Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature - Softcover

Jameson, Fredric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 069101311X ISBN 13: 9780691013114

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 1974

Inhaltsangabe

For more than thirty years, Fredric Jameson has been one of the most productive, wide-ranging, and distinctive literary theorists in the United States and the Anglophone world. Marxism and Form provided a pioneering account of the work of the major European Marxist theorists--T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Jean-Paul Sartre--work that was, at the time, largely neglected in the English-speaking world. Through penetrating readings of each theorist, Jameson developed a critical mode of engagement that has had tremendous in.uence. He provided a framework for analyzing the connection between art and the historical circumstances of its making--in particular, how cultural artifacts distort, repress, or transform their circumstances through the abstractions of aesthetic form. Jameson's presentation of the critical thought of this Hegelian Marxism provided a stark alternative to the Anglo-American tradition of empiricism and humanism. It would later provide a compelling alternative to poststructuralism and deconstruction as they became dominant methodologies in aesthetic criticism. One year after Marxism and Form, Princeton published Jameson's The Prison-House of Language (1972), which provided a thorough historical and philosophical description of formalism and structuralism. Both books remain central to Jameson's main intellectual legacy: describing and extending a tradition of Western Marxism in cultural theory and literary interpretation.

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Charlotte y Peter Fiell son dos autoridades en historia, teoría y crítica del diseño y han escrito más de sesenta libros sobre la materia, muchos de los cuales se han convertido en éxitos de ventas. También han impartido conferencias y cursos como profesores invitados, han comisariado exposiciones y asesorado a fabricantes, museos, salas de subastas y grandes coleccionistas privados de todo el mundo. Los Fiell han escrito numerosos libros para TASCHEN, entre los que se incluyen 1000 Chairs, Diseño del siglo XX, El diseño industrial de la A a la Z, Scandinavian Design y Diseño del siglo XXI.

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'Marxism and Form provides, for American readers, a long overdue introduction to the work of the most important of the Hegelian-Marxists concerned with the problems of culture and society.' The New Scholar

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Marxism and Form

Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature

By Fredric Jameson

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-01311-4

Contents

Preface, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xxi, 
Chapter One T. W. Adorno; or, Historical Tropes, 3, 
Chapter Two Versions of a Marxist Hermeneutic, 
I. WALTER BENJAMIN; OR, NOSTALGIA, 60, 
II. MARCUSE AND SCHILLER, 83, 
III. ERNST BLOCH AND THE FUTURE, 116, 
Chapter Three The Case for Georg Lukács, 160, 
Chapter Four Sartre and History, 206, 
Chapter Five Towards Dialectical Criticism, 306, 
Bibliography, 417, 
Index, 425, 

CHAPTER 1

T. W. ADORNO; OR, HISTORICAL TROPES

To whom can one present a writer whose principal subject is the disappearance of the public? What serious justification can be made for an attempt to summarize, simplify, make more widely accessible a work which insists relentlessly on the need for modern art and thought to be difficult, to guard their truth and freshness by the austere demands they make on the powers of concentration of their participants, by their refusal of all habitual response in their attempt to reawaken numb thinking and deadened perception to a raw, wholly unfamiliar real world?

It is as though everything in the life work of T. W. Adorno were designed to arouse and exacerbate the very socio-economic phenomenon that it denounces: the division of labor, the fragmentation of intellectual energies into a host of seemingly unrelated specialized disciplines. So it is that Adorno's critique of modern culture, one of the most thoroughgoing and pessimistic that we possess, cannot be conveniently scanned in a passing hour between appointments. Indeed, for reasons which we will fully appreciate only later on, it is unavailable as a separate thesis of a general nature, for it is at one with Adorno's detailed working through of the technical specifics of his various preoccupations: those of the professional philosopher, the Hegelian critic of phenomenology and existentialism; of the composer and theoretician of music, "musical adviser" to Thomas Mann during the writing of Doctor Faustus; of the occasional but lifelong literary critic; and finally, of the practicing sociologist, who ranged from a pioneering investigation of anti-Semitism in the monumental Authoritarian Personality to a dissection of the "culture industry" (the term is his) and of so-called popular music.

