Frederic Jameson: Beloved Authoritarian
The American academia from which I recently retired is not an overwhelmingly authoritarian institution. Sure, the administration may police speech here and there. And certainly the system sorts people very early by ideology; during my career, those who disliked the consensus political positions, or who couldn’t conceal their disagreement for years on end, didn’t tend to make it out of grad school. But the purges are relatively gentle, and the institutions do not, by and large, feature internment facilities or beatings or executions.
Nevertheless, many professors I worked with deeply admire authoritarianism. Nothing better illustrates this point than the reception of the late literary theorist Frederic Jameson, who Jacobin dubbed “the leading Marxist literary and cultural critic in the United States, if not the world,” and The Nation called “an intellectual titan and one of the torchbearers of Marxist thought through the tenebrous night of neoliberalism.” For the mighty critic Terry Eagleton, “Jameson was the finest theorist of all.”
Jameson was remarkably influential. He didn’t coin the terms “postmodernism” or “late capitalism,” but his big 1991 book Postmodernism: Or, the Logic of Late Capitalism seemed to inform everyone what they meant. The book wandered through visual arts, literature, architecture, politics, and media, trying to make sense of the 1980s. More to the point, it applied Marxist theory in a way that the emerging academic left turned out to be yearning for.
A pretty good emblem is that phrase, “late capitalism.” It appeared to be an attempt to give a historical account of the then-present, but it also has the quality of a wish. If it’s late, it’s almost over. Jameson, and seemingly everyone I knew, were expressing their desire every time they uttered their name for their time. A famous sentence is often attributed to Jameson, though he did not take credit for it: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Well, even just the incessant use of ‘late,’ along with the demonstration that Marxism could be still be mentioned in the English department in 1992, filled many professors with hope.
All the tributes listed above, and many more besides, express reservations about Jameson’s writing, with its swaggeringly didactic, voice-of-god tone, its quick tendentious takes on a dozen texts per page, and its ought-to-be infamous tics (such as randomly dropping the phrase “as such” every few sentences to lend weight to abstract concepts). But even as the obituaries admitted here and there that there were some drawbacks to Jameson’s work, none appeared to take issue with his dogmatic Marxism. And Jameson was definitely a dogmatist. In his 1981 book The Political Unconscious, he called Marxism the “untranscendable horizon” that “subsumes” other “apparently antagonistic or incommensurable” approaches to literary criticism, “thus at once canceling and preserving them.”
And the Marx at the center of Jameson’s writings is the worst possible version of the thinker. Jameson interprets Marx the same way Marx’s most vociferous enemie
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