “no longer felt has the results of immediate human activity, which inhabit the work like so much dead furniture, tear through the human surface of the work like so much alien inorganic matter.” (168)
• As a result, modern lit must try some new techniques to give meaning to these foreign bodies
  • Symbolism: tries to make things meaningful, but “their presence in the work always stands as an indication that the immediate meaning of objects has disappeared” b/c you can’t assign a meaning to an object if it weren’t clear of meaning in the first place (168)
  • “The original meaningfulness of objects becomes visible only when their link with human labor and production is unconcealed.” (197)
    • but “in modern industrial civilization this link is hard to find: objects appear to lead an independent life of their own” (197)
    • Examples: Zola’s mine, Joyce’s newspaper office, furniture of Spils of Poynton, Dickens’ London, Lawrence’s landscapes: all in which author gets to import meaning into
    • Problems of symbolism are one reason why Lukacs find such solace in classic works of realism, before modernism came 337
• What Would Be Successful Art?
  • Would have concreteness
  • Would be presented “in purely human terms” (lived experience of one person)
  • Yet would also allow the work to be “felt as a totality” where the “partial facts are immediately grasped as a part of a total process” 169
  • That way, we perceive totality THROUGH the individual, not through abstraction
• This is where Lukacs comes in, Theory of the Novel, as he tries to show the novel as epic narration that reconciles these two poles: matter and spirit, concrete and abstract, individual and collective (even though you can’t have real epic now, epic narrative, novel, is replacement: “it is the epic of a world abandoned by God” qtd 172)

Last Chapter: Towards Dialectical Criticism

Random Quotes/Topics

• Napoleon as demonstration of flexibility of transitional moments
• Barthes 58, potential comps prompt
  • On Proust: “The writer thereby falls again into the power of time, for it is impossible to negate within the temporal continuum without at the same time elaborating a positive art which must be destroyed in its turn. Thus the greatest modern works linger as long as possible on the very threshold of Literature itself, in that waiting-room situation in which the density of life is given and protracted without yet being destroyed by the creation of an order of signs.” Writing Degree Zero
  • They can’t make a coherent system b/c that would fall into the trap that they have already rejected
• 10: on stockpiling
  • Balzac, Scott: 19th century novel has its moment of the “primitive accumulation of capital”
  • “initial stockpiling of social and anecdotal raw material for processing and ultimately transformation into marketable, that is to say narratable, shapes and forms”
• 54, 56: on failure of presentation of content
  • Content must always be transcended: Jameson’s stylistic analysis of Adorno shows that “outright statements, such as outright presentations of sheer content, are stylistically wrong, this stylistic failure being itself a reflection of some essential failure in the thought process itself.” (54)
    • Bald presentation is not enough: Jameson seems to imply that Lukacs is being a little too rough and unsubtle, but he doesn’t turn this idea onto Lukacs, keeping it confined to Adorno
    • Bald presentation is a failure of positivist, empirical thought, which trusts sheer content, which dialectical thinking can overcome.
      • “society is clearly not some empirical object which we can meet and study directly” (57) but instead because it’s an “impossible, suprapersonal abstraction” seen only as a “constraint” (57), absent yet concrete
    • Here we have the reason to say that NOT having something directly in the book is an excuse to look for it: showing it as an object of contemplation means you don’t GET IT within the social totality (see 56: “the world taken as directly accessible content results in the illusions of simple empirical positivism”)
  • How should we have content? In a “canceled and transcended fashion” (Hegel does tell us that we shouldn’t be happy with direct apprehension of the thing, which is only the starting point in the devt of consciousness)
  • Society not to be an “object” simply 57, but as a constraint
    • Just like thought, society also not just a given or simply to be seen as an object
• Benjamin
  • 61: “painful straining toward a psychic wholeness or unity of experience which the historical situation threatens to shatter at every turn,” ruins, fragments, chaos
    • Not like other commentators who say this b/c he wants unity not for the future, but for himself right now
    • “Obsession with the past and with memory” 62 is one of his strategies for wholeness: memory determines “whether the individual can have a picture of himself, whether he can master his own experience” (qtd in 62)
  • 76-7
    • Aura: sacred, mystery, charisma
    • Aura, in Benj’s own words: “the single, unrepeatable experience of distance, no matter how close it may be” (77)
  • 80: Storytelling mode of production
    • Storytelling for Benj is “mode of contact with a vanished form of social and historical existence,”
    • This connex between storytelling and a mode of production means “a certain historically determinate mode of production that Benjamin can serve as a model of Marxist literary criticism”
    • Two types of storytelling: the “settled cultivator” and the “seafaring merchant”
      • Must have “fusion” of the two types: happened during Middle Ages in artisans’ guilds, where traveling apprentices shared space with sedentary masters
      • Jameson: “the tale is thus the product of an artisanal culture, a handmade product like a cobbler’s shoe or a pot”
  • 81: Baudelaire’s ambiguous attitude towards modern industrial civilization, “fascined” and “depressed” him
  • 81: Art as progressive rather than propagandist when artist “lives his activity as a technician, and through this technical work finds a unity of purpose with teh industrial worker” even though it’s still mediated
• “No reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other,” Jameson contends, using Benjamin as his proof, noting his twin love of Brech and children’s books
• Breton
  • Surrealism
    • Against logic: philosophic rationality, reality principle, all of it
    • Its images “effort to split open the commodity forms of the objective universe by striking them against each other with immense force” (96)
      • They do the connection of the two distant objects like we’ve talked about before by their “bizarre juxtapositions” to “release otherwise bound psychic energy” (97)
    • Almost “refusal of narration altogether,” even objecting to say, description of setting
      • Against description: “circumstantial and uselessly detailed character” in Breton’s words, noting that they’re determined by “chance”
      • Instead, characters should unfold, change, move from an internal logic of their own: they should be “figural,” making appearances in our fantasies, always changing, a “continuous temptation” (100) transforming by themselves
  • Care about desire because “desire is the form taken by freedom in the new commercial environment” because commodity culture has taken away our desire (101) and replaced them with “pseudosatisfactions,” Jameson explains
    • Explains why “idea of Surrealism is a more liberating experience than the actual texts” b/c you have your own desire, and if you like the works, it’s b/c they happen to coincide w/your own desire
• Freud
  • 98: “manifest content….not merely the disguise of a repressed, unconscious desire, it is the disguise of a repressed, unconscious fantasy-satisfaction of that desire”
  • 99: all drives “mediated through images or fantasies,” a kind of language
  • 99: “the objects around use lead lives of their own in our unconscious fantasies, where…they stand as the words or hieroglyphs of the immense rebus of desire”
• T S Eliot on William Blake 321
  • Homemade system: compares Blake’s philosophy to “an ingenious piece of homemade furniture…put together out of the odds and ends about the house.” Yet he thinks Blake’s effort was wasted b/c England did have a cultural tradition to draw from.
  • Jameson brings it up as an example of one of the “theories of history” that he contrasts w/Marxism (even pointing out that Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility was one such silly theory of history)
  • Why does it matter? Artist as the artisan: a producer in a homework economy
• Stuff
  • Commodities have been made intellectual: divorced from natural (ie material or physical) desires but instead appeal to artificial ones
  • 166f: Talks about Hegel’s Aesthetik, which shows among other things that the epic is impossible in modern world, where his characteristic of the role of tools in preindustrial epics can be compared to the commodity in the modern world
    • Preindustrial: tools are inseparable from his life, so they seem living: “nothing of this must have become dead means to an end for him: he must still feel alive in all these.” The object becomes living due to its connection with the living person who uses it.
    • Jameson notes that Lukacs in The Historical Novel is really just continuing Hegel’s dialectical logic here in its negative sense: ie the ** 168opposite of what Hegel shows, now goes on in modern industrial society (impossibility of the classic epic)
• Vico
  • 181: “it is history rather than nature which constitutes the privileged object of human knowledge”
• Time
  • 176: Lukacs’ analysis of Flaubert’s Education sentimentale shows that time is involved in creating unity: memory and hope (past and future) are what can stitch a bunch of chaos together (remember, the modern world seen as too big, too abstract to put together)

