**Welcome to "Jameson, Althusser, Marxism"!** This book, penned by William C. Dowling, serves as an introduction to Fredric Jameson's deeply significant and, let's be honest, quite challenging work, _The Political Unconscious_. Dowling isn't setting out to critique or survey the field, but rather to make Jameson's demanding argument available to readers who are curious but might have found the book baffling on their own. Introductions like this are becoming increasingly common for complex theoretical works, particularly those from European thinkers, but Dowling sees a need for one for Jameson, despite his prominence as perhaps the most important Marxist critic writing in English today. Why, you might ask, does a living American theorist need an introduction? Well, it's not because of a lack of importance; _The Political Unconscious_ is seminal for several reasons! It was the first sustained effort to bring the Marxist renewal initiated by Louis Althusser in France into English cultural studies. It also powerfully attempts to bring the ideas of thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze under an expanded Marxist framework. Jameson is seen as working at the level of his French poststructuralist peers. So, in terms of intellectual standing, he certainly doesn't need an introduction. The need arises simply because _The Political Unconscious_ is _difficult_. For those who have tried to read it, or who have followed Jameson's work since his earlier books like _Prison House of Language_, his thought has become increasingly complex and his presentation more compressed. Dowling assures us this difficulty isn't born of perversity, but it is certainly there. However, the good news is that with the right background in contemporary theory and Marxism, and with some expansion of Jameson's core concepts, the book becomes much more readable. And that's precisely what Dowling's introduction aims to provide. **Style as Enactment: More Than Just Saying What You Mean** One reason for the difficulty, which might frustrate readers used to a plainer style, involves something called "style as enactment". Thinkers like Derrida and Jameson can't just "come out and say what they mean" in a simple way because their style is part of their argument. For Derrida, the idea that you _can_ simply say what you mean is based on a notion of language being a clear window onto reality, which is precisely the idea he's trying to challenge. His complex style shows that language isn't just a transparent tool; it might even shape the world we perceive. For Jameson, style as enactment relates to the Marxist idea of theory and praxis. He sees the "plain style" as characteristic of bourgeois ideology, a world where everything seems straightforward because uncomfortable truths are hidden. The terrible truth that this pleasant world is built on exploitation and oppression can never be acknowledged in this style. A genuinely Marxist style, then, needs to create a "dialectical shock". It should force the reader out of comfortable ways of thinking and make them confront unexpected and often painful truths. As Jameson puts it, it should make you "hear the shifting of the world's gears" as you read. This shock includes the intellectual pain of following a difficult argument, but also the deeper pain of seeing history as a "nightmare" from which the only escape is political and social revolution. An introduction like Dowling's might clear away some initial confusion, but the reader coming to Jameson through it can still go on to experience this "dialectical shock" firsthand. **Other Pieces of the Puzzle** Beyond style, other factors make Jameson's work complex. One is the ongoing "problem of Stalin" or "really existing socialism". Marxism, as historically implemented in actual governments, hasn't turned out well, and Marxist philosophy struggles to explain why. Marxist critics like Jameson constantly face accusations that the theory itself leads to totalitarian outcomes, and the historical reality of the Gulag and other events press hard on his arguments. This means that Marxist critics often have to carefully position themselves not only against non-Marxists but also against various theoretical stances _within_ Marxism, sometimes writing in a kind of code that can be obscure. Dowling tries to help resolve this obscurity. Another layer of difficulty comes from Jameson's ambitious goal of incorporating contemporary poststructuralism – the work of Derrida, Foucault, and others – within an expanded Marxism. He tries to show that these powerful thinkers offer important insights but are ultimately incomplete without the theory of history that only Marxism can provide. His argument is compressed at these points because he can't both subsume poststructuralism _and_ provide a basic introduction to it simultaneously. Dowling's introduction attempts to fill in some of this necessary background for readers unfamiliar with poststructuralist thought. Finally, the crucial relationship between Jameson and Louis Althusser adds another layer. Althusser's highly influential work attempted to address the "problem of Stalin" and provide a "structuralist" reinterpretation of Marx to make contemporary Marxism competitive with other European thought. Jameson builds on Althusser, but also moves beyond him. His argument assumes some prior knowledge of Althusserian Marxism, a background that Dowling's book specifically aims to supply. Tracing the line from Marx through Althusser to Jameson is key to understanding _The Political Unconscious_. It's worth noting that Jameson's originality often lies not in inventing entirely new ideas, but in synthesizing the ideas of others, like Althusser, A. J. Greimas, Northrop Frye, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Claude Levi-Strauss, and using them in productive, sometimes dazzling ways. Even a central idea like the "political unconscious" had been outlined before. This originality-in-synthesis is seen as a proud claim for a committed Marxist, much like Marx's _Capital_ synthesized existing ideas but had immense influence. **Dialectical Thinking: Seeing the World in Motion** Understanding Jameson's work means grasping his particular "style of thinking," which Dowling calls "dialectical". While being a Marxist critic naturally involves participating in the philosophical tradition running from Hegel through Marx and Engels to later figures like Lukacs and Gramsci, Jameson has forged a powerful and unique instrument of dialectical analysis. A great example, though briefly mentioned in _The Political Unconscious_, is Jameson's take on the history of painting. What might seem like incidental observations are actually a deep meditation on human history, or "History" with a capital H. This capital H signals not just a chronicle of events but the underlying Necessity that, in a materialist philosophy, acts like fate and is the source of human misery. Grasping Jameson's view of painting means grasping