Jameson Marxism And Historicism(1).pdf

Marxism and Historicism

Author(s): Fredric Jameson

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 1, Anniversary Issue: II, (Autumn, 1979), pp. 41-73

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468870

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Marxism and Historicism

Fredric

Jameson

T HE RELATIONSHIP of Marxism to historicism is part of a larger

problem-that of a properly Marxist hermeneutic-which can-

not fully be dealt with here. Let us merely observe that the two

thematic paths along which this problem is generally approached-

that of historicism and that of an interpretive master code-form,

along with the third and more distantly related theme of representation,

the three major polemic and ideological targets of most forms of

poststructuralism today, even though full-dress philosophical

onslaughts on these three concepts have rarely been mounted. Still,

the work of the Tel Quel group, Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard,

Lyotard, and others, presupposes this polemic at the same time that

it contributes locally to this or that aspect of it; while the most system-

atic statement of the repudiation of historicism has been made by

Foucault (in The Order of Things and The Archaeologyof Knowledge), and

the most systematic statement of the repudiation of interpretation is

expressed in the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guattari. All of these

statements, however, presuppose a more basic master text, namely,

Althusser's Reading Capital, which, owing to its explicitly Marxist

framework, is probably less familiar to American readers than other

texts in French theory today. Althusser's attacks on Marxist histori-

cism and on classical hermeneutics (which he calls expressive causality)

are therefore basic reference points in what follows, even if we cannot

here engage Althusser's fundamental work directly.'

As for interpretation, I can only assert here what I will argue more

systematically in another place,2 namely, the semantic priority of Marx-

ist interpretation over the other interpretive codes which are its

rivals in the theoretical marketplace today. If indeed one construes

interpretation as a rewriting operation, then all of the various critical

methods or positions may be grasped as positing, either explicitly or

implicitly, some ultimate privileged interpretive code in terms of which

the cultural object is allegorically rewritten: such codes have taken the

various forms of language or communication (in structuralism), de-

sire (as for some Freudianisms but also some post-Marxisms), anxiety

and freedom (in classical existentialism), temporality (for

phenomenology), collective archetypes (in Jungianism or myth crit-

icism), various forms of ethics or psychological "humanism" (in crit-

University of Virginia

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

icism whose dominant themes are the integration of the personality,

the quest for identity, alienation and nonalienation, the reunification

of the psyche, and so forth). Marxism also proposes a master code, but

it is not, as is sometimes commonly thought, either that of economics

or production in the narrow sense, or of class struggle as a local

conjuncture or event, but rather that very different category which is

the "mode of production" itself, which we may therefore expect to

make its appearance at the conclusion of the present argument. For

the moment, suffice it to say that the concept of a mode of production

projects a total synchronic structure in terms of which the themes and

the concrete phenomena valorized by the other methods listed above

necessarily find the appropriately subordinate structural position.

This is to say that no intelligent contemporary Marxism will wish to

exclude or repudiate any of the themes listed above, which all in their

various ways designate objective zones in the fragmentation of con-

temporary life. Marxism's "transcendence" of these other methods

therefore does not spell the abolition or dissolution of their privileged

objects of study, but rather the demystification of the various

frameworks or strategies of containment by means of which each

could lay claim to being a total and self-sufficient interpretive system.

To affirm the priority of Marxist analysis as that of some ultimate and

untranscendable semantic horizon-namely, the horizon of the

social-thus implies that all other interpretive systems conceal a seam

which strategically seals them off from that social totality of which

they are a part, and constitutes their object of study as an apparently

closed phenomenon. Thus, for instance, the powerful closed her-

meneutic of the Freudian psychic models is unexpectedly and dialec-

tically reopened and transcended when it is understood that such

models ultimately depend on the concrete social reality of the family

as an institution. As to the final stage-in all the poststructuralist

critiques of interpretation-in which allegorical rewriting always pre-

supposes some ultimately privileged form of representation-in the

present instance, presumably, the representation of something called

"History" itself-we can merely assert here that it is precisely in this

respect that a Marxist hermeneutic can be radically distinguished

from all the other types enumerated above, since its "master code" or

transcendental signified is precisely not given as a representation but

rather as an absent cause, as that which can never know full repre-

sentation. I must here limit myself to a formula I have proposed

elsewhere, namely, that History is not in any sense itself a text or

master text or master narrative, but that it is inaccessible to us except

in textual or narrative form, or, in other words, that we approach it

only by way of some prior textualization or narrative (re)construction.

MARXISM AND HISTORICISM

artifacts, and traces.

