By THOMAS AMORIM*
As Walter Benjamin realized, the dead remain interested in building a better future and Fredric Jameson also remains and will continue to be with us.
“In future societies, people will still grow old and die, but the Pascalian questioning of Marxism is of another kind, namely, the idea that death in a fragmented and individualized society is much more frightening and anxiety-ridden than in a genuine community, in which dying is something that happens to the group more intensely than to the individual subject.”[I]
Fredric R. Jameson, who died on September 22, 2024, built an inescapable theoretical legacy for Marxist criticism in the 1934st century. Born in Cleveland in XNUMX, he lived through revolutionary decades, times of war, periods of social pacification, and eras of intense political polarization—times of bright promise and political creativity as well as times of obscurantism and harsh reaction.
Fredric Jameson made time the fundamental fabric of his social critique, but ironically, he consecrated himself in the pantheon of great intellectuals precisely with his explanation of the “end of history”, through the socioeconomic diagnosis that its foundation was globalized capitalism, a period that few understood as deeply as he did.
Just five months ago, Fredric Jameson was exuding energy in a virtual event celebrating his ninetieth birthday, while at the same time demonstrating his concern with contemporary issues such as the Palestinian genocide and reaffirming his theoretical and political commitment in times of social collapse, of evidence of the endless barbarities and catastrophes produced by capitalism. The rapid deterioration of his health and death surprised all those who had as a reference his lucidity, radicalism, originality and productivity, which remained enormous until the recent end of his life.
It is well known that it is not always possible to find a great individual behind a great author. Fredric Jameson seemed to me to bring together, in an exemplary way, the two forms of greatness. I met Fred, as he liked to be called, in 2019 and immediately realized that the mind that had fascinated me with the clarification of the political unconscious of the present, with the periodization of late capitalism and with the cognitive mapping of postmodernity was also the body of a gentleman who maintained the sparkle in his eyes, the gentle smile and all the joviality that one can have when debating theory or teaching a class.
Fred's generosity was also evident in the personal treatment he gave me, from the first email contacts, the Skype conversations, the welcome he gave me in Durham (along with his equally friendly secretary Wendy), the careful and diligent reading of my article in Portuguese, the offer of his books and the regret about one of his titles. In addition, his availability, his constant cordiality, the invitation to dinner and the conversations that I will never forget about literary theory, the gaps in science fiction and the politics of Brazil, the United States and China made it clear that I was not dealing with a closed-off thinker or a petty person.
Despite all Fred's patience with the stuttering moments of my English, I was unable to conclude my series of questions: how do the forms of postmodernity manifest themselves in this or that artistic, cultural or political object? What kind of relationship between utopia and ideology do we find in recent works of mass culture? What national modulations does the temporality of the “perpetual present”[ii] assumes in the global South? At the beginning of my doctorate, I had so many questions to ask that it is impossible not to regret the gaps in my elaboration that prevented me from delving deeper and taking advantage of those dialogues.
Fredric Jameson, the towering figure of cultural criticism, however, I had met while still an undergraduate, and I soon realized something tremendously original, that he was able to explain the “objective appearance” of the social system in a much more complete way than anything I had ever read. I discovered and was enchanted by the omnivorous character of the author who, since his doctoral thesis Sartre: the origins of a style, in 1961, passing through Marxism and form, from 1971 until Archeologies of the future, from 2005, continually developed a radical cultural critique capable of understanding the philosophies of Sartre, Lukács, Bloch, Adorno, Benjamin and Althusser, while at the same time incorporating the most diverse theoretical contributions of psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, etc.
Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,[iii]His most famous work, was for me not only impactful but also a watershed; that periodization suddenly made comprehensible a series of disconcerting phenomena of the contemporary world and made it impossible to observe the postmodern sociopolitical and cultural landscape in the same way. An unfolding of Marxist criticism and a return to Marx that is taken by someone of the stature of Perry Anderson as the culmination and overcoming of Western Marxism.[iv]
I could say that Fredric Jameson woke me from the dystopian slumber of the “end of history,” exposing how the disappearance of the future was not a philosophical fad, an aesthetic invention, or a bolt from the blue, but the end result of modernization itself, the suppression of the survivals of premodern universes. I soon realized that the critique of postmodernity was not made by any abstract denial of the social processes that engendered it, but rather by the historical elaboration of culture and by a genuinely dialectical interpretation of the metamorphoses that occurred at the end of the twentieth century and that became materially and symbolically visible in fields as diverse as literature, cinema, architecture, theory, ideology, utopia, and affections.