his vision of humanity within this History. To truly see the point of his remarks on painting, however, we need the context of his whole system. He relates painting not just to art history textbooks, but to a time _before_ painting existed, a lost "golden" moment of collective consciousness. **Reification: When Humans Become Things** This brings us to a concept central to Jameson's view: reification. This term, given by Lukacs to what Max Weber called "rationalization," describes the process in capitalism where production is broken down into smaller, more efficient units. Lukacs used "reification" to highlight how, in a market system focused on commodities, human labor and even human beings themselves become treated as mere things or objects. Reification implies a world where the human element is being stripped away. While orthodox Marxism often focused on reification as purely an _economic_ process, Jameson wants us to think about it as a _mode of experiencing the world_ from within. He's not dismissing the economic side, but wants to show how this experience of the world as filled with mere things is determined by History, which is in turn determined by the economy "in the last instance". What is it like to experience the world where the human is drained away, leaving only objects and their relations? Moral philosophers sometimes use examples like treating another person with the same unconcern as chopping wood. Marx's point, however, was that this "psychotic" element of treating humans as things is inherent in relations of domination throughout history – master over slave, owner over laborer – because impersonal historical forces lead to relations _among things_ replacing relations _among men_. Jameson's work carries a sense of moral urgency because he feels this process of reification is now deforming humanity as a whole. Returning to painting, Jameson links its origin to a "fall out of collective consciousness" and the disintegration of primitive communism. Cave paintings represent an early stage where the visual sense becomes separate and autonomous, seeking gratification not in the full collective experience of the world but in isolated objects, images on walls. As history moves towards capitalism, reification accelerates. Art focusing solely on sight turns Nature into an object, and by the 18th century, landscape paintings not only depict Nature as an object but become commodities themselves. Sight becomes autonomous and "consumes" the painting as a "work of art," a thing. The dissolution of traditional representation in modern art (Impressionism, Cubism, abstraction) is linked by Jameson to the acceleration of history and reification. In a fully reified world, autonomous sight seeks an autonomous art, one that sheds the pretense of representing a real world and focuses on "pure" color and form existing for themselves. This reading of painting is a prime example of Jameson's dialectical analysis. It sets art against the backdrop of a total theory of History, showing how everything, even the way we see, is shaped by it. But Jameson doesn't stop at just "unmasking" art as a symptom of alienation; he also sees it as a "glorious compensation". From Michelangelo to Jackson Pollock, art answers deep human needs in a world losing its immediacy. This highlights a key aspect of his criticism: it aims to be both negative (exposing problems) and positive (honoring the "utopian" dimension of human culture). **The Problem of the Superstructure and Althusser's Intervention** In Marxist criticism, the "problem of the superstructure" refers to the difficulty of taking cultural elements like literature or art seriously if they are simply seen as passive reflections of the economic base. Orthodox Marxism, in its most rigid form, suggests that the superstructure (law, politics, religion, philosophy, culture, etc.) merely reflects and reinforces the underlying economic system. This view leaves little room for genuine criticism that sees culture as having its own meaning or significance. Jameson, who demands nothing less than taking literature seriously, attempts to rescue it from this "narrow Marxist dogmatism". While Marx's own view of the base-superstructure relationship might have been more complex than later dogma, the economic determinism of figures like Kautsky and Plekhanov became highly influential. The "superstructure" isn't just a few specific institutions; it encompasses "society as we actually inhabit it," our culture. In the orthodox view, it's easy to see how things like property laws or religion serve the ruling class. Orthodox Marxism often relies on a concept called "expressive causality". This idea, associated with Lukacs but also seen in thinkers like Spengler or Foucault, suggests that the various parts of the superstructure (art, law, religion, etc.) are all expressions of an underlying economic essence, like a face expressing a state of mind. The "meaning" of a cultural element is found by relating it back to this economic base. This approach can make historical periods seem like unified, seamless wholes, but critics argue this unity is imposed by the analytical framework itself. Althusser critiques expressive causality, seeing two main problems. One is that it leads to an interpretive practice where cultural elements are "rewritten" in terms of a "master narrative" (like Marx's historical story) to reveal their "meaning". The other, especially relevant for cultural critics, is the concept of "mediation". In classical Marxism, mediation is the process of showing how different superstructural levels (like law and politics) are not only identical to each other but ultimately identical with the economic base, acting as instruments that "mediate" the underlying economic relations. Althusser wants to abolish this view of mediation. Althusser introduces concepts like "overdetermination" and the "structural totality" to combat this. Overdetermination emphasizes that the different levels (economic, political, ideological, etc.) are not mere reflections but conditions for each other's existence. They have their own "vitality and logic," influencing the system as a whole. This leads to the idea of history as an "absent cause". The totality, conceived as a structure of relations, isn't something separate _behind_ the elements, but is immanent _in_ them, like the structure of a face is in the arrangement of features. Another crucial concept is the "relative autonomy" of the superstructural levels. Just as your consciousness is relatively autonomous from your physical body (you can think without constantly being aware of needing food, but deprivation will eventually affect it), the political or cultural levels function with some independence from the economic, though the economic retains a certain priority "in the last instance". **Jameson's Reframing of Mediation** Here's where Jameson makes a key move, departing from Althusser while still building on his critique. Jameson argues that