By SLAVEJ ŽIŽEK*
Jameson was the ultimate Western Marxist, who fearlessly traversed the defining opposites of our ideological space.
Fredric Jameson was not just an intellectual giant, the last true genius of contemporary thought. He was the ultimate Western Marxist, who fearlessly traversed the defining opposites of our ideological space—a “Eurocentrist” whose work found great resonance in Japan and China, a communist who loved Hollywood, especially Alfred Hitchcock, and detective novels, especially Raymond Chandler, a music lover immersed in Wagner, Bruckner, and pop music… There is absolutely no trace of cancel culture, with its rigid false moralism, in his work and life—one could argue that he was the last Renaissance figure.
What Fredric Jameson struggled with throughout his long life was the lack of what he called “cognitive mapping,” the inability to locate our experience in a meaningful whole. The instincts that guided him in this struggle were always right. — for example, in a fine attack on the rejection of “binary logic” by fashionable cultural studies, Fredric Jameson calls for “a widespread celebration of binary opposition”—for him, the rejection of the sexual binary goes hand in hand with the rejection of the class binary… Still in deep shock, I can only offer here a few passing observations that give a clear idea of his orientation.
Today, Marxists generally reject any form of immediacy as a fetish that obscures their social mediation. However, in his masterpiece on Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson shows how a dialectical analysis includes its own suspension point: in the middle of a complex analysis of mediations, Adorno suddenly makes a vulgar gesture of “reductionism,” interrupting a flow of dialectical subtlety with a simple observation, thus: “In the final analysis, it is about class struggle.”
In this way the class struggle functions within a social totality: it is not its “deepest ground,” its profound structuring principle that mediates all its moments, but something much more superficial, the point of failure of the endless complex analysis, a gesture of jumping to a conclusion when, in an act of desperation, we throw up our hands and say: “But after all, all this has to do with the class struggle!”
What must be kept in mind here is that this failure of analysis is immanent to reality itself: it is how society itself totalizes itself through its constitutive antagonism. In other words, class struggle is a quick pseudo-totalization when totalization proper fails, it is a desperate attempt to use antagonism itself as the principle of totalization.
It is also fashionable for today’s leftists to dismiss conspiracy theories as false, simplified solutions. Yet years ago, Fredric Jameson perceptively observed that in today’s global capitalism, things happen that cannot be explained by reference to some anonymous “logic of capital.” — For example, we now know that the 2008 financial collapse was the result of a well-planned “conspiracy” by some financial circles. The real task of social analysis is to explain how contemporary capitalism has created the space for such “conspiratorial” interventions.
Another insight of Jameson’s that goes against today’s prevailing postcolonial trend concerns his rejection of the notion of “alternative modernities,” that is, the claim that our Western liberal-capitalist modernity is only one path to modernization and that other paths are possible to avoid the impasses and antagonisms of our modernity: when we realize that “modernity” is ultimately a code name for capitalism, it is easy to see that this historicist relativization of our modernity is sustained by the ideological dream of a capitalism that would avoid its constitutive antagonisms:
“How then do the ideologists of “modernity” (in its current sense) manage to distinguish their product—the information revolution and the globalized free-market modernity—from the detestable older type, without getting involved in the answers to serious political and economic questions, systematic questions, which the concept of postmodernity makes unavoidable? The answer is simple: we speak of “alternative” or “alternative” modernities.
Now everyone knows the formula: this means that there can be a modernity for everyone, different from the standard Anglo-Saxon, hegemonic model. Whatever we dislike about the latter, including the subordinate position to which it condemns us, can be erased by the reassuring and “cultural” idea that we can create our own modernity in a different way, thus allowing for the existence of the Latin American type, the Indian type, the African type, and so on. “[…] But that would be to ignore another fundamental meaning of modernity, which is that of a global capitalism.”1
The importance of this critique goes far beyond the case of modernity—it concerns the fundamental limitation of nominalist historicization. The appeal to multiplicity (“there is no modernity with a fixed essence, there are multiple modernities, each of which is irreducible to the others”) is false not because it fails to recognize a single fixed “essence” of modernity, but because multiplication functions as the negation of the antagonism inherent in the notion of modernity as such: the falseness of multiplication lies in the fact that it frees the universal notion of modernity from its antagonism, as it is embedded in the capitalist system, relegating this aspect to just one of its historical subspecies.
It should not be forgotten that the first half of the 1920th century was already marked by two major projects that fit perfectly into this notion of “alternative modernity”: fascism and communism. Wasn’t the basic idea of fascism that of a modernity that offered an alternative to the Anglo-Saxon liberal-capitalist pattern, of saving the core of capitalist modernity by discarding its “contingent” Jewish-individualist-professional distortion? And wasn’t the rapid industrialization of the USSR in the late 1930s and XNUMXs also an attempt at modernization different from the Western-capitalist one?
