Marxist Criticism & Fredric Jameson

“ 不能没有马克思，没有马克思，没有对马克思的记忆，没有马克思的遗产，也就没有将来；无论如何得有某个马克思，得有他的才华，至少得有他的

某种精神。” —— 德里达：《马克思的幽灵》

Part 1 Marxist Criticism

1.The division of Marxism 1.1 classical Marxism 1.2 early Western Marxism 1.3 late Marxism Note: It is to be noted that this division, though

chronological in nature, by no means indicates the later period was to replace the former. They in fact co-exist with a complex inter-connection in between.

1.1 classical Marxism

The classical Marxist criticism flourished chiefly in a period from Marx and Engels to the Second World War. It characterizes itself by an insistence on at least the following basic tenets: materialism, economic determinism, class struggle, surplus value, reification, proletarian revolution and communism. Marx and Engels were political philosophers rather than literary critics, but the scant and fragmentary aesthetic comments they had made enabled people after them to build a theory out of them. Marx, for instance, made the famous “ideology critique” in The Holy Family on Eugène Sue’s novel The Mysteries of Paris, and he also mentioned the concept of ideology in The German Ideology. Half a century later Engels elaborated the concept in his letter to Franz Mehring. All this provides a rich resource for an ideological criticism. Marx and Engels were more concerned with the contents rather than the form of the literature, because to them literary study was more politically oriented and content was much more ideologically charged. Literary form, however, did have a place if it served their political purposes. Marx and Engels, for instance, liked the realism in C. Dickens, H. Balzac, and W.M. Thackeray, and Lenin praised L. Tolstoy for the “political and social truths” in his novels.

1.2 Early Western Marxism Georg Lukács , perhaps the first Western Marxist. He d

enounced, as reductionistic and mechanistic the “vulgar” Marxist version of criticism whereby the features of a cultural text were strictly determined by or interpreted in terms of the economic and social conditions of its production and by the class status of its author. However, he insisted, more than anybody else, on the traditional Marxist reflectionist theory, even when this theory was under severe attack from the formalists in the fifties. In Art and Objective Truth (1954), he criticized two fallacies of mimesis, namely, false objectivism for its mechanistic materialism and false subjectivism for its idealism. The typical example of the former is literary naturalism, while for the latter it is the subject-oriented criticism.

1.2 Early Western Marxism

Mikhail M. Bakhtin 1.2.1 In “Discourse in the Novel” written in the thirtieth,

Bakhtin, like Lukács, tried to define the novel as a literary from in terms of Marxism. The discourse of the novel , unlike that of poetry which is monological, is characterized by its dialogic orientation .

1.2.2 The “dialogized heteroglossia” of the novel is ideological in nature, in that sense that the polyphonic voices represent different social forces contending with each other.

1.2.3 “Laughter and Freedom” offers a case of such a heteroglossia of contradictions. Here laughter in the Carnival represents “the voice of the people” in the Middle Ages as a contending force against the empowered “monolithically serious ecclesiastical, political establishment.”

1.2 early Western Marxism

Frankfurt School of Marxism In 1923,“Institute of Social Research” founded in Un

iversity of Frankfurt, Germany Members:Max Hirkheimer, Thoedor Adorno, Walte

r Benjamin, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althussser, Williams ,etc.

A distinctive feature of the Frankfurt School are independence, interdisciplinarity

1.3 late Marxism

Williams: there were at least three forms of Marxism: the writings of Karl Marx, the systems developed by later Marxists out of these writings, and Marxisms popular at given historical moments.

Fredric Jameson: there were two Marxisms, one being the Marxian System developed by Karl Marx himself, and the other being its later development of various kind

Part 2 Fredric Jameson

Fredric R. Jameson (born in 1934 in Cleveland, Ohio) is one of today's most important and most influential cultural theorists. He has done more for the contextual study of culture than any other living scholar. Over the past four decades, he has developed a richly nuanced theory of how modern culture - in particular, literature, painting, cinema, and architecture - relates to social and economic developments.

Publications of F. Jameson: Books F. Jameson. The Modernist Papers.  Verso, 2007.  Jameson on Jameson.  edited by I. Buchanan Duke University Press, 2007. F. Jameson. A Singular Modernity.  Verso Press, 2002.  The Cultural Turn.  London: Verso Press, 1998.  Brecht and Method.  London: Verso Press, 1998.  Seeds of Time.  Columbia University Press, 1994.  Theory of Culture.  Rikkyo University, 1994. (Lectures at Rikkyo University)  The Geopolitical Aesthetic, or, Cinema and Space in the World System.  Inidiana University Press a

nd BFI Publishsing, 1992.  Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.  Durham: Duke University Press, 1990.  Signatures of the Visible.  Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc., 1990.  Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic.  London: Verso Press, 1990. F. Jameson. The Ideology of Theory, Essays 1971-1986.  Vol. 1 Situations of Theory, Vol. 2 The Syn

tax of History University of Minnesota Press, 1988. F. Jameson. Postmodernism & Cultural Theories. 1987. (Houxiandaizhuyi he Wenhualilun (Lectures i

n China) (Xi'an: Shanxi Teacher's University) Reprinted in journals in Taiwan & Hong Kong 1988 Reprinted in Taiwan with new preface by Tang Xiaobing 1989)

F. Jameson. The Political Unconscious.  Cornell University Press, 1981. F. Jameson. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist.  University of Californ

ia Press, 1979. F. Jameson. The Prison-House of Language.  Princeton University Press, 1972. (Reprinted in Japane

se 1989 Reprinted in Korean 1989) F. Jameson. Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature.  Princeton Univ

ersity Press, 1971. F. Jameson. Sartre: The Origins of a Style.  Yale University Press, 1961. (Reissued 1984 (Columbia

University Press))

Jameson restored to literary study the historical responsibility by re-emphasizing the reflective and transformative functions of literature at a time in Western history when these functions were badly needed. Meanwhile he discredited the traditional Marxist generic approach to literature, because post-industrial capitalism had to a large extent destroyed man’s sense of history so that it was difficult to experience historical reality as an integrated unity.

The Political Unconscious, the most important work for the early Jameson perhaps, forcefully reveals that every reading and interpretation is inevitably political and ideological. Here Jameson rewrites the Marxian concept of “ideology” into that of “ideologeme”, the smallest semantic unit in the dialogues among contending social classes (Jameson 1981:76). By focusing on the critical evaluation of one class on another, Jameson draws Marxism from actual reality to textual analysis. This “textualization of history” is better seen in “meta-commentary”, the most important Jamesonian concept in his thirty years of Marxist theoretical praxis. It suggests “not a head-on, direct solution or resolution, but a commentary on the every condition of the problem itself”

Conclusion

It is to be noted that at every historical moment when Marxism seemed in trouble, Marxist criticism would gain a new development. The early 1920s saw the heyday of “anthropological” Marxism; 1930s witnessed a strong leftist literary criticism in the West; and Mc-Carthyism went hand in hand with the strengthening of Western Marxism. Marxism is once again severely challenged in the last years of the twentieth century beginning with the ice age of Reagan-Thatcherism, and it will never be the “true but superfluous,” simply because Marxism provides the best analysis on the contradictions of capitalism, “to the ways that it can not help producing wealth and poverty at a stroke, as material conditions of one another” (Eagleton & Milne 1996:6).

Questions for discussion

1.What’s your comment on Marxist criticism in China nowadays?

2. 有人认为，马克思主义的文艺批评在当下整个文学批评中的领域中处于夹缝状态，你是否同意这一看法？为什么？

The end