Althusser's objection isn't really to mediation itself, but to a related concept: "homology". Homology, seen in the work of Lucien Goldmann, is the idea that different levels of society share a structural identity, like instruments in an orchestra playing the same theme. Althusser's structural totality, in contrast, is like an orchestra playing a symphony – different themes developing relatively autonomously but adding up to a complex whole. Jameson believes that some idea of mediation is _essential_ for Marxism. Without it, Marxism cannot view history and society as a totality or overcome the artificial separations of academic disciplines under capitalism. Mediation allows Marxism to show that these separations are illusions, symptoms of alienation. For Jameson, the very possibility of practicing mediation suggests a prior underlying unity or totality in social life. Just as discussing differences between apples and pears requires the underlying category of "fruit," analyzing differences _or_ identities between cultural levels implies a background unity. Because the term "mediation" might be tainted by association with cruder Marxist analysis, Jameson suggests an alternative term: "transcoding". This means showing that differences between levels are intelligible only against the background of an assumed identity. For Marxism, this background identity is society and the historical process viewed as a totality. Jameson makes a significant redefinition: mediation (or transcoding) isn't just something _present_ in the base-superstructure relationship (like law _mediating_ economic relations) but something used as an _instrument of analysis_ by the Marxist critic. This analytic act presupposes the ultimate existence of the totality. This assertion of an ultimate totality in the face of disparity is Jameson's solution to the problem of the superstructure. **Ideology and Strategies of Containment** Traditional Marxism often saw ideology as simple "false consciousness," a lie told to keep people oppressed. Religion, for instance, was an "opiate" to make people accept their misery by offering stories of a better afterlife. However, Marx himself, in _The Eighteenth Brumaire_, offered a more nuanced view: ideology arises because the limits imposed by the economic reality _prevent_ people from seeing the true source of their misery in History. This drives them to invent systems (religion, philosophy, myth) to gain some sense of coherence. In this view, ideology is still an illusion, but it's produced by History itself. Jameson emphasizes this alternative view: ideology as a "strategy of containment". It's a way of achieving coherence by _shutting out_ the truth about History. More than just limitation, it's the _repression_ of underlying contradictions rooted in History and Necessity. Jameson draws on the Freudian idea of repression here – the collective mind denies intolerable historical conditions much like an individual mind represses the unconscious. This repression is necessary because, in Jameson's view, people cannot simply change their minds to bring about revolution; it depends on impersonal historical laws. This collective repression manifests as the cultural heritage of the West. So, what is Marxist criticism to do with works of literature like _Paradise Lost_ or _Ulysses_? Jameson's answer is "symptomatic analysis". This interpretive mode reveals (1) how these works deny or repress History and (2) what the repressed History looks like once brought to light. Jameson isn't just superficially combining Marx and Freud. He sees the Freudian idea of repression as making explicit a conceptual position already powerfully _implicit_ in classical Marxism. Marx's own analysis often involved treating things that seemed like "solutions" (like classical economics) as actually being questions that required digging deeper. This mirrors the Hegelian dialectic, where each synthesis becomes a new thesis awaiting further development. Classical economics, for example, functions as a strategy of containment. By presenting the workings of capitalism as eternal, objective laws (an "invisible hand"), it represses the underlying system of domination and oppression. For Marx, this science was a symptom of how capitalism hides its true nature. Building on Althusser, Jameson sees ideology not just as mystification but as _necessary_ mystification. Social systems, especially capitalism, conceal their essential operations. Ideology is the way this "self-occultation" happens at the level of collective thought. It doesn't express men's relation to their real conditions, but the _way they live_ that relation. Therefore, ideology expresses its _own kind of truth_, reflecting the collective mind's struggle within historical limits. Althusser argues that no social system could reproduce itself without ideology. This provides the theoretical basis for Jameson's literary criticism. He views literature as ideological in this sense, expressing how people live their relation to reality. He looks beyond a work's strategies of containment to its roots in History and Necessity. Crucially, Jameson treats _non-Marxist literary criticism_ as also ideological. Like literature, rival critical approaches embody strategies of containment and belong to the process of mystification. This means Jameson doesn't just argue _with_ other critics; he analyzes them as objects of study themselves. He asks what _truth_ a rival critical approach contains, seeing its limitations as revealing the limitations of the historical situation it emerged from. Because literature and non-Marxist criticism are produced within similar historical limits, the way a critical approach denies History can be a guide to how the literary work it analyzes does the same. **Symptomatic Analysis in Practice** Jameson's goal remains dismantling the strategies of containment in texts and revealing the underlying contradictions they cannot acknowledge. By subjecting rival critical approaches to symptomatic analysis, he can then use them as instruments for this dismantling. One example is his use of A. J. Greimas's semiotic analysis. Greimas's work on the "semiotic rectangle" aims to map out all possibilities of meaning within a system. While semiotics might seem the opposite of dialectical thought, focused on static structures and denying history, Jameson uses it differently. He sees structuralism as revealing how both literature and social reality are organized by "systems of meaning or signification". Sexual relations in Balzac's novels, for instance, are structured by the categories of bourgeois social relations, which are in turn determined by capitalism. Greimas's analysis, by reproducing these same categories abstractly, can reveal the limits within which Balzac's characters live. Jameson's unique move is to use Greimas not just to see what _is_ in the text, but to identify what is _absent_ – semiotic possibilities that don't appear. These gaps or absences become signs of how