What Jameson avoided like a vampire avoids garlic was any notion of a deeper forced unity of different forms of protest. In the early 1980s, he provided a subtle description of the impasse in the dialogue between the Western New Left and Eastern European dissidents, of the absence of any common language between them: “In short, the East wants to talk in terms of power and oppression; the West, in terms of culture and commodification. In fact, there are no common denominators in this initial struggle for discursive rules, and what we end up with is the inevitable comedy of each side mumbling irrelevant responses in its own favorite idiom.”2
Similarly, the Swedish detective storyteller Henning Mankell is a unique artist of parallax vision. That is, the two perspectives—that of the affluent Ystad in Sweden and that of Maputo in Mozambique—are hopelessly “out of sync,” so that there is no neutral language that allows us to translate one into the other, much less to affirm one as the “truth” of the other. All that can be done under current conditions is to remain faithful to this division as such, to record it.
Any exclusive focus on the First World themes of late capitalist alienation and commodification, ecological crisis, new racisms and intolerances, etc., cannot help but appear cynical in the face of the raw poverty, hunger and violence of the Third World; on the other hand, attempts to dismiss the problems of the First World as trivial in comparison with the “real” ongoing catastrophes of the Third World are no less false—the focus on the “real problems” of the Third World is the ultimate form of escapism, of avoiding confronting the antagonisms of one’s own society. The gap separating the two perspectives IS the truth of the situation.
Like all good Marxists, Fredric Jameson was, in his analysis of art, a rigorous formalist—he once wrote of Hemingway that his concise style (short sentences, almost no adverbs, etc.) is not here to represent a certain kind of (narrative) subjectivity (the lonely, hard-bitten cynical individual); on the contrary, Hemingway's narrative content (stories about hard, bitter individuals) was invented so that Hemingway could write a certain kind of sentences (which was his main goal).
Along the same lines, in his seminal essay “On Raymond Chandler”, Fredric Jameson describes a typical Chandler procedure: the writer uses the formula of the detective story (the detective’s investigation that brings him into contact with all the strata of life) as a frame that allows him to fill the concrete texture with social and psychological insights, plastic portraits of characters, and insights into life’s tragedies. The properly dialectical paradox that cannot be missed here is that it would be wrong to say: “Then why didn’t the writer abandon this same form and give us pure art?” This complaint falls victim to a kind of illusion of perspective: it ignores the fact that if we abandoned the stereotypical frame, we would lose the very “artistic” content that this frame apparently distorts.
Another unique achievement of Fredric Jameson is his reading of Marx through Lacan: social antagonisms appear to him as the Real of a society. I still remember the shock when, at a conference on Vladimir Lenin that I organized in Essen in 2001, Fredric Jameson surprised us all by bringing Lacan as a reader of Trotsky’s dream.
On the evening of June 25, 1935, Trotsky, in exile, dreamed of the late Lenin, who anxiously questioned him about his illness: “I replied that I had already made many consultations, and began to tell him about my trip to Berlin; but, looking at Lenin, I remembered that he was dead. I immediately tried to dismiss this thought, so as to end the conversation. When I had finished telling him about my therapeutic trip to Berlin in 1926, I wanted to add: ‘That was after your death’; but I controlled myself and said: ‘After you fell ill…’.”3
In his interpretation of this dream, Lacan focuses on the obvious connection with Freud’s dream in which his father appears to him, a father who does not know that he is dead. So what does it mean that Lenin does not know that he is dead? According to Jameson, there are two radically opposed ways of reading Trotsky’s dream. According to the first reading, the frighteningly ridiculous figure of the undead Lenin “does not know that the immense social experiment that he alone created (and that we call Soviet communism) has come to an end. He remains full of energy, although dead, and the vituperation heaped upon him by the living—that he was the creator of Stalinist terror, that he was an aggressive personality full of hatred, an authoritarian in love with power and totalitarianism, even (worst of all) the rediscoverer of the market in his NEP—none of these insults succeed in conferring on him a death, or even a second death.
How is it possible that he still thinks he is alive? And what is our own position here — which would be Trotsky's in the dream, no doubt — what is our own unknowing, what is the death from which Lenin protects us?”4 But there is another sense in which Lenin is still alive: he is alive insofar as he embodies what Alain Badiou calls the “eternal Idea” of universal emancipation, the immortal struggle for justice that no insult or catastrophe can kill.
