Thursday, May 30, 2019

The Horizons of Theory: Jameson, Marxism, and Poststructuralism Essay

The Horizons of Theory Jameson, Marxism, and PoststructuralismFredric Jamesons The Political Unconscious is a work which crosses theories boundaries, which walks (or polices?) Marxisms set up on poststructuralism. It may easily be read as a refutation of poststructuralism, or as an embrace of it as a flight from Marxism (though below 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, Jamesons 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 c on the wholes 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 maybe 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 imperious horizon of all reading and all interpretation (17). We may immediately note that this untranscendable presence apparently contradicts deconstructions mistrust of all presences within and behind texts, to put nothing of Derridas 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... ...rificing the mortal 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 t his 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 pasture 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.

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