the text is denying or repressing History. Another example is Freudian criticism. Freudian theory, for Jameson, embodies a strategy of containment by giving timeless validity to bourgeois family relations and failing to acknowledge the historical origins of its "semiotics of sexual desire". The very possibility of this "sexual semiotics" arises from a historical process of alienation under capitalism, where sex is banished to a private sphere. However, Freudian theory also expresses a "special truth" _because_ of this strategy of containment. Freud's patients _did_ experience desire, neurosis, and trauma within the available categories (those of bourgeois capitalism). The strategies of containment that appear in experience and thought are _made available_ by History itself. Freudian literary criticism is valid when it illuminates sexual dynamics in novels because the categories available to the novelists and characters were the same ones available to Freud. Jameson's Marxist approach doesn't deny these insights but shows that the _limits_ of Freudian insights are the same limits within which the characters' lives are lived. Symptomatic analysis extends beyond obviously ideological content to the most basic categories of thought. For instance, it shows how many different critical approaches share the deep assumption of the "individual person" or "individual psyche" as a timeless, universal category. For Jameson, this category is not a universal truth but a product of history, particularly the alienation and fragmentation under capitalism that breaks life into isolated units. To treat individual identity as a primal truth is to repress History. Jameson sees Lacan's critique of individual identity (as constituted by insertion into a symbolic order) as aligning with this Marxist insight. While symptomatic analysis exposes this repression, it doesn't aim to liberate us _from_ history, but by showing how deeply we are _in_ it. **Narrative and Interpretation: The World Comes to Us as Stories** The very subtitle of _The Political Unconscious_, "Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act," tells us narrative is central. While partly linked to the novel's importance as a form emerging with capitalism, Jameson's interest goes deeper, building on the idea that "narrative" or "story" isn't just a literary form but an "epistemological category". Like Kantian concepts of space and time, narrative is seen as a fundamental coordinate through which we perceive and order reality. The radical claim is that the world _comes to us in the shape of stories_, not just that we make up stories to understand it. This idea extends even to physics or mathematical proofs. This perspective, influenced by structuralist thinking, suggests that narrative is a key mechanism for the collective consciousness to repress historical contradictions. The idea that narrative is a fundamental form of experiencing reality inevitably gives it a collective function. Jameson sees narrative as part of a society's "normal" functioning, yet also having something "abnormal" about it, repressing an underlying reality, similar to how slips or dreams function for Freud. This leads to a crucial question about the political unconscious: what is being repressed? Jameson calls it "contradiction," borrowing from Marx/Hegel, but goes further. It's not just logical contradiction but something more primal, linked to Necessity, antagonism, and the painful reality of domination and class struggle. This reality is so intolerable that both oppressors and oppressed must repress it as a condition of survival. **Jameson's System of Interpretation: Ascending Horizons** Faced with critiques of interpretation as reductive (like that of Deleuze and Guattari, who see it as imposing a "master code" or "master narrative" that impoverishes complex reality), Jameson doesn't abandon interpretation. Instead, he proposes a system of interpretation based on "rising orders of generality". This system transforms successive "master codes" into steps towards viewing the "social totality". He aims to take us from the individual text to History and Necessity, showing that each preceding stage was provisional. This approach draws on the idea of "necessary error" or functional ideology. Like Neoplatonism starting from worldly imperfections to reach the ideal, or Althusser seeing ideology as functional error, Jameson suggests ideology can be a means of transcending the merely ideological. Jameson finds a precursor for his system in medieval exegesis with its four levels: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. He aims to adapt the structure of this system, stripping away its historical "content" (interpreting scripture) to use the structure for dialectical interpretation. Although Dowling focuses more on the application, Jameson's system involves three main interpretive "horizons" or levels: 1. **The First Horizon: The Text as a Symbolic Act** This level looks at the individual work as a "socially symbolic act". It's where the critic identifies aesthetic contradictions within the text. This purely formal analysis aims to disclose the presence of an underlying social contradiction. Jameson's method here involves finding "aesthetic contradiction as disclosing the presence of an underlying social contradiction". (The brief Levi-Strauss example of Caduveo facial decorations finding formal tension could serve as a simple parable for this initial step). 2. **The Second Horizon: The Social Order as Class Struggle** Here, the analysis expands to view the text within the context of the social order, specifically as constituted by class struggle. The focus is on the "antagonistic dialogue between class discourses". Jameson uses concepts like Gramsci's "ideological hegemony" and Althusser's "ideological state apparatuses" to explain how a ruling class establishes dominance through thought and institutions. He also draws on Foucault's idea of "discourse" (a system of concepts, rules, etc., that shapes thought and generates institutions) and Bakhtin's idea of "dialogism" (that any discourse implies a dialogue, even with suppressed voices). The English Civil War, where various groups fought within the shared religious "code," serves as an example of this antagonistic dialogue within a shared framework. The individual text is seen as a "parole" (individual utterance) within the "langue" (total system) of its class discourse, which exists in relation to opposing discourses. At this level, the focus is on the "ideologeme," a minimal unit (like a "pseudo-idea" or "protonarrative") around which a class discourse is organized (e.g., "ressentiment" in Nietzsche and Gissing). Analyzing the ideologeme involves tracing its conceptual and narrative development. 