Like me, Fredric Jameson was a resolute communist—yet he simultaneously agreed with Lacan, who argued that justice and equality are based on envy: envy of the other who has what we do not have and who enjoys it. Following Lacan, Fredric Jameson completely rejected the prevailing optimistic view that under communism envy will be left behind as a residue of capitalist competition, to be replaced by solidarity-based collaboration and pleasure in the pleasures of others; dismissing this myth, he emphasizes that under communism, precisely to the extent that it will be a more just society, envy and resentment will explode.
Fredric Jameson's solution is radical to the point of madness: the only way for communism to survive would be some form of universalized psychoanalytic social services that would allow individuals to avoid the self-destructive trap of envy.
Another indication of how Fredric Jameson understood communism was that he read Kafka’s story of Josephine the Singer as a sociopolitical utopia, as Kafka’s vision of a radically egalitarian communist society—with the singular exception that Kafka, for whom human beings are eternally marked by the guilt of the superego, was able to imagine a utopian society only among animals. One should resist the temptation to project any kind of tragedy onto Josephine’s eventual disappearance and death: the text makes it clear that after her death, Josephine “will happily disappear into the countless multitude of our people’s heroes.”
In his long and late essay “American utopia”, Fredric Jameson shocked even most of his followers by proposing as a model for a future post-capitalist society the army—not a revolutionary army, but an army in its inert bureaucratic functioning in peacetime. Fredric Jameson takes as his starting point a joke from the time of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency, according to which any American citizen who wanted socialized medicine had only to enlist in the army to get it. Jameson’s argument is that the army could fulfill this role precisely because it is organized in an undemocratic and non-transparent way (high-ranking generals are not elected, etc.). As with theology, so with communism.
Although Jameson was a staunch materialist, he often used theological notions to shed new light on certain Marxist notions—for example, he proclaimed that predestination was the most interesting theological concept for Marxism: predestination indicates the retroactive causality that characterizes a properly dialectical historical process. Another unexpected connection with theology provides Fredric Jameson’s observation that, in a revolutionary process, violence plays a homologous role to that of wealth in the Protestant legitimization of capitalism: although it has no intrinsic value (and consequently should not be fetishized and celebrated for its own sake, as in the fascist fascination with it), it serves as a sign of the authenticity of our revolutionary effort. When the enemy resists and engages us in violent conflict, it means that we have effectively touched his most sensitive nerve…
Fredric Jameson’s most insightful theological interpretation perhaps occurs in his little-known text “St. Augustine as Social Democrat,” in which he argues that St. Augustine’s most celebrated achievement, his invention of the psychological depth of the believer’s personality, with all the complexity of its inner doubts and despairs, is strictly correlated with (or the other side of) his legitimization of Christianity as the state religion, as fully compatible with the obliteration of the last vestiges of radical politics from the Christian edifice. The same applies, among others, to the anti-communist renegades of the Cold War era: as a rule, their turn against communism went hand in hand with the turn to a certain Freudianism, the discovery of the psychological complexity of individual lives.
Another category introduced by Fredric Jameson is the “missing mediator” between the old and the new. The “missing mediator” designates a specific feature in the process of passing from the old order to a new order: when the old order is disintegrating, unexpected things happen, not only the horrors mentioned by Gramsci, but also brilliant utopian projects and practices.
When the new order is established, a new narrative emerges, and within this new ideological space, the mediators disappear from view. Just look at the transition from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe. When people protested against communist regimes in the 1980s, what the vast majority had in mind was not capitalism. They wanted social security, solidarity, a rough kind of justice; they wanted the freedom to live their lives outside the control of the state, to assemble and speak as they pleased; they wanted a life of simple honesty and sincerity, freed from primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy… in short, the vague ideals that guided the protesters were largely drawn from socialist ideology itself.
And, as we learned from Freud, what is repressed returns in a distorted form. In Europe, the socialism repressed in the dissident imagination returned in the form of right-wing populism.
Many of Fredric Jameson’s formulations have become memes, such as his characterization of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism. Another meme is his old witty observation (sometimes mistakenly attributed to me), which is more valid today than ever: it is easier to imagine a total catastrophe on Earth, which will wipe out all life on it, than a real change in capitalist relations — as if, even after a global cataclysm, capitalism would somehow continue… And if we apply the same logic to Jameson himself? It is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the death of Fredric Jameson.
*Slavoj Žižek, professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School, he is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. Author, among other books, of In defense of lost causes (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/46TCc6V]
Translation: Paulo Cantalice for the Boitempo's blog.
Notes
1 Frederick Jameson. Singular modernity — essay on the ontology of the present (Translation by Roberto Franco Valente). Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 2005.
2 Susan Buck-Morss. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000.
3 Leon Trotsky. Diary in Exile🇧🇷 Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.
4 Frederick Jameson. Lenin and Revisionism. Durham: Duke University Press.
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