The next steps of my particular discovery of this great thinker were no less surprising and thought-provoking. The classic work the political unconscious provides the fundamental tools for the historical-cultural interpretation of the development of the capitalist mode of production and the objective aging of the social world and its narratives. The presentation of the symbolic act as a monument of a collectivity is one of Fredric Jameson's most impressive demonstrations and one of his most fruitful theoretical contributions, because it proposes a hermeneutics that connects forms and contents to the historical totality that constitutes them.
The chapter that presents us with the freshness of the bourgeois world in the period of Honoré Balzac (1799-1850), the freedom of desire in realism, is followed by an examination of the recrudescence of social raw materials and the construction of substitutive techniques in the naturalism of G. Gissing (1857-1903). The subsequent chapter shows us the dialectic that holds together in the narrative of J. Conrad (1857-1924) the forms of modernist sublimation and the resources of repression of the emerging mass culture.
The slogan “always historicize!” summarizes the radical nature of Fredric Jameson’s proposal, which is more than a reformulation of the aesthetic theories of György Lukács or Theodor Adorno, but a detailed exposition of forms understood rigorously as social forms, as active artifices, but entirely pertinent to the economic and ideological conditions of social formations in permanent mutation.
Immanent criticism and dialectical passion meant that Fredric Jameson’s criticism never abandoned any Manichean readings of the artistic, cultural or political objects he focused on. To the vulgarized versions of ideological criticism that reduce it to more or less intentional distortion, Jameson counterposed the perception of ideology as partiality, as structural limit and repression. In other words, the much more sophisticated reading that ideology presents itself as a deviation that inevitably carries within itself its negation, a utopian germ or a “genuine grain of content” as an offering in favor of the management of consciousness operated by mass culture.[v]
In this way, ideology is not just “false consciousness” or the absence of criticism, but a form of repression that is based on the transcoding of historical and collective experience into the gray and fragmentary language imposed by everyday life. It is imperative to understand how falsehood must bargain and even flirt with the truth that it omits.
For example, the symbolic raw materials used in the construction of best sellers, of commercial films and equally of the most falsifying political discourses cannot come from anywhere other than the real experience of individuals in society, which means that they carry a moment of truth of that reality. Desire itself can only be efficiently manipulated if it is first, at some point, recognized and evoked.
Similarly, ideological criticism is not limited to the denunciation of untruth and the “simple” presentation of scientific truth, but is the detailed demonstration of the ties that unite ideology and utopia within a given symbolic construction and the understanding of how such a configuration responds to its own historical context.
The seductive power of a containment strategy, the capacity of the partial to overshadow the totality, demands a symbolic configuration that favors the superposition of incomplete knowledge, without favoring that they present themselves as contradictions. In many cases, there is a clear element of self-deception, of mental sleight of hand, a bad faith that allows the individual to know and not know reality simultaneously.
I believe that the philosophical and sociological consequences of this hermeneutics proposed by Fredric Jameson are among the most important for intervening in the political and cultural debates of our time. And, for this reason, all the reflection developed in books such as those that make up his Poetics of social forms or in the grandiose Valences of dialectics It is far from being limited to a specialized reflection on literary theory, but rather the most consequential investigations into the social laws that order collective experience in the era of capital and the contradictions that unfold within it.[vi]
In a polemic with critics of the so-called “linear history,” Fredric Jameson quoted the famous American interviewer Larry King, who said that the worst thing about death is never finding out what comes next. It was precisely this eagerness for the next chapters of history that characterized Fredric Jameson’s research, but it is possible that the anguish of death was alleviated in him precisely by his utopian activity that glimpsed the possibility of historical reconciliation and saw in collective emancipation the antidote to the extreme fragmentation and privatization of our days.
It may be impossible to avoid the fact that Fredric Jameson's death appears to his friends, admirers and collaborators as an irremediable gap or, at least, as a painful absence of answers to questions such as those that remained pent up during my brief visit to Durham and that can never be answered by their recipient, but Fredric's avid interest in the collective destiny is a decisive part of his legacy for all who have been touched by the spirit of his work and by his existence.
The hope for a better world is the most reliable guide for future political interventions and praxis, but also for regulating our particular anxieties, distrusts and fears in the individualistic and degraded reality of the present. As Walter Benjamin realized, the dead remain interested in building a better future, and Fredric Jameson also remains and will continue to be with us.[vii]
*Thomas Amorim He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of São Paulo (USP). He is currently a professor of sociology at the University of Brasília (UnB).
Notes
[I] Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Routledge, 1992), 265.
[ii] Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2015).
[iii] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (São Paulo: Ática, 1997).
[iv] Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1998).
[v] Fredric Jameson, Marks of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 2007), 30.
[vi] Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso Books, 2009).
[vii] Walter Benjamin, Theses “On the Concept of History”, 2005.
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