3. **The Third Horizon: History as Successive Modes of Production** This is the broadest level, where analysis places the text and its ideological contradictions within the sweep of History, understood through the concept of successive "modes of production" (tribal, ancient, feudal, capitalist, etc.). Jameson is keenly aware of the danger here – that presenting this sequence of modes of production can become just another "master narrative" or salvational story, falling into the trap of transcendent interpretation that Althusser and Deleuze/Guattari warned against. However, he argues that the concept retains value not as a literal historical sequence, but as an abstract "methodological standard" or "absent cause". It allows us to see the fragmentation and contradictions within a specific historical period (like the English Civil War) as implying an underlying, albeit absent, social unity. You might wonder why a living American theorist like Jameson needs an introduction. Well, while he's widely recognized as perhaps the most important Marxist critic writing today, and _The Political Unconscious_ takes his work to new heights, the book is, quite simply, difficult. This difficulty isn't born of perversity, but from the ambitious philosophical program Jameson is undertaking and the very way he chooses to write. **Why is Jameson So Tricky? Understanding the Challenge** Several things contribute to the challenge of reading _The Political Unconscious_. One key aspect is what Dowling describes as Jameson's "style as enactment". This isn't just about choosing words; it's a way of writing that aims to _show_ what it's trying to convey, not just _tell_ it directly. Like thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Jameson believes that trying to just "come out and say what you mean" is often based on a flawed understanding of language, particularly the idea that language is merely a transparent tool for describing a world "out there". Poststructuralist thought, which Jameson engages with deeply, suggests language might actually create or shape the world we perceive, often in treacherous ways. For Jameson, this idea of style as enactment connects to the Marxist principle of theory and praxis. He sees the plain, "limpid" style often associated with bourgeois ideology as problematic because it implies that all essential truths are known in advance – except, crucially, the hidden truth that this seemingly pleasant world is built on exploitation and oppression. A genuinely Marxist style, according to Jameson, needs to disrupt this comfort. It should produce a sense of "dialectical shock," pushing the reader out of familiar positions into uncomfortable confrontations with unsuspected truths. It's a style designed to make you feel the world's gears shifting as you read. Dr. Johnson noted there's pain in reading intellectual prose, and Jameson's "dialectical shock" includes that intellectual effort, but also the pain of a Marxist confronting history as a "nightmare" from which revolution is the only escape. Dowling's introduction, of course, smooths out some of this shock to help you grasp the argument first. Beyond style, Jameson's work is layered with the historical and theoretical complexities of Marxism itself. There's the ongoing "problem of Stalin" or "really existing socialism" – the difficult reality that historical attempts to implement Marxist ideas in actual governments haven't gone well, and Marxist philosophy struggles to explain why. This brings up the accusation from figures like the _nouveaux philosophes_ that Marxist theory is inherently a "machine for constructing concentration camps," linking ideas like Hegel's Absolute Spirit and Marx's materialist teleology directly to Stalin's Gulag. As a Marxist critic, Jameson constantly has to navigate these accusations and position his work not only for non-Marxist readers but also within the various theoretical camps of Marxism, which can make parts of his argument feel coded. Dowling's book aims to clarify this context. Another source of difficulty is Jameson's ambitious project of trying to "neutralize" contemporary poststructuralism by incorporating it into an expanded Marxism. He attempts to "swallow up" thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze by showing that their powerful ideas are incomplete without a Marxist theory of history. This requires tremendous compression in his argument, as he can't fully introduce the basic assumptions of poststructuralism while also trying to subsume them. Dowling tries to fill in some of this background for readers unfamiliar with poststructuralist thought. Finally, Jameson's deep engagement with Louis Althusser adds another layer. Althusser himself tried to address the "problem of Stalin" and reinterpreted Marx using "structuralist" ideas to make Marxism competitive with other European philosophical movements. Jameson builds significantly on Althusser, often assuming a certain level of reader familiarity with Althusserian Marxism. Dowling emphasizes Althusser's role as a major mediator between Marx and Jameson and provides this essential background. The very title, _Jameson, Althusser, Marx_, is meant to trace this crucial intellectual lineage. **Originality Through Synthesis: Building on Others' Ideas** Despite the complexity and the difficulty stemming from these sources, Dowling highlights that Jameson's originality isn't necessarily in creating wholly new concepts from scratch. Paradoxically, his genius lies in seeing the possibilities for synthesis within the ideas of others. Even the central idea of the "political unconscious" had been outlined by Terry Eagleton before _The Political Unconscious_ appeared. Jameson creatively uses ideas from a wide range of thinkers, including A. J. Greimas, Northrop Frye, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Claude Levi-Strauss. For a committed Marxist, this originality-in-synthesis is something to be proud of, much like how _Capital_ is said to contain no ideas original to Marx yet had profound influence. **Jameson's Dialectical Thinking: Seeing Beneath the Surface** At the heart of Jameson's approach is what Dowling calls his "style of thinking" – a uniquely developed form of dialectical analysis. While this stems from the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, Jameson forges it into a powerful tool. Dowling later refines this, often referring to it as "negative dialectics". This dialectical thinking involves looking beyond the surface of things – whether it's observations on the history of painting or cultural phenomena – to see a deeper, sustained meditation on human history, or "History" with a capital 'H'. This isn't just a chronicle of events, but a recognition of the source of human misery in a materialist "Necessity" that operates with the force of fate. Grasping this vision of "man in history" is key to understanding Jameson. However, because his remarks can be extremely compressed, this larger vision often only becomes clear when viewed within the context of his total system. For instance, his comments on painting might only make sense when related to a time _before_ painting existed, a lost golden moment in the