The Horizons of Theory: Jameson, Marxism, and Poststructuralism

The Horizons of Theory: Jameson, Marxism, and Poststructuralism

Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious is a work which crosses theories' boundaries, which walks (or polices?) Marxism's border on poststructuralism. It may easily be read as a refutation of poststructuralism, or as an embrace of it; as a flight from Marxism (though under its own banner), or as its theoretical redemption – this is not a contradiction (we might read Jameson as replying), but a dialectical, productive exploration of the tension between these philosophies. Indeed, Jameson's exposition of his Marxist hermeneutic may be taken as a reply (from within a discourse he perceives as Marxism) to the poststructuralisms of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, and as a conversation with the structural Marxism he calls "Althusserian"; but Jameson attempts to reconcile these views with the Marxist tradition. We may read The Political Unconscious as positing a mode of reading which is acceptable to – or which subsumes – both a "demystifying" Marxism and the aporia or irreducible contradiction of deconstruction; but in so doing, as Jameson perhaps realizes, the text is drawn into the clear contradictions between these theories, and only partially resolves (or evades) them.

The central thesis of The Political Unconscious is the presence of History as the "untranscendable" or "absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation" (17). We may immediately note that this "untranscendable presence" apparently contradicts deconstruction's mistrust of all presences within and behind texts, to say nothing of Derrida's derisive references to "transcendence." To look for History in the text, to find the hidden meaning of History through it, would evidently not be a sa...

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...rificing the individual text to a broader structural analysis – "that a Marxist cultural study can hope to play its part in political praxis, which remains, of course, what Marxism is all about" (299). It is revealing (from a Marxist standpoint) that this final aside marks the only reference to concrete political involvement in the volume; perhaps more tellingly, The Political Unconscious treats this sacrifice of the traditional, individualistic literary text as a price which, however unfortunately, must be paid (in order to satisfy the demands of Marxism). But as a reconciliation of the poststructuralist, anti-transcendent insistence on specificity with some of the theoretical imperatives of Marxist cultural thought, The Political Unconscious remains a breakthrough; and as a proposal of a newly political, poststructuralist historicism, it is undeniably persuasive.