But although these various and distinct fields of study have their own structures and laws, their own independent traditions, their own precise technical terminology, although they are to be thought of as something more and other than the epiphenomena, the false consciousness, that we associate with the word ideology, they nonetheless share an uneasy existence, an uncertain status, as objects afloat in the realm of culture.

Adorno's treatment of these cultural phenomena — musical styles as well as philosophical systems, the hit parade along with the nineteenth-century novel — makes it clear that they are to be understood in the context of what Marxism calls the superstructure. Such thinking thus recognizes an obligation to transcend the limits of specialized analysis at the same time that it respects the object's integrity as an independent entity. It presupposes a movement from the intrinsic to the extrinsic in its very structure, from the individual fact or work toward some larger socio-economic reality behind it. To put it another way, the very term superstructure already carries its own opposite within itself as an implied comparison, and through its own construction sets the problem of the relationship to the socio-economic base or infrastructure as the precondition for its completeness as a thought.

The sociology of culture is therefore first and foremost, I would like to suggest, a form: no matter what the philosophical postulates called upon to justify it, as practice and as a conceptual operation it always involves the jumping of a spark between two poles, the coming into contact of two unequal terms, of two apparently unrelated modes of being. Thus in the realm of literary criticism the sociological approach necessarily juxtaposes the individual work of art with some vaster form of social reality which is seen in one way or another as its source or ontological ground, its Gestalt field, and of which the work itself comes to be thought of as a reflection or a symptom, a characteristic manifestation or a simple by-product, a coming to consciousness or an imaginary or symbolic resolution, to mention only a few of the ways in which this problematic central relationship has been conceived.

Clearly, then, a sociology of literature has its origins in the Romantic era along with the invention of history itself, for it depends on some prior theorization about the unity of the cultural field: whether the latter is thought of in terms of political regimes (the character of monarchic, as opposed to despotic or republican, society), historical periods (the classic, the medieval, the modern-romantic), the organic language of national character (the English, French, or German temperament), or in the more recent language of cultural personality or socio-economic situation (the postindustrial, the industrializing, the underdeveloped). At first, of course, this type of thinking about the arts, this dawning historicity in the realm of taste, was the property of Right and Left alike, for it has its existential origins in the very convulsions of the revolutionary period itself, and royalists like Chateaubriand were as profoundly aware of the relativity of cultures and the historicity of human experience as was Madame de Stael, whose Literature Considered in Its Relation to Social Institutions (1800) may stand, after Vico and Montesquieu, as the first fullblown treatise on the subject. Indeed, we shall have to concern ourselves later on in this book with the problem of distinguishing a sociological, "value-free" approach to literature, which counts the Romantics among its ancestors, from the specifically Marxist form of literary analysis to be presented here.

Once some such notion of cultural unity has been acquired, however, the two essential elements of the sociological operation — work and background — begin to interact in dialectical and indeed almost chemical fashion, and this fact of sheer interrelationship is prior to any of the conceptual categories, such as causality, reflection, or analogy, subsequently evolved to explain it. Such categories may therefore be seen as the various logical permutations or combinations of the initial model, or as the alternating visual possibilities of the Gestalt into which it is organized: the attempts of the mind, after the fact, to account for its ability to subsume two such disparate terms within the framework of a single thought.

In this context, it becomes possible to place the vexed question of determinism by social being, or by "race, moment, milieu," between parentheses, and such issues as those which seemed to oppose Marxism and the Weberians turn out to be optical illusions. For from this point of view, the Marxist analysis of a phenomenon such as Puritanism — that it is one of the ideologies of early capitalism, or in other words that it reflects and is determined by its social context — and that of Max Weber, for whom Puritanism is precisely one of the causes or contributing factors in the development of capitalism in the West, are essentially variations on the same model, and have far more in common with each other as ideograms — in which a form of consciousness is superposed against the pattern of a collective and institutional organization — than with what we may call the two-dimensional treatments of the separate elements involved, such as works on the theology of the reformers, or on changes in the structure of sixteenth-century commerce.