The dilemma of any "historicism" can then be dramatized by the

peculiar, unavoidable, yet seemingly unresolvable alternation be-

tween Identity and Difference. This is indeed the first arbitrary deci-

sion we are called on to make with respect to any form or object from

out of the past, and it is a decision which founds that contact: so that

on the one hand, as with Sartrean freedom, we cannot not opt for one

or the other of these possibilities (even when for the most part we

remain oblivious of a choice made in an unthematized and unreflex-

ive way), while on the other, the decision itself, since it inaugurates the

experience, is something like an absolute presupposition which is it-

self beyond any further philosophical argument (thus, we cannot ap-

peal to any empirical findings about the past, since they are them-

selves grounded on this initial presupposition). That this is meanwhile

an intolerable option may quickly be conveyed by an oversimplified

demonstration: if we choose to affirm the Identity of the alien object

with ourselves-if, in other words, we decide that Chaucer, say, or a

steatopygous Venus, or the narratives of nineteenth-century Russian

gentry, are more or less directly or intuitively accessible to us with our

own cultural moyens du bord-then we have presupposed in advance

what was to have been demonstrated, and our apparent "comprehen-

sion" of these alien texts must be haunted by the nagging suspicion

that we have all the while remained locked in our own present-the

present of the societe de consommation with its television sets and

superhighways, its Cold War, and its postmodernisms and

poststructuralisms-and that we have never really left home at all,

that our feeling of Verstehen is little better than mere psychological

projection, that we have somehow failed to touch the strangeness and

the resistance of a reality genuinely different from our own. Yet if, as

a result of such hyperbolic doubt, we decide to reverse this initial

stance, and to affirm, instead and from the outset, the radical Dif-

ference of the alien object from ourselves, then at once the doors of

comprehension begin to swing closed and we find ourselves separated

by the whole density of our own culture from objects or cultures thus

the latter's monuments,

These preliminary remarks about the problem of interpretation

would therefore seem to have restructured in advance the other re-

lated problem which is our official subject here, namely, that of his-

toricism, to which we now turn. I will speak in a moment about the

curious destiny of this term, which cannot today be pronounced with-

out furtively turning up one's lapels and glancing over one's shoulder.

Let us for the moment construe this problem in a more empirical or

commonsense fashion as being simply that of our relationship to the

past, and of our possibility of understanding

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

initially defined as Other from ourselves and thus as irremediably

inaccessible.

The status of the classical world has long been paradigmatic of this

dilemma. When Greek forms and Latin texts were felt as classical for

us, what was affirmed was not merely the Identity of these formal

languages and sign systems with our own aesthetic values and ideals,

but rather also, and through the symbolic medium of the aesthetic

experience, a whole political analogy between two forms of social life.

This we are today in a position to grasp better, when Greek forms-

and the ideal of classical beauty that derives from them and of which

the art of Raphael has generally been taken as the supreme

embodiment-come to be felt as insipid and when the temptation

arises to rewrite them more "strongly" in terms of Difference. Then

the Nietzschean reassertion of the Dionysian and of the orgiastic

counter-religion of the mysteries, the ritual studies of the Cambridge

school, Freud himself (and Levi-Strauss's rewriting of the Oedipus

legend in terms of primitive myth), decisive reversals in classical

scholarship, such as the work of George Thompson, Dodds's The

Greeksand the Irrational, or the newer French classical scholarship;

above all, perhaps, contemporary aesthetic reinterpretations of the

Greek fact, such as Karl Orff's opera Antigone-all converge to pro-

duce an alternative Greece, not that of Pericles or the Parthenon, but

something savage or barbaric, tribal or African, or Mediterranean-

sexist-a culture of masks and death, ritual ecstasies, slavery,

scapegoating, phallocratic homosexuality, an utterly non- or anticlas-

sical culture to which something of the electrifying otherness and

fascination, say, of the Aztec world, has been restored. That this

powerful counter-image is no less conditioned by our own collective

fantasies than the "edle Einfalt und stille Gr6sse" of the Apollonian

classicism which it replaced, may be deduced from its kinship with

other persistent historical motifs, such as the constellation of "to-

talitarian" fantasies expressed in 1984, images of Wittvogel's Oriental

Despotism,popular representations of Stalinist "bureaucracy" and of

the cyclical return (particularly in science fiction) of various images

of imperial domination and of archaic power systems. Nonetheless,

the content of these new motifs allows us to reevaluate the older vision

of the classical world, which now proves to be less a matter of indi-

vidual taste than rather a whole social and collective mirror image, in

which the production of a new artistic style-neoclassicism-comes to

serve as the vehicle for political legitimation: now it is a whole domi-

nant social class, the English aristocratic oligarchy as it persists as a

privileged enclave within the hostile environment of industrialization

and commerce and the alien element of a brutalized and mentally and

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