Random Notes About Marxism

• “Marxism as a mental operation is to be characterized as a kind of inner ‘permanent revolution’” (362)
  • Thus you can’t really call it a system: it actually is “a form moving in time” (362)
  • Some people do think hist mat is a method, but Jameson reminds you that you don’t have to end history to think about history itself
• Marxism is not technological determinism
  • 74: “nothing is further from Marxism than the stress on invention and technique as the primary cause of historical change”
  • those techniques merely provide illusion of concreteness while still ignoring “human factors” (classes, mode of production)
• Realism, Idealism, Hegel
  • Marx rejects Hegel’s idealism
    • It is inclined to egocentrism
    • The permanent reconciliation of self and world makes you forget that you are positioned within society
      • Maybe that’s why modernism can’t show that reconciliation? B/c it would be false?
    • Marx’s “hygienic downgrading of the pretensions of spirit” (369) for you are an historical and social being after all
      • Taking out the Spirit stuff: “It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell” (Capital 25)
    • Absolute Spirit is where Hegel damages the dialectic, abandons it
  • Marx adopts Hegel’s rejection of realism
    • It is analytical, undialectical
    • It is positivism
    • Breton notes that is is “antagonistic to any kind of upward intellectual or moral impulse” (367)
    • Rejects enthusiasm
    • Encourages compartmentalization, discourages finding connections
    • Essentially for Marx a class philosophy
• Materialism = anti-religion
• Marxism not just one system among others
  • 161: not a philosophical commodity that can be classed next to others, though that’s how our academic atmosphere works (allowing different systems of thought to be next to one another, like some party where everyone’s invited)
    • After all “pure thought” really just disguised social behavior
    • “as a cultural object, Marxism returns against cultural activity in general to devalue it…ruins itself as a spiritual commodity and short-circuits the process of culture consumption” (161)
    • It is not just contemplation because it explains that action and thought are inseparable
  • 320-2: “marxism is not just one more theory of history, but on the contrary the ‘end’ of abolition of theories of history as such” (321)
    • List of various systems given, various theories of history: Toynbee, Spengler, Mumford, Malraux (artistic synthesis), Mac Luhan?, Foucault, Weber (bureaucratization of society), Wyndham Lewis (apocalypse), Eliot
      • They’re all created and marketed in order to “outsmart the present” so that it seems like “a completed historical instant” (320)
      • Comes from “a profound horror of time and fear of change” (320)
      • All they do is “offer alternate ways to ‘punctuate’ the rise of the middle-class world” (321), picking one small factor as the cause of it all, thus “fetishize a single moment in a total process” (322)
    • They’re all about bourgeois life, so why don’t we focus on ideology?
  • Marxism isn’t just the “economic” filter set on some generic bunch of historical facts, not just “a privileged code” (322): economics IS the concrete itself, not a way to interpret it
• Alienation is not just alienation, but also abstraction
  • 164: “the abstract and the alienated, no doubt, name the same object”
    • Always remember “abstract” so you don’t forget to “complete our thought” and get to concrete
  • You have to be concrete, think through “idea of concreteness”
• 183: What Marx really disagreed with in P E
  • Classical political economy had find accounts of, say, ground rent, but they don’t have an overall theory, a model: “unable to evolve a unified field theory” and couldn’t integrate their empirical data
  • If they ever tried to put it all together, their conclusions would scare them, so they instinctually stay away, only empiricism, fragments: the contemplative view that Lukacs damns Kant for (the “motionless gaze” that is separated from the thing: an excuse not to make connections)
• 184: Class consciousness: “the overall form or Gestalt according to which those details are organized and interpreted”
• 191-193: 1st literary conversation of Marxists
  • Marx, Engels, Lassalle, about Lassalle’s play
  • His play isn’t significant historically b/c it’s about morals, not about social realities. L says that the hero (member of 1848 Rev) fails b/c of personal weakness, but M and E say he fails b/c doesn’t share view of the peasants supporting the Rev.
  • His play should have enacted “the real historical development” (193)
  • Doesn’t mean that you should have characters as “mere allegories of social forces” with typical characters; typicality means they show social conflict, not that they represent Joe Bourgeois or Jane Peasant.
  • Real good Art: with Lukacs, Jameson says “antisymbolic,” more about motion, movement, conflict: action and drama
• 205: Heidegger: “saw Marxism not merely a political or economic theory but above all an ontology and an original mode of recovering our relationship to being itself” (205) (see “Letter on Humanism”)
• Lukacs: Don’t see him as having stages: all his life, he contemplated narrative