Such thinking is therefore marked by the will to link together in a single figure two incommensurable realities, two independent codes or systems of signs, two heterogeneous and asymmetrical terms: spirit and matter, the data of individual experience and the vaster forms of institutional society, the language of existence and that of history. Let the following passage from Adorno's Philosophy of the New Music stand, therefore, not so much as an implied philosophical proposition, or as a novel reinterpretation of the historical phenomena in question, but rather as a metaphorical composition, a kind of stylistic or rhetorical trope through which the new historical and dialectical consciousness, shattering the syntactic conventions of older analytical or static thought, comes to its truth in the language of events:

It is hardly an accident that mathematical techniques in music as well as logical positivism originated in Vienna. The fondness for number games is as peculiar to the Viennese mind as the game of chess in the coffee house. There are social reasons for it. All the while intellectually productive forces in Austria were rising to the technical level characteristic of high capitalism, material forces lagged behind. The resultant unused capacity for figures became the symbolic fulfillment of the Viennese intellectual. If he wanted to take part in the actual process of material production, he had to look for a position in Imperial Germany. If he stayed home, he became a doctor or a lawyer or clung to number games as a mirage of financial power. Such is the way the Viennese intellectual tries to prove something to himself, and — bitte schön! — to everyone else as well.

Psychoanalysis of the Austrian character? Object lesson in the way society resolves in the imaginary realm those contradictions which it cannot overcome in the real? Stylistic juxtaposition of music, symbolic logic, and financial sheets? The text under consideration is all of these things, but it is first and foremost a complete thing, I am tempted to say a poetic object. For its most characteristic connectives ("it is no accident that") are less signs of some syllogistic operation to perform than they are equivalents of the "just as ... so" of the heroic simile.

Nor does the sudden exchange of energy involved really tell us anything new about either of the elements juxtaposed: indeed, we must already know what each of them is, in its own specificity, to appreciate their unexpected connection with each other. What happens is rather that for a fleeting instant we catch a glimpse of a unified world, of a universe in which discontinuous realities are nonetheless somehow implicated with each other and intertwined, no matter how remote they may at first have seemed; in which the reign of chance briefly refocuses into a network of cross-relationships wherever the eye can reach, contingency temporarily transmuted into necessity.

It is not too much to say that through such a historical form there is momentarily effected a kind of reconciliation between the realm of matter and that of spirit. For in its framework the essentially abstract character of the ideological phenomenon suddenly touches earth, takes on something of the density and significance of an act in the real world of things and material production; while there flashes across the material dimension itself a kind of transfiguration, and what had only an instant before seemed inertia and the resistance of matter, the sheer meaninglessness of historical accident — in the determining factors in Austrian development, the chance agents of geography or foreign influence — now finds itself unexpectedly spiritualized by the ideality of the objects with which it has been associated, reorganizing itself, under the pull of those mathematical systems which are its end product, into a constellation of unforeseen uniformities, into a socioeconomic style which can be named. Thus the mind incarnates itself in order to know reality, and in return finds itself in a place of heightened intelligibility.

It is, however, one of the most basic lessons of dialectical method that the potentialities for development of a given mode of thought lie predetermined and, as it were, foreordained within the very structure of the initial terms themselves, and reflect the characteristics of its point of departure. The limits on any large-scale projection of the sociological figure here described are therefore implicit in the nature of the objects synthesized. Like wit, the Adorno trope drew its force from the instantaneity of the perception involved, and it is only too clear that to juxtapose against its historical background a cultural item understood in an isolated, atomistic way — whether it be an individual work, a new technique or theory, even something as vast as a new movement understood as a separate entity, or a period style detached from its historical continuum — is to ensure the construction of a model that cannot but be static.