human story when the visual arts as we know them weren't necessary. **Navigating Key Concepts: Reification, Totality, Ideology** To better understand Jameson's system, Dowling unpacks several key concepts: - **Reification:** This term, given by Lukacs to describe what Weber called "rationalization," refers to the capitalist process of breaking down production and distribution into smaller units, leading society to mirror this economic specialization. More powerfully, it describes the commodification of human labor and people themselves, reducing them to "things" in a market-driven world. This implies a world where the human element is being eliminated. Orthodox Marxism focused on reification as an economic process. Jameson, however, urges us to consider reification as a _mode of experiencing the world_ – what it feels like from the inside to live in a sphere where the human is drained away. This connects to ethical questions, like Stanley Cavell's notion of "acknowledgment," contrasting treating a person with respect versus treating them like a log. Marx saw this "psychotic" element in relationships of domination (master/slave, owner/laborer), driven by impersonal historical forces that turn relations among men into relations among things. Jameson feels this process is now deforming humanity as a whole. - **The Totality:** A central idea in Jameson's Marxist analysis. Our everyday experience of the world is often based on a separation between our consciousness ("I") and everything external ("not-I"). This individualistic perspective is so deep it feels like the basis of our identity and is supported by philosophical empiricism (Descartes, Locke, Russell). Structuralism and poststructuralism challenged this with the "de-centering of the subject", and Jameson wants to push this challenge further using Marxism. He draws on Durkheim's idea that the world we perceive is the world _as society_. - **Totality as "Negative Totality":** This is one of Jameson's most important moves, drawing on Althusserian Marxism but unique in cultural analysis. Instead of a concrete, positive vision of history, Jameson uses the idea of totality as an abstract standard to expose partial or limited ideological truths. Dowling calls this "negative dialectics". It's like "negative theology," which insists that any positive conception of God diminishes the divine infinite; similarly, any specific, positive vision of the totality risks becoming just another limited ideology. This "negative totality" unmasks local ideologies to point to History as an "absent cause". Orthodox Marxism, in promising a positive vision of the totality, made a real error because a materialist view prevents one from getting "outside" the totality to see its end or meaning. Jameson's negative dialectics offer a way to resolve this dilemma. - **Ideology as Strategy of Containment:** For Jameson, ideology is more than just "false consciousness". Given the limitations of any historical situation, people develop "ideological closure" – systems of thought (religions, philosophies, myths) that provide a sense of comprehensibility. Every ideology is a "strategy of containment," simultaneously denying the intolerable contradictions hidden beneath the social surface (the "Necessity" driving domination) and building a substitute truth to make existence bearable. This applies to literature and art as well, where formal unity can represent an attempt to shut out the intolerable reality of History. Even seemingly robust systems like Hegel's philosophy and classical Marxism, with its "providential fable" of historical stages, can be seen as strategies of containment, ways of holding the "waking nightmare" of Necessity at bay. Jameson's critical practice aims to dismantle these strategies to reveal the underlying Necessity and the possibility of a Freedom that can only be won once illusion is stripped away. **The Problem of the Superstructure and Althusser's Influence** A major challenge for Marxist criticism, and thus for Jameson, is the "problem of the superstructure". Traditional or orthodox Marxism often treated the superstructure (law, politics, religion, philosophy, culture, society itself) as merely a reflection of the economic base. This makes serious cultural analysis difficult, reducing literature to simple illustrations of economic systems. Jameson aims to rescue literature and culture from this narrow determinism. While Marx's own views might have been more nuanced, interpretations rooted in the Second International emphasized economic determinism. Traditional Marxism also relied on a notion of "expressive causality," derived partly from Hegel's mind/body metaphor. This saw the economic "base" as a hidden essence being "expressed" through all levels of the superstructure. Interpreting history or culture involved finding this underlying essence, but this often led to conjuring a factitious unity or "organic wholeness" for historical periods. Althusser strongly critiqued expressive causality, seeing two main problems: it implies a reductive interpretive practice ("rewriting" phenomena in terms of a master narrative like Marx's providential history), and it mishandles the concept of mediation. Althusser proposed instead the idea of **overdetermination**. In this view, the levels of the superstructure are not mere reflections, but _conditions_ for the functioning of the economy. They have their own vitality and relative autonomy, exerting a reciprocal influence on the system as a whole. The totality is a "synergistic whole" where no single instance (like the Economy) is solely dominant. This leads to two other important Althusserian concepts: **History as an "absent cause"** (the structure of the totality is immanent in its elements/effects, not separate from them), and the **relative autonomy** of superstructural levels (they function with partial independence, but are ultimately determined by Necessity "in the last instance"). **Mediation vs. Homology: Jameson's Refinement** Althusser wanted to abolish the classical Marxist notion of mediation, which was used to show the underlying identity of different superstructural levels with the economic base. However, Jameson argues that Althusser was really objecting to **homology** – the idea (found in critics like Goldmann or Caudwell) that different levels of society or culture share a structural identity that simply replicates the economic base, like every instrument in an orchestra playing the same theme. Homology creates a factitious unity. Jameson insists that some idea of mediation _is_ essential for Marxism to view history and society as a totality and overcome the false specializations of bourgeois disciplines (economics, sociology, history seen as separate). Mediation helps demonstrate that these separations are symptoms of alienation under capitalism. For Jameson, mediation isn't just a demonstration of identity; it's a process that _assumes_ both prior difference and prior unity. Just as we can't talk about differences between apples and pears without the underlying category of "fruit," Marxist analysis of cultural differences assumes the background unity of "society" and the "historical process viewed as a totality". Jameson suggests the term "transcoding" instead of mediation to highlight this process. We "transcode" differences (say, between a legal system and a political system) in the name of the assumed identity (society as a whole). Crucially, for Jameson, this process of mediation or transcoding is not something inherent in the base-superstructure relationship itself, but an _instrument of analysis_ used by Marxist criticism. **Narrative and Interpretation: The World Comes as Stories** A vital element in Jameson's system, and a key to his subtitle _Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act_, is the concept of narrative. For Jameson, narrative isn't just a literary form found in novels or epics; it's an **epistemological category**. Like the Kantian categories of space and time, narrative is an abstract, contentless form through which we process and understand reality. The world, in his view, doesn't just exist; it "comes to us in the shape of stories". This isn't just about personal storytelling; even challenges to traditional "narrative history" (like those focusing on structures or quantitative data) simply move to a different mode or scale of storytelling. Even Marx's theory of history, despite his scientific aims, functions as a story with a teleological (purposeful) plot. For Jameson, taking history seriously means accepting _some_ story as the means of knowing anything. Anything that seems to exist outside a story, like a lyric poem or even a structural account of a mode of production, can only do so through a kind of fiction, implicitly relying on a larger, untold narrative. Because reality comes to us in narrative form – not just in novels, but in myths, theories of history, etc. – it inherently demands **interpretation**. Narrative contains both manifest meaning (what's obviously happening) and latent content (a hidden or implied meaning), much like the parables of the New Testament require allegorical interpretation to reveal their deeper significance. Interpretation, while it can reveal or illuminate, also inevitably hides or distorts aspects of reality. For Jameson, interpreting these narratives isn't a marginal activity for literary critics; it's the fundamental way the mind confronts and understands Reality itself, especially History. The task of Marxist thought is to rescue interpretation from modes that deny or repress History. **Interpretation Under Attack and Jameson's Defense** Jameson confronts powerful challenges to interpretation, particularly from poststructuralist thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Drawing on Nietzsche, D&G argue that interpretation, especially "transcendent" interpretation (which rewrites reality in terms of a master code or narrative, like Freudian analysis using the "family romance" or Marxist analysis using its providential history), is a form of the "will to power". It impoverishes complex lived reality by reducing it to a predetermined "meaning". They advocate for "immanent" interpretation, respecting the complexity and internal norms of the object being interpreted. This critique is particularly thorny for Marxism, which has often used its historical narrative as a "master code". Jameson responds by analyzing the claims of "immanent interpretation" as found in critical formalism, particularly the American New Criticism. Formalism claimed to interpret texts "immanently," focusing solely on the work's internal norms and values, suspending external beliefs (like disbelief in ghosts when reading _Hamlet_ or atheism when reading _Paradise Lost_). While sympathetic to the idea that formalism could be an escape from history, Jameson argues that it is, in fact, a form of _transcendent_ interpretation in disguise. He argues that formalism implicitly rewrites literature using an ethical "master code" based on a "humanism" that universalizes bourgeois social relations. The core of this hidden code is the idea of an "integrated identity," a "whole self," a "stable and balanced individual psyche". Jameson sees this as an ideological reverse image of the alienated and fragmented reality of modern life under capitalism. Because this concept of the stable self feels universal to us, we don't recognize it as a specific, historically produced ideology and thus don't see formalism's ethical allegorizing. Jameson argues this hidden master code denies or represses History, making formalism ideological in the "bad" sense. He implies this critique of disguised transcendence applies to other forms of interpretation claiming immanence, including structuralism and possibly even D&G themselves. **Jameson's Multi-Horizon Interpretive System** Given that all interpretive methods seem ultimately ideological and transcendent, how can one interpret without simply imposing another master code? Jameson's solution is to pursue interpretation through "rising orders of generality". Instead of trying to abolish transcendent interpretation, his system transforms successive master codes or narratives into steps of an ascent towards a view of the social totality. This system, a major contribution of _The Political Unconscious_, involves moving through different interpretive "horizons". It relies on the idea of "necessary error" – that ideologies aren't just mistakes, but functional, necessary errors produced by historical limitations. Understanding these errors becomes the means of transcending the merely ideological. Jameson sees a precursor for this multi-level system in medieval biblical exegesis, with its literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical levels. He aims to strip away the specific historical content of such systems (like Christian theology) and use their underlying forms for dialectical interpretation. Central to this system is the concept of the **political unconscious**. This isn't a direct adaptation of Freudian psychology but stems from the rigorous Marxist idea of the _collective denial or repression of underlying historical contradictions_ by human societies. Freud touched upon this with his idea of repression, but for Jameson, trapped by categories like "individual psyche," he couldn't fully grasp its collective, political dimensions. Drawing on structuralism, Jameson argues that individual consciousness itself presupposes a collective consciousness or social system. Narrative is the mechanism by which this collective consciousness represses historical contradictions. Narrative is part of normal social functioning, but also has this "abnormal" quality of repressing an intolerable reality beneath. What is this repressed reality? It's historical contradiction. Unlike Hegel's idea of contradiction as a dynamic principle of unfolding, Jameson (drawing on Althusser) sees it often as a deadlock or double bind inherent in social relations, like the master/slave relation where each depends on the other. This deadlock, this "Necessity," produces relations of domination. The collective repression of this historical "nightmare" is so powerful that Jameson can base a system of interpretation and a theory of history upon it. His method, akin to Foucauldian or Nietzschean "genealogy," is a "semantic reconstruction" that elicits the repressed subtext or _hors texte_ (unspoken) from cultural artifacts. Like an engineer reconstructing stress from twisted metal, Jameson interprets texts to reveal the "absent cause" of History pressing upon them. Jameson's interpretive system operates across three horizons: 1. **The First Horizon: Political History (Synchrony)**: Analysis focusing on the literary text's formal or aesthetic contradictions. Using an example from Levi-Strauss's analysis of Caduveo Indian face paint (where patterns run obliquely to facial features, creating a formal clash), Jameson shows how analyzing such immanent, aesthetic contradictions can disclose the presence of an underlying social contradiction. This seems formalistic, but its goal is to reveal the social pressures that manifest as formal tensions. 2. **The Second Horizon: Society as Class Struggle (Social Totality)**: The text is reconstituted as a _parole_ (individual utterance) in relation to the _langue_ (total system) of its class discourse. This involves seeing the social order as fundamentally constituted by class struggle. Interpretation here rewrites texts within the categories of an _antagonistic dialogue between class discourses_. Drawing on Bakhtin, Jameson emphasizes that discourse is always dialogical, even if one voice (the hegemonic one) suppresses others. The English Civil War, where Anglicanism and Puritanism fought within the "shared code" of religion, is an example. This horizon draws on Gramsci's hegemony and Althusser's ideological state apparatuses. The object of study is the **ideologeme** – a minimal unit around which a class discourse is organized, like a "pseudo-idea" or "protonarrative" that can develop into a philosophical system or cultural narrative. _Ressentiment_, appearing in Nietzsche's philosophy and Gissing's novels, is an example of a shared ideologeme rooted in specific class relations. Unpacking an ideologeme leads to the third horizon. 3. **The Third Horizon: History as a Sequence of Modes of Production (Diachrony)**: This horizon views history in the broadest sense. To avoid the pitfall of simply imposing Marx's teleological narrative as a master code, Jameson treats the concept of a "mode of production" not as a description of historical stages, but as a _heuristic instrument_. Its value lies in allowing us to see all social phenomena within a framework as related to a totality, not as a linear story. Actual historical societies are "social formations" (Poulantzas), complex structures where various modes of production coexist and interact. This involves the concept of **Ungleichzeitigkeit** or "nonsynchronous development" (Bloch), where different cultural levels (legal, religious, economic, etc.) develop at different rates, influenced by Althusser's overdetermination. Like the organs in a body having different histories but functioning together, these levels interact to produce the social formation. By moving through these horizons, Jameson aims to reveal how cultural artifacts, like literary texts, are shaped by and attempt to manage the historical contradictions inherent in their social formation, ultimately pointing back to the "absent cause" of History itself. **In Conclusion** Dowling's book serves as an invaluable guide to navigating the challenging, but rewarding, landscape of Fredric Jameson's _The Political Unconscious_. It explains the necessity of Jameson's difficult style, rooted in a Marxist vision of dialectical shock. It clarifies his position within contemporary theory, particularly his complex relationship with Althusser and poststructuralism. Most importantly, it breaks down Jameson's core concepts – reification as lived experience, the negative totality, ideology as strategy of containment, the problem of the superstructure, and his multi-horizon system of interpretation, revealing the political unconscious and the ideologeme – making them accessible. It shows how Jameson rescues cultural analysis, particularly literature, from narrow determinism by viewing narrative as a fundamental way we apprehend historical reality and interpretation as the crucial task of confronting that reality. His system, while responding to challenges like those posed by anti-interpretation and formalism, provides a powerful framework for understanding culture's complex relationship with History and Necessity. **Ideas and Questions to Explore Further:** Dowling's introduction opens up many fascinating avenues. Here are just a few questions you might want to ponder or research: - How do specific literary works, like novels by Balzac or Conrad that Jameson analyzes in _The Political Unconscious_ itself, demonstrate the concepts of "strategies of containment" or reveal the "absent cause" of History through their formal and narrative choices? - Can you identify ideologemes at work in contemporary cultural phenomena – perhaps in popular films, music, or political discourse? How do these ideologemes develop conceptually and narratively? - Consider the idea of "nonsynchronous development" in a society you know. How do different aspects (technology, politics, social norms, religious beliefs) seem to operate on different historical time scales and interact with each other? - Apply Jameson's critique of "immanent interpretation" to other fields. Are there ways that seemingly objective or internal analyses in other disciplines (like economics, psychology, or even certain scientific fields) might be subtly imposing ideological "master codes"? - Delve deeper into the "problem of Stalin" and the critiques offered by Althusser and the _nouveaux philosophes_. How have contemporary Marxist thinkers responded to these challenges? - Explore the relationship between Jameson's "political unconscious" and Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis. What are the specific ways he "historicizes" these theories, and what are the implications of seeing repression as a collective, historical phenomenon? - Think about the concept of "dialectical shock." Can you identify cultural experiences (not just intellectual reading) that produce a similar unsettling feeling by revealing hidden truths or contradictions? - Investigate the concept of "reification" as a lived experience. How does it manifest in the modern world, and what are its effects on our relationships and sense of self? Exploring these questions, drawing on the insights provided by Dowling's introduction, will undoubtedly deepen your understanding of Jameson's powerful and complex ideas about culture, history, and the political unconscious.