Thus the full-scale study of superstructures, the construction of the historical trope, not to lyrical but rather to extended and epic proportions, presupposes a transcendence of the atomistic nature of the cultural term: it is essentially the difference between the juxtaposition of an individual novel against its socio-economic background, and the history of the novel seen against this same background. In effect, at this point a relationship which was that of form to background, of point to field, gives place to the superposition of two fields, two series, two continua; the language of causality gives way to that of analogy or homology, of parallelism. Now the construction of the microcosm, of the cultural continuum — whether it be the formal history of costume or of religious movements, the fate of stylistic conventions or the rise and fall of epistemology as a philosophical issue — will include the analogy with the socioeconomic macrocosm or infrastructure as an implied comparison in its very structure, permitting us to transfer the terminology of the latter to the former in ways that are often very revealing. Thus it turns out that as a marketable commodity on the spiritual level, the nineteenth-century novel may also be said to have known its version of a stage of "primitive accumulation of capital": the names of Scott and Balzac may be associated with this initial stockpiling of social and anecdotal raw material for processing and ultimate transformation into marketable, that is to say narratable, shapes and forms.

At the same time, inasmuch as the cultural is far less complex than the economic, it may serve as a useful introduction to the real on a reduced, simplified scale. Thus Engels spoke of Balzac's "complete history of French society from which, even in economic details (for instance, the rearrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period to gether." Traditionally, indeed, Marxist literary criticism has furnished a convenient introduction both to the subtleties of the dialectical method and to the complexities of Marxist social and economic doctrine. But what Engels learned from the content, a modern Marxist literary criticism ought to be able to demonstrate at work within the form itself: so it is the model that now helps us to read the bewildering and massive substance of the real of which it began by being the projection.

I

The ideal material for a full-scale demonstration of such historical models would no doubt be drawn from spheres as distant from everyday life as possible: non-Euclidean geometry, for example, or the various logical worlds of science fiction, in which our own universe is reduplicated at an experimental level. Illustrations derived from the history of the visual arts or from the development of mathematics are thus more useful for our purposes than the more representational modes of literature or philosophy. For in dialectical treatments of the latter, there tends to take place a kind of slippage from form into content which cannot but blur the methodological points to be made.

Thus our characterization of Balzac's primitive accumulation of raw material above was intended to function on a formal level, to underscore a parallel between two formal processes. Yet the analogy is complicated by the fact that Balzac's raw material, his content, happens to be precisely that primitive accumulation of capital with which we compared the form: for the origins of the first businesses and the first fortunes are among the archetypal stories he has to tell. As a model, therefore, literature is not so useful as the more abstract arts, and the parallels with developments in the novel will in what follows be underlined as analogies to the central model to be presented, rather than as historical projections in their own right.

Yet even the specialized is sometimes taken for granted, even highly sophisticated techniques can come to seem natural in the general indistinction of everyday life. So it turns out that to assess the full originality of Adorno's historical vision, we must try to bring a new unfamiliarity to some of the social phenomena we are accustomed to take for granted: to stare, for instance, with the eyes of a foreigner at the row upon row of people in formal clothing, seated without stirring within their armchairs, each seemingly without contact with his neighbors, yet at the same time strangely divorced from any immediate visual spectacle, the eyes occasionally closed as in powerful concentration, occasionally scanning with idle distraction the distant cornices of the hall itself. For such a spectator it is not at once clear that there is any meaningful relationship between this peculiar behavior and the bewildering tissue of instrumental noises that seems to provide a kind of background for it, like Arab musicians playing behind their curtain. What is taken for granted by us is not apparent to such an outsider, namely that the event around which the concert hall is itself established consists precisely of attention to that stream of sound patterns entering in at the ear, to the organized and meaningful succession of a nonverbal sign-system, as to a kind of purely instrumental speech.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Marxism and Form by Fredric Jameson. Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1974
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 069101311X
• ISBN 13: 9780691013114
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 456
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar